if I just keep stretching my arm, some kind of lamarckian mechanism is bound to kick in?

Update: now cancelled. Just awful.

Tenar of Earthsea. She gives up a ring (and much more)!

This is the thesis work of Andrea Gardner, a talented recent grad of the lab. We look forward to using CMDuo to explore these ideas further & would be happy to hear your input as we move this ms towards submission!

Fusion is a mechanism that results in WGD & aneuploidies, and as such may contribute to the ways that cancer avoids Muller’s ratchet.

Since at least 1976 (Nowell), cancer evolution has been viewed as conceptually similar to Darwinian evolution of asexually reproducing organisms. We hypothesize that rates of proliferative fusion cells may be higher than currently appreciated in many tumor cell populations.

In TNBC cells we uncovered subclonal transcriptomic hybridization and unveiled distinct cell-states which arise in cancer cell fusion. Cell-cell fusion increases population heterogeneity.

ClonMapper Duo (‘CMDuo’), identifies cells that have undergone fusion by a reporter expression & reporter-associated index sequences paired to random barcode sets. scRNA-seq of the indexed barcodes enables the mapping of each set of parental cells and fusion progeny throughout a cell population.

The role of cell-cell fusion in cancer has been understudied due to limited experimental systems for tracking and analyzing individual fusion events. To meet this need, we developed a molecular toolkit to map the origins and outcomes of individual cell fusion events within tumor cell populations.

Cell-cell fusion is a tightly controlled process in the body, involved in fertilization, placental development, muscle growth, bone remodeling, & viral response, among others.