ArticleQuantitative biology (Beijing, China)2026
DNA methylation meets lineage tracing: History, recent progress, and future directions.
Article in Quantitative biology (Beijing, China), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Charting single-cell lineages with synthetic and natural barcodes.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- DNA methylation meets lineage tracing: History, recent progress, and future directions.Quantitative biology (Beijing, China) · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Lineage tracing techniques have been developed rapidly in the past decades by employing new genetic engineering tools. However, due to their invasive nature, these are difficult to apply to humans. Although endogenous DNA mutations can be used for in vivo lineage tracing in humans, their extremely low mutation rate presents substantial technical challenges. Epimutations on DNA methylation happen at a rate of about 0.001 per CpG site per division. Such rich and stable information enables high-resolution, noninvasive lineage tracing in humans, as recently achieved with both MethylTree and EPI-Clone. MethylTree is a computational innovation that accurately predicts cell lineages from single-cell DNA methylation data, be it genome-wide or targeted. EPI-Clone is a targeted approach that requires careful CpG panel selection for specific tissues, which has been validated in blood. In this review, we present an overview of related historical studies, discuss the development of both MethylTree and EPI-Clone, and compare these two approaches. Although EPI-Clone is more scalable and cheaper, MethylTree has a higher resolution and works directly across different tissues. We demonstrate here that MethylTree also works well with EPI-Clone data, thus providing a unified solution for epimutation-based lineage tracing. Finally, we highlight the advantages of epimutation-based lineage tracing, discuss future directions for tool development, and touch on considerations in biological applications. Epimutation-based lineage tracing opens up an exciting avenue for noninvasive lineage tracing in humans across many biological processes.
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Registered trials
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.