Volume 55 Issue 9, September 2023

The symmetric inheritance of histone modifications by the nascent chromatin fibers during DNA replication is essential for proper developmental progression. Two new studies using mouse embryonic stem cells further illuminate the role of histone inheritance in early cell fate decisions.

Identifying genetic risk factors for binge-eating disorder (BED) is vital to understand its etiology and develop effective prevention and intervention strategies. To overcome under-reporting of clinical BED diagnosis, a new study uses machine learning to identify genetic variants associated with quantitative BED risk scores and finds evidence for a pathological role of heme metabolism.

A novel pipeline that expands the utility of the protein language model ESM1b has provided variant effect predictions for more than 40,000 protein isoforms. This strategy outperformed several state-of-the-art methods over multiple benchmarks.

Incidence of keratinocyte skin cancer varies markedly between populations living in different areas of the world. A detailed analysis of somatic mutations in the normal skin of individuals from the UK and Singapore reveals different patterns of clonal mutational landscapes that could contribute to differential risk.

In this issue of Nature Genetics, Lara-Astiaso et al. systematically characterized the functional roles of several chromatin factors in hematopoiesis by combining functional CRISPR screens with single-cell transcriptomics and chromatin accessibility profiling, revealing lineage biases and relationships with important transcription factors.

Transformation of a myeloproliferative neoplasm to a secondary acute myeloid leukemia is rare but devastating. Single-cell, multi-omic characterization of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells now shows the role of inflammation in transformation driven by mutations in TP53, with effects on the mutant clone but also non-mutant counterparts.

Meta-analysis of three large whole-exome sequencing datasets highlights protein-truncating and rare missense variants associated with breast cancer susceptibility.

A comparison of somatic mutations in skin from individuals from the UK and Singapore suggests that the difference in cancer incidence between the two countries is due to markedly different mutational spectra and patterns of selection.

Genome-wide association analyses of blood glucose measurements under nonstandardized conditions provide insights into the biology of glucose regulation, diabetes complications and pathways for treatment stratification.

Genome-wide association analysis of a binge eating disorder phenotype derived from a supervised machine-learning model applied to electronic medical records identifies three risk loci for this disorder and implicates iron metabolism in its etiology.

Genome-wide association meta-analyses identify 26 risk loci for epilepsy, including 19 loci specific to genetic generalized epilepsy. Prioritized candidate genes implicate synaptic processes and overlap with targets of antiseizure medications.

Genome-wide association analyses of magnetic resonance imaging data describe the genetic architecture of 13 cortical phenotypes at both global and regional levels, implicating neurodevelopmental and constrained genes.

Linkage disequilibrium graphical models (LDGMs) derived from genome-wide genealogies provide an efficient representation of LD, yielding large improvements in runtime for LD matrix computations. LDGMs will enable methods that scale to millions of variants and individuals.

Tissue co-regulation score regression (TCSC) infers causal tissues and partitions trait heritability into tissue-specific components using a transcriptome-wide association study framework. Applying TCSC to 78 complex traits and diseases identifies biologically plausible tissue–trait relationships.

A modified framework leveraging a protein language model (ESM1b) is used to predict all possible 450 million missense variant effects in the human genome and shows potential for generalizing to more complex genetic variations such as indels and stop-gains.

An analysis of UK Biobank participants shows that the risk of developing different types of myeloid neoplasms can be inferred years before diagnosis. The authors integrate somatic gene mutations with blood test parameters into a predictive model, which could guide future strategies for early detection and prevention of these diseases.

Single-cell multi-omic analyses show that chronic inflammation contributes to myeloproliferative neoplasm transformation to secondary acute myeloid leukemia by enhancing tumor protein 53 (TP53) mutant cell fitness and genetic evolution.

Bulk ex vivo and single-cell in vivo CRISPR knockout screens are used to characterize 680 chromatin factors during mouse hematopoiesis, highlighting lineage-specific and normal and leukemia-specific functions.

Mcm2 mutation or Pole3 deletion in mouse embryonic stem cells leads to asymmetric parental histone distribution and impaired neural differentiation. Mutation of the Mcm2 histone-binding domain causes defects in pre-implantation development and embryonic lethality.

Asymmetric segregation of parental histones H3 and H4 in MCM2-mutant embryonic stem cells impacts mitotic inheritance of histone modifications and genome regulation. MCM2-2A mutation perturbs exit from pluripotency and differentiation.

High-quality genome assemblies of four Solanum Americanum accessions lead to the identification of three NLR-encoding genes, Rpi-amr4, R02860 and R04373, that recognize potato late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans effectors.

GATK-gCNV uses a probabilistic model and inference framework to discover rare copy number variants (CNVs) from sequencing read-depth information. This algorithm is used to generate a reference catalog of rare coding CNVs in exome sequencing data from UK Biobank.

PhenoScore is an open-source machine-learning tool that combines facial image recognition with Human Phenotype Ontology for genetic syndrome identification without genomic data, with applications to subgroup analysis and variants of unknown significance classification.