The influence of evolutionary history on human health and disease

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  • Neil Gemmell recalls the pioneering work published in 1968 by Britten and Kohne, which ignited in him an enduring fascination as to why eukaryotic genomes contain substantial fractions of repetitive DNA.

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    • In this Perspective, Teschendorff and Feinberg describe how single-cell analysis methods based on statistical mechanics can provide valuable insights into developmental phenomena, such as differentiation potency and lineage trajectories, as well as disruption of these processes in cancer.

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    • In this Review, Neafsey, Taylor and MacInnis discuss how population genomics approaches are currently used to study malaria parasites and mosquito vectors. They explore information that can be derived from such genomics approaches and discuss the use of relatedness-based measures of population variation to understand parasite and vector dynamics at highly resolved spatiotemporal scales.

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News & Comment

  • Xia et al. highlight an unexpected horizontal gene transfer event, whereby the sweet potato whitefly has harnessed a host plant detoxification mechanism to resist its defences.

    • Ingrid Knarston
    Research Highlight

  • From the June 2021 issue onwards, Nature Reviews Genetics will publish Journal Club articles, which explore a historical scientific publication that has served as inspiration to the author.

    Editorial

  • Qifa Zhang describes how a 2008 publication in Nature Biotechnology on transgenic purple tomatoes inspired him to tackle food security by improving the nutrient and culinary value of black rice.

    • Qifa Zhang
    Journal Club

  • Two studies co-published in Nature Genetics describe induced pluripotent stem cell-based resources for identifying novel, disease-related genetic variants.

    • Joseph Willson
    Research Highlight

  • Two new studies in Science use lineage tracking in humans to show that among the first few embryonic cells originating from post-fertilization cell divisions, there can be substantial imbalance in their contributions to mature tissues.

    • Darren J. Burgess
    Research Highlight

  • Neil Gemmell recalls the pioneering work published in 1968 by Britten and Kohne, which ignited in him an enduring fascination as to why eukaryotic genomes contain substantial fractions of repetitive DNA.

    • Neil J. Gemmell
    Journal Club

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