Technology and methods

A new paper from the lab of Whitehead Institute Director Ruth Lehmann reveals how primordial germ cells in flies migrate from one end of an embryo to the other during development. The work could have implications for how scientists study germ cells in vivo, as well as other motile cells such as cancer cells.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch designed a way to turn human pluripotent stem cells into insulin-resistant fat cells, providing a useful model for studying type 2 diabetes, a complex and slow-to-onset disease. 

Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and collaborators used their single-cell sequencing tool Perturb-seq on every expressed gene in the human genome, linking each to its job in the cell and creating a free resource for other researchers to address their own questions.

Family trees of lung cancer cells, built using CRISPR-based lineage tracing, reveal in depth how cancer evolves from its earliest stages to become aggressive and capable of spreading throughout the body.

A new screening method in the parasite Toxoplasma gondii allows researchers to look beyond whether or not a gene is essential to survival and track the gene’s product through time and physical space 

Researchers in Whitehead Institute Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab tackled the problem of how to make mature liver from stem cells in the lab, and found that thyroid hormone signaling plays a key role.

Whitehead Institute scientists taking on a research challenge outside of their area of expertise use an open science approach to get outside input.

New research from Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman and collaborators enables researchers to predict a cell’s path over time, such as what type of cell it will become, in normal settings or under genetic perturbations.

Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring created a new way to study a family of enzymes that control gene expression in plants. Their method reveals how these enzymes affect key decisions in plant development, including when to produce flowers.