Browse Articles

Metabologenomics integrates multi-omics data into genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) to analyse complex metabolic networks. Mardinoglu and Palsson review advancements in GEMs at the global, cell- and tissue-specific, microbiome and whole-body levels, with insights into their applications towards improving health care.

In this Journal Club, Alejo Rodriguez-Fratelli discusses a paper by Spudich and Koshland Jr that characterized non-genetic cell individuality in bacteria, a concept with emerging relevance to cancer progression.

A study in Science investigating bacterial defence mechanisms against phages reports a novel mode of gene regulation through reverse transcription of a non-coding RNA template, leading to the formation of a toxic repetitive gene.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Ming Zhu describes Tracking-seq, a versatile method for detecting off-target effects of genome-editing tools across a range of experimental conditions.

Yimiao Qu and Kyle Loh discuss a 2004 paper by Xie et al., who demonstrated that B cells can be reprogrammed into macrophages through the enforced expression of a single transcription factor, providing insights into cellular plasticity and lineage conversion.

In this Comment, Veltman and Tüttelmann call on geneticists to further study male infertility and help to develop diagnostic strategies using state-of-the-art genomic approaches.

Toxicogenomics leverages molecular data to predict toxicological effects. In this Review, the authors summarize innovations in transcriptomics and emerging methods, such as single-cell technologies and multi-omics, that offer detailed insights into toxicological mechanisms to enhance hazard prediction and risk assessment.

Merly C. Vogt recalls a seminal paper by Greer et al., who demonstrated the transgenerational inheritance of longevity, a complex trait, in Caenorhabditis elegans by manipulating the trimethylation of histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4me3) in the parental generation.

Satterlee et al. employ several approaches to demonstrate that prickle evolution has a common genetic basis among several plant lineages.

Mosaic variegated aneuploidy is a rare condition in which the copy number of different chromosomes varies across some cells within an individual. In this Review, the authors discuss the genetic underpinnings and clinical manifestations of this condition and relate these findings to the consequences of chromosomal instability more broadly.

In this Review, the authors provide an overview of the roles of individual histone variants in multiple processes, including gene regulation, DNA replication and DNA repair, and the cellular consequences of their dysfunction.

Duttke et al. show that transcription factors have position-dependent effects relative to their distance from the transcription start site, which suggests that a 'spatial grammar' could be used to encode multiple gene-regulatory programmes.

In this Review, Smith et al. describe DNA methylation landscapes that emerge over mammalian development and within key disease states, as well as how different methyltransferases interface with histone modifications and other proteins to create and maintain them.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Pablo Librado describes a novel computational method to infer the time between successive generations from genomic data, including ancient genomes, which offers new insights into the timing of evolutionary and demographic events.

Chromosomal instability (CIN) drives cancer progression through diverse mechanisms. The authors review the molecular consequences of CIN in advanced cancer, such as genomic and phenotypic heterogeneity and cancer cell-intrinsic inflammation.

Neumann, Bertozzi et al. describe a novel epigenetic editor termed CHARM and report its use to silence prion protein expression in the brain.

Advances in genomic technologies have enabled investigations into a wide range of species. In this Review, the authors describe recent studies in both non-model and model organisms that illustrate the diversity of animal sex chromosomes with respect to their evolutionary histories and mechanistic roles in sex-determination systems.

Two studies in Nature reveal the mechanistic and structural properties of a family of mobile genetic elements that can be reprogrammed to engineer genome modifications.

RNA-binding proteins regulate the lifecycle of RNA, and their dysregulation is associated with diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. Using methods based on ultraviolet crosslinking followed by immunoprecipitation (CLIP), we can now begin to decode the mechanisms of the interactions between RNA-binding proteins and RNA. This Review discusses recent insights from and future applications of these methodologies.