Scientists develop new analytical method
REHOVOT, Israel, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- A multidisciplinary team
at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science says it has developed a
new analytical method that can trace the lineage of cells.
The scientists say they hope their work will lead to answers
for such questions as: "Where do stem cells originate?" and "How
does cancer develop?"
The accomplishment started with a challenge to common
wisdom, which says every cell in an organism carries an exact
duplicate of its genome. Although mistakes in copying occur when
cells divide -- with the errors passed to the next generation of
cells as mutations -- such tiny flaws in the genome are thought to
be trivial and mainly irrelevant.
But research students Dan Frumkin and Adam Wasserstrom of
the Institute's Biological Chemistry Department raised a new
possibility: although biologically insignificant, the accumulated
mutations might hold a record of the history of cell divisions.
Together with Professor Uriel Feige and research student
Shai Kaplan, they proved such mutations can be treated as
information and used to trace lineage on a large scale.
Their findings are detailed in the current issue of the
journal PLoS Computational Biology.
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