Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way
that researchers think of humans as a whole.
All Nicholas Navin needed was one cell — the issue was how
to get it. It was 2010, and the postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in New York was exploring the genetic changes that drive breast
cancer. Most of the cancer-genome studies before then had ground up bits of
tumour tissue and sequenced the DNA en masse, giving a consensus picture of the
cancer’s genome. But Navin wanted to work out the sequence from individual
cells to see how they had mutated and diverged as the cancer grew.