Eats, Shoots and Leaves - S1-E11
Factual error: They travel to Zambia along the Luangwa to search for leopards and the locals speak Swahili. In that region of Zambia they speak Nyanja or Bemba. I lived in Northerm Zambia for a few years and all the way up to the Tanzania border it was not common for anyone to know Swahili.
Answer: In the episode "Blame It on Leo", Leo Butler, who use to work for Reiden, tells the group about the "mother cell." He explains it's Reiden's molecule vector. So it's something Reiden created. In real life science, vector cells are used to introduce DNA sequences from one organism to another. There are a variety of ways for this to occur, however, in the show not much explanation is given about how Reiden's mother cell works (and tends to bend how it works to the will of the plot).
Bishop73