Articles

Analysis of Vibrio cholerae genomes identifies new type VI secretion system gene clusters

Like many bacteria, Vibrio cholerae deploys a harpoon-like type VI secretion system (T6SS) to compete against other microbes in environmental and host settings. The T6SS punctures adjacent cells and delivers toxi...

Authors: Cristian V. Crisan, Aroon T. Chande, Kenneth Williams, Vishnu Raghuram, Lavanya Rishishwar, Gabi Steinbach, Samit S. Watve, Peter Yunker, I. King Jordan and Brian K. Hammer

Quantitative principles of cis-translational control by general mRNA sequence features in eukaryotes

General translational cis-elements are present in the mRNAs of all genes and affect the recruitment, assembly, and progress of preinitiation complexes and the ribosome under many physiological states. These eleme...

Authors: Jingyi Jessica Li, Guo-Liang Chew and Mark Douglas Biggin

Correction to: Ancient polymorphisms contribute to genome-wide variation by long-term balancing selection and divergent sorting in Boechera stricta

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported that the Availability of data and materials section required updating. The updated text reads as follows:

Authors: Baosheng Wang, Julius P. Mojica, Nadeesha Perera, Cheng-Ruei Lee, John T. Lovell, Aditi Sharma, Catherine Adam, Anna Lipzen, Kerrie Barry, Daniel S. Rokhsar, Jeremy Schmutz and Thomas Mitchell-Olds

Correction to: Identification of novel Y chromosome encoded transcripts by testis transcriptome analysis of mice with deletions of the Y chromosome long arm

Following publication of the original article [1], the following error was reported: The actin control panel in Fig. 3 of this paper is reproduced from Fig. 7 of Touré et al, 2004 [2] by kind permission of the...

Authors: Aminata Touré, Emily J. Clemente, Peter J. I. Ellis, Shantha K. Mahadevaiah, Obah A. Ojarikre, Penny A. F. Ball, Louise Reynard, Kate L. Loveland, Paul S. Burgoyne and Nabeel A. Affara

Is it time to change the reference genome?

The use of the human reference genome has shaped methods and data across modern genomics. This has offered many benefits while creating a few constraints. In the following opinion, we outline the history, prop...

Authors: Sara Ballouz, Alexander Dobin and Jesse A. Gillis

A systematic assessment of current genome-scale metabolic reconstruction tools

Several genome-scale metabolic reconstruction software platforms have been developed and are being continuously updated. These tools have been widely applied to reconstruct metabolic models for hundreds of mic...

Authors: Sebastián N. Mendoza, Brett G. Olivier, Douwe Molenaar and Bas Teusink

Linker histones are fine-scale chromatin architects modulating developmental decisions in Arabidopsis

Chromatin provides a tunable platform for gene expression control. Besides the well-studied core nucleosome, H1 linker histones are abundant chromatin components with intrinsic potential to influence chromatin...

Authors: Kinga Rutowicz, Maciej Lirski, Benoît Mermaz, Gianluca Teano, Jasmin Schubert, Imen Mestiri, Magdalena A. Kroteń, Tohnyui Ndinyanka Fabrice, Simon Fritz, Stefan Grob, Christoph Ringli, Lusik Cherkezyan, Fredy Barneche, Andrzej Jerzmanowski and Célia Baroux

RNA methylomes reveal the m⁶A-mediated regulation of DNA demethylase gene SlDML2 in tomato fruit ripening

Methylation of nucleotides, notably in the forms of 5-methylcytosine (5mC) in DNA and N⁶-methyladenosine (m⁶A) in mRNA, carries important information for gene regulation. 5mC has been elucidated to participate in...

Authors: Leilei Zhou, Shiping Tian and Guozheng Qin

BART-Seq: cost-effective massively parallelized targeted sequencing for genomics, transcriptomics, and single-cell analysis

We describe a highly sensitive, quantitative, and inexpensive technique for targeted sequencing of transcript cohorts or genomic regions from thousands of bulk samples or single cells in parallel. Multiplexing...

