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Marnie Blewitt highlights the visionary 1961 paper by Mary Lyon in which she proposed that dosage compensation in female mammals involves X-inactivation and recognized its implications for sex-specific phenotypes in X-linked disorders.
Leon Mutesa highlights a 2009 article by Yehuda and Bierer that considered the relevance of epigenetic mechanisms to post-traumatic stress disorder, which inspired his own research on the importance of DNA methylation changes in trauma survivors.
Fay-Wei Li recalls a 1966 paper by Klekowski and Baker, who built on their observation that homosporous pteridophytes have many more chromosomes than heterosporous lineages to generate hypotheses on the evolutionary impact of polyploidy.
Roser Vento-Tormo highlights the synergy of single-cell omics and organoids by Camp et al., who used single-cell RNA sequencing to characterize the cell–cell communication events driving tissue formation in human liver organoids.
Marja Timmermans recalls a series of papers published back-to-back in Science in 2018 that reported the use of single-cell RNA sequencing to obtain a more complete picture of the expression landscapes describing early vertebrate development.
In this Journal Club, Celine Vallot discusses two 2015 papers that introduced the concept of high-throughput RNA barcoding, which paved the way for today’s plethora of single-cell omic approaches.
Tanja Woyke highlights a 2014 study by Kashtan et al., who applied single-cell genomics to populations of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, revealing hundreds of subpopulations with distinct genomic backbones of this wild uncultured microorganism.
In this Journal Club, Loic Yengo discusses a study by Tenesa et al., who used height as a model complex trait to estimate the degree to which height similarity between spouses is caused by mate choice.
Sophie von der Heyden highlights a paper by Barber et al. that examined variations in the genetic structuring of populations of the mantis shrimp Haptosquilla pulchella, furthering our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of marine species.
Nandita Garud recalls two seminal papers by Hermisson and Pennings that provide a framework for understanding when adaptation should be gradual versus rapid.
Julio Collado-Vides recalls two 2005 publications that provide a conceptual framework based on a statistical thermodynamics approach to quantitatively model the regulatory activity at promoters subject to regulation by multiple transcription factors.
This journal club by Elisa Oricchio highlights two studies published in 2012, which used chromatin conformation capture methods to detect the formation of self-interacting chromatin regions, known as topologically associating domains (TADs).
Magda Bienko highlights a landmark paper by Lieberman-Aiden et al., which in 2009 reported the development of high-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C), revolutionizing the field of 3D genome biology.
In this Journal club, Meritxell Huch recalls a dogma postulated by Hayflick in 1961, that the capacity for propagating primary epithelial cells with normal ploidy is limited — a theory that persisted until the advent of organoid cultures.
Sérgio Pena discusses a 2019 study by Gruhn et al., which showed that meiotic chromosome segregation errors originating in oocytes determine the curve of female fertility in humans.
Selene Fernandez-Valverde recalls a seminal publication by Jacob and Monod to showcase how thoughtful reasoning and extrapolation of limited observations can provide meaningful insights into complex systems.
Riccardo Marioni discusses how the publication of Horvath’s epigenetic clock has affected research into ageing, rejuvenation and epigenetic epidemiology.
Luis Saraiva recalls a 1997 paper by Krings et al., which reports the sequencing of mitochondrial Neanderthal DNA extracted from a 40,000-year-old bone, enabling the direct study of the relationship between ancient and modern humans.
In this Journal Club, Morgan Levine discusses a publication by Rose and Charlesworth that provided direct evidence of the impact of natural selection on differential ageing rates.
Guojie Zhang discusses a seminal paper by Alfred H. Sturtevant, in which he concluded based on his observations in fruitflies that the mutation rate is an evolving parameter.
