Vital flaw
Genetic glitch may make liver stronger
Liver cells play fast and loose with rules governing the shuffling of genetic information. The cells’ creative dealing of cards to daughter cells ought to wreak havoc, but for some reason it actually may help the liver deal with toxins more effectively, a new study suggests.
Instead of dealing out two copies of each chromosome — one inherited from mom and one from dad — to each daughter cell, liver cells often double or even quadruple the number of chromosomes in each cell. Scientists have long puzzled over why liver cells have so many extra chromosomes, and now the story has gotten even more bizarre: Not only can liver cells have multiple full sets of chromosomes, but the number of individual chromosomes in a cell is often wrong, researchers report online September 22 in Nature.
Cells that have anything other than the usual pairwise arrangement of chromosomes — such as one or three copies of a particular chromosome instead of two — are known as aneuploid cells.