A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

The genomic regions regulating gene expression are often themselves transcribed into a variety of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). However, the regulatory roles of this noncoding transcription remain largely ...

Recent AI developments and what they mean for us Quick primer on general AI models* State-of-the-art in AI agent capabilities AI agents in biology (examples) Discussion - what does this mean for our r...

The bacteriophage ΦX174 was the first genome to be sequenced and the first to be chemically synthesised. Here we present a complete map of the consequences of changing every nucleotide in the ΦX174 ge...

Abstract. Understanding why species differ in their rates of mutation is central to explaining patterns of molecular and phenotypic evolution. Mutation rat

GOOSE enables the design and testing of thousands of disordered protein region sequences to reveal distinct sequence-to-function relationships.

President Donald Trump’s more than $14 million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation was completed just over a week ago, with its more than 300,000 square feet refilled with 6.5 million gallons ...

An analytical pipeline called Iteratively Defined Lengths of Inaccessibility (IDLI) maps the genome-wide occupancy of a range of nucleosome types and shows that most nucleosomes exhibit programmed ‘di...

Biases in molecular evolution can significantly influence evolutionary trajectories. They have been described in a variety of contexts such as development and mutation, but not for acquiring new funct...

Dominance is a central principle of genetics, yet the mechanistic basis and the evolutionary consequences of dominance arising from cis-regulatory variation remain poorly understood. We examined the evolutionary trajectories of a pleiotropic developmental enhancer in Drosophila . A genotype–phenotype map between D. melanogaster and D. simulans enhancer sequences reveals extensive epistasis, and many homozygous evolutionary paths reduce transcriptional output. In heterozygotes, however, regulatory dominance masks variants that reduce gene expression, potentially relaxing evolutionary constraints. Using allele-specific reporters and imaging, we show that this dominance arises from interallelic interactions (also known as transvection) reinforced by transcriptional hubs. Importantly, this enhancer dominance is cell-type specific, raising the possibility that it conceals deleterious effects in essential tissues while revealing novel, ectopic activity in others. Interallelic regulatory hubs may therefore expand the range of mutational paths available to diploid genomes while preserving essential transcriptional output. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Transferring genetic materials between distantly related yeasts, presents technical challenges but can yield industrially interesting phenotypes. Here the authors establish a method to transfer indivi...

Insecticides remain indispensable for crop protection and food security, yet their widespread use may contribute to the global decline of beneficial i…

Promoters and enhancers are cis-regulatory elements (CREs), DNA sequences that bind transcription factor (TF) proteins to up- or down-regulate target genes. Decades-long efforts yielded TF-DNA interac...

Gene regulatory changes are considered major drivers of evolutionary innovations, including the cerebellum’s expansion during human evolution, yet they remain largely unexplored. In this study, we com...

Personal thoughts on the passing of Peer Bork

AI-powered pipeline converts antibodies into functional intrabodies, enabling live-cell imaging of peptides and histone marks.

The existing ENCODE registry of candidate human and mouse cis-regulatory elements is expanded with the addition of new ENCODE data, integrating new functional data as well as new cell and tissue types...

Low-affinity transcription factor (TF) motifs are an important element of the cis-regulatory code, yet they are notoriously difficult to map and mechanistically incompletely understood, limiting our a...

imageimageHeterochromatin-island epimutations can provide resistance to caffeine and antifungal drugs in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. This study reveals that some epimutations cause re...

In vitro-derived insights into features that drive transcription factor binding to DNA, including motif-adjacent sequence, enable prediction of chromatin states and transcription factor occupancy in cells.

Calcium imaging of taste neurons and the ventral brain provides insight into evolutionary divergence of food choice in Drosophila species, supporting a role of sensorimotor processing in addition to p...