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Perspectives
Counting Divisions in a Human Somatic Cell Tree: How, What and Why
Darryl Shibata and Simon Tavaré
volume 5 | issue 6
16 march 2006Pages: 610 - 614
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The billions of cells within an individual can be organized by genealogy into a single somatic cell tree that starts from the zygote and ends with present day cells. In theory, this tree can be reconstructed from replication errors that surreptitiously record divisions and ancestry. Such a molecular clock approach is currently impractical because somatic mutations are rare, but more feasible measurements are possible by substituting instead the 5? to 3? order of epigenetic modifications such as CpG methylation. Epigenetic somatic errors are readily detected as age-related changes in methylation, which suggests that certain adult stem cells divide frequently and “compete” for survival within niches. Potentially the genealogy of any human cell may be reconstructed without prior experimental manipulation by merely reading histories recorded in their genomes.
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.