Cell Ontology

OntoBee AberOWL OLS BioPortal Bioregistry

Cell Ontology (CL) is an ontology designed to classify and describe cell types across different organisms. It serves as a resource for model organism and bioinformatics databases. The ontology covers a broad range of cell types in animal cells, with over 2700 cell type classes, and provides high-level cell type classes as mapping points for cell type classes in ontologies representing other species, such as the Plant Ontology or Drosophila Anatomy Ontology. Integration with other ontologies such as Uberon, GO, CHEBI, PR, and PATO enables linking cell types to anatomical structures, biological processes, and other relevant concepts.

The Cell Ontology was created in 2004 and has been a core OBO Foundry ontology since the start of the Foundry. Since then, CL has been adopted by various efforts, including the HuBMAP project, Human Cell Atlas (HCA), cellxgene platform, Single Cell Expression Atlas, BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN), ArrayExpress, The Cell Image Library, ENCODE, and FANTOM5, for annotating cell types and facilitating cellular reference mapping, as documented through various publications and examples.

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:

CZ CELLxGENE

CZI Single-Cell Biology Program, Shibla Abdulla, Brian Aevermann, Pedro Assis, Seve Badajoz, Sidney M. Bell, Emanuele Bezzi, et al. 2023. “CZ CELL×GENE Discover: A Single-Cell Data Platform for Scalable Exploration, Analysis and Modeling of Aggregated Data.” bioRxiv. doi:10.1101/2023.10.30.563174.

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.

Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP)

Ong E, Wang LL, Schaub J, O’Toole JF, Steck B, Rosenberg AZ, Dowd F, Hansen J, Barisoni L, Jain S, de Boer IH, Valerius MT, Waikar SS, Park C, Crawford DC, Alexandrov T, Anderton CR, Stoeckert C, Weng C, Diehl AD, Mungall CJ, Haendel M, Robinson PN, Himmelfarb J, Iyengar R, Kretzler M, Mooney S, and He Y, Kidney Precision Medicine Project. Modeling Kidney Disease Using Ontology: insights from the Kidney Precision Medicine Project. Nature Review Nephrology. 2020 Nov;16(11):686-696. doi: 10.1038/s41581-020-00335-w. PMID: 32939051. PMCID: PMC8012202.

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)