Journal Clubs

In this Journal Club, Kirstyn Brunker highlights two papers published in 2017 that showcase how the emergence of portable sequencing capabilities improved the real-time response to infectious disease outbreaks on a global scale.

Renée Beekman discusses the possibilities for research into transient enhancers by highlighting a recent paper by Vermunt et al. that identifies how they can modulate gene silencing dynamics.

In this Journal Club article, Olivia Rissland describes how a 1987 paper by Don Cleveland and colleagues provided insight into co-translational gene regulation of tubulin.

In this Journal Club article, Jenny Tung reflects on a 1975 paper from King and Wilson that emphasized the importance of gene regulatory changes in human evolution.

Reflecting on the importance of short tandem repeats (STRs) in population genetics, Ning Xie highlights a 2023 publication that characterized genome-wide STR variation in global human genomes to expand our understanding of STR genetic diversity within and across populations.

In this Journal Club, Yoav Ram recalls how he reconciled results from his own research with the reduction principle through the help of a paper published in PNAS by Altenberg et al.

Hajk-Georg Drost recalls a 2010 publication that used a phylotranscriptomic approach to estimate the age of genes that contribute to the developmental transcriptome across animal species and inspired a subsequent study on the embryonic hourglass in plants.

Kate Galloway highlights a paper by Kueh et al., who showed that the cell cycle indirectly influences concentrations of the transcription factor PU.1 to stabilize cell-fate trajectories in mice.

In this Journal Club, Hajk-Georg Drost highlights a recent study by Pavlopoulos et al. that organizes proteins at tree-of-life scale using massively parallel graph-based clustering.

Carl G. de Boer highlights a recent paper by Lim et al. on the importance low-affinity transcription factor-binding sites for determining organismal phenotypes.

Amnon Koren recalls two papers from 2001 and 2002 that laid the foundations for a new field by using microarrays to measure DNA replication timing across the genome.

Vincent Courdavault and Nicolas Papon highlight two articles in Nature, published in 2006 and 2013, that reported the biosynthesis of a complex natural plant product to treat malaria in engineered yeast.

Shinichi Morishita recalls a seminal publication by Weber and Myers, who in 1997 proposed a direct whole-genome shotgun sequencing approach to tackle the human genome.

Kylie R. James discusses a paper by Moor et al. that described a transcriptional gradient along the intestinal axis using single-cell RNA sequencing.

Mashaal Sohail reflects on a 2011 Nature study by Smillie et al., which analysed human microbiome data to show that microbial ecology, rather than phylogeny or geography, is a key driver of horizontal gene transfer.

Aashiq Kachroo highlights a recent paper by van Loggerenberg et al. that demonstrates the experimental power of ‘humanized yeast’ to gain insight into the genetic variants underlying disease.

Segun Fatumo highlights a paper by Mahajan et al. that uses a multi-ancestry genome-wide association studies approach to uncover the genetic underpinnings of type 2 diabetes, emphasizing the importance of incorporating diverse populations in such studies.

Li Zhao recalls a 2006 paper by Levine et al. that, by identifying a handful of de novo genes, outlined a potentially universal process of de novo gene birth and propelled forward this field of research.

Luis Barreiro highlights a 2007 paper by Tishkoff et al. that identified genetic variants associated with lactose persistence in East African populations, representing one of the first examples of convergent evolution in humans.

Marnie Blewitt highlights the visionary 1961 paper by Mary Lyon in which she proposed that dosage compensation in female mammals involves X-inactivation and recognized its implications for sex-specific phenotypes in X-linked disorders.