As the field of single-cell and spatial biology advances towards large-scale analyses for biological insight discovery, atlas-building program efforts have become increasingly important. These initiatives, however, introduce challenges regarding data and metadata standards, particularly in balancing constraints that enable uniform processing pipelines with the flexibility required to incorporate externally processed datasets. In addition, atlases rely on tools for discovery, analysis, and visualization across diverse biological entities and assay types, including bulk, single-cell and multi-modal assays. 

The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) provides a multi-scale spatial atlas of the healthy human body at single-cell resolution. The HuBMAP Data Portal hosts over 5,032 published datasets spanning multiple and biological scales. Over the past eight years, the HuBMAP Data Portal has been developed by a multi-institutional team to allow global researchers, including experimental and computational biologists and computer scientists, to access and utilise this complex data to answer emerging questions in medicine.

In this talk, we will introduce core concepts in spatial data management through the lens of the HuBMAP Data Portal. We will discuss the importance of metadata standardisation, and demonstrate how to retrieve, use, visualize, and share public HuBMAP data. 

This event is part of a broader webinar series on spatial transcriptomics. For more information about the series and its webinars, please visit the following link: “Decoding spatial transcriptomics through sequences, pixels, and bioinformatics”.