The notion that police can identify a suspect based on the tiniest drop of blood or trace of tissue has long been a staple of TV dramas, but scientists at Harvard have taken the idea a step further. Using just a single human cell, they can reproduce an individual’s entire genome.

As described in a Dec. 21 paper in Science, a team of researchers, led by Xiaoliang Sunney Xie, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and made up of postdoctoral fellow Chenghang Zong, graduate student Alec Chapman, and former graduate student Sijia Lu, developed a method — dubbed MALBAC, short for Multiple Annealing and Looping-based Amplification Cycles — that requires just one cell to reproduce an entire DNA molecule.