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Genetics is the branch of science concerned with genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms. It seeks to understand the process of trait inheritance from parents to offspring, including the molecular structure and function of genes, gene behaviour in the context of a cell or organism (e.g. dominance and epigenetics), gene distribution, and variation and change in populations.
Investigations in Arabidopsis reveal how coding-sequence-localized N6-methyladenosine (m6A) triggers co-translational mRNA decay at the endoplasmic reticulum to rapidly resolve translational overload in response to both abiotic and biotic stressors.
By mapping chromatin accessibility over transposable elements (TEs) across normal hematopoietic cells and the various cell types of primary acute myeloid leukemia (AML), we identified TE subfamilies with altered chromatin state in leukemia stem cells. Signatures of TE chromatin accessibility were able to predict clinical outcomes in cohorts of patients with AML, linking repetitive DNA elements to stemness.
A high-quality genome assembly of the elite bread wheat cultivar JM44, combined with population genomics, reveals the adaptive evolution of wheat end-use quality. The findings show that human selection has preferentially targeted variable gluten genes and strengthened epistatic interactions over millennia, and points to new breeding strategies for wheat with improved baking quality.
The authors uncover complex structural diversity at a medically important region of the genome, revealing previously uncharacterized human haplotypes, independent and recurrent changes in great apes, and a recent rise of copy-number variation in some human populations.
Telomeric systems are conserved across eukaryotes and may have originated over 1 billion years ago. Here the authors replaced yeast’s telomeres with a bacterial virus system, resulting in a stable functional assembly of DNA molecules up to 2.77 Mb, offering insights into the possible origins of telomeres.
DNA double-strand breaks function as promoter-like elements that drive transcription and protein synthesis of polyadenylated RNAs from otherwise silent DNA regions.
