HeLa cell line exhibits single-clonal growth variation

The HeLa cell line is the first human-derived immortalized cell line, one of the most widely used cell lines in the world. While many researches had pointed out the heterogeneity of HeLa cells across laboratories and the low repeatability of experiments performed on HeLa cells, the reason how these heterogeneities generated is little known. We sorted cells into single cells, cultured them to single clones and performed multi-omics sequencing. The single cell-derived clones exhibited persistent growth variation both in vitro and in vivo. The corresponding WGS analysis revealed the single clones diverse in copy number even at the whole chromosome level. Our work explored the intrinsic mechanisms of the low repeatability of cell line experiments. We also provided a resource for single cell derived clones.