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Scientists develop new analytical method
Publish Date : 10/28/2005 8:56:00 AM Ý Source : Technology News Onlypunjab.com
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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