A new method allows stem cells and cancer stem cells to be studied at the single cell level and the resulting cell clones to be traced directly. The method was developed by scientists from the Stem Cell Institute HI-STEM*, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Center for Genome Regulation in Barcelona. Studying thousands of individual cells in parallel, the researchers combined the analysis of the genomic cancer mutations with the associated expression profiles.
Publication: Velten L, Story BA, Hernández-Malmierca P, Raffel S, Leonce DR, Milbank J, Paulsen M, Demir A, Szu-Tu C, Frömel R, Lutz C, Nowak D, Jann JC, Pabst C, Boch T, Hofmann WK, Müller-Tidow C, Trumpp A, Haas S, Steinmetz LM. Identification of leukemic and pre-leukemic stem cells by clonal tracking from single-cell transcriptomics. Nature Communication. 2021 Mar 1;12(1):1366. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-21650-1. PMID: 33649320; PMCID: PMC7921413.
Read more: DKFZ Press Release