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Two new studies on snake venom glands have implications for improved anti-venom development. One describes the de novo assembly of an Indian cobra reference genome and venom gland transcriptome; the other describes the derivation of snake venom gland organoids.
Two new studies in Molecular Cell report a role for antisense oligonucleotides in inducing transcriptional termination, with important implications for the interpretation of functional studies of long non-coding RNAs.
A Genome Research study reports gene expression and DNA methylation profiles of multiple tissues sampled from the same individuals across humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques.
The pathology of heritable human traits and diseases often affects a narrow range of tissues, even when causal genes are expressed widely across the body. In this Review, Hekselman and Yeger-Lotem discuss the latest understanding of tissue specificity in human traits and disease, including the diverse underlying molecular mechanisms, experimental and bioinformatics resources to leverage omics data, and implications for understanding disease aetiology.
Cell-free gene expression systems have long been used to address fundamental research questions. Now, owing to technological advances, these systems are finding wider applications in the field of synthetic biology, including in biosensing, biomanufacturing, education and the design of gene networks.
To map the full extent of structural variation in the human genome, detection methods are needed that improve on short-read approaches. This Review discusses how ensemble algorithms and emerging sequencing technologies are helping to resolve the full spectrum of structural variations.
In this Perspective article, Cheetham, Faulkner and Dinger describe our latest understanding of pseudogenes, which are typically defined as defective copies of regular genes. They argue that being open minded about potential functionality, as well as carefully designing functional studies, will lead to a growing appreciation of emerging functional roles of these understudied elements.
