Over the past couple of decades, researchers have sequenced thousands of genomes from numerous species. In virtually every case, the deciphered DNA was extracted from millions of cells and pooled. The result has been a wealth of data, but, says Joel Hirschhorn, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "there are a lot of phenomena where there's a lot of cell-to-cell variability that won't be apparent when you look across populations of cells." That may be about to change.
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