RECORDING CELLS’ STORIES New DNA recorder CHYRON offers nondestructive observation of cells for lineage tracing and recording
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TONYA BECERRA
H
ISTORIES HOLD KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING THE PRESENT AND ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE BY LOOKING AT THE PAST. But how do you tell the history of a cell if you can’t watch what it does over time because it is deep within a living animal? What if measuring the properties of a cell requires you to destroy it so that you can never get a complete history? And how do you track the history of not just one but millions or billions of cells? A new DNA recorder called CHYRON (Cell History Recording by Ordered Insertion) changes the way researchers can study cell histories by giving cells the ability to write their experiences into their own genomes, as a growing DNA barcode. Later on, researchers can sequence the barcodes to find out what cells experienced, including their relationship to other cells or how much of an important biological signal the cell saw during its life. In essence, CHYRON gives cells the ability to hold on to their pasts so that we can deduce how a cell’s past may have influenced its future. This will help us understand complex biological questions such as how organisms develop or what causes a cancer to spread throughout a patient. Chang Liu, UCI Samueli School associate professor of biomedical engineering with joint appointments in chemistry as well as molecular biology and biochemistry, and Theresa Loveless, postdoctoral scholar in biomedical engineering, created CHYRON. They detail their findings in the March 22, 2021, issue of Nature Chemical Biology.
UCI Department of Biomedical Engineering
