Research articles

Rickard Sandberg and colleagues use allele-sensitive single-cell RNA–seq on primary mouse fibroblasts and human T cells to study clonal and dynamic monoallelic expression patterns. They find that the majority of random monoallelic expression of autosomal genes occurs transiently within individual cells rather than being stably inherited within clonally related cells.

Howard Chang and colleagues identify a long noncoding RNA, DINO, that is transcribed upstream of CDKN1A and induced by p53 in response to DNA damage. They show that DINO binds to p53 protein and promotes its stabilization, producing a feedback loop that amplifies DNA damage signaling.

Laurent Fasano and colleagues identify TSHZ3 deletions in patients with autism spectrum disorder. Tshz3-mutant mice show functional changes at synapses established by cortical projection neurons and exhibit autism-like behavioral patterns.

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson and colleagues report a fine-mapping and association analysis of germline variants in the APOBEC3 region associated with cancer risk. They identify two variants with differential effects in bladder and breast cancer, and their in vitro results suggest that environmental exposures may induce tissue-specific APOBEC mutagenesis and contribute to oncogenesis in carriers of APOBEC3 risk variants.

Peter Scacheri and colleagues identify ‘outside’ SNPs that physically interact with GWAS risk SNPs as part of a target gene's regulatory circuitry. Their findings suggest a model whereby outside variants and GWAS SNPs that physically interact collude to influence target transcript levels as well as clinical risk.

Giacomo Cavalli, Anne-Marie Martinez and colleagues identify a large set of genes that are bound by PRC1 in the absence of H3K27me3 in Drosophila larval tissues and in differentiated human cell lines. Many of these genes, which regulate cell proliferation, signaling and polarity, are upregulated in PRC1-mutant tissues and contribute to tumor formation in Drosophila.

Bjarni Halldorsson, Kari Stefansson and colleagues use SNP array and whole-genome sequencing data to estimate the meiotic gene conversion rate (G) in humans. They find that G for SNPs is 7.0 conversions/Mb per generation, is 2.17 greater in mothers than in fathers, and increases with maternal age.

Patricia Munroe, Christopher Newton-Cheh, Andrew Morris and colleagues perform association studies in over 340,000 individuals of European ancestry and identify 66 loci, of which 17 are novel, involved in blood pressure regulation. The risk SNPs are enriched for cis-regulatory elements, particularly in vascular endothelial cells.

Patricia Munroe, Joanna Howson and colleagues genotype ∼350,000 individuals and identify 30 new blood pressure– or hypertension-associated risk loci. Their analyses provide insights into the pathophysiology of hypertension and highlight new potential targets for clinical intervention.

Daniel Chasman, Daniel Levy, Christopher Newton-Cheh, Georg Ehret and colleagues perform an association meta-analysis for blood pressure in ∼330,000 individuals and identify 31 new risk loci, implicating biological pathways related to vascular function and cardiometabolic traits. Their findings highlight potential therapeutic strategies for hypertension, emphasizing a link with cardiometabolic risk.

Runjun Kumar, S. Joshua Swamidass and Ron Bose present an unsupervised parsimony-guided method, ParsSNP, for prioritizing candidate cancer driver mutations. They apply ParsSNP to a gastric cancer data set and predict potential driver mutations not detected by other methods, including truncations in known tumor-suppressor genes and previously confirmed drivers.

Shankar Balasubramanian and colleagues examine endogenous DNA G-quadruplex (G4) structures in the context of chromatin by using G4 antibody-based ChIP–seq. They find that G4 structures are enriched in nucleosome-depleted regions and the promoters and 5′ UTRs of highly transcribed genes, suggesting a relationship between chromatin state, transcriptional output and G4 status.

Ben Lehner and colleagues analyze data from matched exomes and transcriptomes from tumors across 27 cancer types to elucidate rules linking premature termination codon location to nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). They propose a model that explains variability in NMD efficiency and find evidence of positive and negative selection on NMD-initiating mutations in tumors.

Mingfang Zhang, Sally Mackenzie and colleagues report the genome sequence of allopolyploid Brassica juncea and through comparative analysis suggest that A-subgenome evolution contributes to differences in agricultural subvarieties. They find that differential homoeolog gene expression from the subgenomes helps to shape the selection that distinguishes vegetable- and oil-use Brassica.

Rebecca Fitzgerald and colleagues report the whole-genome sequences of 129 esophageal adenocarcinomas, showing frequent copy number alterations and prevalent mutations in receptor tyrosine kinases concomitant with mitogenic activation. They further characterize mutation signatures and find three distinct molecular subtypes with potential for application to clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Yanick Crow and colleagues report that biallelic mutations in SNORD118, which encodes the box C/D snoRNA U8, cause the cerebral microangiopathy leukoencephalopathy with calcifications and cysts. The mutations affect U8 expression, processing and protein binding and suggest a role for this snoRNA in cerebral vascular homeostasis.

Mathieu Lupien and colleagues report an enrichment of somatic mutations at the ESR1 cis-regulatory region in 7% of ESR1-positive breast cancers. They find that the activity of the recurrently mutated ESR1 enhancer is also influenced by breast cancer risk–associated SNPs.

Michael Speicher and colleagues analyze plasma DNA whole-genome sequencing data from healthy donors and patients with cancer to infer nucleosome positioning on the basis of read depth coverage patterns. They use this approach to accurately predict expression of cancer driver genes from circulating tumor DNA in regions with somatic copy number gains.

Christian Fuchsberger, Gonçalo Abecasis and colleagues describe a new web-based imputation service that enables rapid imputation of large numbers of samples and allows convenient access to large reference panels of sequenced individuals. Their state space reduction provides a computationally efficient solution for genotype imputation with no loss in imputation accuracy.

Jonathan Marchini, Gonçalo Abecasis, Richard Durbin and colleagues describe the construction of a reference panel of human haplotypes from whole-genome sequencing data. They are able to use this to accurately impute genotypes at low minor allele frequency and present remote server resources for use by the community.