ArticlePLoS computational biology2005
Genomic variability within an organism exposes its cell lineage tree.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 159 citations in OpenAlex.
- A method for CRISPR/Cas9-induced genetic barcoding and lineage tracing in sheep.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Mapping the zygote-to-adult developmental cell phylogeny in Arabidopsis thaliana reveals a three-cell rule of branching.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Direct and indirect neurogenesis from radial glial progenitor cell clones in the mouse neocortex.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Cell Fate Determination and Lineage Tracing: Technological Evolution and Multidimensional Applications.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- Advances in CRISPR-Cas9 in lineage tracing of model animals.Animal models and experimental medicine · 2025Review
- Quantifying cell divisions along evolutionary lineages in cancer.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- Polyguanine microsatellites are robust replication clocks in cancer.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- LINNAEUS: Simultaneous Single-Cell Lineage Tracing and Cell Type Identification.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Recording Lineage History with Cellular Barcodes in the Mammary Epithelium and in Breast Cancer.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2025Review
- High-fidelity, large-scale targeted profiling of microsatellites.Genome research · 2024Article
- Review
- Cell type evolution reconstruction across species through cell phylogenies of single-cell RNA sequencing data.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- The transcriptional legacy of developmental stochasticity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Respiratory epithelial cell types, states and fates in the era of single-cell RNA-sequencing.The Biochemical journal · 2023Review
- LINEAGE: Label-free identification of endogenous informative single-cell mitochondrial RNA mutation for lineage analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Mapping single-cell-resolution cell phylogeny reveals cell population dynamics during organ development.Nature methods · 2021Article
- Applications of high-resolution clone tracking technologies in cancer.Current opinion in biomedical engineering · 2021Article
- Applications of Single-Cell DNA Sequencing.Annual review of genomics and human genetics · 2021Review
- Comparison of seven single cell whole genome amplification commercial kits using targeted sequencing.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Retrospective cell lineage reconstruction in humans by using short tandem repeats.Cell reports methods · 2021Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What is the lineage relation among the cells of an organism? The answer is sought by developmental biology, immunology, stem cell research, brain research, and cancer research, yet complete cell lineage trees have been reconstructed only for simple organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans. We discovered that somatic mutations accumulated during normal development of a higher organism implicitly encode its entire cell lineage tree with very high precision. Our mathematical analysis of known mutation rates in microsatellites (MSs) shows that the entire cell lineage tree of a human embryo, or a mouse, in which no cell is a descendent of more than 40 divisions, can be reconstructed from information on somatic MS mutations alone with no errors, with probability greater than 99.95%. Analyzing all approximately 1.5 million MSs of each cell of an organism may not be practical at present, but we also show that in a genetically unstable organism, analyzing only a few hundred MSs may suffice to reconstruct portions of its cell lineage tree. We demonstrate the utility of the approach by reconstructing cell lineage trees from DNA samples of a human cell line displaying MS instability. Our discovery and its associated procedure, which we have automated, may point the way to a future "Human Cell Lineage Project" that would aim to resolve fundamental open questions in biology and medicine by reconstructing ever larger portions of the human cell lineage tree.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.