Back Faculty of 1000, an indicator of scientific impact in biomedicine, highlights a paper by Simone Tassani

Faculty of 1000, an indicator of scientific impact in biomedicine, highlights a paper by Simone Tassani

A researcher with the DTIC, he is co-author of a scientific paper published in the journal Annals of Human Biology (2013) on the number of cells a human being contains. The work has been widely cited by the scientific community, and National Geographic has also featured it.

18.01.2018

 

Faculty of 1000 highlights a paper of which Simone Tassani is a co-author. A researcher of the research groups MBIOMM (Multiscale and Computational Biomechanics and Mechanobiology) and SIMBiosys of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, he published a paper in the Annals of Human Biology (2013) on the number of cells a human being contains: “An estimation of the number of cells in the human body”, an article that has been widely cited by the scientific community, and also covered by National Geographic

F1000Prime is a company founded by Vitek Tracz, the creator of BioMed Central and Current Opinions, which aims to be a work space for scientists and an alternative system to peer review. The company recommends articles on biology and medicine through a community that is made up of more than 6,000 scientists and clinical researchers and 5,000 academics. F1000Prime uses individual scores to calculate the total scores for each article and to classify the articles of each discipline. The F1000Prime score is a metric on the worthiness of the article, as well as a potential indicator of the scientific impact of individual documents.

The total number of cells that make up a standard adult human

All living organisms are made up of individual and identifiable cells, whose number, along with their size and type, defines the eventual structure and functions of an organism. Although the total number of cells of some organisms is sometimes known, it had not yet been defined in higher organisms. Specifically, the total number of cells in a human being is estimated at between 1012 and 1016.

Therefore, the goal of the study published in Annals of Human Biology was to study and discuss the theoretical problem of the total number of cells that make up the standard adult body, for which he performed a systematic calculation of the total number of cells of the human body and of individual organs using bibliographic and/or mathematical approaches. The resulting value obtained by this group of researchers was 3.72 x 1013.

This estimate calculated for a variety of organs and cell types has been referred to by subsequent cultural, biological, medical and comparative modelling studies.

Reference work:

 

Bianconi E, Piovesan A, Facchin F, Beraudi A, Casadei R, Frabetti F, Vitale L, Pelleri MC, Tassani S, Piva F, Perez-Amodio S, Strippoli P, Canaider S.  (2013), “An estimation of the number of cells in the human body”, Ann Hum Biol, Nov-Dec; 40(6):463-71. 

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