Research Highlights

Bolognini et al. report evidence of positive selection for human amylase gene duplications associated with the agricultural revolution.

A study in Science investigating bacterial defence mechanisms against phages reports a novel mode of gene regulation through reverse transcription of a non-coding RNA template, leading to the formation of a toxic repetitive gene.

Satterlee et al. employ several approaches to demonstrate that prickle evolution has a common genetic basis among several plant lineages.

Duttke et al. show that transcription factors have position-dependent effects relative to their distance from the transcription start site, which suggests that a 'spatial grammar' could be used to encode multiple gene-regulatory programmes.

Neumann, Bertozzi et al. describe a novel epigenetic editor termed CHARM and report its use to silence prion protein expression in the brain.

Two studies in Nature reveal the mechanistic and structural properties of a family of mobile genetic elements that can be reprogrammed to engineer genome modifications.

A study in Nature charts the history of malaria in the Americas from ancient Plasmodium parasite genomes.

Petrazzini et al. leverage exome sequencing data and a novel machine learning-based marker to identify rare and ultra-rare coding variants associated with coronary artery disease.

A study in Nature finds that transient perturbation of the Polycomb complex and target epigenome can irreversibly induce cancer cell fates.

Logsdon et al. report the second complete sequence of all centromeres from a single human genome, enabling comparative analyses of the variation in tandemly repeating α-satellite DNA.

A paper in Nature Genetics identifies a mechanism involving the transcription factor DUXBL that controls the development of early embryonic mouse cells past stages marked by totipotency.

A paper in Nature reports a ‘Z-DNA-anchored’ model for the target specificity of the transcription factor AIRE, involving promoter poising at double-strand breaks.

A publication in Nature reports the data release of around 245,000 clinical-grade whole-genome sequences as part of the NIH’s All of Us Research Programme. Several companion papers highlight the value of better capturing global genomic diversity.

A study in Science reports that corn snakes use both PRDM9 and promoter-like features to direct meiotic recombination, indicating that these are not mutually exclusive.

A study in Nature Genetics identifies many regulators of genome-wide chromatin accessibility and then reports the mechanistic underpinnings for one of the identified transcription factors.

Lan et al. report a high-throughput method for single-cell sequencing of diverse microbial communities.

A study in Science uses bacteria from the Long-Term Evolution Experiment to report on how fitness effects of mutations change through evolution.

A study in Nature describes how single-cell expression data can be used to understand gene regulatory landscapes in bacteria.

Four papers in Nature describe how ancient European migration patterns have shaped the modern human genome.

The Farm Animal GTEx project introduces a new resource for pigs, in which they map genetic variation to differences in gene expression across thousands of samples.