A Lost Library

There is a vast library bursting with untapped information, but all the books were locked in place when they were put on the shelves. This is the bank of patient tissue samples held in hospitals and labs around the world. The genetic material in samples is often degraded during the preservation process, but now a new tool is piecing the information back together. The approach, called Patho-DBiT, tags and reads various forms of RNA and pinpoints where each piece came from within a tissue sample. In doing so, it maps gene expression (where a gene is being read) across a sample (pictured with expression types coloured on a cell-by-cell level throughout a 5-year-old cancer sample), detecting tiny mutations that may be linked to tumour development. This opens up access for researchers to investigate the genetics of tumour progression, the tumour environment itself, and even potential drug targets in samples just waiting to be explored.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Zhiliang Bai, Dingyao Zhang, Yan Gao, Daiwei Zhang & Shuozhen Bao, and colleagues
• Depts of Biomedical Engineering; Genetics; Pathology, Yale University, CT; Center for Computational & Genomic Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Dept of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, PA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in Cell, November 2024