Despite decades of research into cancer biology, researchers still dont fully understand what happens to the malignant cells DNA as they mutate. Its not an idle question: The better biologists appreciate how DNA changes, the better they can create therapies that specifically target the disease. Now scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, have found a way to get a far more detailed look at a tumors biology than was previously possible. James Hicks and his colleagues have shown, for the first time, that its possible to examine the genomic evolution of individual cells within a tumor.

via Technology Review: Examining Individual Tumor Cells.