HeLa cells derived from a cervical cancer tumor of the patient Henrietta Lacks (name), which had been treated at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in teh beginnings of the 50th. The cells were taken from the cervical epithelial and successfully cultivated till today. The cell line played a leading role in the development of the oral polio vaccine against infantile paralysis. They were also very important for the research that led to two Nobel Prizes - a serious contribution in the in vitro research.

A team of researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg has successfully decoded the genome. They found out that are irregularities in the number and structure of the chromosomes. Many regions on the chromosomes are placed incorrectly, many genes are present in too many (copy gene polymorphism) or too few copies (deletions). There are also numerous individual characteristic mutations (single nucleotide polymorphism). As reason they indicated that HeLa cells derived from tumor cells and not from normal cells.

Source: http://www.biotechnologie.de/BIO/Navigation/DE/root, did = 158532.html