Leibovich Nava, Goyal Sidhartha
NRC-Fields Mathematical Sciences Collaboration Centre, National Research Council of Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2025 Apr 14;21(4):e1012880. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012880. eCollection 2025 Apr.
Tracking cellular lineages using genetic barcodes provides insights across biology and has become an important tool. However, barcoding strategies remain ad hoc. We show that elevating barcode insertion probability and thus increasing the average number of barcodes within the cells, adds to the number of traceable lineages but may decrease the accuracy of lineages inference due to reading errors. We establish the trade-off between accuracy in tracing lineages and the total number of traceable lineages, and find optimal experimental parameters under limited resources concerning the populations size of tracked cells and barcode pool complexity.
使用遗传条形码追踪细胞谱系为整个生物学领域提供了深刻见解，并已成为一种重要工具。然而，条形码策略仍然是临时制定的。我们表明，提高条形码插入概率，从而增加细胞内条形码的平均数量，会增加可追踪谱系的数量，但由于读取错误可能会降低谱系推断的准确性。我们确定了谱系追踪准确性与可追踪谱系总数之间的权衡，并在有限资源条件下找到了关于被追踪细胞群体大小和条形码库复杂性的最佳实验参数。
