Tabula Sapiens is a benchmark, first-draft human cell atlas of over 1.1M cells from 28 organs of 24 normal human subjects. This work is the product of the Tabula Sapiens Consortium. Taking the organs from the same individual controls for genetic background, age, environment, and epigenetic effects, and allows detailed analysis and comparison of cell types that are shared between tissues. Our work creates a detailed portrait of cell types as well as their distribution and variation in gene expression across tissues and within the endothelial, epithelial, stromal and immune compartments.

We have built directly on our unique skills, experience, and data infrastructure from Tabula Muris and Tabula Muris Senis to create a high-quality human reference dataset and portal at a 10-fold larger scale from these prior efforts.

A critical factor in the Tabula projects is our large collaborative network of PIs with deep expertise at preparation of diverse organs, enabling all organs from a subject to be successfully processed within a single day. We have built the logistics and infrastructure capable of tracking hundreds of samples and thousands of 384-well plates from tissue through sample prep, library construction and on to sequencing and ultimately computational and expert cell annotation with tight quality control.

Tabula Sapiens leverages our network of human tissue experts and a close collaboration with a Donor Network West, a not-for-profit organ procurement organization. We use their experience to balance and assign cell types from each tissue compartment and optimally mix high-quality plate-seq data and high-volume droplet-based data to provide a broad and deep benchmark atlas.

The first version of Tabula Sapiens contained nearly 500,000 cells from 24 organs of 15 normal human subjects.

With the second version, Tabula Sapiens 2.0, we have built an integrated map of 28 tissues collected across 24 donors. Nine new donors and four new tissues were collected and analyzed together with the original Tabula Sapiens 1.0 dataset. All tissues and organs, with the exception of the respective reproductive organs, were profiled from both male (n=11) and female (n=13) donors. The donor's age ranges from 22 to 74 years old, offering one of the most comprehensive molecular profiles of human tissues across the adult lifespan (7 donors under the age of 40, 11 donors between 40 and 60, and 6 donors over 60 years of age).

Our goal is to make sequence data rapidly and broadly available to the scientific community as a community resource. If you use our data please cite The Tabula Sapiens Consortium, Science 376, eabl4896 (2022) if using the original v1 dataset. If you are using the Tabula Sapiens v2 data release please cite The Tabula Sapiens Consortium, biorxiv (2024). For access to the raw data please read our data release policy.

We express our gratitude and thanks to donor WEM and his family, as well as all of the anonymous organ and tissue donors and their families for giving both the gift of life and the gift of knowledge by their generous donations. We also thank Donor Network West for their cooperation in this project.

This project has been made possible in part by grant number 2019-203354 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.