Project Info

-Goal
Unraveling the lineage relation between cells is of great importance both in the fields of developmental biology and cancer research.

A multi-cellular organism develops from a single cell – the zygote, through numerous cell divisions and cell deaths to display an astonishing complexity of trillions of cells of different types, residing in different tissues and expressing different genes. This complex developmental program is still mostly unknown and necessitates the reconstruction of the lineage relation between cells.

In the field of cancer research fundamental unanswered questions include understanding tumor growth dynamics, tumor cell turnover rate and the lineage relations between cells in primary tumors and their associated metastases.

Existing methods to reconstruct cell lineage relations are very limited and usually invasive. Our group developed a method that uses somatic genomic variability between cells for reconstructing their lineage. The method is based on the fact that microsatellite mutations accumulated during cell divisions carry information both on the number of divisions cells have undergone (cell depth) and on the lineage relation between them.

The systems takes as input DNA samples, processes them using a liquid handling laboratory robot, analyzes the signals obtained from a capillary electrophoresis machine to detect mutations in over 100 microsatellite loci. The mutation signal is then processed using existing and novel phylogenetic algorithm to yield the lineage tree, cell depth and association between lineage and other biological parameters (gene expression, geometric location etc).