Jerome Karle, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has died, the New York Times reports. He was 94.

At the Naval Research Laboratory in the 1950s, Karle and his college classmate, Herbert Hauptman, developed X-ray crystallography, which allows researchers to study crystal structure directly. The Times notes that the method now is used to examine complex molecules, especially in drug development research.

"These structures are solved all over the world on a daily basis," Louis Massa, a professor at Hunter College in Manhattan and a recent collaborator of Karle's, tells the Times. "It's one of those things that's taken for granted now."

An international team led by investigators at the Broad Institute, the University of Aberdeen, the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and elsewhere sequenced the genome of a fungal fish pathogen called Saprolegnia parasitica — work that they describe in a PLOS Genetics study. Using genome and RNA sequence data, the researchers identified genome features that appear to distinguish S. parasitica and other animal pathogens from plant-infecting fungi from the same lineage. For instance, they uncovered a large set of genes coding for protease and kinase enzymes and gene expansions involving potential virulence factors, including some acquired from other animal pathogens by lateral gene transfer. But they also saw a dip in representation by numerous effector genes in the pathogen compared to its plant-infecting counterparts, along with gene expression shifts.

A study in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases looks at the genetic patterns in Leishmania parasites from Africa and Eurasia. Through a multilocus sequence analysis of 222 African and Eurasian Leishmania isolates, French researchers identified seven genetic clusters of Leishmania in the regions tested. For the most part, those clusters corresponded to existing Leishmania classification schemes, the study authors note, though their analysis suggests genetic distinctions are somewhat hazier for three Leishmania species implicated in visceral forms of leishmaniasis. "Although these taxa cause specific clinical forms of the disease and are maintained through different parasitic cycles," they say, "they are not clearly distinct and form a continuum, in line with the concept of species complex already suggested for this group thirty years ago."

A team from Canada and the UK presents evidence for Native American admixture in the Quebec founder population. As they report in PLOS One, the researchers used autosomal SNP data on 205 individuals from 10 sub-populations in the Canadian province to look at the possibility of admixture in relatively isolated sub-populations that were long considered to be genetically homogenous. The analysis revealed low levels of overall admixture with Native American populations, though some of Quebec's sub-populations had more pronounced Native American ancestry, including Gaspesian populations and groups from the Quebec's North Shore and Saguenay regions.

A new survey suggests that many Americans would consider taking part in a clinical trial, but that most of their doctors do not discuss medical research with them, writes Ed Silverman at Pharmalot.

Silverman notes that previously cited reasons for low participation rates in trials include wide access to medication and difficulties in finding participants who are not taking other medications that could influence the trial.

The survey, conducted on behalf of Research!America by Zogby Analytics, asked 1,000 adults in the US about participation in medical research.

Of those surveyed, 72 percent said that they would be somewhat or very likely to participate in a clinical trial if their physician recommended it. However, 70 percent also said that their doctor has never discussed such research with them. Doctors, the survey further finds, are the preferred source of information about clinical trials — followed closely by the Internet — and physicians, according to the respondents, have the greatest responsibility to educate people about such trials.

"Blaming doctors, however, will not solve the problem," Silverman adds. "How so? A slight majority — 53 percent — say the lack of participation reflects a lack of awareness and information. But the same proportion [cites] a lack of trust.

In Science this week, a team led by University of Tubingen researchers report the sequencing and analysis of the genomes of medieval and modern Mycobacterium leprae, the pathogen responsible for leprosy, using ancient skeletons and existing patients. They found that the bacterium has not changed much genetically over the past millennium, with only about 800 mutations occurring among the 16 genomes examined, and that strains from the Americas most likely originated in Europe.

Also in Science, Japanese investigators describe the discovery of two microRNAs that may play a key role in human reproduction. Ovulation in mammals is controlled by hormones secreted by the hypothalamopituitary-ovarian axis — the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and gonads — which also expresses miRNAs. The scientists created knockout mice lacking miR-200b, which is detected in male reproductive organs, and ones lacking miR-429, which sits near the other miRNA in the mouse genome. While males were unaffected by the missing miRNAs, female mice experienced a sharp decrease in fertility. Because the miR-200b cluster is also present in people, the findings suggest that the miRNAs also be involved in human reproduction.

More and more local police forces around the country are creating their own databases of DNA from possible suspects – some of which is being collected without the donor's knowledge – and these banks are unregulated and write their own rules, the New York Times reports.

This "trend is trends is only expected to accelerate" now that the US Supreme Court has affirmed the right of law enforcers to swab and store DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, the Times' Joseph Goldstein speculates.

Local databases have more "leeway" from state and federal regulations, and police sometimes have been collecting samples from people who were not convicted or arrested for serious offenses, including from victims of crimes who may not know that their DNA is being stored for future searches, Goldstein notes.

New York City has a database of 11,000 crime suspects, the Orange County, Calif. district attorney's office has 90,000 such entries, for example, which shows that local departments are not content to rely on the "highly regulated" federal state and federal-level DNA databases, the Times reports.

“Unfortunately, what goes into the national database are mostly reference swabs of people who are going to prison,”

The national database mostly is full of reference swabs from people who go to prison, Jay Whitt, of the company DNA:SI Labs, told the Times.

They’re not the ones we’re dealing with day in day out, the ones still on the street just slipping under the radar," Whitt said.

This arrival of these regional databases could stir up concerns about privacy practices and how this information may be used.

“We have been warning law enforcement that when public attention began to focus on these rogue, unregulated databases, people would be disturbed,” said Innocence Project co-founder Barry Scheck.

The report released yesterday that found the US investment in the Human Genome Project and later genomics funding has generated $965 billion in economic impact stirred up some skeptical pushback from critics, according to Nature's Meredith Wadman.

A former NSF science and innovation policy director, Julia Lane, called the numbers in the report from Battelle "ridiculous." Lane says that the report, which was released by United for Medical Research, an advocate for science funding, "reinforces this notion that science is a slot machine that you put money in, and magic happens and money pops out at the end."

Lane points out that Battelle used data from Dun and Bradstreet, an industry analysis company, to define which activities may be classified as within the genomics sector, when it should have turned to codes from the US Census Bureau.

Likewise, the employment data in the report would have been better if the authors had used numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Lane suggests.

Another criticism has been that this report ties the genomics sector as a whole too closely to the federal investment.

"Many other factors, including private investment and innovation, have also contributed to the subsequent growth in clinical and practical applications of genomics," notes Mark McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution.