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Genomics week in brief: Week ending 14th November

Your weekly summary of recent genomics news and research!

Top stories from the past week

  • Stanford researchers have developed a DNA approach to forecast ecosystem changes, for example measuring the vulnerability of specific species. (Hadly et al, 2020)
  • A recent study has found that young adults treated for acute myeloid leukaemia have a high risk of developing several long-term health complications, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. (Keegan et al, 2020)
  • A team of researchers have explored the role of miRNA overexpression, including miR-155 and Let-7c, in individuals with Down Syndrome and its associations with biochemical indicators of lipid metabolism. (Angulo-Rojo et al, 2020)
  • Researchers used scATAC-seq to assess the landscape of open chromatin regions of peripheral blood mononuclear cells in patients with ankylosing spondylitis. (Dai et al, 2020)
  • Findings have shown that antibiotic-induced DNA damage results in a controlled loss of pH homeostasis and genome instability. (Booth et al, 2020)
  • A newly developed technology is able to precisely and rapidly degrade targeted proteins in yeast, mammalian cells and mice. This technology could help study how knocking down specific proteins can influence physical manifestations. (Kanemaki et al, 2020)
  • An epigenome-wide association study has identified methylation sites at birth associated with ADHD symptoms. (Tiemeier et al, 2020)
  • A multi-institutional team have found that liposomes can be triggered by light to release their contents in a specific site of the body. This could help to deliver CRISPR gene therapy. (Deng et al,2020)
  • Lewy bodies are pathological protein inclusions present in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease. These inclusions mainly consist of α-synuclein. Researchers have now found evidence to support the pathogenic role of AIMP2 in the aggregation of α-synuclein in mice. (Ham et al, 2020)
  • The Zoonomia Project is investigating the genomics of shared and specialised traits in eutherian mammals. The team has provided genome assemblies for 131 species, of which all but 9 were previously uncharacterised. (Zoonomia Consortium, 2020)
  • Researchers have provided a comprehensive catalogue of Earth’s microbiomes. This includes 52,515 metagenome-assembled genomes representing 12,556 novel candidate species-level operational taxonomic units spanning 135 phyla. (Nayfach et al, 2020)
  • Yale researchers have discovered a protein that helps protect hosts from infection with the tick-borne spirochete that causes Lyme Disease. (Gupta et al, 2020)

In other news

  • Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer Research have launched a new unit – The Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Unit (CEPRU) – which will focus on cancer prevention research and strategies. (Myers, 2020)
  • Twist Bioscience, Illumina and Western Digital announced the formation of an alliance with Microsoft to advance the field of DNA data storage. (Twist Bioscience, 2020)

Events

  • Join us this week for the third webinar in our ‘Single Cell ONLINE’ webinar series. In this webinar, we will be exploring the use of single cell analysis for drug discovery with interesting presentations from global pharma companies. Register now.

Reports


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Genomics / Week in brief