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Fruiting date palm (Phoenix dactylifera, Khalas variety). The draft genome of date palm assembled by Malek and colleagues has important implications for cultivation and improvement of the crop (p 521). Credit: Mohammed Sulaiman Khalfan Al-Rawahi.
Magtanong et al. describe the first study to systematically analyze dosage suppression, a type of genetic interaction in which increased dosage of one gene compensates for mutation in another. The authors also develop reagents for future large-scale studies of dosage suppression.
When embarking on a microarray-based study of genomic copy number variation, what's helpful for navigating the myriad of available array platforms and data analysis approaches? Pinto et al. evaluate six samples from healthy controls in triplicate on commonly used combinations of commercial arrays and analytic tools, providing realistic comparisons of performance.
Unlike most plants, date palms are either male or female. Assembly of a draft date palm genome, the first for a member of the order Arecales, reveals loci linked to gender and provides markers for improving traits such as fruit quality and ripening time.
Krencik et al. present a chemically defined system for differentiating human pluripotent stem cells to large numbers of immature astrocytes, which mature further after transplantation to the neonatal mouse brain. By applying regional patterning factors at the neuroepithelial stage, the authors also succeed in generating different astrocytes subtypes.
Larman et al. create a phage library containing >400,000 sequences encoding peptides that cover all open reading frames in the human genome. They then use this synthetic peptidome to discover novel autoantigens targeted by antibodies in the cerebrospinal fluid of individuals with a neurological autoimmune disease.
Carette et al. use a retroviral gene-trap vector to disrupt and tag >98% of all genes in a haploid human cancer cell line. Cells selected for a phenotype of interest are pooled and characterized by parallel DNA sequencing to circumvent time- and labor-intensive screening of individual clones.
