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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2018 Sep 17.
Published in final edited form as: Science. 2016 Nov 4;354(6312):557–558. doi: 10.1126/science.aak9761

Figure 1. Single-cell genomics detects diverse somatic mutations and enables tracing of cell lineages in the human brain.

Figure 1.

Somatic mutations occur during every cell division from the zygote throughout normal body and brain development. Single-cell genomics enables systematic measurement of somatic mutation rates. Each somatic mutation event (lightning bolt) is inherited by all offspring of the cell in which it occurred. Somatic mutations can therefore also be used as spontaneously occurring, endogenous markers for lineage tracing in human tissues, enabling reconstruction of patterns of progenitor proliferation and migration in the brain.