Lexicon · NucLex for innovators
Cell type
Fully specified name: Cell type (concept)
A category of cells defined using stated characteristics and a classification system.
- Scope note
- Labels from different atlases may require careful resolution.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Molecular targeting (planned; brief only)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
Notes
A cell type is a named class of cells. The name looks simple, but the criteria behind it differ by discipline and by era. Classical histology classified cells by appearance and tissue of origin under the microscope. Immunology classified them by the surface markers detected with antibodies. Single-cell sequencing classifies them by patterns of gene expression, and often by clusters discovered computationally and named afterward. The same word, used by a pathologist and by a genomics researcher, can point to overlapping but not identical sets of cells.
Cell atlases, the large reference collections built from sequencing and imaging, each publish their own labels and hierarchies. A label in one atlas may correspond to one label, several labels, or part of a label in another. Resolving these correspondences is a mapping task with the same demands as any terminology mapping: it needs direction, relationship type, versions, and evidence, and it should not be done by matching strings.
For nuclear oncology, cell type matters because target expression is a property of particular cells, and a tumor is a mixture of malignant cells, immune cells, stromal cells, and vessels. Saying that "the tumor expresses" a target leaves open which cells do. NucLex records the classification system and version with every cell type label, and treats cross-atlas correspondences as reviewed mappings rather than assumed equivalences.