News & Comment

Breda et al. developed a method for gene editing bone marrow cells in vivo, circumventing the need for toxic conditioning regimens such as chemotherapy or radiation.

In April 2023, leading experts met with members of US Congress to discuss strategies to ensure global food security. Following on from this, Pamela Ronald emphasizes the role that plant genetics has in achieving these goals.

Two studies published in Nature investigate the genetic mechanisms of sex bias in cancers and implicate Y chromosome genes in contributing to the aggressiveness of bladder cancer and colorectal cancer in men.

Jacobs et al. report in Science that different co-repressors repress the transcriptional activity of different subsets of enhancers associated with genes of different function.

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.

A study in Nature reports a strong association between asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections and the HLA-B*15:01 allele and reveals mechanistic insights into its protective effect.

Zeng et al. introduce RIBOmap, a three-dimensional in situ imaging technique that enables the mapping of mRNAs undergoing translation.

Liang et al. report in Nature that complementary Alu sequences allow an enhancer to find its cognate promoter over long distances, potentially through the formation of RNA duplexes.

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.

Single-cell omics approaches are providing unprecedented insights into cellular function and dysfunction. This Editorial highlights the remarkable potential of these technologies and their profound impact on our understanding of biology and disease.

A study in Science identifies Mavericks, a class of ancient, virus-like transposable elements, as a vector for horizontal gene transfer in nematodes.

In five new studies, the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium reports the generation and initial characterization of a draft human pangenome.

A study in Nature Biotechnology describes Scriabin, a highly scalable framework for inference of cell–cell communication from scRNA-seq data at the level of individual cells.

Morris et al. present an integrated multi-omic workflow to identify target genes of noncoding variants for blood trait loci.

Hao et al. present a workflow to integrate single-cell datasets of diverse modalities using a multi-omic dataset as a molecular bridge.

A study in Nature integrates single-cell RNA-sequencing data from more than 1,000 tumour samples to report a pan-cancer atlas of intratumour transcriptional heterogeneity.

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.

Marja Timmermans recalls a series of papers published back-to-back in Science in 2018 that reported the use of single-cell RNA sequencing to obtain a more complete picture of the expression landscapes describing early vertebrate development.

In this Journal Club, Celine Vallot discusses two 2015 papers that introduced the concept of high-throughput RNA barcoding, which paved the way for today’s plethora of single-cell omic approaches.

Tanja Woyke highlights a 2014 study by Kashtan et al., who applied single-cell genomics to populations of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, revealing hundreds of subpopulations with distinct genomic backbones of this wild uncultured microorganism.