During the development of multicellular organisms, and in aberrant developmental processes such as cancer, cells undergo a series of stresses, gene expression changes, and other transient events, some of which determine their ultimate fates. The historical events preceding most cell fates are unknown. Even less is known about which historical events cause a cell fate and which merely accompany it. Our lab develops DNA recorders, synthetic biology tools that enable cells to make a durable DNA record of ephemeral events in their history, in principle enabling biologists to correlate any type of cellular event to long term changes in the cell’s phenotype. One application of particular interest to us is long-term genotoxic stress and its consequences for cell fate.

Key Publications:

Loveless TB*^#, Carlson CK*, Hu VJ, Dentzel Helmy CA, Liang G, Ficht M, Singhai A, Liu CC^#. Molecular recording of sequential events into DNA. bioRxiv pre-print: doi.org/10.1101/2021.11.05.467507. *equal contribution ^#co-corresponding

Loveless TB, Grotts JG, Schechter MW, Forouzmand EF, Carlson CK, Agahi BS, Liang G, Ficht M, Liu B, Xie X, Liu CC. Lineage tracing and analog recording in mammalian cells by single-site DNA writing. Nature Chemical Biology. 2021 Jun;17(6):739-47.