New Tool Maps Cell Paths to Help Understand Development and Healing
A new computational tool called Moslin is gaining attention in biomedical research by helping scientists better understand how cells make decisions during critical biological processes like development, disease progression, and tissue healing. The method was developed by researchers around Prof. Fabian Theis at Helmholtz Munich and Prof. Mor Nitzan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with an international team from Switzerland and Israel. Moslin allows researchers to track both gene activity and lineage history over time, revealing how individual cells make choices that lead them to become specific types of cells, such as muscle or nerve cells.
Marius Lange (formerly Helmholtz Munich, now ETH Zurich), one of the study’s first authors, explains: “studying processes like development, disease, or regeneration has traditionally been challenging because analyzing cells over time usually requires destroying them to measure their internal states, breaking their natural cell lineage, or ‘family tree’. Current methods use gene activity snapshots to connect cells across different time points, but this approach misses out on the full picture. Moslin’s unique approach is the first to combine both family tree information and gene activity from multiple points in time, providing a clearer, more accurate picture of cell evolution.”
How Moslin Traces Cell Fate
Moslin works by creating a “map” that links related cells over time, allowing scientists to predict how cells might change in the future and what drives these changes. In testing, Moslin outperformed other methods by accurately predicting cell paths in simulated data. In real-world applications, such as studying the development of C. elegans worms and zebrafish heart healing, Moslin has helped researchers identify key gene signals that influence cell behavior.
Potential for Medical Advances
By combining information about gene activity and cell family trees, Moslin could improve our understanding of how cells make decisions. This knowledge may lead to breakthroughs in regenerative medicine, where knowing how to guide cells to grow into specific types is essential.
The Moslin software is freely available, complete with guides and tutorials, at github.com/theislab/moslin.
Original publication
Lange, Piran, Klein, Spanjaard et al. (2024): Mapping lineage-traced cells across time points with moslin. Genome Biology. DOI: 10.1186/s13059-024-03422-4
