●Shares in the human genome – the future of patenting DNA. Thomas, S. M., Hopkins, M. M. & Brady, M. Nature Biotechnology December (2002) The authors of this Commentary article remind us that patenting was developed to protect invention and therefore argue that a patent should be considered only if isolating a gene leads to a product with a specific practical use.

●The importance of being erroneous. Bonhoeffer, S. & Sniegowski, P. Nature 28 November (2002) A new model of virus evolution is the subject of this News and Views — viral mutation rates might be a result of a trade-off between adaptability and genomic integrity.

●Mystery of the mutagenic male. Hurst, L. D. & Ellegren, H. Nature 28 November (2002)

●The Fanconi anaemia/BRCA pathway in human cancer. D'Andrea, A. D. & Grompe, M. Nature Reviews Cancer January (2003) Fanconi anaemia (FA) is a rare inherited susceptibility to cancer. Recent data indicate that inactivating FA genes results in chromosome instability, a common feature of many human cancers. The authors of this Review bring together recent data that implicate the FA proteins in homologous recombinational repair.

●Pluripotency and tumorigenicity. Brickman, J. M. & Burdon, T. G. Nature Genetics December (2002) This News and Views article discusses how recent analysis of pluripotent cells that carry mutations in APC supports the idea that many cancers might arise from dysregulation of stem-cell programmes.

●Is proteomics heading in the wrong direction? Huber, L. A. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology January (2003) This Opinion considers whether the ambitious plans of many biotech companies to annotate the entire human proteome are realistic.

●Knockouts model the 100 best-selling drugs — will they model the next 100? Zambrowicz, B. P. & Sands, A. T. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery January (2003) This Review presents a critical evaluation of mouse-knockout technology for target discovery and for validation of the drug targets. The authors, both from Lexicon Genetics, Inc., use the 100 best-selling drugs as an example.

●Chipping forecast II. A supplement to the December issue of Nature Genetics on aspects of microarray design and analysis that includes:

●Microarray data normalization and transformation. Quackenbush, J.

●The genetic variation in gene expression. Cheung, V. G. & Spielman, R. S.

●From patterns to pathways: gene expression data analysis comes of age. Slonim, D. K.