When specialized cells join together in a group they form free#
"I think the future of development will be to routinely single-cell sequence embryos," says Detlev Arendt, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.Īll these studies started by gently dissolving embryos of different stages in special solutions, then shaking or stirring them to free individual cells. Yet the researchers managed to track the emerging identities of thousands of cells and their progeny.
In vertebrates, "the complexity is much higher," Zinzen notes. Just last week, two other papers online in Science traced cell-by-cell gene activity in planaria, simple flatworms, as they regenerated after being cut into pieces. "My first reaction was, ‘Wow!'" says developmental biologist Robert Zinzen of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. They then assembled those data, taken at intervals of just minutes to hours, into coherent, cell-by-cell histories of how those embryos take shape. In three papers online in Science this week, researchers report taking multiple snapshots of gene activity in most of the cells in developing zebrafish or frog embryos. Now, a combination of single-cell sequencing technologies and computational tools is providing the most detailed picture yet of this process. One of biology's great mysteries is how a single fertilized egg gives rise to the multitude of cell types, tissues, and organs that fit together to make a body.
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