Authors: Fatma Uzbas, Florian Opperer, Can Sönmezer, Dmitry Shaposhnikov, Steffen Sass, Christian Krendl, Philipp Angerer, Fabian J. Theis, Nikola S. Mueller and Micha Drukker

MicroPro: using metagenomic unmapped reads to provide insights into human microbiota and disease associations

We develop a metagenomic data analysis pipeline, MicroPro, that takes into account all reads from known and unknown microbial organisms and associates viruses with complex diseases. We utilize MicroPro to anal...

Authors: Zifan Zhu, Jie Ren, Sonia Michail and Fengzhu Sun

Assignment of virus and antimicrobial resistance genes to microbial hosts in a complex microbial community by combined long-read assembly and proximity ligation

We describe a method that adds long-read sequencing to a mix of technologies used to assemble a highly complex cattle rumen microbial community, and provide a comparison to short read-based methods. Long-read ...

Authors: Derek M. Bickhart, Mick Watson, Sergey Koren, Kevin Panke-Buisse, Laura M. Cersosimo, Maximilian O. Press, Curtis P. Van Tassell, Jo Ann S. Van Kessel, Bradd J. Haley, Seon Woo Kim, Cheryl Heiner, Garret Suen, Kiranmayee Bakshy, Ivan Liachko, Shawn T. Sullivan, Phillip R. Myer…

A statistical and biological response to an informatics appraisal of healthy aging gene signatures

Jacob and Speed did not identify even a single example of a ‘150-gene-set’ that was statistically significant at classifying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) samples, or age in independent studies. We attempt to clari...

Authors: James A. Timmons, Iain J. Gallagher, Sanjana Sood, Bethan Phillips, Hannah Crossland, Robert Howard, William E. Kraus and Philip J. Atherton

Alternative splicing is required for stage differentiation in malaria parasites

In multicellular organisms, alternative splicing is central to tissue differentiation and identity. Unicellular protists lack multicellular tissue but differentiate into variable cell types during their life c...

Authors: Lee M. Yeoh, Christopher D. Goodman, Vanessa Mollard, Emma McHugh, V. Vern Lee, Angelika Sturm, Anton Cozijnsen, Geoffrey I. McFadden and Stuart A. Ralph

Population dynamics of the human gut microbiome: change is the only constant

Characterization of the temporal dynamics of the human gut microbiome is crucial for understanding its role in modulating host health. Two recent studies explored the genetic diversity of gut microbes and unra...

Authors: Sambhawa Priya and Ran Blekhman

HUPAN: a pan-genome analysis pipeline for human genomes

The human reference genome is still incomplete, especially for those population-specific or individual-specific regions, which may have important functions. Here, we developed a HUman Pan-genome ANalysis (HUPA...

Authors: Zhongqu Duan, Yuyang Qiao, Jinyuan Lu, Huimin Lu, Wenmin Zhang, Fazhe Yan, Chen Sun, Zhiqiang Hu, Zhen Zhang, Guichao Li, Hongzhuan Chen, Zhen Xiang, Zhenggang Zhu, Hongyu Zhao, Yingyan Yu and Chaochun Wei

Spatial chromatin architecture alteration by structural variations in human genomes at the population scale

The number of reported examples of chromatin architecture alterations involved in the regulation of gene transcription and in disease is increasing. However, no genome-wide testing has been performed to assess...

Authors: Michal Sadowski, Agnieszka Kraft, Przemyslaw Szalaj, Michal Wlasnowolski, Zhonghui Tang, Yijun Ruan and Dariusz Plewczynski

Challenges in funding and developing genomic software: roots and remedies

The computer software used for genomic analysis has become a crucial component of the infrastructure for life sciences. However, genomic software is still typically developed in an ad hoc manner, with inadequa...

Authors: Adam Siepel

Modulating chromatin accessibility by transactivation and targeting proximal dsgRNAs enhances Cas9 editing efficiency in vivo

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is unable to edit all targetable genomic sites with full efficiency in vivo. We show that Cas9-mediated editing is more efficient in open chromatin regions than in closed chromatin regio...

Authors: Guanwen Liu, Kangquan Yin, Qianwei Zhang, Caixia Gao and Jin-Long Qiu

Benchmarking of alignment-free sequence comparison methods

Alignment-free (AF) sequence comparison is attracting persistent interest driven by data-intensive applications. Hence, many AF procedures have been proposed in recent years, but a lack of a clearly defined be...

