Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
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.
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.
A new study in Science reports the extraction and analysis of ancient hominid nuclear DNA from Paleolithic sediments. This advance paves the way to a fuller picture of human evolution by bypassing the dependency on rare skeletal remains.
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.
There is a rapidly growing appreciation of the complexities of 3D genome organization, as well as associations with gene expression and wider cellular and organismal phenotypes, including diseases. In this Review, the authors describe diverse experimental methods for manipulating 3D genome organization — from fine-scale control of DNA contacts to large-scale nuclear repositioning — which are facilitating detailed testing of the biological functions of 3D genome organization.
Interactions between microorganisms and their hosts are highly context dependent and contribute to both normal tissue function and infectious disease pathology. In this Review, Westermann and Vogel describe how advances in RNA sequencing techniques are providing molecular insights into host–microbe interactions, including advances in cross-species and single-cell transcriptomics.
Maintenance of cell-type identity requires the faithful inheritance of chromatin states through cell division, despite the challenges posed by the disruptive passage of the DNA replication fork and the dilution of nucleosome components in complex with the daughter DNA strands. In this Review, Escobar, Loyola and Reinberg discuss how methodological advances are providing unprecedented mechanistic insights into the segregation of parental nucleosomes, how these mechanisms maintain gene expression programmes and how non-faithful nucleosome segregation is linked to differentiation and disease.
Stapornwongkul and Vincent review models for morphogen gradient formation. They propose that hindered diffusion, in which interactions between morphogens and extracellular binders modulate gradient shape and dynamics, could form robust morphogen gradients in a variety of tissue contexts.
