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How mutations express themselves in blood-cell production

A method for detecting mutations and measuring gene-expression levels in the same cell has enabled an investigation into the effects of mutations in a specific gene on the emergence of a form of blood cancer.
By
  1. Siddharth Raju

    1. Siddharth Raju is in the Department of Medicine, Institute for Human Genetics, and at the Bakar Institute for Computational Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.

  2. Chun Jimmie Ye

    1. Chun Jimmie Ye is in the Department of Medicine, Institute for Human Genetics, and at the Bakar Institute for Computational Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.

The cells that circulate in the bloodstream perform various functions and, in adults, are derived from progenitor cells in the bone marrow. Mutations in the DNA sequences of progenitor cells can lead to changes in blood-cell development, sometimes resulting in cancer. Owing to technical constraints, elucidating the effects of progenitor mutations on blood-cell development has been challenging. Writing in Nature, Nam et al.1 report a method for detecting mutations and measuring gene expression in individual blood progenitor cells, and use it to analyse a mixture of progenitors with or without mutations in a cancer-linked gene. They show that progenitors that have the same mutation can give rise to cells with different gene-expression profiles.

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Nature 571, 329-330 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02028-2

References

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