United Press International - NewsTrack - Scientists develop new analytical method

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10/31/2005 10:38:00 AM -0500

Newstrack: The percentage of blacks in the U.S. military has dropped significantly in the past five years. Some members of Britain's Parliament are pushing for an investigation into Prime Minister Tony Blair's conduct in the run-up to the Iraq War. The Summit of Americas ended Saturday with an agreement to table the question of a hemispheric trade bloc. British healthcare planners say medical care practitioners will help alleviate the shortage of doctors and nurses in hospital emergency rooms. The National Transportation Safety Board said a toxicology report on the captain of Lake George, N.Y., tour boat that capsized and killed 20 was inconclusive. More than 400 South Koreans traveled Saturday to North Korea for reunions with relatives they have been separated from for more than 50 years. Intelligence experts are questioning whether White House adviser Karl Rove should retain his security clearance, the Los Angeles Times reported. Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces engaged in a fight Saturday against the fundamentalist terrorist group al-Qaida in Iraq near the Syrian border. New York City police want to question a 41-year-old former journalist who worked for the Village Voice and Women's Wear Daily concerning a Halloween rape. A New York City school bus driver, who allegedly was drugged, fell asleep behind the wheel and drove into oncoming traffic injuring four.

NewsTrack

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, under the guidance of Professor Ehud Shapiro, 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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