In early July, the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing at UW Medicine, in collaboration with labs at Caltech and Harvard, launched alongside the Allen Discovery Center for Human Brain Evolution at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Both centers begin with four year grants of $10M.

The Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing aims to generate the first global maps of cell lineage in complex organisms. It will be directed by Jay Shendure, MD, PhD, University of Washington professor of Genome Sciences, and co-directed by Michael Elowitz, PhD, at the California Institute of Technology, with site director Alex Schier, PhD, at Harvard University.

“For the first time, we have the tools and technology to answer questions that have fascinated developmental biologists for decades,” says Shendure in a press release from the Allen Frontiers Group.  “By inserting ‘barcodes’ into the genome that mutate throughout development, we can essentially create a family tree for an organism’s cells, which tells us each cell’s relationships to its ancestors and other cells both near and far. We hope that the generation of technologies that we’re developing will enable us to gain the same kind of global view on development that the Human Genome Project provided for our genes.”

“This application of genome editing and sequencing technologies will allow the study of development at unprecedented scales and create the new field of developmental statistics,” says Schier, also in the press release.

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