Studying the Individual Cell

“Researchers are taking advantage of new tools and techniques in imaging, sequencing, and proteomics to zoom in on what single cells are doing … Paul Dear at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology says that single-cell analysis is going to explode — and test the paradigm that all cells in a body have identical genomes. “I think we are going to see a lot more cell-cell variation,” he says. Right now, though, Dear is focusing on cancer as those individual cells have lots of genomic differences.” More…