Research articles

James Liley, John Todd and Chris Wallace present a statistical method for determining whether disease-associated variants have different effect sizes in phenotypically defined subgroups of disease cases. The test can be combined with existing methods to determine whether genetic heterogeneity is driven by population stratification or by different mechanisms of disease pathology.

Yun Song and colleagues present SMC++, a statistical method for population history inference capable of analyzing unphased whole genomes and sample sizes much larger than can be analyzed by current methods. The authors apply SMC++ to sequence data from human, Drosophila and finch populations.

Nir Hacohen, Bruce Walker, David Sabatini, Eric Lander and colleagues perform a CRISPR–Cas9-based screen for host factors that are required for HIV infection. They identify two known and three novel factors that are necessary for viral infection but that are not required for cell viability, making them potential targets for antiviral therapy.

Konstantinos Lazaridis, Carl Anderson and colleagues report results of a genome-wide association study of primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). They identify four new susceptibility loci for PSC and quantify the correlation of common genetic variation shared between PSC and inflammatory bowel diseases.

Richa Saxena and colleagues report genome-wide association analyses of sleep disturbance traits in the UK Biobank cohort. They discover loci associated with insomnia symptoms and excessive daytime sleepiness and identify genetic correlations with several neuropsychiatric and metabolic traits.

Manju Kurian and colleagues report heterozygous variants in KMT2B in 27 unrelated individuals with a complex progressive childhood-onset dystonia, often associated with a typical facial appearance. Their findings highlight a clinically recognizable form of dystonia and demonstrate a crucial role for KMT2B in the physiological control of voluntary movement.

Jaroslaw Maciejewski, Seishi Ogawa and colleagues examine the clonal dynamics of myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) by analyzing whole-exome and targeted sequencing data from a large patient collection. They find that progression steps previously defined by pathologic criteria are accompanied by distinct molecular changes, and they show that driver genes can be classified into molecular subtypes differentially associated with low-risk MDS, high-risk MDS or secondary acute myeloid leukemia.

Gerald Crabtree, Keji Zhao and colleagues report that recurrent disease-associated mutations in SMARCA4 result in increased PRC1 deposition and activity. Using an in cellula assay, they find that the BAF (mSWI/SNF) complex directly evicts PRC from chromatin via an ATP-dependent mechanism and that this occurs within minutes of BAF occupancy.

Gerald Crabtree, Cigall Kadoch and colleagues report that BAF complexes oppose PRC by rapid, ATP-dependent eviction in the absence of Pol II occupancy, transcription or replication, leading to the formation of accessible chromatin. They also find that tumor-suppressor and oncogenic mutations in BAF subunits result in differential effects on PRC eviction.

Charles Roberts and colleagues show that deletion of Arid1a from mouse intestinal epithelium results in invasive adenocarcinomas resembling human colorectal cancer. They further show that ARID1A loss impairs SWI/SNF targeting and enhancer-mediated gene regulation.

Charles Roberts, Peter Park, Bradley Bernstein and colleagues examine the consequences of SMARCB1 loss on enhancer landscapes in human rhabdoid tumors. They show that SMARCB1 is essential for the integrity and abundance of SWI/SNF complexes and facilitates their targeting to appropriate enhancers.

Bastiaan Heijmans, Peter ’t Hoen, Lude Franke and colleagues describe a strategy to identify context-dependent expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs). They apply their method to peripheral blood RNA–seq data from 2,116 unrelated individuals and discover 23,060 significant cis-regulated genes, of which 12% showed context-dependent eQTL effects.

Songlin Chen, Manfred Schartl, Qingyin Wang, Deborah M. Power and colleagues analyze the genome of the Japanese flounder and its transcriptome dynamics during metamorphosis. They report a role for thyroid hormone and retinoic acid signaling, as well as phototransduction pathways, in the regulation of craniofacial asymmetry.

Chi-Hua Chen and colleagues report a GWAS for five personality traits and identify four loci associated with extraversion and two associated with neuroticism at genome-wide significance. They find that the five personality traits are genetically correlated and identify genetic correlations between personality traits and psychiatric disorders.

Audrey Chu, Matthew Steinhauser, Caroline Fox and colleagues report results of genome-wide association meta-analyses of ectopic-fat traits in individuals of European, African, Hispanic and Chinese ancestry. They identify seven new loci associated with ectopic-fat traits and present functional studies suggesting physiological roles for ATXN1 and UBE2E2 in adipogenesis.

Peter 't Hoen, Lude Franke, Bastiaan Heijmans and colleagues present a combined analysis of methylome and transcriptome data from a large collection of whole-blood samples to infer the downstream effects of disease-associated variants. They identify a large number of trait-associated SNPs influencing methylation of CpG sites in trans, providing insights into the downstream functional effects of many disease-associated variants.

Zachary Lippman, José Jiménez-Gómez and colleagues show that cultivated tomatoes have lost day-length-sensitive flowering, compared to their wild relatives, as a result of cis-regulatory variation affecting expression of SP5G, a paralog of the florigen gene SFT. They engineered SP5G loss-of-function mutant plants, resulting in rapid flowering and early yield.

Sanjay Sinha and colleagues use a vascular model derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with Marfan syndrome with fibrillin-1 alterations to study aortic aneurysms. They find defects that mimic Marfan pathology as well as novel targets for treatment and can rescue the phenotype by correcting the mutation through genome editing.

Yoshitaka Fukada, Hikari Yoshitane and colleagues report that rhythmic expression of ADARB1, an RNA-editing enzyme that catalyzes adenosine-to-inosine conversion, controls mRNA oscillations in the mouse liver. Mice with Adarb1 mutations exhibit short-period rhythms in locomotor activity and gene expression.

Hanno Glimm, Jan Korbel and colleagues present a computational framework called cis expression structural alteration mapping (CESAM), which they use to identify somatic copy-number alterations affecting cis-regulatory elements in cancer. They find that enhancer hijacking leads to overexpression of IRS4 and IGF2 in cancer.