Articles

Using high-throughput multiple optical phenotyping to decipher the genetic architecture of maize drought tolerance

Drought threatens the food supply of the world population. Dissecting the dynamic responses of plants to drought will be beneficial for breeding drought-tolerant crops, as the genetic controls of these respons...

Authors: Xi Wu, Hui Feng, Di Wu, Shijuan Yan, Pei Zhang, Wenbin Wang, Jun Zhang, Junli Ye, Guoxin Dai, Yuan Fan, Weikun Li, Baoxing Song, Zedong Geng, Wanli Yang, Guoxin Chen, Feng Qin…

Detection of cell-free microbial DNA using a contaminant-controlled analysis framework

The human microbiome plays an important role in cancer. Accumulating evidence indicates that commensal microbiome-derived DNA may be represented in minute quantities in the cell-free DNA of human blood and cou...

Authors: Enrique Zozaya-Valdés, Stephen Q. Wong, Jeanette Raleigh, Athena Hatzimihalis, Sarah Ftouni, Anthony T. Papenfuss, Shahneen Sandhu, Mark A. Dawson and Sarah-Jane Dawson

Roles of TET and TDG in DNA demethylation in proliferating and non-proliferating immune cells

TET enzymes mediate DNA demethylation by oxidizing 5-methylcytosine (5mC) in DNA to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), 5-formylcytosine (5fC), and 5-carboxylcytosine (5caC). Since these oxidized methylcytosines (...

Authors: Atsushi Onodera, Edahí González-Avalos, Chan-Wang Jerry Lio, Romain O. Georges, Alfonso Bellacosa, Toshinori Nakayama and Anjana Rao

SPARK-X: non-parametric modeling enables scalable and robust detection of spatial expression patterns for large spatial transcriptomic studies

Spatial transcriptomic studies are becoming increasingly common and large, posing important statistical and computational challenges for many analytic tasks. Here, we present SPARK-X, a non-parametric method f...

Authors: Jiaqiang Zhu, Shiquan Sun and Xiang Zhou

GxEsum: a novel approach to estimate the phenotypic variance explained by genome-wide GxE interaction based on GWAS summary statistics for biobank-scale data

Genetic variation in response to the environment, that is, genotype-by-environment interaction (GxE), is fundamental in the biology of complex traits and diseases. However, existing methods are computationally...

Authors: Jisu Shin and Sang Hong Lee

LIQA: long-read isoform quantification and analysis

Long-read RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technologies can sequence full-length transcripts, facilitating the exploration of isoform-specific gene expression over short-read RNA-seq. We present LIQA to quantify isofo...

Authors: Yu Hu, Li Fang, Xuelian Chen, Jiang F. Zhong, Mingyao Li and Kai Wang

Author Correction: Highly recurrent CBS epimutations in gastric cancer CpG island methylator phenotypes and inflammation

Authors: Nisha Padmanabhan, Huang Kie Kyon, Arnoud Boot, Kevin Lim, Supriya Srivastava, Shuwen Chen, Zhiyuan Wu, Hyung-Ok Lee, Vineeth T. Mukundan, Charlene Chan, Yarn Kit Chan, Ong Xuewen, Jason J. Pitt, Zul Fazreen Adam Isa, Manjie Xing, Ming Hui Lee…

Positive natural selection of N6-methyladenosine on the RNAs of processed pseudogenes

Canonical nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) is an important splicing-dependent process for mRNA surveillance in mammals. However, processed pseudogenes are not able to trigger NMD due to their lack of introns. It ...

Authors: Liqiang Tan, Weisheng Cheng, Fang Liu, Dan Ohtan Wang, Linwei Wu, Nan Cao and Jinkai Wang

Leveraging breeding programs and genomic data in Norway spruce (Picea abies L. Karst) for GWAS analysis

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify loci underlying the variation of complex traits. One of the main limitations of GWAS is the availability of reliable phenotypic data, particularly for long-lived...

Authors: Zhi-Qiang Chen, Yanjun Zan, Pascal Milesi, Linghua Zhou, Jun Chen, Lili Li, BinBin Cui, Shihui Niu, Johan Westin, Bo Karlsson, Maria Rosario García-Gil, Martin Lascoux and Harry X. Wu

GUNC: detection of chimerism and contamination in prokaryotic genomes

Genomes are critical units in microbiology, yet ascertaining quality in prokaryotic genome assemblies remains a formidable challenge. We present GUNC (the Genome UNClutterer), a tool that accurately detects an...

