Limitations and optimizations of cellular lineages tracking

Tracking cellular lineages using genetic 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 may decrease the accuracy of lineages inference due to reading errors. We establish the trade-off between accuracy in tracing lineages and the total number of traceable lineages, and find optimal experimental parameters under limited resources concerning the populations size of tracked cells and barcode pool complexity.