The recent Human Cell Atlas (HCA) 2022 General Meeting, hosted in Vienna, Austria, provided a great opportunity for me to catch up on progress towards the HCA’s goal of mapping every cell type in the human body. I also got the chance to hear presentations that either highlighted new insights gleaned from HCA data or described the outcomes from ongoing collaborations between research groups.
More sensitive technology spurs proteomic and metabolomic biomarker identification, clinical use. (Complete article on page 21)
Metabolomics—often referred to as the youngest of the omics—provides key insight into phenotype. However, bulk metabolomics requires the homogenization of the sample and is thus unable to discern metabolic differences at a cellular level.
Over the past 5 decades or so, the growing understanding that RNA can influence protein function through routes other than direct translation has opened the prospect of discovering small molecules for tackling diseases in novel ways.
