John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Wow. You can now get cells to automatically record their history in their own DNA! ...
Wow. You can now get cells to automatically record their history in their own DNA!
Scientists altered the stem cells of mouse embryos so that now and then all the cells descended from these insert a short piece of information - a 'barcode' - into their genome.
This barcode randomly changes with time, and new copies keep getting added to the genome.
Later, you can read off these barcodes 𝑜𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 by shining light at a cell!
By comparing the results for many different cells, you can establish a lineage - a literal 'geneology' - of each cell.
One of these techniques is called MEMOIR - one of those cute acronyms scientists love. It stands for Memory by Engineered Mutagenesis with Optical In Situ Readout:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5725379/There are actually many related techniques, described here, and they keep improving:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.573434v1.full 
Published at
2024-09-22 19:09:53 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Wow. You can now get cells to automatically record their history in their own DNA!\n\nScientists altered the stem cells of mouse embryos so that now and then all the cells descended from these insert a short piece of information - a 'barcode' - into their genome.\n\nThis barcode randomly changes with time, and new copies keep getting added to the genome. \n\nLater, you can read off these barcodes 𝑜𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 by shining light at a cell!\n\nBy comparing the results for many different cells, you can establish a lineage - a literal 'geneology' - of each cell.\n\nOne of these techniques is called MEMOIR - one of those cute acronyms scientists love. It stands for Memory by Engineered Mutagenesis with Optical In Situ Readout:\n\nhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5725379/\n\nThere are actually many related techniques, described here, and they keep improving:\n\nhttps://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.573434v1.full\nhttps://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/182/774/648/882/269/original/909982cb225e155d.jpg\n",
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