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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."
Apparently you don't speak to many live human beings.
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.
"Gets" can also mean "becomes", and "sequenced" here is a past participle (called a passive participle by some grammarians), not a past tense finite verb.
That's not Ms. Lack's genome anymore. The summary says it has more than the usual number of chromosomes. Cancer cells generally lose the ability to maintain their genomes, they become very unstable, allowing a bizzare, short-term form of evolution to occur. More mutations allow the cancer to get better at proliferating and invading, at least right up until the host dies. Usually, anyway, HeLa is or was unique in that it managed to escape it's own doom, much like we might need to do with Earth.
Sorry, got off topic there. Anyway, cloning HeLa cells, as in putting the genome into a fertilized egg like Dolly the sheep, that would probably not make a complete embryo. I'm not familiar with HeLa's genome, but I think it's likely they've lost the ability to control cell division, cell death, and/or cell differentiation. You need those processes to make anything that looks like an embryo. You'd likely end up with just another petrie dish of HeLa cells. It would be a neat if ethically questionable experiment.
...with the ghost of Ms. Lacks. They'd have to salt & burn every last 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
Maybe he speaks to many live, educated, human beings.
Yes, the zeitgeist is for intelligent people to drop in a few bon mots of another language. In fact, I'd say it's a sina qua non, a very important shibboleth that distinguishes the literate from the phillistine.
And as the partially-agentive-passive (get done etc) isn't a direct analogue of a classical Latin form, it's obviously stupid.
Seriously, when we stop pegging people as stupid simply because they speak actual real-life English, we'll find that the world contains far more people of intelligence than you ever imagined.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
"sequenced" is past tense.
No. Just No.
Grammar Nazi? Pffffft--you're not even a Grammar Hitler Youth, boyo.
"Sequenced" is a participle, which functions as an adjective, not a verb, and thus has no tense of its own.
In addition, it's a passive participle, which means that the noun described is the recipient of the action, rather than its cause.
Also, 'to get' is a perfectly acceptable if not entirely formal substitute for 'to be' in passive constructions. German and Swedish don't have this problem, always preferring werden and bli, both meaning specifically 'to become', respectively, and never admit sein and vara in this sense. We English speakers got screwed up because we layered Vulgar Latin/Norman French progressive tenses on top of the Germanic passive and perfect. This was further complicated by the fact that the latter used 'to be' with verbs of motion and 'to have' with others, a distinction still strictly made in modern German (always er ist gegangen, never er hat gegangen) and optional in modern English (he has gone or he is gone [an exception to be usual rule of 'to have + participle = active perfect, to be + participle = passive']), BTW).
Don't swim with the sharks if you don't know which end of the speargun to point at yourself.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.