Making cancer cells fluorescent

Imagine you are playing laser tag in the dark and you want to find your teammate. What do you look for? A fluorescent vest or some light to indicate where your teammate is, right?

In cancer biology, we can do the same thing to track cancer cells in a petri dish! Let’s say we want to study the effect of a gene in cancer cells. To do this, we can insert bits of genetic code into the cancer cell that tells them to produce our gene of interest AND a fluroescent marker. Any cell that incorporates the added bits of genetic code into their DNA also becomes “tagged” with the fluorescent marker, which allows to track only the cancer cells that have our gene of interest. Amazing? I think so!

In the image above, all the green fluorescent cells are expressing our gene of interest called p53. Now we can track the green cells expressing the p53 gene and see what happens to them in a dish under different treatment conditions…