A research team has published a whole-body single-cell atlas of Danionella cerebrum, a small adult vertebrate fish, in a paper appearing in the journal Science. The work addresses one of the major challenges of modern cell biology: systematically mapping the cell types that make up an entire organism, rather than an isolated organ or tissue.

The chosen species, Danionella cerebrum, is a tiny fish related to the zebrafish that has gained prominence in neuroscience for its transparent body and small size, features that facilitate whole-body imaging of its tissues. Having a reference atlas for the entire organism makes it possible to relate the molecular diversity of cells to their anatomical location and opens the door to comparative studies with other vertebrates.

The paper appears in volume 394, issue 6823, of Science, dated October 2026. The available bibliographic reference does not detail the methodology used or the specific quantitative results of the atlas, so the sequencing techniques and the numbers of identified cell types are not described here.

An atlas of this kind becomes a reference tool for the community: it serves to interpret experiments on development, regeneration or disease in the model, and to understand how genetic programs are conserved or diverge across vertebrate species.