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The journal endorses the principle of transparency in the production of genome-edited crops and livestock as a precondition for the registration of a breed or cultivar, with no further need for regulation or distinction of these goods from the products of traditional breeding.
The idea that pollinators are in large part responsible for the diversity of flowering plants dates back more than 150 years to Darwin's work, but even modern scientists have struggled to identify specific 'speciation genes' and determine how they influenced flower-pollinator interactions. A new study proposes that a series of mutations in a single gene controlling floral chemicals influenced pollinator preferences, likely resulting in speciation, bringing us closer to finding a speciation gene.
The Legionella genus includes opportunistic human pathogenic species that invade human cells using effector proteins that evolved during association with their natural amoeba hosts. A new study compares the genomes of 41 Legionella species to identify nearly 6,000 effectors, providing insight into these species' evolution and pathogenic lifestyles.
Plant pathogens can evolve new host specificities and overcome host resistances over surprisingly few generations, a process that is greatly accelerated by agricultural practices. A new study provides a striking example in which the rapid emergence of a new pathogen via introgressive hybridization mirrors the evolution of a hybrid cereal crop.
Sanwen Huang, Detlef Weigel, Roger Beachy and Jiayang Li propose a regulatory framework for precision breeding with genome-edited crops. They argue that society should benefit from the latest advances in plant genetics and genomics.
Shamil Sunyaev, Alexander Gimelbrant and colleagues report an analysis of the genetic variability in human monoallelically expressed genes. They find that genes with monoallelic expression show greater genetic diversity than biallelically expressed genes and that this diversity is associated with greater allelic age.
Swapan Nath, Sang-Cheol Bae and colleagues report the results of a large-scale association study of systemic lupus erythematosus in individuals of Asian ancestry. They identify several new susceptibility loci and find enrichment for signals near genes implicated in B cell and T cell function.
Owen Rackham, Jose Polo, Julian Gough and colleagues present a method, Mogrify, for predicting sets of transcription factors that can induce transdifferentiation between cell types. They show that Mogrify is able to predict known factors for published cell conversions and experimentally validate factors for two new conversions.
Andrea Sottoriva, Trevor Graham and colleagues analyze tumor sequencing data and show that a substantial proportion of cancers of many different types are characterized by neutral evolution resulting in a characteristic power-law distribution of the mutant allele frequencies. This neutral framework provides a new way to interpret cancer genomic data and to discriminate between functional and non-functional intratumoral heterogeneity.
Haifan Lin, Jamy Peng and colleagues report that the Drosophila Piwi protein is a negative regulator of PRC2 in the fly ovary, a function required for the maintenance of germline stem cells. Their results indicate that Piwi sequesters PRC2 in the nucleoplasm, thereby reducing genome-wide levels of H3K27me3.
Christoph Plass, Christopher Oakes and colleagues study genome-wide DNA methylation dynamics during B cell maturation and the pathogenic role of transcription factor dysregulation in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). By comparing normal and malignant B cells, they find that tumors derive from a continuum of maturation states, which correlate with different clinical outcomes.
Janey Wiggs, Jonathan Haines and colleagues identify three new susceptibility loci for primary open-angle glaucoma. The association signals map near genes implicated in ocular development (FOXC1), neurodegeneration (ATXN2) and mitochondrial function (TXNRD2).
Gil Segal, Howard Shuman and colleagues sequence the genomes of 38 Legionella species and analyze 5,885 predicted effector proteins. Their analysis identifies a core set of seven effectors shared by all 38 species and numerous previously unidentified conserved effector domains.
Beat Keller, Thomas Wicker and colleagues compare the genomes of 46 isolates of powdery mildew, Blumeria graminis. They find that B. graminis f. sp. triticale, a pathogen growing on triticale (a wheat × rye hybrid plant), is a hybrid of B. graminis f. sp. tritici and B. graminis f. sp. secalis, which grow on wheat and rye, respectively.
Iuliana Ionita-Laza, Kenneth McCallum and colleagues developed an unsupervised statistical approach, Eigen, that integrates different functional annotations into a single measure of functional importance for coding and noncoding variants. Their meta-score can outperform the recently proposed CADD score and can be applied to fine-mapping studies.
Elodie Ghedin, Benjamin Cowling and colleagues quantify the frequency at which variants of influenza virus were transmitted between individual hosts during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in Hong Kong. They find transmission of multiple variants between donor-recipient pairs and provide estimates of the number of viral particles that can infect and replicate within a host.