Science & Publishing

Written by members of the GSA Early Career Scientist Communication and Outreach Subcommittee: Angel F. Cisneros Caballero, Université Laval; Adelita Mendoza, PhD, Washington University; Narjes Alfuraiji, University of Manchester; Anna Bajur, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics During the current global pandemic, public attention is increasingly falling on the process of drug…

From April 22–25, TAGC 2020 Online brought scientists from multiple research communities together to share their research and stay connected. Videos from select TAGC cross-community sessions are now available on YouTube. Those who weren’t able to participate in the conference in April, check out the recordings below! Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Speakers: Scott Barolo, University of Michigan…

Congratulations to the winners of the Editors’ Choice Awards for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2019! The journal’s Editorial Board considered a diverse range of articles, finding many papers worthy of recognition. After much deliberation, they settled on one exceptional article for each of the three award categories: molecular genetics, population and evolutionary genetics, and quantitative genetics.…

Guest post by C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Assistant Professor at Brown University. John Maynard Smith, born in London on January 6, 1920, was one of the great iconoclasts of the post neo-Darwinian synthesis era, a cult figure whose life was defined by notable contributions across a wide breadth of subfields [1]. He not only authored numerous…

Last Friday, I was made aware of an executive order being finalized by the White House that reportedly mandates immediate public access to journal articles describing federally funded research. If this policy were enacted as is, many scientific societies would have to severely cut their services to the scientific community, such as peer-reviewed journals, travel…

Guest authors C. Brandon Ogbunugafor and Rafael F. Guerrero demystify higher order epistasis through a short story about the perfect brew. Epistasis is the flavor of the month Epistasis is one of the most popular and provocative topics in modern genetics. It has many different definitions, but one especially useful one is that epistasis is…

Improved duplex sequencing identifies spontaneous mutations in bacteria without long-term culturing. Spontaneous mutations are the driving force of evolution, yet, our ability to detect and study them can be limited to mutations that accumulate clonally. Sequencing technology often cannot identify very rare variants or discriminate between bona fide mutations and errors introduced during sample preparation.…

Apoptotic pathway promotes asymmetric cell division during C. elegans development. Cell division doesn’t always produce identical daughter cells; often, the demands of multicellular development require cells to split into two quite different daughters with quite different fates. These “asymmetric” divisions are needed so that cells can differentiate and specialize, and some cells are even programmed…

A better way to make endogenous reporters in C. elegans CRISPR systems for gene editing have revolutionized biological research, but the method still has limitations. While it is usually straightforward to delete parts of the genome using CRISPR, large insertions can be a challenge. This has been the case even for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans,…

The GSA Journals, GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, are proud to present our annual Spotlight booklets for research published in 2018. Each Spotlight is a showcase of the excellent research and scholarship published over the course of the year, along with a selection of striking images submitted by our authors. Browse the 2018 GENETICS Spotlight.   Browse the 2018 G3 Spotlight.

Guest post by Kathryn “Kaylee” Mueller, Phase Genomics. Plasmodium parasites—the microbes that cause malaria—are right at home in the tropics. After all, tropical regions harbor the two animals that the malaria parasites need to complete their complex lifecycle: female Anopheles mosquitoes and human beings. And in 2017 alone, Plasmodiumracked up 219 million cases of malaria,…