Keeping Your Cell Lines Straight

A Nature News piece examines the use of DNA fingerprinting technologies to validate the authenticity of cell lines used for research. "Cell-line misidentification has led to mistakes in the literature, misguided research based on those results and millions wasted in grant money," according to Nature. To combat the issue, researchers from the American Type Culture Collection group based in Manassas, Va., are developing a standardized system "for verifying the identity of cultured cells using DNA fingerprinting," Nature reports. Additionally, the ATCC team intends to deposit reference line data into a National Center for Biotechnology Information-hosted database for public use. Some are skeptical, however, of whether researchers will universally embrace DNA fingerprinting for cell-line verification. Gertrude Buehring, a virologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Nature, "Without the policing by journal editors and granting agencies many investigators may not be motivated to do the necessary tests to authenticate the cell lines used for their research."