Beyond the average cell

Models based on an average cell are useful, but they may not accurately describe how individual cells really work. New possibilities opened up with the advent of single-cell live imaging technologies. Now it is possible to peer into the lives of individual cells. In a new paper in PLOS Genetics, a team of biologists and physicists from Washington University in St. Louis and Purdue University used actual single-cell data to create an updated framework for understanding the relationship between cell growth, DNA replication and division in a bacterial system.

Gut Check

At a glance:

Researchers identify links between genetic makeup of bacteria in human gut and several human diseases

Clusters of bacterial genes present in conditions including cardiovascular illness, inflammatory bowel disease, liver cirrhosis, and cancer

Work brings scientist closer to developing tests that could predict disease risk or identify disease presence based on a sampling of the genetic makeup of a person’s microbiome