The 2010s brought major advancements
in every aspect of the life sciences and ushered in an era of collaboration and
multidisciplinary approaches. The Scientist spoke
with Steven Wiley, a systems biologist at Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory and member of TS’s editorial
board, about what he thinks the recent past indicates about the upcoming decade
of research.
TS: What advancements are you most looking forward to
in the next decade?
Wiley: The next year will be a
continuation of the scientific breakthroughs that were present the last couple
of years, and what’s happened the last couple of years will fundamentally
transform the next decade. There are two areas that I think are really posed
for an explosive growth, and one is single-cell biology. . . . The second one
people know is transformative . . . is CRISPR technologies.
TS: Why do you think we will see explosive growth in
single-cell biology?
Wiley: Single-cell sequencing,
single-cell proteomics, single-cell imaging—these are all part of this new area
of single-cell biology which is really going to impact a whole slew of
different fields. We’ll see a lot of breakthroughs driven by that in the next
year, but we’ll see the full impact of this playing out over the next decade.
[Single-cell biology] started [out]
driven by single-cell sequencing, and very near on the horizon is going to
single-cell proteomics. And then, of course, that complements a lot of the imaging
work that’s been done, developing a new generation of probes to be able to
query what’s happening at the single-cell level.
This really brings to the fore the
idea that cells in a population are very heterogeneous, and what we see at the
population level is a reflection of what the individual cells are doing. And
until we understand what the individual cells in a population are doing, we
can’t deal with issues of, for example, mathematically modeling what’s going on
in cells.
[Researchers developing] both
sequencing technologies and proteomics technology in the last decade have been
working on increased sensitivity and speed and precision. This increase in
speed and precision and increasingly small sample size has gotten down to a
point where now we can look at things like cancer heterogeneity. That is . . .
when you treat a cancer you can kill 95 percent of the tumor but there’s 5
percent left and that is what’s going to come back, and you have a recurrence
of the cancer or metastasis. So it’s the small parts that really cause the
problem, and until you can actually understand why those resistant cells are
different, you’re never going to do things like develop a completely effective
cancer treatment.
Now the technology is there—both
sequencing technology and mass spectrometry technologies. It opens up new
worlds of what we can look at, and I think that’s why this is really being very
transformative. We’re now at the level where we can look at individual cells.
That’s amazing.
TS: And what about CRISPR?
Wiley: CRISPR technologies—everyone
touts them as a way of editing the genome, which is true. But the true power of
that, I believe . . . is the fact that it provides a way of tagging endogenous
genes. So for example, you see a number of different papers come out in which
people have used CRISPR technologies to insert fluorescent markers into genes.
You can look at the dynamics and localization and expression of individual
genes and individual cells.
The second thing that CRISPR is
really good at is perturbations, being able to turn up genes and down genes,
altering the expression of individual genes up and down in a cell with
incredible specificity. For example, [with] a genetic disease or in cancer,
most of the really significant impactful genetic changes are at the level of
increased expression or decreased expression. So the way we think about
changing gene expression is: [in] one cell type, the gene is off, [and in]
another cell type, the gene is on. But that’s not actually true. There are
subtle changes in abundance and localization and disposition of individual
genes that have enormous regulatory impact on the cells. But we’ve lacked good
tools to [investigate] that.
The ability to manipulate the
expression level of genes, to tag them, to make modifications in the individual
genes and cells opens up a toolbox of experimental technologies that are just
revolutionary.
Story via The Scientist
Source: https://myfusimotors.com/2020/01/11/the-advances-that-will-shape-life-sciences-in-the-2020s/
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