Articles in 2016

Timothy Chan and colleagues find that somatic mutations in SERPINB3 or SERPINB4 are associated with longer survival in patients with melanoma who received anti-CTLA4 immunotherapy. These findings may have implications for precision medicine efforts in cancer.

Nicole Soranzo, Alexander Reiner, Paul Auer and colleagues use whole-genome sequencing data to impute the genotypes of over 35,000 individuals and perform a genome-wide association study for 20 quantitative cardiometabolic and hematological traits. They find 17 new associations and apply fine-mapping analysis to resolve causal variants for a number of the loci.

Susan Gasser and colleagues find that methylation at histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9me) is required for repression of simple repeats and transposons in Caenorhabditis elegans. Loss of H3K9me in worms leads to extensive accumulation of insertions and deletions at repeat elements, which correlate with R-loop formation and increased sensitivity to replication stress.

Rickard Sandberg and colleagues use allele-sensitive single-cell RNA–seq on primary mouse fibroblasts and human T cells to study clonal and dynamic monoallelic expression patterns. They find that the majority of random monoallelic expression of autosomal genes occurs transiently within individual cells rather than being stably inherited within clonally related cells.

Howard Chang and colleagues identify a long noncoding RNA, DINO, that is transcribed upstream of CDKN1A and induced by p53 in response to DNA damage. They show that DINO binds to p53 protein and promotes its stabilization, producing a feedback loop that amplifies DNA damage signaling.

Laurent Fasano and colleagues identify TSHZ3 deletions in patients with autism spectrum disorder. Tshz3-mutant mice show functional changes at synapses established by cortical projection neurons and exhibit autism-like behavioral patterns.

Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson and colleagues report a fine-mapping and association analysis of germline variants in the APOBEC3 region associated with cancer risk. They identify two variants with differential effects in bladder and breast cancer, and their in vitro results suggest that environmental exposures may induce tissue-specific APOBEC mutagenesis and contribute to oncogenesis in carriers of APOBEC3 risk variants.

Peter Scacheri and colleagues identify ‘outside’ SNPs that physically interact with GWAS risk SNPs as part of a target gene's regulatory circuitry. Their findings suggest a model whereby outside variants and GWAS SNPs that physically interact collude to influence target transcript levels as well as clinical risk.

Giacomo Cavalli, Anne-Marie Martinez and colleagues identify a large set of genes that are bound by PRC1 in the absence of H3K27me3 in Drosophila larval tissues and in differentiated human cell lines. Many of these genes, which regulate cell proliferation, signaling and polarity, are upregulated in PRC1-mutant tissues and contribute to tumor formation in Drosophila.

Bjarni Halldorsson, Kari Stefansson and colleagues use SNP array and whole-genome sequencing data to estimate the meiotic gene conversion rate (G) in humans. They find that G for SNPs is 7.0 conversions/Mb per generation, is 2.17 greater in mothers than in fathers, and increases with maternal age.

Patricia Munroe, Christopher Newton-Cheh, Andrew Morris and colleagues perform association studies in over 340,000 individuals of European ancestry and identify 66 loci, of which 17 are novel, involved in blood pressure regulation. The risk SNPs are enriched for cis-regulatory elements, particularly in vascular endothelial cells.

Patricia Munroe, Joanna Howson and colleagues genotype ∼350,000 individuals and identify 30 new blood pressure– or hypertension-associated risk loci. Their analyses provide insights into the pathophysiology of hypertension and highlight new potential targets for clinical intervention.

Daniel Chasman, Daniel Levy, Christopher Newton-Cheh, Georg Ehret and colleagues perform an association meta-analysis for blood pressure in ∼330,000 individuals and identify 31 new risk loci, implicating biological pathways related to vascular function and cardiometabolic traits. Their findings highlight potential therapeutic strategies for hypertension, emphasizing a link with cardiometabolic risk.

Runjun Kumar, S. Joshua Swamidass and Ron Bose present an unsupervised parsimony-guided method, ParsSNP, for prioritizing candidate cancer driver mutations. They apply ParsSNP to a gastric cancer data set and predict potential driver mutations not detected by other methods, including truncations in known tumor-suppressor genes and previously confirmed drivers.

Shankar Balasubramanian and colleagues examine endogenous DNA G-quadruplex (G4) structures in the context of chromatin by using G4 antibody-based ChIP–seq. They find that G4 structures are enriched in nucleosome-depleted regions and the promoters and 5′ UTRs of highly transcribed genes, suggesting a relationship between chromatin state, transcriptional output and G4 status.

Ben Lehner and colleagues analyze data from matched exomes and transcriptomes from tumors across 27 cancer types to elucidate rules linking premature termination codon location to nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). They propose a model that explains variability in NMD efficiency and find evidence of positive and negative selection on NMD-initiating mutations in tumors.

Mingfang Zhang, Sally Mackenzie and colleagues report the genome sequence of allopolyploid Brassica juncea and through comparative analysis suggest that A-subgenome evolution contributes to differences in agricultural subvarieties. They find that differential homoeolog gene expression from the subgenomes helps to shape the selection that distinguishes vegetable- and oil-use Brassica.

Rebecca Fitzgerald and colleagues report the whole-genome sequences of 129 esophageal adenocarcinomas, showing frequent copy number alterations and prevalent mutations in receptor tyrosine kinases concomitant with mitogenic activation. They further characterize mutation signatures and find three distinct molecular subtypes with potential for application to clinical diagnosis and treatment.