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Updated: Jan 27, 2026

Shape Memory Polymers for Active Cell Culture
Published on: July 4, 2011
Memory and relatedness of transcriptional activity in mammalian cell lineages
Nicholas E Phillips1, Aleksandra Mandic1, Saeed Omidi1
1Institute of Bioengineering, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Abstract:
Phenotypically identical mammalian cells often display considerable variability in transcript levels of individual genes. How transcriptional activity propagates in cell lineages, and how this varies across genes is poorly understood. Here we combine live-cell imaging of short-lived transcriptional reporters in mouse embryonic stem cells with mathematical modelling to quantify the propagation of transcriptional activity over time and across cell generations in phenotypically homogenous cells. In sister cells we find mean transcriptional activity to be strongly correlated and transcriptional dynamics tend to be synchronous; both features control how quickly transcriptional levels in sister cells diverge in a gene-specific manner. Moreover, mean transcriptional activity is transmitted from mother to daughter cells, leading to multi-generational transcriptional memory and causing inter-family heterogeneity in gene expression.
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