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Johan Paulsson and Dann Huh report a mathematical modeling analysis proposing that stochastic partitioning errors during cell division contribute to non-genetic heterogeneity between cells in a population. They find that fluctuations arising from such partitioning errors are difficult to suppress and can mimic noise in gene expression.
Jianzhi Zhang and Xionglei He report analyses of published RNA sequencing data examining relative expression levels between genes located on the X chromosome and genes located on autosomes. Unlike previous reports of dosage compensation between the X chromosome and autosomes, their analyses detect an X:autosome expression ratio of ∼0.5.
Nilanjan Chatterjee and colleagues report an analysis of the number and effect size distribution of susceptibility variants identified from current genome-wide association studies. They estimate the number of susceptibility loci expected to be discovered by GWAS over a range of sample sizes and compare to recent findings from GWAS for height, Crohn's disease and several cancers.
Peter Visscher and colleagues report an analysis of the heritability explained by common variants identified through genome-wide association studies. They find that 45% of the variance for height can be explained by using a linear model to simultaneously consider the combined effect of common SNPs.
