UT Southwestern stem cell scientists find that stringent lineage tracing is crucial for studies of nerve cell regeneration. Their results, which are published in Cell, show that this tracing is far from routine in the field and suggest that earlier studies reporting “striking” regeneration results must be reexamined.
Lineage tracing, which is a fundamental approach in developmental biology, refers to tests used to map out the progeny — or descendants — of a given cell in an organism.