Over time, those lineages of cells grow distinct, giving rise to all the different organs and tissues in the human body and comprising as many as 36 trillion cells.
“We really only understand bits and pieces,” said Tanja Stadler, a computational biologist at ETH in Zurich.
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.
Persons:
”, Alex Schier, “, Tanja Stadler
Organizations:
University of Basel, ETH
Locations:
Switzerland, Zurich