If I could turn back time

May 4, 2018 6:43 AM

With these datasets, if someone wants to make a specific cell type, they now have the recipe for the steps that those cells took as they formed in the embryo. Developmental biologists can gather more and higher quality data on many species, follow embryos further in time and perform any number of perturbation experiments, all of which can help improve our understanding of the fundamental rules of biology and disease.
posted by asok (3 comments total)

Very cool. I try to keep up with science news but I didn't know that single-cell sequencing was possible.
posted by exogenous at 9:15 AM on May 4, 2018

I'm endlessly annoyed when science reporting doesn't link to the actual articles.

This Science(mag.org) news article does.

The Phys.org article mentions single cell sequencing, but what was really done was sequencing the transcriptome of each single cell. In other words, what messenger RNAs and how much of it are being expressed (which genes are turned on and how loud it is) - as a start to understanding what makes one specialized cell different than another and how they decide.

Single cell transcriptome sequencing has been a thing for a while, but this was a huge application of the technology.

(The genomic DNA sequence of every cell from a single organism is identical, barring mosaicism and cancer and stuff.)
posted by porpoise at 2:20 PM on May 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ah, that makes more sense. I have been talking about this with friends and we were getting stuck on the fact that the DNA should not be different from cell to cell.
posted by asok at 1:20 PM on May 14, 2018