Will the Humans be Able to Cure Cancer Soon?
FollowA great discovery has just arrived! Very exciting time for the world of medicine is coming! For the first time in history, scientists have been able to take out all the RNA from a single living cell as it is still in its natural microenvironment.
A multi-disciplinary team from the University of Pennsylvania has published this discovery in Nature Methods It was the first-of-its-kind way to isolate RNA from live cells in their natural tissue microenvironment without damaging nearby cells. Now researchers can analyse how cell-to-cell chemical connections impact individual cell function and overall protein production.
As it is known, even cells of seemingly the same type are not identical at the molecular level. Most knowledge about variability in gene expression was from studies using heterogeneous groups of cells grown in culture.
The new method provides a unique way to study cell function. Basically, it could be developed into a new way to study the effects of drugs inside the body. The tool is used it to show that a neuron interacting with its neighbors expresses a very different set of genes than a neuron grown in culture.
In general, studying the molecular makeup of single cells is quite challenging. Most lab tests require much more starting material than one cell can offer. However, while analysing a large number of cells at once, it tends to muddy the results. The reason for that is researchers are taking an average of what is happening in each cell.
In conclusion, this is an important contribution for medicine. Take, for instance, a tumor. Two different cells in the same tumor can have different DNA mutations and also other molecular changes that contribute to their deranged state. So, when scientists want to estimate whether a tumor has a particular mutation that can be treated with a particular drug, they may not know if that drug will attack all or even most of the cells in that tumor.