Volume 52 Issue 4, 2 April 2020

The African Orphan Crops Consortium promotes the strategic, genome-enabled improvement of under-researched crops for biodiversity-based, nutritious food solutions in Africa. The African Plant Breeding Academy empowers the continent’s plant breeders to apply advanced genetic approaches and shared genetic solutions to the task of tailoring the immense diversity of underutilized crops to the needs of Africa’s producers, processors and consumers.

Cancer cells have the extraordinary evolutionary potential to adapt and acquire resistance to most conventional and targeted therapies. In a new study, Lin et al., develop a systematic approach to identify combination therapies that produce cancer traps, in which evading the first drug makes the cancer vulnerable to the second.

Combining genomic data with CRISPR, hiPSC and organoid technologies provides platforms to study the complex genetic architectures of brain disease. These studies could improve genetic diagnosis, drive drug discovery and move the field toward precision medicine.

Whole-exome sequencing of human brain metastases from lung adenocarcinoma uncovers new drivers by comparison of somatic alteration frequencies in brain metastasis cases to those in primary lung adenocarcinomas.

Single-cell analysis of mouse hematopoietic stem cells shows that mutations in DNA methylation genes change the frequencies of erythroid versus myelomonocytic progenitors, owing to differential CpG enrichment in transcription factor binding motifs.

Analysis of 3D chromatin architecture in T-ALL identifies differences in intra-TAD interactions and TAD boundary insulation. Inhibition of oncogenic signal transduction or epigenetic regulation can alter specific 3D interactions.

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of 542,934 individuals identifies 336 novel loci associated with refractive error and implicates eye development, circadian rhythm and pigmentation pathways in controlling myopia.

CRISPR–Cas9 knockout screens in chemotherapy-treated acute myeloid leukemia cells help map the drug-dependent genetic basis of fitness trade-offs (antagonistic pleiotropy) for the design of evolutionary traps that target drug resistance in cancer.

An α-helical region conserved among FOXA pioneer factors interacts with core histones and promotes chromatin opening in vitro. This region also promotes chromatin opening in early mouse embryos and is required for normal development.

Whole-genome resequencing and association analyses in 424 soybean accessions identify two homeologous genes that contributed to flowering time adaptation during soybean domestication.

Genetic analyses of depression based on minimal phenotyping identify nonspecific genetic risk factors shared between major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric conditions, suggesting that this approach may have limited ability to identify pathways specific to MDD.

This analysis presents a harmonized meta-knowledgebase to facilitate clinical interpretation of somatic genomic variants in cancer. This community-based project highlights the need for cooperative efforts to curate clinical interpretations of somatic variants for robust practice of precision oncology.

Assessing heritability models using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of 31 human traits shows that the Baseline LD model is realistic and can be improved by incorporating features from the LDAK model.