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A paper in Nature reports a ‘Z-DNA-anchored’ model for the target specificity of the transcription factor AIRE, involving promoter poising at double-strand breaks.
A paper in Nature Genetics identifies a mechanism involving the transcription factor DUXBL that controls the development of early embryonic mouse cells past stages marked by totipotency.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Dongsheng Bai and Chenxu Zhu describe SIMPLE-seq, a scalable single-cell sequencing method that simultaneously decodes the cytosine modifications 5mC and 5hmC.
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.
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, 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.
In this Review, the authors summarize recent progress in cell–cell interaction (CCI) research. They describe the recent evolution in computational tools that underpin CCI studies, discuss improvements in experimental methods enabling more high-throughput analyses of CCIs, and highlight future directions for the field.
Genomic technologies have greatly improved the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases. Here, the authors review emerging approaches for the identification of disease-causal genetic variants as well as omic technologies that show great potential for variant interpretation.
In this Review, Patrick Keeling proposes that the eukaryotic-specific processes of phagocytosis and endosymbiosis are unlikely to increase the frequency of horizontal gene transfers, because most of the transferred genes will be non-essential and will thus not be selected for the long term.
Multiple mechanisms have evolved to prevent or trap deleterious unwanted transcripts. The unwanted transcript hypothesis proposes that selection at synonymous sites favours mutations that prevent the generation of unwanted transcripts or that make native transcripts appear ‘wanted’ by being GC-rich.
