Genomics

Nonlinear transcriptional responses to gradual modulation of transcription factor dosage

1. Júlia Domingo
2. Mariia Minaeva
3. John A Morris
4. Samuel Ghatan
5. Marcello Ziosi
6. Neville E Sanjana
7. Tuuli Lappalainen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work develops a new protocol to experimentally perturb target genes across a quantitative range of expression levels in cell lines. The evidence supporting their new perturbation approach is convincing, and we propose that focusing on single modality (activation or inhibition) would be sufficient to draw their conclusions. The study will be of broad interest to scientists in the fields of functional genomics and biotechnology.

Reviewed by eLife

Crossing host boundaries: the evolutionary drivers and correlates of viral host jumps

1. Cedric C.S. Tan
2. Lucy van Dorp
3. Francois Balloux

Reviewed by Rapid Reviews Infectious Diseases

Acetylation of H3K115 is associated with fragile nucleosomes at CpG island promoters and active regulatory sites

1. Yatendra Kumar
2. Dipta Sengupta
3. Elias T Friman
4. Robert S Illingworth
5. Manon Soleil
6. Zheng Fan
7. Hua Wang
8. Kristian Helin
9. Matthieu Gerard
10. Wendy A Bickmore

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The reviewers have found that this manuscript is a valuable contribution, and the evidence in support of its conclusions is mostly solid. It provides novel insights and raises interesting possibilities about the functions of an understudied histone modification within the nucleosome core; however, the data are mostly descriptive and correlative, and although this has value, it is not totally persuasive. Short of additional non-genomic experiments, a more detailed analysis of the genomic data and perhaps additional data would strengthen the conclusions. The manuscript crucially needs further antibody validation to raise confidence in the data.

Reviewed by eLife

Conservation of chromatin states and their association with transcription factors in land plants

1. Vikas Shukla
2. Elin Axelsson
3. Tetsuya Hisanaga
4. Jim Haseloff
5. Frédéric Berger
6. Facundo Romani

Reviewed by Review Commons

TinkerHap - A Novel Read-Based Phasing Algorithm with Integrated Multi-Method Support for Enhanced Accuracy

1. Uri Hartmann
2. Eran Shaham
3. Dafna Nathan
4. Ilana Blech
5. Danny Zeevi

Reviewed by GigaScience

Human-specific lncRNAs contributed critically to human evolution by distinctly regulating gene expression

1. Jie Lin
2. Yujian Wen
3. Ji Tang
4. Xuecong Zhang
5. Huanlin Zhang
6. Hao Zhu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study uses tools of population and functional genomics to examine long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in the context of human evolution. Analyses of computationally predicted human-specific lncRNAs and their genomic targets lead to the development of hypotheses regarding the potential roles of these genetic elements in human biology. The conclusions regarding evolutionary acceleration and adaptation, however, only incompletely take data and literature on human/chimpanzee genetics and functional genomics into account.

Reviewed by eLife

CellCover Defines Marker Gene Panels Capturing Developmental Progression in Neocortical Neural Stem Cell Identity

1. Lanlan Ji
2. An Wang
3. Shreyash Sonthalia
4. Seungmae Seo
5. Daniel Q Naiman
6. Laurent Younes
7. Carlo Colantuoni
8. Donald Geman

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study offers a valuable methodological advance by introducing a gene panel selection approach that captures combinatorial specificity to define cell identity. The findings address key limitations of current single-gene marker methods. The evidence is compelling, but would be strengthened by further validation of rare cell states and unexpected marker categories.

Reviewed by eLife

The genetic control of rapid genome content divergence in Arabidopsis thaliana

1. Christopher J Fiscus
2. Daniel Koenig

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study systematically investigates repeat expansion in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana using a new k-mer-based method, expanding on smaller studies to more comprehensively identify cis- and trans-acting loci associated with repeat dynamics. The approach is methodologically sound and broadly applicable to large-scale short-read datasets for assessing copy number variation and genomic repeat content. While convincing in its scope and novelty, the findings would be further strengthened with exploratory analyses of datasets from other species with more or fewer repeats in their genomes.

Reviewed by eLife

Beyond the transcript: chromatin implications in trans-splicing in Trypanosomatids

1. Romina Trinidad Zambrano Siri
2. Paula Beati
3. Lucas Inchausti
4. Pablo Smircich
5. Guillermo Daniel Alonso
6. Josefina Ocampo

Reviewed by Review Commons

Chromatin accessibility variation provides insights into missing regulation underlying immune-mediated diseases

1. Raehoon Jeong
2. Martha L Bulyk

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper addresses a significant question regarding the low overlap between genetic discoveries for human complex diseases and those for gene expression by emphasizing the contribution of cell-type-specific chromatin accessibility QTLs. The analyses supporting the main claims are convincing, and the key conclusions are valuable and of interest to readers in the fields of human genetics and functional genomics.

Reviewed by eLife