New technology tracks cell lineage.

• Position: Disease - High-resolution lineage tracking

Evolution is change, and not always for the better. In fact, evolution is at the core of many of the diseases that are hardest to treat. Pathogens such as bacteria and parasites evade their host's defenses or antimicrobial drugs through evolution. Cancer itself is an evolutionary process, whereby "rogue" cells evolve to grow beyond their normal barriers, migrate to distant locations in the body, and ultimately evade chemotherapy.

Sasha Levy, professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University and assistant professor of physical and quantitative biology, has developed a technology--high-resolution lineage tracking--that allows scientists to monitor the evolution of populations of cells with unprecedented granularity and study these processes more quantitatively.

"The technology has the potential to help us understand many processes important to infection and disease," says Levy. "One avenue we are pursuing is to place it into pathogenic microbes to study how they develop resistance to antibiotics. We are looking into placing it into cancer cells to try to understand the fundamental rules by which cancer cells adapt and metastasize. We hope that gaining a better understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of these disease processes will allow us to optimize treatment to slow their rates of progression."

The researchers developed a set of genetic tools to insert millions of unique and random DNA sequences at a specific genomic location in Saccharomyces...