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In this Journal Club article, Jenny Tung reflects on a 1975 paper from King and Wilson that emphasized the importance of gene regulatory changes in human evolution.
Reflecting on the importance of short tandem repeats (STRs) in population genetics, Ning Xie highlights a 2023 publication that characterized genome-wide STR variation in global human genomes to expand our understanding of STR genetic diversity within and across populations.
In this Journal Club, Yoav Ram recalls how he reconciled results from his own research with the reduction principle through the help of a paper published in PNAS by Altenberg et al.
Hajk-Georg Drost recalls a 2010 publication that used a phylotranscriptomic approach to estimate the age of genes that contribute to the developmental transcriptome across animal species and inspired a subsequent study on the embryonic hourglass in plants.
Kate Galloway highlights a paper by Kueh et al., who showed that the cell cycle indirectly influences concentrations of the transcription factor PU.1 to stabilize cell-fate trajectories in mice.
In this Journal Club, Hajk-Georg Drost highlights a recent study by Pavlopoulos et al. that organizes proteins at tree-of-life scale using massively parallel graph-based clustering.
Carl G. de Boer highlights a recent paper by Lim et al. on the importance low-affinity transcription factor-binding sites for determining organismal phenotypes.
Amnon Koren recalls two papers from 2001 and 2002 that laid the foundations for a new field by using microarrays to measure DNA replication timing across the genome.
Vincent Courdavault and Nicolas Papon highlight two articles in Nature, published in 2006 and 2013, that reported the biosynthesis of a complex natural plant product to treat malaria in engineered yeast.
Shinichi Morishita recalls a seminal publication by Weber and Myers, who in 1997 proposed a direct whole-genome shotgun sequencing approach to tackle the human genome.
Mashaal Sohail reflects on a 2011 Nature study by Smillie et al., which analysed human microbiome data to show that microbial ecology, rather than phylogeny or geography, is a key driver of horizontal gene transfer.
Aashiq Kachroo highlights a recent paper by van Loggerenberg et al. that demonstrates the experimental power of ‘humanized yeast’ to gain insight into the genetic variants underlying disease.
Segun Fatumo highlights a paper by Mahajan et al. that uses a multi-ancestry genome-wide association studies approach to uncover the genetic underpinnings of type 2 diabetes, emphasizing the importance of incorporating diverse populations in such studies.
Li Zhao recalls a 2006 paper by Levine et al. that, by identifying a handful of de novo genes, outlined a potentially universal process of de novo gene birth and propelled forward this field of research.
Luis Barreiro highlights a 2007 paper by Tishkoff et al. that identified genetic variants associated with lactose persistence in East African populations, representing one of the first examples of convergent evolution in humans.
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.
