New Technology Tracks Cell Lineage

摘要

Evolution is change, and not always for the better. In fact, evolution is at the core of many of the diseases that are hardest to treat. Pathogens such as bacteria and parasites evade their host's defenses or antimicrobial drugs through evolution. Cancer itself is an evolutionary process, whereby "rogue" cells evolve to grow beyond their normal barriers, migrate to distant locations in the body, and ultimately evade chemotherapy. Sasha Levy, professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University and assistant professor of physical and quantitative biology, has developed a technology-high-resolution lineage tracking-that allows scientists to monitor the evolution of populations of cells with unprecedented granularity and study these processes more quantitatively.