Sociology

Cellular differentiation

Cell

Developmental biology

Evolutionary biology

Biology

Gene

Regeneration (biology)

Anthropology

Lineage (genetic)

Cell lineage

Diversity (politics)

Computational biology

Genetics

Science

More diversity at the top A detailed knowledge of cell differentiation hierarchies is important for understanding diverse biological processes such as organ development, tissue regeneration, and cancer. Single-cell RNA sequencing can help elucidate these hierarchies, but it requires reliable computational methods for predicting cell lineage trajectories. Gulati et al. developed CytoTRACE, a computational framework based on the simple observation that transcriptional diversity—the number of genes expressed in a cell—decreases during differentiation. CytoTRACE outperformed other methods in several test cases and was successfully applied to study cellular hierarchies in healthy and tumor tissue. Science , this issue p. 405

Single-cell transcriptional diversity is a hallmark of developmental potential