WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTEUsing a technique called “gene trapping,” researchers have built a library of haploid human cell lines. The collection includes more than 3,000 lines, each one possessing a different mutated gene, a team led by researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Vienna firm Haplogen reports today (August 25) in Nature Methods. “I think this could be quite an interesting resource,” said William Stanford, a professor at the University of Ottawa, who was not involved in the study. “I imagine people would embrace it. It looks very powerful.”
Functional studies of genes can be greatly aided by the use of haploid cell lines—those that have just one of each chromosome, rather than a pair—because the effects of mutations in an allele won't be masked by the other chromosome. “Having a complete knockout, you’ll have much stronger phenotypes compared to other techniques,” said Jan Carette, a Stanford University professor who was not involved in the current study, but who has collaborated with the authors. Human cells, however, are diploid, so to create the haploid cell lines, Sebastian Nijman from the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (CeMM) and his colleagues turned to a human cell line called KBM7.
KBM7 originated from a patient with chronic myeloid leukemia, and is ...
