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Synopsis
The human body is made of about 100 trillion cells, all of which are descendants of a single cell, the fertilized egg. The quest to understand their path of descent, called a cell lineage tree, is shared by many branches of biology and medicine, including developmental biology, immunology, stem cell research, brain research, and cancer research. So far, science has been able to determine the cell lineage tree of tiny organisms only, worms with a thousand cells or so.
Our team has discovered that the mutations accumulated in each cell in our body during its normal development from the zygote carry sufficient information to reconstruct, in principle, cell lineage trees for large organisms, including humans. Inspired by this discovery, we developed an automated procedure for the reconstruction of cell lineage trees from DNA samples. A direct application of these results may include the analysis of the development of cancer. The results may also inspire a future ‘‘Human Cell Lineage Project,’’ whose aim would be to reconstruct an entire human cell lineage tree.
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