Authors: Askarbek Orakov, Anthony Fullam, Luis Pedro Coelho, Supriya Khedkar, Damian Szklarczyk, Daniel R. Mende, Thomas S. B. Schmidt and Peer Bork

Publisher Correction: scDesign2: a transparent simulator that generates high-fidelity single-cell gene expression count data with gene correlations captured

Authors: Tianyi Sun, Dongyuan Song, Wei Vivian Li and Jingyi Jessica Li

Transcription shapes DNA replication initiation to preserve genome integrity

Early DNA replication occurs within actively transcribed chromatin compartments in mammalian cells, raising the immediate question of how early DNA replication coordinates with transcription to avoid collision...

Authors: Yang Liu, Chen Ai, Tingting Gan, Jinchun Wu, Yongpeng Jiang, Xuhao Liu, Rusen Lu, Ning Gao, Qing Li, Xiong Ji and Jiazhi Hu

Chromosome-level genome assembly of a regenerable maize inbred line A188

The maize inbred line A188 is an attractive model for elucidation of gene function and improvement due to its high embryogenic capacity and many contrasting traits to the first maize reference genome, B73, and...

Authors: Guifang Lin, Cheng He, Jun Zheng, Dal-Hoe Koo, Ha Le, Huakun Zheng, Tej Man Tamang, Jinguang Lin, Yan Liu, Mingxia Zhao, Yangfan Hao, Frank McFraland, Bo Wang, Yang Qin, Haibao Tang, Donald R. McCarty…

BUTTERFLY: addressing the pooled amplification paradox with unique molecular identifiers in single-cell RNA-seq

The incorporation of unique molecular identifiers (UMIs) in single-cell RNA-seq assays makes possible the identification of duplicated molecules, thereby facilitating the counting of distinct molecules from se...

Authors: Johan Gustafsson, Jonathan Robinson, Jens Nielsen and Lior Pachter

Gene set enrichment analysis for genome-wide DNA methylation data

DNA methylation is one of the most commonly studied epigenetic marks, due to its role in disease and development. Illumina methylation arrays have been extensively used to measure methylation across the human ...

Authors: Jovana Maksimovic, Alicia Oshlack and Belinda Phipson

The global and promoter-centric 3D genome organization temporally resolved during a circadian cycle

Circadian gene expression is essential for organisms to adjust their physiology and anticipate daily changes in the environment. The molecular mechanisms controlling circadian gene transcription are still unde...

Authors: Mayra Furlan-Magaril, Masami Ando-Kuri, Rodrigo G. Arzate-Mejía, Jörg Morf, Jonathan Cairns, Abraham Román-Figueroa, Luis Tenorio-Hernández, A. César Poot-Hernández, Simon Andrews, Csilla Várnai, Boo Virk, Steven W. Wingett and Peter Fraser

Annotation of snoRNA abundance across human tissues reveals complex snoRNA-host gene relationships

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are mid-size non-coding RNAs required for ribosomal RNA modification, implying a ubiquitous tissue distribution linked to ribosome synthesis. However, increasing numbers of studi...

Authors: Étienne Fafard-Couture, Danny Bergeron, Sonia Couture, Sherif Abou-Elela and Michelle S. Scott

Dynamics of alternative splicing during somatic cell reprogramming reveals functions for RNA-binding proteins CPSF3, hnRNP UL1, and TIA1

Somatic cell reprogramming is the process that allows differentiated cells to revert to a pluripotent state. In contrast to the extensively studied rewiring of epigenetic and transcriptional programs required ...

Authors: Claudia Vivori, Panagiotis Papasaikas, Ralph Stadhouders, Bruno Di Stefano, Anna Ribó Rubio, Clara Berenguer Balaguer, Serena Generoso, Anna Mallol, José Luis Sardina, Bernhard Payer, Thomas Graf and Juan Valcárcel

Targeted mutagenesis in mouse cells and embryos using an enhanced prime editor

Prime editors, novel genome-editing tools consisting of a CRISPR-Cas9 nickase and an engineered reverse transcriptase, can induce targeted mutagenesis. Nevertheless, much effort is required to optimize and imp...

Authors: Soo-Ji Park, Tae Yeong Jeong, Seung Kyun Shin, Da Eun Yoon, Soo-Yeon Lim, Sol Pin Kim, Jungmin Choi, Hyunji Lee, Jeong-Im Hong, Jinhee Ahn, Je Kyung Seong and Kyoungmi Kim

Detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA using RT-LAMP and molecular beacons

Rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 has led to a global pandemic, resulting in the need for rapid assays to allow diagnosis and prevention of transmission. Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) provi...

Authors: Scott Sherrill-Mix, Young Hwang, Aoife M. Roche, Abigail Glascock, Susan R. Weiss, Yize Li, Leila Haddad, Peter Deraska, Caitlin Monahan, Andrew Kromer, Jevon Graham-Wooten, Louis J. Taylor, Benjamin S. Abella, Arupa Ganguly, Ronald G. Collman, Gregory D. Van Duyne…

N⁶-methyladenosine RNA modification regulates strawberry fruit ripening in an ABA-dependent manner

Epigenetic mark such as DNA methylation plays pivotal roles in regulating ripening of both climacteric and non-climacteric fruits. However, it remains unclear whether mRNA m⁶A methylation, which has been shown to...

Authors: Leilei Zhou, Renkun Tang, Xiaojing Li, Shiping Tian, Bingbing Li and Guozheng Qin

Highly recurrent CBS epimutations in gastric cancer CpG island methylator phenotypes and inflammation

CIMP (CpG island methylator phenotype) is an epigenetic molecular subtype, observed in multiple malignancies and associated with the epigenetic silencing of tumor suppressors. Currently, for most cancers inclu...

Authors: Nisha Padmanabhan, Huang Kie Kyon, Arnoud Boot, Kevin Lim, Supriya Srivastava, Shuwen Chen, Zhiyuan Wu, Hyung-Ok Lee, Vineeth T. Mukundan, Charlene Chan, Yarn Kit Chan, Ong Xuewen, Jason J. Pitt, Zul Fazreen Adam Isa, Manjie Xing, Ming Hui Lee…

Impacts of allopolyploidization and structural variation on intraspecific diversification in Brassica rapa

Despite the prevalence and recurrence of polyploidization in the speciation of flowering plants, its impacts on crop intraspecific genome diversification are largely unknown. Brassica rapa is a mesopolyploid spec...

Authors: Xu Cai, Lichun Chang, Tingting Zhang, Haixu Chen, Lei Zhang, Runmao Lin, Jianli Liang, Jian Wu, Michael Freeling and Xiaowu Wang

diffBUM-HMM: a robust statistical modeling approach for detecting RNA flexibility changes in high-throughput structure probing data

Advancing RNA structural probing techniques with next-generation sequencing has generated demands for complementary computational tools to robustly extract RNA structural information amidst sampling noise and ...

Authors: Paolo Marangio, Ka Ying Toby Law, Guido Sanguinetti and Sander Granneman

GRiNCH: simultaneous smoothing and detection of topological units of genome organization from sparse chromatin contact count matrices with matrix factorization

High-throughput chromosome conformation capture assays, such as Hi-C, have shown that the genome is organized into organizational units such as topologically associating domains (TADs), which can impact gene r...

Authors: Da-Inn Lee and Sushmita Roy

scDesign2: a transparent simulator that generates high-fidelity single-cell gene expression count data with gene correlations captured

A pressing challenge in single-cell transcriptomics is to benchmark experimental protocols and computational methods. A solution is to use computational simulators, but existing simulators cannot simultaneousl...

Authors: Tianyi Sun, Dongyuan Song, Wei Vivian Li and Jingyi Jessica Li

Samplot: a platform for structural variant visual validation and automated filtering

Visual validation is an important step to minimize false-positive predictions from structural variant (SV) detection. We present Samplot, a tool for creating images that display the read depth and sequence ali...

Authors: Jonathan R. Belyeu, Murad Chowdhury, Joseph Brown, Brent S. Pedersen, Michael J. Cormier, Aaron R. Quinlan and Ryan M. Layer

Genome-wide DNA mutations in Arabidopsis plants after multigenerational exposure to high temperatures

Elevated temperatures can cause physiological, biochemical, and molecular responses in plants that can greatly affect their growth and development. Mutations are the most fundamental force driving biological e...

Authors: Zhaogeng Lu, Jiawen Cui, Li Wang, Nianjun Teng, Shoudong Zhang, Hon-Ming Lam, Yingfang Zhu, Siwei Xiao, Wensi Ke, Jinxing Lin, Chenwu Xu and Biao Jin

Characterization of structural variation in Tibetans reveals new evidence of high-altitude adaptation and introgression

Structural variation (SV) acts as an essential mutational force shaping the evolution and function of the human genome. However, few studies have examined the role of SVs in high-altitude adaptation and little...

Authors: Cheng Quan, Yuanfeng Li, Xinyi Liu, Yahui Wang, Jie Ping, Yiming Lu and Gangqiao Zhou

MichiGAN: sampling from disentangled representations of single-cell data using generative adversarial networks

Deep generative models such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate and manipulate high-dimensional images. We systematically assess the complementary strengths a...