Authors: Andrzej Zielezinski, Hani Z. Girgis, Guillaume Bernard, Chris-Andre Leimeister, Kujin Tang, Thomas Dencker, Anna Katharina Lau, Sophie Röhling, Jae Jin Choi, Michael S. Waterman, Matteo Comin, Sung-Hou Kim, Susana Vinga, Jonas S. Almeida, Cheong Xin Chan, Benjamin T. James…

RaPID: ultra-fast, powerful, and accurate detection of segments identical by descent (IBD) in biobank-scale cohorts

While genetic relatedness, usually manifested as segments identical by descent (IBD), is ubiquitous in modern large biobanks, current IBD detection methods are not efficient at such a scale. Here, we describe ...

Authors: Ardalan Naseri, Xiaoming Liu, Kecong Tang, Shaojie Zhang and Degui Zhi

CellSIUS provides sensitive and specific detection of rare cell populations from complex single-cell RNA-seq data

We develop CellSIUS (Cell Subtype Identification from Upregulated gene Sets) to fill a methodology gap for rare cell population identification for scRNA-seq data. CellSIUS outperforms existing algorithms for s...

Authors: Rebekka Wegmann, Marilisa Neri, Sven Schuierer, Bilada Bilican, Huyen Hartkopf, Florian Nigsch, Felipa Mapa, Annick Waldt, Rachel Cuttat, Max R. Salick, Joe Raymond, Ajamete Kaykas, Guglielmo Roma and Caroline Gubser Keller

Multilayered control of exon acquisition permits the emergence of novel forms of regulatory control

The long introns of mammals are pools of evolutionary potential due to the multiplicity of sequences that permit the acquisition of novel exons. However, the permissibility of genes to this type of acquisition...

Authors: Nesli Avgan, Juli I. Wang, Javier Fernandez-Chamorro and Robert J. Weatheritt

Stable enhancers are active in development, and fragile enhancers are associated with evolutionary adaptation

Despite continual progress in the identification and characterization of trait- and disease-associated variants that disrupt transcription factor (TF)-DNA binding, little is known about the distribution of TF ...

Authors: Shan Li, Evgeny Z. Kvon, Axel Visel, Len A. Pennacchio and Ivan Ovcharenko

The bread wheat epigenomic map reveals distinct chromatin architectural and evolutionary features of functional genetic elements

Bread wheat is an allohexaploid species with a 16-Gb genome that has large intergenic regions, which presents a big challenge for pinpointing regulatory elements and further revealing the transcriptional regul...

Authors: Zijuan Li, Meiyue Wang, Kande Lin, Yilin Xie, Jingyu Guo, Luhuan Ye, Yili Zhuang, Wan Teng, Xiaojuan Ran, Yiping Tong, Yongbiao Xue, Wenli Zhang and Yijing Zhang

CONFINED: distinguishing biological from technical sources of variation by leveraging multiple methylation datasets

Methylation datasets are affected by innumerable sources of variability, both biological (cell-type composition, genetics) and technical (batch effects). Here, we propose a reference-free method based on spars...

Authors: Mike Thompson, Zeyuan Johnson Chen, Elior Rahmani and Eran Halperin

GEMINI: a variational Bayesian approach to identify genetic interactions from combinatorial CRISPR screens

Systems for CRISPR-based combinatorial perturbation of two or more genes are emerging as powerful tools for uncovering genetic interactions. However, systematic identification of these relationships is complic...

Authors: Mahdi Zamanighomi, Sidharth S. Jain, Takahiro Ito, Debjani Pal, Timothy P. Daley and William R. Sellers

Frequent intra- and inter-species introgression shapes the landscape of genetic variation in bread wheat

Bread wheat is one of the most important and broadly studied crops. However, due to the complexity of its genome and incomplete genome collection of wild populations, the bread wheat genome landscape and domes...

Authors: Hong Cheng, Jing Liu, Jia Wen, Xiaojun Nie, Luohao Xu, Ningbo Chen, Zhongxing Li, Qilin Wang, Zhuqing Zheng, Ming Li, Licao Cui, Zihua Liu, Jianxin Bian, Zhonghua Wang, Shengbao Xu, Qin Yang…

Cell type-specific epigenetic links to schizophrenia risk in the brain

The importance of cell type-specific epigenetic variation of non-coding regions in neuropsychiatric disorders is increasingly appreciated, yet data from disease brains are conspicuously lacking. We generate ce...

