Science & Publishing

The October issue of GENETICS is out now! Check out the Highlights below or the full Table of Contents here. ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS A coalescent model for a sweep of a unique standing variant, pp. 707-725 Jeremy J. Berg and Graham Coop Loci that have recently been under natural selection are commonly identified through the use of genetic polymorphism data.…

This week, GENETICS and protocols.io are launching a partnership to improve the materials & methods sections of published papers. The journal GENETICS, published by the Genetics Society of America, is encouraging authors to publish detailed methods on protocols.io, in parallel with their article’s publication in GENETICS. Also, as part of the partnership, several accepted manuscripts…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair: Tomas Lindahl (Francis Crick Institute, UK) for discovery of base excision repair, which counteracts damage to DNA bases; Paul Modrich (HHMI and Duke University) for demonstrating mismatch repair, which occurs during DNA replication; and Aziz Sancar (University of North Carolina…

  Genetic analysis of an island population of mice reveals that 19 quantitative trait loci are responsible for their impressive size. Island populations of animals, isolated from their mainland relatives, have given us insight into evolution from the very birth of the field. In fact, studying finches on the Galápagos Islands helped Charles Darwin establish…

Check out the October issue of G3! Meeting Report Meeting Report on the Challenge of Inference from Genome to Phenome Bevan Emma Huang, Antonio Reverter, Ian Purvis, and Scott Chapman G3 October 2015 5:1945-1947; doi:10.1534/g3.115.019182 Full Text | Full Text (PDF) | Supporting Information Investigations Endogenous Small RNA Mediates Meiotic Silencing of a Novel DNA Transposon…

The Conversations in Genetics project, led by former GSA President Rochelle Easton Esposito, has a new in-depth interview of Mary-Claire King by Evan Eichler. As described in the video “Talking with Mary-Claire King,” Dr. King is American Cancer Society Professor of Genome Sciences and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her innovative studies of human genetics…

While the science behind the synthetic yeast genome project is cutting edge, the ethical questions surrounding it aren’t new. The scientists of the Sc2.0 project have a goal that sounds akin to science fiction – they’re working toward building a completely synthetic yeast genome. This new strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, affectionately named Sc2.0, will be…

Neurons actively shuttle membranous cargos called “organelles” along microtubule tracks using motor proteins that are essentially molecular engines. The motor proteins literally walk along the tracks, shouldering their cargos. Research published in two back-to-back papers in the September issue of GENETICS reveals a neuron-specific transmission system for regulating one of the motors. The microtubule tracks are…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking applications from exceptional candidates to be the next director of NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM). NLM is the world’s largest biomedical library that maintains and makes available a broad range of print and electronic resources. Current NLM databases include GenBank, PubMed, and ClinicalTrials.gov. Following from the…

Over the last decade, advances in next-generation sequencing technology have given rise to many findings increasing our understanding of human disease and natural variation within species. Sequencing of the exome, the small fraction of the genome encompassing all exons of protein coding genes, has gained popularity as an inexpensive alternative to sequencing the entire genome.…

Today’s guest post was contributed by Maria Costanzo of Stanford University. She has been a biocurator since before the term was coined and has contributed to genome database projects for a variety of fungi. The views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter: @mariaccostanzo.   When someone asks what I do for a living,…