BICAN data available
The first public release of data from the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) is now available, thanks to the creation of a data ecosystem built by UTHealth Houston researchers.
The first Rapid Release Inventory project features data from six labs, totaling 255 donors, 1,461 specimens, and 20 data collections. The project-level organization provides search across common features of all single cell data. Data is further packaged into 20 “collections” of files that are available individually from the Neuroscience Multiomic Archive (NeMO); each collection is grouped based upon technique, species, grant, and participating laboratory.
BICAN’s data generation and release effort is supported by an ecosystem platform whose creation was led by GQ Zhang, PhD, vice president and chief data scientist for UTHealth Houston and principal investigator on “Engagement and outreach to achieve a FAIR data ecosystem for the BICAN” grant.
A five-year, $500M NIH program, the overall goal of BICAN is to map the approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain by their type and function. Investigators from more than a dozen institutions form the BICAN research consortium.
As a PI of BICAN’s data coordination component, Zhang led his group who designed, developed, and continuously enhanced and expanded the NIMP (Neuroanatomy-anchored Information Management Platform) platform for collaborative BICAN data generation. NIMP has been recognized as the most upstream metadata tracking engine critical for all downstream data generation and sharing activities for the BICAN consortium. Downstream systems rely on NIMP’s metadata feeds to support their mission-critical operations, leading to regular public data releases that incorporates the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles.
BICAN is a groundbreaking collaborative effort that brings together neuroscientists, computational biologists, and software engineers to create a comprehensive atlas of the human brain, referred to as the “human genome project” for the brain. W. Jim Zheng, PhD, professor at the UTHealth Houston’s McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, is a principal investigator on this project leading metadata standardization.
Under the direction of Zhang, co-director of the Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies and professor of medicine, biomedical informatics and public health, the UTHealth Houston-led project plays a critical role in this initiative by enhancing data sharing and accessibility, which are fundamental to advancing understanding of the brain.
The BRAIN Initiative aims to accelerate the development and application of innovative technologies, enabling researchers to share data in order to produce a revolutionary, new dynamic picture of the human brain that, for the first time, will show how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space.