Elevated contractility drives implantation failure in mouse embryos from aged females - Nature Cell Biology

Cavanaugh et al. show that embryos from aged mice have increased contractility and tissue viscosity on embryonic day 4.5, which leads to poor spreading and attachment. Similar age-associated mechanica...

nature.com

Bonsai reconstructs tree representations for distortion-free visualization and exploration of high-dimensional data - Nature Biotechnology

High-dimensional data are visualized through representation on tree structures.

nature.com

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

404media.co

Three-dimensional mapping of intact ovaries reveals the aging dynamics of the ovarian reserve - Nature Aging

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the depletion of the ovarian reserve remain incompletely understood. Combining whole-ovary imaging, AI and modeling, the authors mapped over 85,000 mouse oocytes and fou...

nature.com

Coalescent-Based Time-Stratified Statistics Reveal Population Structure Dynamics using the Ancestral Recombination Graph

Many questions in population genetics are concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history through time, such as inferring how population structure has changed throughout the past. Yet, many existing approaches have only an implicit temporal component, using quantities such as allele frequency or haplotype length as rough proxies for age. Recent advances in the inference of Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) have made it possible to estimate the entire sequence of local genealogies along the genome. These genealogies explicitly encode how samples are related to each other at different time points in the past, enabling the inference of how population structure has changed over time. To this end, recent work has used ARGs to define time-stratified versions of widely-used population genetics summary statistics in an attempt to capture the population structure present within a particular time window. Here, we show that naive approaches result in statistics that cannot be interpreted solely in terms of the population structure present within the time window they are targeting. To address this problem, we introduce a framework of coalescent-based time-stratified statistics, which use coalescence probabilities to partition classical summary statistics into interval-specific contributions. Using coalescent simulations, we demonstrate that these statistics accurately isolate population structure at different temporal depths and avoid spurious signals. Our results highlight the necessity of integrating coalescent theory into ARG-based temporal analyses and provide a principled and practical foundation for studying the dynamics of population structure through time. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. National Human Genome Research Institute, https://ror.org/00baak391, R01HG014005

google.com

The Genome-Wide Effect of Drift and Selection over a Single Generation

The relative importance of genetic drift versus selection to evolutionary change has long been debated. This debate has mainly focused over long-time-scales (e.g. hundreds of thousands of generations)...

biorxiv.org

On Fermi Problems in Human Genetics

and some very useful numbers about human genomes to get you started!

jkpritchard.substack.com

From Wikipedia to AI: Measuring 25 years of synthesis of human genetics research in the public-facing information ecosystem

Genetics research frequently intersects with ethnicity, nationality, and race, making it uniquely vulnerable to misrepresentation. Yet, 25 years after the initial sequencing of the human genome, there...

biorxiv.org

Research Associate (Fixed Term)

We seek a highly motivated Postdoctoral Research Associate to join the laboratory of Professor Kathy Niakan. We are based in the Loke Centre for Trophoblast Research (LCTR), in the Department of Physi...

cam.ac.uk

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern human ancestors, leaving behind telltale DNA in our genomes. Now we have evidence of modern human interbreeding with two much older but unknown ancest...

news.berkeley.edu

Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unad...

science.org

The deSUMOylase SPF2 and the cohesin regulators SGO2 and CTF18 suppress crossovers near centromeres

Nature Plants - Gamboa et al. identified three proteins that restrict meiotic crossovers near centromeres. This finding suggests that cohesion regulation plays a role in this suppression and...

rdcu.be

Scalable ARG-free Detection of Denisovan-mediated Superarchaic Introgression Reveals Heterogeneous Patterns across Populations

Ghost introgression from unsampled hominin lineages has emerged as an increasingly important component of human evolutionary history. Recent studies suggest that deeply divergent hominin lineages may ...

biorxiv.org

Inference of elevated mutation rates and variant effects using 700k exomes

Genomic sequencing is now widely accessible for genetic diagnostics and is emerging as a component of newborn screening. This technological development generates the need to characterize incoming muta...

biorxiv.org

Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes

Abstract. The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model pred

doi.org

What sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species?

Mutation rates per generation are strikingly similar across germlines of animals and across at least one somatic cell type, suggesting a key role for natural selection in shaping mutation rates. This ...

journals.plos.org

Macroevolutionary divergence of gene expression driven by selection on protein abundance

The regulation of messenger RNA (mRNA) and protein abundances is well-studied, but less is known about the evolutionary processes shaping their relationship. To address this, we derived a new phylogen...

doi.org

Scientists find yeast in frozen mummy's guts, use it to make sourdough bread

More than 5,300 years ago, Oetzi the Iceman was strolling through the Alps on the border of Austria and Italy when he was killed by an arrow in the back.

cbsnews.com