Cell lineage
Cell Lineage
- CellLineage of an organism is the pattern of cell division during its development
- In lineage tracing, a single cell is marked in such a way that the mark is transmitted to the cell’s progeny , resulting in a set of labelled clones.
- Provides information about number of progeny of the founder cell, their location and their differentiation status.
- Applied to stem cell research and in modelling cellular heterogeneity in cancer.
- Began with Whitman’s description of cleavage patterns in leech embryos. Later lineage were described in nematodes, sea urchins and ascidians.
Why Caenorhabditis elegans ?
- Small, relatively simple and precisely structured organism. Anatomy has been described in detail and one can map out the exact lineage of every cell in the body.
- Development is highly determinant , and cell fate decisions are autonomous from the surroundings.
- Number of somatic cell is highly limited . Make the analyses straight forward and accurate.
- Fate of every cell in the embryo has been determind using the timelapse microscopy.
Method to study Cell Lineage
- Direct observation:-
- Direct observation or by reconstruction from fixed specimens.
- Required embryos that were very small , transparent and rapidly developing.
- Nomarski differential interference contrast microscopy allows imagining transparent specimens.
- Time lapse microscopy in multiple focal planes has been has allowed entire cell lineage of individual animals to be recorded digitally.
- Clonal analysis
- In large Opaque or slowly developing embryos where direct observation of cell divisions is not feasible.
- Necessary to mark individual cells by physical or genetic means , and later the progeny are identified by expression of the marker.
- Cells can be labelled by injection with a non-diffusing dye such as a fluorescein-conjugated dextran.
- Progeny of a single cell forms a clone.
- Possible issue is that the dye gets progressively diluted with each division.
- Used to study cheek and my million neutral development.