Reading and editing genomes
New technologies for reading and editing DNA and RNA provide vast amounts of data and reveal transformative insights. At the Ó³»´«Ã½, scientists generate a whole human genome’s worth of genetic data every few minutes, read gene expression patterns in tissues and in millions of single cells, and use gene editing to create disease models and dissect cell circuitry. Learn more about #HowWeScience.
Spatial -omics
"Location, location, location" applies to biology, too
What a cell does depends not just on the genes it expresses or the proteins it produces, but also on its location within an organ or tissue. But many molecular experiments analyze cells in bulk, or even break down tissue samples into individual cells, which strips away information about where a given cell was within its original tissue, who its cellular neighbors were, what signals it received from those neighbors, and how those spatial relationships might influence its functions.
Scientists at Ó³»´«Ã½ and elsewhere are working on powerful "spatial -omics" techniques that collect in-depth molecular profiles from individual cells while retaining detailed information about each cell's original location. By studying single cells in ways that capture that spatial data, these methods are revealing more than ever before about how cells work and the mechanisms of disease.
