“over the course of decades, it has become clear that the genome doesn’t just vary from person to person. It also varies from cell to cell. The condition is not uncommon: We are all mosaics.
For some people, that can mean developing a serious disorder like a heart condition. But mosaicism also means that even healthy people are more different from one another than scientists had imagined...
It’s hard to think that a tumor might have anything in common with a pink grapefruit. Yet they are both products of the same process: lineages of cells that gain new mutations not found in the rest of the body.
Some skin diseases proved to be caused by mosaicism, too. Certain genetic mutations cause one side of the body to become entirely dark. Other mutations draw streaks across the skin.
The difference is in the timing. If a cell gains a mutation very early in development, it will produce many daughter cells that will end up spreading across much of the body. Late-arising mutations will have a more limited legacy...
Preliminary studies suggest that mosaicism underlies many other diseases. Last year, Christopher Walsh, a geneticist at Harvard University, and his colleagues published evidence that mosaic mutations may raise the risk of autism.
But scientists are also finding that mosaicism does not automatically equal disease. In fact, it’s the norm.”
FB: “Markus Grompe, a biologist at Oregon Health & Science University, and his colleagues looked at liver cells from children and adults without liver disease. Between a quarter and a half of the cells were aneuploids, typically missing one copy of one chromosome.”
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