ALLEN DISCOVERY CENTER FOR CELL LINEAGE TRACING

We each began as one cell, which divided into two, and then into four, eight, sixteen and so on, ultimately giving rise to the highly organized mass of forty trillion cells that constitutes an adult human. A fundamental scientific question is to understand the process by which this family tree or "lineage" of cells unfolds in space and time. How is each cell related to each other cell? How closely are different kinds of cells related? Who and where were their common ancestors? What are the signals that drove their differentiation into different types? When and from whom were these signals received? For over a century, biologists have been asking these questions, but our understanding of how humans and other vertebrates develop remains highly incomplete. Over the past few years, our team pioneered a novel paradigm for globally recording the histories of cells. In brief, we use a powerful new genome editing tool, CRISPR, to irreversibly record information by mutating targeted regions of..