It's a common enough situation that Keith Weaver describes at Nature: at a conference, there are a number of talks scheduled at the same time, and you have to choose which to go to. And sometimes that choice is driven by not the title of the talks, but from what institutions the speakers hail.

At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe notes that such snobbery isn't limited to academia. "This carries over to industry, too, both in the ways that people look at other's academic backgrounds, and even in terms of industrial pedigrees," he writes. "Working for a biopharma that's been successful, that everyone's heard of, does a lot more for your reputation than working for one that no one knows anything about.

Weaver adds that this preference for prestigious labs or universities hurts both those at less well-known spots and the investigators who ignore them. "In many cases, this is a loss: to my students and their projects, which could have benefited from the input, and to the investigators who might have missed information that could have been useful in their own work," he says.

Both Weaver and Lowe write that researchers should acknowledge this bias and try to correct it, especially, as Lowe notes, "some very smart people have come out of some very obscure backgrounds, and you can't — and shouldn't — assume anything in that line."

In the online edition of Genome Research, the University of Oxford's Gerton Lunter leads an international team retracing the origin, evolution, and functional consequences of small insertions and deletions in the human genome. With a collection of some 1.6 million such indels that they assembled with genome sequence data for 179 individuals from three populations, the researchers explored everything from the instigators and incidence of insertions and deletions to the sites in the genome that are most prone to indel-related mutagenesis.

The microbes that make up the human microbiome seem to exhibit substantial intra-species diversity, according to a study by researchers from the US and China. The team cultured microbial microcolonies using a gel microdroplet scheme that made it possible to cultivate hundreds or thousands of identical microbial cells. In addition to showing that the gel microdroplet approach produced sequences that jibe with single-cell sequence data, the investigators used the technique to uncover genomic diversity in two human microbiome members: Streptococcus oralis, from the mouth microbiome community, and Enterococcus faecium, from the gut microbiome.

Manolis Kellis and co-authors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute describe a massively parallel reporter assay that they used to systematically study regulatory motifs falling within thousands of predicted enhancer sequences in the human genome. Using this assay, they examined 2,104 potential enhancers in two human cell lines, along with another 3,314 engineered enhancer variants. "Our results suggest a general strategy for deciphering cis-regulatory elements by systematic large-scale experimental manipulation," they write, "and provide quantitative enhancer activity measurements across thousands of constructs that can be mined to generate and test predictive models of gene expression."

Scientists can be critical people, especially as they are critiquing others' work, writes Prof-like Substance at the Spandrel Shop. "Critique pushes science forward (especially when it's of that other lab!) and keeps us thinking," he writes. "But everyone has spent time in that journal club or lab meeting where it seems like the sole purpose is to tear anything to shreds."

Prof-like Substance adds, though, that he is going to make a "concerted effort this month to dedicate roughly the same amount of text to both the 'Strengths' and 'Weaknesses' sections of my reviews."

In a separate critique-related post, Prof-like offers tips for those serving on review panels, advising panelists to get their reviews in early and to choose which proposals they want to fight for. Once panelists have submitted their reviews, they can read what others have written. By doing so, Prof-like says, panelists can get a sense of the "mood" of the group, by seeing whether reviews are generally positive or negative, and panelists can determine who they'll have to win over to fund their favorite proposals.

"Above all, remember that you are there to talk science and participate in the process of getting people funding. As a group you'll have to make some hard decisions and it's easy to walk out of one of these feeling a little depressed by the amount of good science that doesn't make the cut," Prof-like Substance notes. "But do what you can, learn what you can and get to know the other panelists — there's a decent chance they will be reviewing one of your grants some day."

While the US Food and Drug Administration has been working to speed up the time it takes for drugs to garner approval, Commissioner Margaret Hamburg says that the sequester may slow those efforts, the Boston Herald reports. Speaking to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council annual meeting attendees, Hamburg added that she would like Congress to allow FDA to access the user fees it collects to pay for its operating costs.

She added, according to the Boston Globe, that it was too early to determine the full effect of the sequester on FDA, but it is going to be "significantly under the budget knife." Further she said that "sequestration has added an unexpected burden to us at a critical time."

In PLOS Genetics, the University of California, Santa Cruz's Beth Shapiro and colleagues from the US, Russia, and Canada present evidence for a relatively straightforward model for polar bear evolution. Using genomic sequence data on seven polar bears, one black bear, one mainland brown bear, and one brown bear from Alaska's Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof, or ABC, islands, the team uncovered an over-representation of polar bear sequences on the ABC brown bear X chromosome. Together with existing genetic data, the findings seem to support the notion that female polar bears mixed with male brown bears on the Alaskan islands long ago, eventually reverting to a brown bear-like population. If so, researchers say, it puts the polar bear-brown bear divergence time prior to this mixing event, with present-day polar bears likely carrying relatively little in the way of recent brown bear ancestry.

Our sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News has more on the study.

A University of Waterloo team has sequenced the genome of a Pseudomonas bacterial strain that lives in the region around reed plant roots and is known for boosting the plant's growth. As the researchers write in PLOS Pathogens, they identified an estimated 5,423 protein-coding genes in the nearly 6.2 million-base-pair genome of the strain, known as Pseudomonas sp. UW4. The sequence has already helped the group see some genes predicted to bolster growth of nearby plants and the fitness of the bacterial strain itself, study authors note, adding that "the availability of the whole genetic contents of this organism will surely help to provide more insight in unraveling the complex biological mechanisms that UW4 and other similar organisms use to promote plant growth."

A team from the US and Singapore takes a look at the spread of yellow fever virus across Africa using a phylogeny-focused approach in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The researchers brought together sequence data for 26 yellow fever virus isolates from Africa, including seven East and Central African isolates not published in the past. From a phylogenetic analysis based on 49 partial yellow fever virus coding sequences, they determined relationships and divergence times for African lineages of the mosquito-spread scourge — patterns that are useful for retracing its transmission on the continent and perhaps for coming up with surveillance and vaccination schemes.

Efforts to bring the extinct passenger pigeon back from the dead are heating up, Wired's Kelly Servick says today in a story following Ben Novak, a 26-year-old genetics student who she writes has "put his graduate studies on hold to pursue a goal he'd once described in a junior high school fair presentation: de-extinction."

According to Servick, Novak's pigeon-philia has been recognized with an appointment as coordinator for this first subject case in a larger project to raise the dead of many extinct species from Revive and Restore, led by Ryan Phelan, who founded the DTC genetic company DNA Direct in 2005.

The company has convened a team of scientists to work through the challenge of rebuilding a passenger pigeon from the slime left in museum specimens and the architecture of close pigeon relatives, and is hosting a TEDx talk today to discuss the project, featuring field heavyweight George Church among many others.

According to Wired, Novak's plan hinges on sequencing available fragments of the genome of the passenger pigeon and comparing them to the genome of its cousin, the band-tailed pigeon.

"The short, mangled DNA fragments from the museums' passenger pigeons don't overlap enough for a computer to reassemble them, but the modern band-tailed pigeon genome could serve as a scaffold. Mapping passenger pigeon fragments onto the band-tailed sequence would suggest their original order," Servick writes.

Novak sent requests to 30 museums before receiving a passenger pigeon tissue sample from Chicago's Field Museum in 2011 and used a borrowed $2,500 to pay for it to be sequenced, according to Servick. Now working with evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Novak hopes to complete full sequences of the passenger and band-tailed pigeon genomes within a year.

But the project could really get dicey, Servick says. According to Shapiro, "because the last common ancestor of the two species flew about 30 million years ago, their genomes will likely differ at millions of locations." Fitting the pieces together will be grueling, if not impossible

Then Novak will have to break the even more stalwart barrier of actually modifying the genome of the band-tailed pigeon to match that of the carrier pigeon and bringing it to life implanted in another bird's egg.

Assuming all this actually works out, Servick says Novak eventually hopes to set up a "sanctuary of lab-generated pigeon chicks in the bird's original breeding territory."