Authors: Isabel Mendizabal, Stefano Berto, Noriyoshi Usui, Kazuya Toriumi, Paramita Chatterjee, Connor Douglas, Iksoo Huh, Hyeonsoo Jeong, Thomas Layman, Carol A. Tamminga, Todd M. Preuss, Genevieve Konopka and Soojin V. Yi

SMURF-seq: efficient copy number profiling on long-read sequencers

We present SMURF-seq, a protocol to efficiently sequence short DNA molecules on a long-read sequencer by randomly ligating them to form long molecules. Applying SMURF-seq using the Oxford Nanopore MinION yield...

Authors: Rishvanth K. Prabakar, Liya Xu, James Hicks and Andrew D. Smith

Integrative analysis of vascular endothelial cell genomic features identifies AIDA as a coronary artery disease candidate gene

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of loci associated with coronary artery disease (CAD) and blood pressure (BP) or hypertension. Many of these loci are not linked to traditional r...

Authors: Simon Lalonde, Valérie-Anne Codina-Fauteux, Sébastian Méric de Bellefon, Francis Leblanc, Mélissa Beaudoin, Marie-Michelle Simon, Rola Dali, Tony Kwan, Ken Sin Lo, Tomi Pastinen and Guillaume Lettre

Emerging technologies towards enhancing privacy in genomic data sharing

As the scale of genomic and health-related data explodes and our understanding of these data matures, the privacy of the individuals behind the data is increasingly at stake. Traditional approaches to protect ...

Authors: Bonnie Berger and Hyunghoon Cho

CDetection: CRISPR-Cas12b-based DNA detection with sub-attomolar sensitivity and single-base specificity

CRISPR-based nucleic acid detection methods are reported to facilitate rapid and sensitive DNA detection. However, precise DNA detection at the single-base resolution and its wide applications including high-f...

Authors: Fei Teng, Lu Guo, Tongtong Cui, Xin-Ge Wang, Kai Xu, Qingqin Gao, Qi Zhou and Wei Li

Emphasis on the deep or shallow parts of the tree provides a new characterization of phylogenetic distances

Phylogenetically informed distances are commonly used in the analysis of microbiome data, and analysts have many options to choose from. Although all phylogenetic distances share the goal of incorporating the ...

Authors: Julia Fukuyama

The long walk to African genomics

Authors: Serena Tucci and Joshua M. Akey

Performance of neural network basecalling tools for Oxford Nanopore sequencing

Basecalling, the computational process of translating raw electrical signal to nucleotide sequence, is of critical importance to the sequencing platforms produced by Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT). Here, w...

Authors: Ryan R. Wick, Louise M. Judd and Kathryn E. Holt

Trapping a somatic endogenous retrovirus into a germline piRNA cluster immunizes the germline against further invasion

For species survival, the germline must faithfully transmit genetic information to the progeny. Transposable elements (TEs) constitute a significant threat to genome stability due to their mobility. In the met...

Authors: Céline Duc, Marianne Yoth, Silke Jensen, Nolwenn Mouniée, Casey M. Bergman, Chantal Vaury and Emilie Brasset

Ancient polymorphisms contribute to genome-wide variation by long-term balancing selection and divergent sorting in Boechera stricta

Genomic variation is widespread, and both neutral and selective processes can generate similar patterns in the genome. These processes are not mutually exclusive, so it is difficult to infer the evolutionary m...

Authors: Baosheng Wang, Julius P. Mojica, Nadeesha Perera, Cheng-Ruei Lee, John T. Lovell, Aditi Sharma, Catherine Adam, Anna Lipzen, Kerrie Barry, Daniel S. Rokhsar, Jeremy Schmutz and Thomas Mitchell-Olds

Essential guidelines for computational method benchmarking

In computational biology and other sciences, researchers are frequently faced with a choice between several computational methods for performing data analyses. Benchmarking studies aim to rigorously compare th...

Authors: Lukas M. Weber, Wouter Saelens, Robrecht Cannoodt, Charlotte Soneson, Alexander Hapfelmeier, Paul P. Gardner, Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Yvan Saeys and Mark D. Robinson

Correction to: RNA G-quadruplexes at upstream open reading frames cause DHX36- and DHX9-dependent translation of human mRNAs

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported the following error in the name of the fourth author.

Authors: Pierre Murat, Giovanni Marsico, Barbara Herdy, Avazeh T. Ghanbarian, Guillem Portella and Shankar Balasubramanian

Cold stress induces enhanced chromatin accessibility and bivalent histone modifications H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 of active genes in potato

Cold stress can greatly affect plant growth and development. Plants have developed special systems to respond to and tolerate cold stress. While plant scientists have discovered numerous genes involved in resp...

Authors: Zixian Zeng, Wenli Zhang, Alexandre P. Marand, Bo Zhu, C. Robin Buell and Jiming Jiang

Correction to: VULCAN integrates ChIP-seq with patient-derived co-expression networks to identify GRHL2 as a key co-regulator of ERa at enhancers in breast cancer

Following publication of the original article [1], the authors reported that Figs. 4 and 5 had mistakenly been transposed. Please find the correct Figs. 4 and 5 below. The original article [1] has been corrected.

Authors: Andrew N. Holding, Federico M. Giorgi, Amanda Donnelly, Amy E. Cullen, Sankari Nagarajan, Luke A. Selth and Florian Markowetz

Current status and applications of genome-scale metabolic models

Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) computationally describe gene-protein-reaction associations for entire metabolic genes in an organism, and can be simulated to predict metabolic fluxes for various systems-...

Authors: Changdai Gu, Gi Bae Kim, Won Jun Kim, Hyun Uk Kim and Sang Yup Lee

Invasive DNA elements modify the nuclear architecture of their insertion site by KNOT-linked silencing in Arabidopsis thaliana

The three-dimensional (3D) organization of chromosomes is linked to epigenetic regulation and transcriptional activity. However, only few functional features of 3D chromatin architecture have been described to...

Authors: Stefan Grob and Ueli Grossniklaus

Codon usage optimization in pluripotent embryonic stem cells

The uneven use of synonymous codons in the transcriptome regulates the efficiency and fidelity of protein translation rates. Yet, the importance of this codon bias in regulating cell state-specific expression ...

Authors: Susanne Bornelöv, Tommaso Selmi, Sophia Flad, Sabine Dietmann and Michaela Frye

A practical guide to methods controlling false discoveries in computational biology

In high-throughput studies, hundreds to millions of hypotheses are typically tested. Statistical methods that control the false discovery rate (FDR) have emerged as popular and powerful tools for error rate co...

Authors: Keegan Korthauer, Patrick K. Kimes, Claire Duvallet, Alejandro Reyes, Ayshwarya Subramanian, Mingxiang Teng, Chinmay Shukla, Eric J. Alm and Stephanie C. Hicks

Single-cell transcriptomics unveils gene regulatory network plasticity

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) plays a pivotal role in our understanding of cellular heterogeneity. Current analytical workflows are driven by categorizing principles that consider cells as individual ...

Authors: Giovanni Iacono, Ramon Massoni-Badosa and Holger Heyn

Comprehensive evaluation of structural variation detection algorithms for whole genome sequencing

Structural variations (SVs) or copy number variations (CNVs) greatly impact the functions of the genes encoded in the genome and are responsible for diverse human diseases. Although a number of existing SV det...

Authors: Shunichi Kosugi, Yukihide Momozawa, Xiaoxi Liu, Chikashi Terao, Michiaki Kubo and Yoichiro Kamatani

Haplotype-aware diplotyping from noisy long reads

Current genotyping approaches for single-nucleotide variations rely on short, accurate reads from second-generation sequencing devices. Presently, third-generation sequencing platforms are rapidly becoming mor...

Authors: Jana Ebler, Marina Haukness, Trevor Pesout, Tobias Marschall and Benedict Paten

Collateral damage: benchmarking off-target effects in genome editing

This editorial discusses what levels of off-target effects can be tolerated in genome editing, in the context of various types of applications.

Authors: Dana Carroll

Bridging the gap between reference and real transcriptomes

Genetic, transcriptional, and post-transcriptional variations shape the transcriptome of individual cells, rendering establishing an exhaustive set of reference RNAs a complicated matter. Current reference tra...

Authors: Antonin Morillon and Daniel Gautheret