Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funders who make our work possible.

Wellcome Trust#

The team is core-funded by the Wellcome Trust through the Wellcome Sanger Institute:

This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number 220540/Z/20/A]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)#

Supporting development and extension of the Cell Ontology and semantic tooling for single-cell data — including ontology coverage for Human Cell Atlas datasets, annotation of CELLxGENE content, our knowledge graph, and agentic ontology-editing and annotation workflows.

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, grant BHDAF2026-011729 (current, 2026–2027) — Cell Ontology extension for published HCA atlases, agentic editing and annotation tools, and semantic support for CELLxGENE users.
• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, grant 2023-221471 (recently completed) — added hundreds of new cell type terms, flagged Cell-Ontology-annotated content in CELLxGENE Census, released a Neo4j knowledge graph combining CL with CELLxGENE metadata, and delivered semantic query tooling.

NIH BRAIN Initiative — Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas (HMBA)#

Supporting Cell Ontology and brain anatomy ontology extensions for HMBA cell types and brain regions — including terms for whole-mouse-brain and human/non-human-primate basal ganglia cell types, and tools linking atlas annotations back to the Cell Ontology — as part of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN).

Research was supported by the grant “Functionally guided adult whole brain cell atlas in human and NHP” (UM1MH130981). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Schmidt Futures#

A gift from Schmidt Futures supporting our contributions to the Cell Annotation Platform (CAP) — collaborative infrastructure for standardised cell type annotation, built around the Cell Annotation Schema.