Cell Ontology

OntoBee AberOWL OLS Bioregistry

The Cell Ontology is designed as a structured controlled vocabulary for cell types. This ontology was constructed for use by the model organism and other bioinformatics databases, where there is a need for a controlled vocabulary of cell types. This ontology is not organism specific. It covers cell types from prokaryotes to mammals. However, it excludes plant cell types, which are covered by PO.

Integration with other ontologies

Cell types in CL are linked to uberon via part-of relationships. The cl.owl product imports a subset of the entire uberon ontology. To see all cell types in the context of all anatomical structures, use the uberon ext release.

Cell types are linked to GO biological processes via the capable-of relationship type. CL also links to other ontologies such as chebi, pr and pato.

In turn, CL is linked to from a variety of ontologies such as GO, Uberon and various phenotype ontologies.

Applications

The following are some applications of the cell ontology along with their publications:

HuBMAP

HuBMAP Consortium (2019) The human body at cellular resolution: the NIH Human Biomolecular Atlas Program. Nature, 574, 187–192

Human Cell Atlas (HCA)

Regev,A., Teichmann,S.A., Lander,E.S., Amit,I., Benoist,C., Birney,E., Bodenmiller,B., Campbell,P., Carninci,P., Clatworthy,M., et al. (2017) The Human Cell Atlas. Elife, 6.

Single Cell Expression Atlas

Papatheodorou,I., Moreno,P., Manning,J., Fuentes,A.M.-P., George,N., Fexova,S., Fonseca,N.A., Füllgrabe,A., Green,M., Huang,N., et al. (2020) Expression Atlas update: from tissues to single cells. Nucleic Acids Res., 48, D77–D83.

BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN)/Brain Data Standards Ontology

Tan,S.Z.K., Kir,H., Aevermann,B., Gillespie,T., Hawrylycz,M., Lein,E., Matentzoglu,N., Miller,J., Mollenkopf,T.S., Mungall,C.J., et al. (2021) Brain Data Standards Ontology: A data-driven ontology of transcriptomically defined cell types in the primary motor cortex. bioRxiv, 10.1101/2021.10.10.463703.

ENCODE

Malladi, V. S., Erickson, D. T., Podduturi, N. R., Rowe, L. D., Chan, E. T., Davidson, J. M., … Hong, E. L. (2015). Ontology application and use at the ENCODE DCC. Database : The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, 2015, bav010–. doi:10.1093/database/bav010

FANTOMS

Lizio, M., Harshbarger, J., Shimoji, H., Severin, J., Kasukawa, T., Sahin, S., … Kawaji, H. (2015). Gateways to the FANTOM5 promoter level mammalian expression atlas. Genome Biology, 16(1),

1. doi:10.1186/s13059-014-0560-6

LINCS

Metadata Standard and Data Exchange Specifications to Describe, Model, and Integrate Complex and Diverse High-Throughput Screening Data from the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS)