March 17, 2021
Image credit: Spencer Gordon
03/19/2021
Research Article
Ghaffari et al. study intrahepatic biliary network formation, involved in cholestatic liver diseases and autoimmune disorders, in zebrafish. They find a mutation in the nckap1l gene that disrupts the actin organization of biliary epithelial cells.
Image credit: Ghaffari et al., pgen.1009402
Current Issue April 2021
03/19/2021
Research Article
Casas-Tintó and Ferrús study the haplolethal region of the Troponin I (TnI) encoding gene wupA in Drosophila and find that haplolethality results from the combined haploinsufficiency of a large set of TnI isoforms. These findings compare to another studiedhaplolethal region and reveal a scenario of strict dosage dependence with implications for gene expression regulation and splitting.
Image credit: Casas-Tintó and Ferrús, pgen.1009108
03/18/2021
Research Article
Vaughn et al. characterize and track the entire mutational spectrum between two rice varieties through the last century of rice breeding. They show that large structural mutations in exons are selected against at a greater rate than any other mutational class, which illuminates the nature of deleterious alleles and will guide attempts to predict variety vigor based solely on genomic information.
Image credit: wilkoszenator, Pixabay
03/17/2021
Research Article
Liu et al. study models of Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease to find that WDR81 promotes the autophagic clearance of protein aggregates via facilitating the recruitment of autophagic proteins onto protein aggregates, and reduction of WDR81 impairs the viability of mouse primary neurons.
Image credit: Liu et al., pgen.1009415
03/08/2021
Research Article
Zepecki et al. discover the relationship between miRNAs and the RNA methylation machinery in human glioblastoma and show how miRNA-induced loss of m6A results in increase in protein translation of clinically important transcripts during glioblastoma stem cell differentiation, which has implications for the design of cancer therapeutics.
Image credit: Zepecki et al., pgen.1009086
03/09/2021
Research Article
Bente et al. study paramutation in Arabidopsis thaliana and find several parameters that influence paramutation: an important role for sRNAs to initiate silencing, the sequence of the allele itself, the environmental conditions during growth of the hybrids, the developmental stage, and the copy number ratio between the alleles.
Image credit: Bente et al., pgen.1009444
04/22/2021
Viewpoints
Nielsen et al. comment on two recent studies that have taken advantage of MAVE technology to investigate loss-of-function variants in MSH2, which cause the cancer-predisposing Lynch Syndrome.
Image credit: Nielsen et al., pgen.1009496
04/22/2021
Perspective
Chang and Malik highlight a new study (pgen.1009418) showing an active co-evolutionary arms race between DNA and protein components of the meiotic machinery in Mimulus, with consequences for individual fitness and molecular divergence.
Image credit: Finseth et al., pgen.1009418
03/11/2021
Review
Korunes and Goldberg discuss recent progress in human genetic admixture studies and potential areas for future work. The Review serves as an introduction to the PLOS Genetics Human Genetic Admixture Collection.
Image credit: Mehrjoo et al., pgen.1008385
02/25/2021
Perspective
Guery and Claessens highlight a new paper (pgen.1009269) that explores the evolution of specific DNA sequences of the major VSA gene of the human malaria parasite.
Image credit: Tonkin-Hill et al.
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