Limitations and Optimizations of Cellular Lineages Tracking

Tracking cellular lineages using barcodes provides insights across biology and has become an important tool. However, barcoding strategies remain ad-hoc. We show that elevating barcode insertion probability, and thus increasing the average number of barcodes within the cells, adds to the number of traceable lineages but decreases the accuracy of lineages’ inference due to reading errors. We discuss how this tradeoff informs optimal experimental design under different constraints and limitations. In particular, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and the number of traceable lineages, concerning limited resources, the cells and barcode pool features, and the dropout probability.