In recent years, scientists have built methods to measure a cell's transcriptome, or all the RNA produced by a cell, to study the cell's identity and genetic activity. However, these methods rely on killing the cell to access the bits of RNA within, and offer only a one-time snapshot. Now, researchers at the Broad Institute and at MIT have invented a 'cellular self-reporting' approach to make living cells share their own transcriptomes, so that scientists can analyze them without killing the cells. Described in Cell, the live cell transcriptomic method relies on virus-like particles, which the cells use to package and deliver RNA to the culture medium they're bathed in. Scientists can simply sample the medium to isolate the RNA, and do this repeatedly to reveal how gene activity in the same cell population changes as the cells mature or respond to perturbations. The researchers applied their method to a variety of cellular model systems, demonstrating its potential to help reveal...
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