Benchmarking Developing and Adult Kidney with Organoids at Single Cell Resolution

This network will build a single-cell atlas of a healthy developing and adult human kidney, across ages and sex, and benchmark these data against cell types in human kidney organoids, or 3D cell culures that mimic human organs.

This group will also pilot a patient engagement strategy to include samples from African American donors in the kidney atlas and to recruit people from understudied racial and ethnic populations for future translational research. Additionally, they will hire a clinical coordinator whose racial and ethnic background reflects the population served by Boston University Medical Center. This coordinator will partner community members with healthcare centers, policymakers, and researchers, as well as provide guidance on best practices for patient engagement, retention, and the establishment of a patient advisory board.

This Network was awarded the CZI Seed Networks Incentive to Support Diversity for the Human Cell Atlas.

This group developed protocols for human kidney single-nuclei dissociation for ATAC-sequencing. They benchmarked single-cell RNA-sequencing, single-nuclei RNA-sequencing, and single-nuclei ATAC-sequencing on adult and fetal kidneys, generating two datasets from kidney cells from healthy and diabetic patients. They continue to analyze kidney samples across age, sex, and ethnicity and have sequenced over 120,000 cells and nuclei from fetal kidneys.