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A catalog of genetic variation in a crop species facilitates marker-assisted breeding, gene mapping and analysis of elite traits. Xu et al. resequenced 40 cultivated and 10 wild rice accessions to >15 × coverage, yielding 6.5 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms and 808,000 small insertions and deletions.
The International Stem Cell Initiative compares 125 ethnically diverse human embryonic stem cell lines at early and late passage. Data on karotype, single-nucleotide polymorphisms and methylation shed light on how the cells adapt to long-term culture.
Davis et al. extend their previous efforts to use inhibitor-kinase interactions to understand kinase inhibitor selectivity by profiling the binding of 72 kinase inhibitors to 442 human kinase catalytic domains. The data reveal group-specific differences in selectivity and suggest the feasibility of developing reasonably specific inhibitors for most kinases.
The promiscuity of most kinase inhibitors can cause drug toxicity and complicate the interpretation of experiments. Rather than assessing kinase-compound binding, Anastassiadis et al. use functional assays to profile the activities of 178 commercially available kinase inhibitors against 300 recombinant human protein kinases.
Prosser et al. describe a resource of mouse embryonic stem cell clones harboring deletions that target 392 microRNA loci.. Because the targeting cassettes can be readily replaced by reporter genes, conditional alleles and other variants, the lines should facilitate a broad range of studies into microRNA function.
Essential genes have been effectively studied using temperature-sensitive alleles in yeast. Li et al. construct a large collection of temperature-sensitive yeast mutants and show how it enables high-throughput analyses of the function of essential genes.
Previous work has suggested that induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are inferior to embryonic stem cells (ESCs) with respect to in vitro differentiation, raising questions about the utility of iPSCs for disease modeling. Characterization of a test set of 16 human iPSC lines shows that they perform as well as ESCs in differentiating to motor neurons.
