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Most Popular Human Cell In Science Gets Sequenced
ananyo writes "The research world's most famous human cell has had its genome decoded, and it's a mess. German researchers this week report the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which originates from a deadly cervical tumor taken from a patient named Henrietta Lacks (Slashdot has previously noted a film made about the cells and there's a recent mutli-award winning book on Lacks). Established the same year that Lacks died in 1951, HeLa cells were the first human cells to grow well in the laboratory. The cells have contributed to more than 60,000 research papers, the development of a polio vaccine in the 1950s and, most recently, an international effort to characterize the genome, known as ENCODE. The team's work shows that HeLa cells contain one extra version of most chromosomes, with up to five copies of some, and raises further questions over the widespread use of HeLa cells as models for human cell biology."
get/get/Verb: Come to have or hold (something); receive
Experience, suffer, or be afflicted with (something bad)
"gets sequenced?"
wouldn't simply "sequenced" have been better?
"gets" is present-tense, "sequenced" is past tense.
Sent from my ENIAC
I wonder if she will be cloned in the distant future? Ideal source material to use for consistent, replicable experimental results over a long period of time. Fix the 'infinite lives' mod that's gotten into the genome and it's perfect. She really will live forever I think.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
5 copies of some chromosomes? That seems likely to be an artifact of many many generations of mitosis, not something the original sample had. The good news is that we'll have better experimental controls in future science. The bad news is that this might invalidate a lot of research.
The fact that the cell line originates in a cancer tumor should have been your first hint.
Seeing as a leading cause of cancer is DNA becoming damaged (radiation including UV, viruses, etc) why'd nobody until now think of the possibility that cells taken from a deadly cancerous tumor might just possibly have f'd up DNA?!
When I was much younger and heard about cloning, I started thinking about saving some of my DNA so someone could clone me someday. (Yes, I was born into a conspiracy-prone family [crackle of tinfoil].) Then, one day when I was thinking what would be best to save, and before I had heard of stem cells that can grow into different cell types, I looked at a scab I had just pulled off a healing cut. It occurred to me that if they cloned from this scab, maybe my clone would be a brown, scaly, wrinkly version of a human.
I tossed the scab and the idea.
If it were better to get "normal" type tissue for DNA samples, who would define normal? What if there were one little cancer cell in there that was undetectable by normal means, or a cell with DNA for some kind of genes for mental illness? We hardly know what we're messing with at this pont.
Obligatory
...with the ghost of Ms. Lacks. They'd have to salt & burn every last cell line.
That's a hella cell line.
this particular cancer's DNA was fouled up.
Even that was not all THAT surprising. Most cancers tend to be weak - because the continuous reproduction leads to them skipping things they would normally do in idle time between reproductions and also causes them to use up resources on reproduction as fast as they can absorb them.
Many cancer therapies are built around this, ALMOST killing off the normal cells in the hope of JUST BARELY killing off the weaker cancer cells. (An exception to the above is Melanoma, which gets extra energy as a side-effect of synthesizing melanin, making it more robust than normal tissue.)
HeLa is very robust and invasive - to the point of being able to survive outside the original host body and contaminate cell cultures. (In fact a now-discarded theory of cancer cell progression, with all types of cancer gradually mutating and converging on a set of common characteristics, turned out to be based on an illusion caused by the robust HeLa cancer cells scattered about in research laboratories eventually contaminating cultures of other cancer cell lines and taking them over.)
Cells with more copies of chromosomes tend to be more robust. So it's not too surprising that this line has extra copies of most chromosomes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So how'd they get a cell from my penis?
Don't you mean "That's HeLa mutation"?
That must be a new one. I've never heard of the "mutli" award.
(Can't people even take care to make a summary correct?)
I just think it is important to note that they never asked her and never informed her when they decided to keep her tumor cells and not incenerate them like normal. Also, it is simply sequenced, as in we sequenced BLAH BLAH BLAH, or BLAH BLAH BLAH sequenceds.
Compared to Henrietta Lacks, it's interesting to note that her cell line is a much more successful offspring, in a way, being cultured up to thousands of times her body weight in labs around the world. Anyway in my work modelling toxicological processes I like to avoid depending just on carcinoma data. All of them have shotgunned DNA and I really don't think the data they give is that useful other than for very basic ball park measurements. This is partly because they are too resilient and partly because they don't exhibit certain types of metabolism. Fortunately there are a number of normal human cell lines that can be used instead, which I prefer. The only draw back is they are more expensive as they need to be repurchased frequently and are more difficult to culture.
When doctors were treated as gods and never had to ask for permission to treat their patients as cars in a DIY junk yard, taking what they wanted.