Data from: Whole organism lineage tracing by combinatorial and cumulative genome editing

Multicellular systems develop from single cells through distinct lineages.
However, current lineage-tracing approaches scale poorly to whole, complex
organisms. Here, we use genome editing to progressively introduce and
accumulate diverse mutations in a DNA barcode over multiple rounds of cell
division. The barcode, an array of clustered regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 target sites, marks cells and enables
the elucidation of lineage relationships via the patterns of mutations
shared between cells. In cell culture and zebrafish, we show that rates
and patterns of editing are tunable and that thousands of
lineage-informative barcode alleles can be generated. By sampling hundreds
of thousands of cells from individual zebrafish, we find that most cells
in adult organs derive from relatively few embryonic progenitors. In
future analyses, genome editing of synthetic target arrays for lineage
tracing (GESTALT) can be used to generate large-scale maps of cell lineage
in multicellular systems for normal development and disease.