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Ming-Rong Wang, Benjamin Berman and colleagues perform whole-exome sequencing and global methylation profiling on different tumor regions of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. They find evidence for intratumoral heterogeneity and identify late driver mutations targeting oncogenes and early driver mutations occurring in tumor-suppressor genes.
Paul Brennan and colleagues perform genome-wide association analysis for oral cavity and pharyngeal cancer in trans-ancestry populations. They find seven new loci across different cancer subtypes, including a protective association in the HLA region that has a stronger effect in patients with human papillomavirus–positive cancers.
Amit Majithia and colleagues employ a pooled assay in human macrophages to assess the functional effects of all possible missense variants in PPARG. Their study shows the value of saturation mutagenesis and prospective experimental characterization to support diagnostic interpretation of newly discovered missense variants in disease-related genes.
Richard Spritz and colleagues present a genome-wide association study of autoimmune vitiligo in 4,680 cases and 39,586 controls and report 23 new risk loci. Their results highlight specific pathways, including immune response, apoptosis and melanocyte function, that may be important in the pathobiology of autoimmune vitiligo.
Jung Kyoon Choi and colleagues identify sets of regulatory mutations in breast and lung cancer samples that converge on the same gene target across individual samples. They use features of these mutation sets to develop a method for predicting functionally recurrent regulatory mutations that may function as drivers in cancer.
Gelareh Zadeh, Kenneth Aldape and colleagues present an integrative genomic analysis of schwannomas. In addition to finding recurrent mutations in ARID1A, ARID1B and DDR1, they identify a recurrent SH3PXD2A-HTRA1 fusion that confers increased proliferation, invasion and in vivo transformation, and is associated with sensitivity to MEK inhibition.
Paola Bronson, Lennart Hammarström and colleagues report a genome-wide association study meta-analysis of selective IgA immunodeficiency in Europeans. They identify four new loci and a rare variant of a previously associated gene, IFIH1.
Andre Franke and colleagues perform a genome-wide association study for the gut microbiome, examining the influence of host genetics on overall microbial variation and individual taxa. They find significant associations at the VDR (vitamin D receptor) locus and observe correlations between microbiota and metabolites of VDR, including bile acids.
Jamel Chelly and colleagues identify mutations in the E3 ubiquitin ligase gene NEDD4L that cause a syndrome of periventricular nodular heterotopia associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, cleft palate and toe syndactyly. The authors show that the mutations affect the mTORC1 and AKT pathways and cause defects in mouse brain development.
Alexandra Zhernakova, Jingyuan Fu, Cisca Wijmenga and colleagues perform genome-wide association analysis for microbiome characteristics in a cohort with fully sequenced metagenomes and detailed diet and lifestyle data. They find loci significantly associated with different microbial species, pathways and genes and examine specific gene–diet interactions.
Po-Ru Loh, Alkes Price and colleagues present Eagle2, a reference-based phasing algorithm that allows for highly accurate and efficient phasing of genotypes across a broad range of cohort sizes. They demonstrate an approximately 10% improvement in accuracy and 20% improvement in speed compared to a competing method, SHAPEIT2.
Kenneth Croitoru, Andrew Paterson and colleagues perform genome-wide association analysis for gut microbiome composition. They identify 58 SNPs significantly associated with relative abundance of 33 taxa and replicate 4 of the associations in an independent cohort, providing further evidence that host genetics can influence the gut microbiota.
A common ancestor of the modern codfish acquired a set of mutations that eliminated a major arm of the adaptive immune system—the MHC II pathway of antigen presentation to CD4+ T cells. Subsequent to this event, there was a radiation of these fish in which the number and diversity of MHC I genes increased in species-specific ways.
A new study demonstrates that genomic sequencing coverage of plasma DNA fragments around transcription start sites reflects the expression levels of genes in corresponding tumors. This approach may enable noninvasive monitoring of treatment-induced changes in gene expression for patients with cancer.
A prevalent but trivial systematic error in supplementary tables provides a reminder that genomic and other large data files are most usable when they are readable by both humans and machines. It is best practice to deposit large files in public databases and to provide accession links for peer review rather than to delay data deposition until publication.
A new study based on single-nucleus sequencing reports that triple-negative breast cancers acquire copy number aberrations in short punctuated bursts in the earliest stages of tumor evolution, rather than continuously and gradually, challenging prevailing models of tumor evolution.