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HeLa cells have now been cultured for nearly 70 years in many labs across the world, and were long considered to be an infinite supply of unchanging, identical cells. However, new research published in Nature last week (February 18) demonstrates that the cells can vary substantially from lab to lab, raising questions about the reproducibility of research conducted with the cell line.
“I’m glad to see this study, but in a sense, I’m not surprised,” says molecular biologist Prasad Jallepalli from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who wasn’t involved in the study.
It’s not the first report that the HeLa cell line has diversified since its creation: Over the years, other groups have documented significant differences in genetic sequence and RNA expression between variants.
This latest investigation is the first comprehensive analysis of genetic variation across a wide range of HeLa variants—different batches of HeLa cells ...
