Lineage tracing provides key insights into the fate of individual cells in complex organisms. Although effective genetic labeling approaches are available in model systems, in humans, most approaches require detection of nuclear somatic mutations, which have high error rates, limited scale, and do not capture cell state information. Here, we show that somatic mutations in mtDNA can be tracked by single-cell RNA or assay for transposase accessible chromatin (ATAC) sequencing. We leverage somatic mtDNA mutations as natural genetic barcodes and demonstrate their utility as highly accurate clonal markers to infer cellular relationships. We track native human cells both in vitro and in vivo and relate clonal dynamics to gene expression and chromatin accessibility. Our approach should allow clonal tracking at a 1,000-fold greater scale than with nuclear genome sequencing, with simultaneous information on cell state, opening the way to chart cellular dynamics in human health and disease.
Pubmed ID: 30827679 RIS Download
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A generic alignment format for storing read alignments against reference sequences, supporting short and long reads (up to 128 Mbp) produced by different sequencing platforms.
View all literature mentionsSoftware performing alignment of high-throughput RNA-seq data. Aligns RNA-seq reads to reference genome using uncompressed suffix arrays.
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View all literature mentionsSoftware performing alignment of high-throughput RNA-seq data. Aligns RNA-seq reads to reference genome using uncompressed suffix arrays.
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