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A new study shows that aberrant DNA transposase activity promotes structural alterations that are clonally selected to drive tumor development. This discovery uncovers novel mechanisms of tumor-suppressor gene inactivation and highlights a new approach to cancer gene identification.
Damian Smedley and colleagues report the phenotypic characterization of the first 3,328 genes by the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium. They develop new mouse models based on genes known to be associated with human mendelian diseases and identify potential disease-associated genes with little or no previous functional annotation.
Jeffrey Barrett, Tarjinder Singh and colleagues present a meta-analysis of rare coding variants and copy number variants in a large collection of schizophrenia cases and controls, combined with de novo mutation data from family trios. They find that rare, damaging variants contribute to risk of schizophrenia both with and without intellectual disability and that there is overlap between genetic risk for schizophrenia and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Jos Jonkers, Lodewyk Wessels and colleagues use a Sleeping Beauty transposon mutagenesis screen to identify genes required for invasive lobular breast carcinoma formation (ILC) in mice. They find recurrent and mutually exclusive insertions in Myh9, Ppp1r12a, Ppp1r12b and Trp53bp2, which are implicated in the actin cytoskeleton regulation pathway and have been found to be altered in human ILC breast cancer.
Rogier Versteeg, Johan van Nes and colleagues report that neuroblastomas comprise two cell types, mesenchymal and adrenergic, that have different responses to chemotherapeutic agents in vitro. Using ChIP–seq and expression profiling of pairs of phenotypically divergent isogenic cell lines, they identify candidate transcription factors for regulation of the two cell states.
Kari Stefansson and colleagues identify a nonsense mutation in RBM12 segregating with psychosis in an extended Icelandic pedigree and an independent frameshift mutation in RBM12 segregating with psychosis in a Finnish family. They further show that carriers of the Icelandic mutation who are unaffected by psychosis exhibit a psychiatric disorder and cognitive test battery profile resembling that of patients with schizophrenia.
Erwin Gelfand, Andrew Snow, Joshua Milner and colleagues identify heterozygous CARD11 mutations associated with severe atopic disease in eight individuals from four families. They further show that the mutant CARD11 proteins exhibit both loss-of-function and dominant-interfering activity and that the cellular defects in patient T cells can be partially rescued by supplementing with glutamine.
Ian Alexander and colleagues characterize a liver-specific enhancer–promoter element that is found in the genome of wild-type adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2), from which gene transfer vectors have been derived. They suggest that these sequences could provide a possible link between AAV integration events in the liver and gene dysregulation and pathogenesis.
Ralph McGinnis, Valgerdur Steinthorsdottir, Linda Morgan and colleagues perform a genome-wide association study in the offspring of preeclampsia pregnancies and identify variants in the fetal genome near FLT1 that are associated with risk of preeclampsia. FLT1 is known to encode an isoform of placental origin implicated in the pathology of preeclampsia, providing biological support for the association of this locus with preeclampsia risk.
Ingileif Jonsdottir, Björn Nilsson, Kari Stefansson and colleagues perform a genome-wide association study for immunoglobulin levels in Icelandic and Swedish cohorts. They find 38 new variants associated with IgA, IgG, IgM or composite immunoglobulin traits and identify candidate genes underlying the regulation of immunoglobulin levels.
Danielle Posthuma and colleagues report a genome-wide association analysis for insomnia complaints in 113,006 individuals from the UK Biobank that identifies associations with variants near seven genes. They find evidence for sex-specific genetic architectures underlying genetic risk for insomnia and genetic correlations between insomnia complaints and psychiatric and metabolic traits.
Christopher Amos and colleagues perform genome-wide association analysis for lung cancer using cohorts genotyped on the OncoArray and combing these with existing data. They identify 18 loci, 10 of which are new, finding heterogeneity across the different lung cancer subtypes, and explore candidate genes through eQTL analysis in lung tissue.
Clare Turnbull and colleagues report discovery of 19 new susceptibility loci for testicular germ cell tumor (TGCT) and provide evidence for a network of physical interactions between TGCT risk variants and candidate causal genes. Their findings implicate widespread disruption of developmental transcriptional regulators in TGCT susceptibility, consistent with failed primordial germ cell differentiation as an initiating step in oncogenesis.
Katherine Nathanson, Peter Kanetsky and colleagues present a meta-analysis of five genome-wide association studies of testicular germ cell tumor (TGCT). They identify eight new susceptibility loci and new independent signals at two previously reported loci, providing further clues to the etiology of TGCT.
Christoph Plass and colleagues investigate the transcriptomic and epigenomic changes induced by treatment with inhibitors of DNMT and HDAC in cancer cell lines. They observe large numbers of treatment-induced non-annotated TSSs (TINATs) encoded in long-terminal repeats that are normally repressed in most cell types.
Paul Lehner and colleagues identify an essential role for MORC2 in HUSH complex–mediated epigenetic silencing. They show that loss of MORC2 causes chromatin decompaction at HUSH-target loci and that a MORC2 mutation that causes Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease results in hyperactivation of HUSH-mediated repression in neuronal cells.
Salvatore Spicuglia and colleagues use a high-throughput reporter assay to identify a set of mammalian promoters, termed Epromoters, that display enhancer activity and have distinct genomic and epigenomic features. Through CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing experiments, they show that Epromoters are involved in long-range gene regulation in cis.
Etienne Bucher and colleagues use a combination of short- and long-read sequencing, along with optical mapping technologies, to produce the high-quality de novo assembly of the apple genome. They identify a new repetitive retrotransposon sequence and analyze DNA methylation data in relation to important agronomic traits.
Tianzhen Zhang, Xiongming Du and colleagues report whole-genome resequencing of 318 upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) accessions. They carried out genome-wide association analyses to identify loci associated with fiber quality, lint yield and resistance to Verticillium wilt, and identify two ethylene-pathway genes associated with the increased lint yield observed in improved cultivars.
Christina Curtis and colleagues simulate spatial tumor growth under different evolutionary models and compare their results to multiregion sequencing data. They find that it is possible to distinguish tumors driven by strong positive selection from those evolving neutrally or under weak selection and infer different evolutionary modes within and between tumor types.