Search by cell or niche

Two resources describe lung cells, and they answer different questions. CellCards describes what a cell type is: its markers, its lineage and its function. The Niche Explorer describes where those cells sit: the tissue structures they build, and how those structures change in disease. Both are indexed by the same cell-type names, so a cell type can be followed from one to the other.

Hierarchy of lung epithelial cell types, from conducting and respiratory zones to individual cell types

CellCards Explorer

Explore expert curated cell types and function

Expert-curated records for each cell type of the human lung: canonical markers, developmental origin, function, disease associations and ontology identifiers, organised by anatomical compartment. Use it to establish what a cell type is and how it has been defined in the literature.

Curated · cell-type resolution · literature-sourced Open CellCards → Lung tissue foci: a lined air sac drawn as a ring beside a fibrotic niche drawn as a solid focus

Niche Explorer

Explore lung tissue niches in health and disease

Lung tissue foci from image-based spatial transcriptomics, each drawn in the grammar its anatomy requires: the air sac as a lined ring, the fibrotic niche as a solid focus. Each focus reports its cell composition, its radial organisation, its donors, its agreement with the published niche labels, and the genes that separate it. Use it to establish where a cell type sits within the tissue, and how that changes with disease.

Measured · niche resolution · spatial transcriptomics Open the Niche Explorer →

The Niche Explorer is under review and is not yet linked from the site navigation. It covers all 45 samples of GSE250346, from 35 donors across 5 tissue arrays. Its tissue foci use the pathologist's annotations. An exploratory mixture model groups regions using cell-type abundance by depth, neighboring cell types, region cell count and spatial span. The resulting groups summarize this dataset; they are not established biological archetypes or independently validated disease categories.