Guidelines for reporting cell types: the MIRACL standard

Abstract

Cell types are at the root of modern biology, and describing them is a core task of the Human Cell Atlas project. Surprisingly, there are no standards for reporting new cell types, leading to a gap between classes mentioned in biomedical literature and the Cell Ontology, the primary registry of cell types. Here we introduce the Minimal Information Reporting About a CelL (MIRACL) standard, a guideline for describing cell types alongside scientific articles. In a MIRACL sheet, authors organize a label, a diagnostic description, a taxon, an anatomical structure, and a parent cell class for each cell type of interest. The MIRACL standard bridges the gap between wet-lab researchers and ontologists, facilitating the integration of biomedical knowledge into ontologies and artificial intelligence systems.