Microwell Displacement Amplification System
Copying and Reading the Book of Life Inside One Cell, Accurately
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: The genome researchers collaborated with materials science engineers to create the arrays of microwells or compartments that each capture a single cell.
Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Decoding the complete DNA genome in a single cell has been a major goal of technology developers. But the methods aren’t quite able to deal with that yet. So, for scientists to do this, they first need to make multiple copies of the DNA inside. Until now, the copying technology hasn’t been as accurate as scientists would like. If you think of the genome like a book, then our current copiers replicate certain chapters thousands of times, others just a few, and some not at all. As you can imagine, if you tried to read one of these copies, you’d be quite confused—and you certainly couldn’t rely on your reading for any medical purposes.
Now, NIH-funded researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new molecular technique that can accurately and uniformly copy the DNA inside a single cell [1]. Using this technique, they’ve already made some surprising discoveries.
