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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Most cells will not grow in an infinite uniform lineage, but rather will try to develop into a cow, or stop reproducing at some point because they think they're in an old cow.

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I've been curious about these so called immortal cell lines. Do they really just mean by immortal something qualitative and at the extremes, like some unreasonably high number of cell division cycles before senescence takes over and the tissue reaches end of line? I've been curious if anyone's ever sequenced the DNA from these lines to see if they're truly the same source organism or have diverged or another organism was slipped in their place unbeknownst to anyone not looking.

Most immortal lines come from samples of tumors. I don't know how GOOD Meat is doing it.

They claim to use the spontaneously immortalized UMNSAH/DF-1 chicken fibroblast cell line, which isn't a tumor cell line. I still wouldn't eat any "cultured meat" regardless of the cell line (if my great-grandparents didn't eat it, I'm not eating it) but there is a difference between immortalized and full-on cancerous cells.

>I've been curious if anyone's ever sequenced the DNA from these lines to see if they're truly the same source organism or have diverged or another organism was slipped in their place unbeknownst to anyone not looking.

Cellline contamination is a real problem where a foreign population out competes the intended cell line. There are estimates that thousands of papers have been published where the intended cellline has been accidentally replaced with HeLa.

Most mammalian cells, sure. The majority of cells on Earth are not mammalian cells or even animal cells.

Ah that's an interesting point, what cell family is on the table, something like prokaryotic vs eukaryotic.

Just for everyone's information before the chain continues. Cultured meat generally refers to real but modified animal cells. So when you're eating cultured chicken they're effectively similar or even identical to a real animal's cells.

Sure. I'm just saying that there's nothing unearthly or, uh, "satanic" about a self-perpetuating cell line that doesn't turn into a whole multicellular organism. Sometimes it seems like the main thing people took away from the HeLa story was "aaaaah, spooky immortal cells!"

Although it was hardly the only bad thing about the story, that someone's cancer outlived them by a century is is horrifying.

It's happened in the wild a couple times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_...

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