Authors: Hengshi Yu and Joshua D. Welch

treeclimbR pinpoints the data-dependent resolution of hierarchical hypotheses

treeclimbR is for analyzing hierarchical trees of entities, such as phylogenies or cell types, at different resolutions. It proposes multiple candidates that capture the latent signal and pinpoints branches or le...

Authors: Ruizhu Huang, Charlotte Soneson, Pierre-Luc Germain, Thomas S.B. Schmidt, Christian Von Mering and Mark D. Robinson

A systematic dissection of the epigenomic heterogeneity of lung adenocarcinoma reveals two different subclasses with distinct prognosis and core regulatory networks

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is a highly malignant and heterogeneous tumor that involves various oncogenic genetic alterations. Epigenetic processes play important roles in lung cancer development. However, the ...

Authors: Chongze Yuan, Haojie Chen, Shiqi Tu, Hsin-Yi Huang, Yunjian Pan, Xiuqi Gui, Muyu Kuang, Xuxia Shen, Qiang Zheng, Yang Zhang, Chao Cheng, Hui Hong, Xiaoting Tao, Yizhou Peng, Xingxin Yao, Feilong Meng…

PEPPRO: quality control and processing of nascent RNA profiling data

Nascent RNA profiling is growing in popularity; however, there is no standard analysis pipeline to uniformly process the data and assess quality. Here, we introduce PEPPRO, a comprehensive, scalable workflow f...

Authors: Jason P. Smith, Arun B. Dutta, Kizhakke Mattada Sathyan, Michael J. Guertin and Nathan C. Sheffield

Multi-omic profiling of lung and liver tumor microenvironments of metastatic pancreatic cancer reveals site-specific immune regulatory pathways

The majority of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC) are diagnosed at the metastatic stage, and standard therapies have limited activity with a dismal 5-year survival rate of only 8%. The liver and lung ar...

Authors: Won Jin Ho, Rossin Erbe, Ludmila Danilova, Zaw Phyo, Emma Bigelow, Genevieve Stein-O’Brien, Dwayne L. Thomas II, Soren Charmsaz, Nicole Gross, Skylar Woolman, Kayla Cruz, Rebecca M. Munday, Neeha Zaidi, Todd D. Armstrong, Marcelo B. Sztein, Mark Yarchoan…

Novel predictions arise from contradictions

Authors: Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher

On the optimistic performance evaluation of newly introduced bioinformatic methods

Most research articles presenting new data analysis methods claim that “the new method performs better than existing methods,” but the veracity of such statements is questionable. Our manuscript discusses and ...

Authors: Stefan Buchka, Alexander Hapfelmeier, Paul P. Gardner, Rory Wilson and Anne-Laure Boulesteix

Cellular and transcriptomic analyses reveal two-staged chloroplast biogenesis underpinning photosynthesis build-up in the wheat leaf

The developmental gradient in monocot leaves has been exploited to uncover leaf developmental gene expression programs and chloroplast biogenesis processes. However, the relationship between the two is barely ...

Authors: Naresh Loudya, Priyanka Mishra, Kotaro Takahagi, Yukiko Uehara-Yamaguchi, Komaki Inoue, Laszlo Bogre, Keiichi Mochida and Enrique López-Juez

Super-resolution visualization and modeling of human chromosomal regions reveals cohesin-dependent loop structures

The 3D organization of the chromatin fiber in cell nuclei plays a key role in the regulation of gene expression. Genome-wide techniques to score DNA-DNA contacts, such as Hi-C, reveal the partitioning of chrom...

Authors: Xian Hao, Jyotsana J. Parmar, Benoît Lelandais, Andrey Aristov, Wei Ouyang, Christian Weber and Christophe Zimmer

Functional mapping of androgen receptor enhancer activity

Androgen receptor (AR) is critical to the initiation, growth, and progression of prostate cancer. Once activated, the AR binds to cis-regulatory enhancer elements on DNA that drive gene expression. Yet, there ...

Authors: Chia-Chi Flora Huang, Shreyas Lingadahalli, Tunc Morova, Dogancan Ozturan, Eugene Hu, Ivan Pak Lok Yu, Simon Linder, Marlous Hoogstraat, Suzan Stelloo, Funda Sar, Henk van der Poel, Umut Berkay Altintas, Mohammadali Saffarzadeh, Stephane Le Bihan, Brian McConeghy, Bengul Gokbayrak…

The genetic mechanism of heterosis utilization in maize improvement

In maize hybrid breeding, complementary pools of parental lines with reshuffled genetic variants are established for superior hybrid performance. To comprehensively decipher the genetics of heterosis, we prese...

