Jonathan Weissman’s team saw the cancer cells spread across the doomed mouse. Made with a bioluminescent enzyme, they first appear in scans as a small dark blue diamond lying close to the heart; a week later, while a triangle spread over the upper body of the mouse, with stripes of green and two distinct bright red pivots. By day 54, the mouse looks like a lava lamp.
The images would have been known to any cancer biologist, but they did not tell you much about what was going on: why the cancer was metastasized or which cells were responsible. For that, the Weissman team designed a new instrument. Inside the original navy blue diamond, they designed the microbiological equivalent of the black box of an airplane – a ‘molecular recorder’ that allowed them to extract the cells and intimate footage of a single mouse after death. cancer recurrence.
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