News & Comment

Neumann, Bertozzi et al. describe a novel epigenetic editor termed CHARM and report its use to silence prion protein expression in the brain.

Two studies in Nature reveal the mechanistic and structural properties of a family of mobile genetic elements that can be reprogrammed to engineer genome modifications.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Andrey Tvardovskiy and Saulius Lukauskas introduce the web resource MARCS, which offers a set of visualization tools to explore chromatin regulatory circuits from either a protein- or modification-centred perspective.

A study in Nature charts the history of malaria in the Americas from ancient Plasmodium parasite genomes.

Petrazzini et al. leverage exome sequencing data and a novel machine learning-based marker to identify rare and ultra-rare coding variants associated with coronary artery disease.

Tandem repeats are ubiquitous in the human genome and hold crucial information about our genetic diversity, evolution and susceptibility to disease.

Thirty years after the discovery and cloning of the cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1, William Foulkes reflects on this defining moment for breast and ovarian cancer genetics and how far the field has come.

In this Journal Club article, Laura Ross discusses several seminal papers that describe the discovery of germline-specific chromosomes and paternal genome elimination, striking examples of non-Mendelian genetics.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Francisco Lorenzo-Martín and Matthias Lutolf present mini-colons as a new ex vivo cancer model that incorporates microfabrication, tissue engineering and optogenetics.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Saori Sakaue describes SCENT, a tool to generate cell-type-specific enhancer–gene maps using single-cell multi-omics data, which can help identify disease-causal, non-coding variants and genes from GWAS-defined loci.

In this Journal Club, Jessica Tollkuhn discusses how a paper describing genome-wide application of chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP)-on-chip inspired her own research into oestrogen-based gene regulation in the brain.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Vipul Singhal and Nigel Chou describe BANKSY, a machine learning tool that harnesses gene expression gradients from the neighbourhood of a cell for cell typing and domain segmentation.

A study in Nature finds that transient perturbation of the Polycomb complex and target epigenome can irreversibly induce cancer cell fates.

Mustafa Mir reflects on a 1976 paper by McKnight and Miller, in which they developed a technique to directly visualize gene regulatory dynamics.

Logsdon et al. report the second complete sequence of all centromeres from a single human genome, enabling comparative analyses of the variation in tandemly repeating α-satellite DNA.

In this Comment, Lamkin and Gymrek discuss recent results that suggest that the systematic incorporation of tandem repeats into complex trait analyses will yield a rich source of causal variants and new biological insights.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Samuel Gould explains how prime editing sensors can improve experimental efficiency and can be designed using a computational tool he created and named PEGG.

Renée Beekman discusses the possibilities for research into transient enhancers by highlighting a recent paper by Vermunt et al. that identifies how they can modulate gene silencing dynamics.

In this Journal Club, Kirstyn Brunker highlights two papers published in 2017 that showcase how the emergence of portable sequencing capabilities improved the real-time response to infectious disease outbreaks on a global scale.

In this Journal Club article, Olivia Rissland describes how a 1987 paper by Don Cleveland and colleagues provided insight into co-translational gene regulation of tubulin.