Amazing stuff!
"“Dr. Stadler’s lab and others around the world are trying to turn cells into their own historians, as she and her colleagues described in the journal Nature Reviews Genetics on Monday. Their engineered cells can insert distinctive bits of genetic material into their DNA. As the cells divide, those genetic bits turn into distinctive bar codes.
The technology is also allowing cells to create a genetic record when they experience a notable event, such as receiving a signal from other cells or making a particular protein.
Dr. Schier speculated that doctors might even someday inject sentinel cells into our bodies to track our changing health. ..."
From the abstract:
"A paradigm for biology is emerging in which cells can be genetically programmed to write their histories into their own genomes. These records can subsequently be read, and the cellular histories reconstructed, which for each cell could include a record of its lineage relationships, extrinsic influences, internal states and physical locations, over time. DNA recording has the potential to transform the way that we study developmental and disease processes. Recent advances in genome engineering are driving the development of systems for DNA recording, and meanwhile single-cell and spatial omics technologies increasingly enable the recovery of the recorded information. Combined with advances in computational and phylogenetic inference algorithms, the DNA recording paradigm is beginning to bear fruit. In this Perspective, we explore the rationale and technical basis of DNA recording, what aspects of cellular biology might be recorded and how, and the types of discovery that we anticipate this paradigm will enable."
The lives of cells, recorded (open access)
Fig. 1: Rationale for DNA recording.
Fig. 2: Recording and reconstructing cellular histories.
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