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Gene expression noise can suggest a role for stochasticity during development. But Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz and Sui Huang argue that care should be taken in data interpretation and language use before labelling developmental events as 'random'.
Understanding the intrinsic sequence specificity of proteins — particularly of transcription factors — that interact with DNA is an important component of studies of gene regulation. Several recently developed methods have greatly increased the throughput of protein–DNA interaction studies, and the sophistication of computational modelling is improving.
The multisubunit Mediator complex is a transcriptional co-activator that interacts directly with RNA polymerase II. The Mediator can also interact with and coordinate the action of numerous other co-activators and co-repressors, leading to distinct transcriptional outputs in response to different cellular signals.
There is increasing interest in investigating the influence of rare variants on common diseases, aided by high-throughput sequencing. However, the statistical approaches that are essential for analysing associations between rare variants and traits of interest are urgently in need of evaluation and refinement.
Many models have been proposed to explain how and why trinucleotide repeats in the human genome can expand and cause disease. This Review re-evaluates such models in the light of our knowledge of where and when instability occurs during human development.
Identity by descent (IBD) — the probability that two alleles descended from a common ancestor — is used in fundamental applications such as gene mapping and estimating heritability. The authors offer a solution to the confusion between IBD and identity by state (IBS) that is caused by the common practice of using dense SNPs to estimate IBD.
Chronic stress is increasingly implicated as a contributing factor in common diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. This Opinion article brings together evidence supporting the idea that stress can induce epigenetic changes that alter cell behaviour and thereby lead to disease.