Authors: Yingjie Xiao, Shuqin Jiang, Qian Cheng, Xiaqing Wang, Jun Yan, Ruyang Zhang, Feng Qiao, Chuang Ma, Jingyun Luo, Wenqiang Li, Haijun Liu, Wenyu Yang, Wenhao Song, Yijiang Meng, Marilyn L. Warburton, Jiuran Zhao…

Endogenous retroviruses in the origins and treatment of cancer

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are emerging as promising therapeutic targets in cancer. As remnants of ancient retroviral infections, ERV-derived regulatory elements coordinate expression from gene networks, i...

Authors: Natasha Jansz and Geoffrey J. Faulkner

Long-read cDNA sequencing identifies functional pseudogenes in the human transcriptome

Pseudogenes are gene copies presumed to mainly be functionless relics of evolution due to acquired deleterious mutations or transcriptional silencing. Using deep full-length PacBio cDNA sequencing of normal hu...

Authors: Robin-Lee Troskie, Yohaann Jafrani, Tim R. Mercer, Adam D. Ewing, Geoffrey J. Faulkner and Seth W. Cheetham

SpatialDWLS: accurate deconvolution of spatial transcriptomic data

Recent development of spatial transcriptomic technologies has made it possible to characterize cellular heterogeneity with spatial information. However, the technology often does not have sufficient resolution...

Authors: Rui Dong and Guo-Cheng Yuan

HDAC4 degradation during senescence unleashes an epigenetic program driven by AP-1/p300 at selected enhancers and super-enhancers

Cellular senescence is a permanent state of replicative arrest defined by a specific pattern of gene expression. The epigenome in senescent cells is sculptured in order to sustain the new transcriptional requi...

Authors: Eros Di Giorgio, Harikrishnareddy Paluvai, Emiliano Dalla, Liliana Ranzino, Alessandra Renzini, Viviana Moresi, Martina Minisini, Raffaella Picco and Claudio Brancolini

scSNV: accurate dscRNA-seq SNV co-expression analysis using duplicate tag collapsing

Identifying single nucleotide variants has become common practice for droplet-based single-cell RNA-seq experiments; however, presently, a pipeline does not exist to maximize variant calling accuracy. Furtherm...

Authors: Gavin W. Wilson, Mathieu Derouet, Gail E. Darling and Jonathan C. Yeung

Promoter G-quadruplex folding precedes transcription and is controlled by chromatin

Four-stranded G-quadruplexes (G4s) are DNA secondary structures in the human genome that are primarily found in active promoters associated with elevated transcription. Here, we explore the relationship betwee...

Authors: Jiazhen Shen, Dhaval Varshney, Angela Simeone, Xiaoyun Zhang, Santosh Adhikari, David Tannahill and Shankar Balasubramanian

Transgenerational effect of mutants in the RNA-directed DNA methylation pathway on the triploid block in Arabidopsis

Hybridization of plants that differ in number of chromosome sets (ploidy) frequently causes endosperm failure and seed arrest, a phenomenon referred to as triploid block. In Arabidopsis, loss of function of NRPD1

Authors: Zhenxing Wang, Nicolas Butel, Juan Santos-González, Lauriane Simon, Cecilia Wärdig and Claudia Köhler

Embryo CHH hypermethylation is mediated by RdDM and is autonomously directed in Brassica rapa

RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) initiates cytosine methylation in all contexts and maintains asymmetric CHH methylation. Mature plant embryos show one of the highest levels of CHH methylation, and it has b...

Authors: Tania Chakraborty, Timmy Kendall, Jeffrey W. Grover and Rebecca A. Mosher

Determination of complete chromosomal haplotypes by bulk DNA sequencing

Haplotype phase represents the collective genetic variation between homologous chromosomes and is an essential feature of non-haploid genomes. Here we describe a computational strategy to reliably determine co...

Authors: Richard W. Tourdot, Gregory J. Brunette, Ricardo A. Pinto and Cheng-Zhong Zhang

Genetic and environmental modulation of transposition shapes the evolutionary potential of Arabidopsis thaliana

How species can adapt to abrupt environmental changes, particularly in the absence of standing genetic variation, is poorly understood and a pressing question in the face of ongoing climate change. Here we lev...

Authors: Pierre Baduel, Basile Leduque, Amandine Ignace, Isabelle Gy, José Gil Jr, Olivier Loudet, Vincent Colot and Leandro Quadrana