Lentiviral and targeted cellular barcoding reveals ongoing clonal dynamics of cell lines in vitro and in vivo. Homo sapiens

These data come from the development of a novel method that combines marking of individual cells with unique 20bp barcodes, deep sequencing, and bio-informatic processing that allows us to quantitatively and simultaneously track the clonal dynamics of tens of thousands of cells. The power of this system is several-fold in that it allows the tracking of clonal activity within the context of a population of cells rather than having to isolate it from its neighbors (the isolation of single cells is a highly non-physiologic process and puts a cell into an un-natural environment) and its ability to track tens of thousands of cells rather than just a small number as has been done with other systems.