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Two teams – including one from the ӳ����ý, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine – report surprising discoveries about head and neck cancer biology in back-to-back papers published in Science.

Today, the cancer samples we have been following will go from tangible pieces of tissue to something a bit more abstract: invisible strands of pure DNA. In the process, the samples will be whirled and spun through laboratory machinery, incubated over night, and washed repeatedly with different chemical substances. The final product of all of this will be large droplets of clear liquid at the bottom of tiny, plastic Eppendorf tubes.

Back in May, we about Trinity, a suite of tools that assembles transcripts, or bits of RNA that have been copied from a cell’s genome, into a “transcriptome,” even without a reference genome handy.