Breakthrough of the Year
The breakthrough of 2018 was called by Science magazine a combination of new methods for detailed tracking of the development of individual cells under DNA control
Marina Astvatsaturyan, "EhoMoskvy"
Just as a musical score dictates at which moment to perform symphonic music to enter strings, when to brass instruments, and when to percussion and woodwind, a combination of molecular biological methods has revealed a sequence of genes that ensures the development of individual cells of the body to perform specialized functions, writes the editors of Science.
Calling this combination of techniques the Breakthrough of 2018 (2018 Breakthrough of the Year), the journal recognizes its potential for the progress of basic research and medicine.
Actually, the breakthrough was provided by methods of isolating thousands of intact cells of living organisms, successfully determining the sequence, or sequencing, of nucleic acid molecules reflecting the activity of genes in these cells, as well as labeling cells to recreate their relationships in space and time.
"Such a methodological triad will revolutionize research in the next decade," the expert believes Sciencemag.org Nikolaus Rajewsky from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. This year alone, a number of articles were published with a detailed description of the process of organ formation in worms, fish, frogs and other organisms. The same methods began to be used to study the dynamics of specialization of human cells during life, tissue regeneration and cell changes in various diseases.
The ability to isolate individual cells by the thousands and sequence the genetic material in each of them gave scientists "snapshots" of the RNA that is produced in each cell at a particular moment. And since the RNA sequences correspond to the genes from which they were "rewritten", researchers can see which of the genes are active. These active genes determine the function of the cell.
The combination of methods in question is called "single cell RNA sequencing," and it has been achieved over the past few years. But the turning point came last year when two research groups showed that this approach is applicable on a large enough scale to track the early development of the body. Some authors used single-cell RNA sequencing to measure the gene activity in 8000 cells isolated simultaneously from fruit fly embryos, others obtained a profile of the gene activity of 50,000 cells of the larval stage of roundworms Caenorhabditis elegans. These data showed which proteins – the so–called transcription factors - direct cells to one or another path of specialization, that is, determine their type.
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