Earlier non-invasive prenatal testing can lead to difficult decisions for prospective parents, USA Today writes. "Rapid technological advances are opening up a new era, doctors say — one in which couples have an unprecedented glimpse of the forming child, and with this new information an often-wrenching choice: proceed with the pregnancy or terminate it," it adds.

Because they are not invasive, early screens will likely appeal to more women, the paper adds, noting that only about 2 percent of women opt for invasive testing, though such tests may be used to confirm NIPT results. Newer cell-free DNA screens, like the one from Sequenom, among other companies, can be conducted as early as nine weeks. Early results allow women with negative results to bypass invasive screening and enable women with positive results to, if they choose, undergo an earlier termination, which carries fewer risks, USA Today says.

While advances in technology are giving prospective parents more information, and earlier, the choice they face remains the same. "This technology has not given us some way to magically prevent the condition or cure the baby," Ruth Faden, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, says. "The pregnancy will be terminated or the baby will be born with it."

And that decision is intensely personal. Melanie Perkins McLaughlin, who received a Down syndrome diagnosis 20 weeks into her pregnancy, continued her pregnancy and now talks to other prospective parents with that diagnosis. "I would never in a million years judge them," McLaughlin tells USA Today. "Who is anybody else to judge somebody in that situation? Even if you've been in that position, with a prenatal diagnosis, everyone is an individual and every situation is different."

In Science this week, a group of Chinese researchers report on the use of reverse genetics to gain insights into how H5N1 avian flu can spread to, and between, mammals. In the past, avian flu viruses have crossed species barriers by reassorting with mammal-infective viruses in intermediate livestock hosts. The team created 127 reassortant viruses between a duck isolate of H5N1 and a highly transmissible human H1N1 virus. They tested the viruses' virulence in mice and transmissibility to guinea pigs, which both have avian and mammalian types of airway receptors, and found that some reassortments were transmissible by airborne droplet, although they were not lethal. The findings indicate that avian H5N1 subtype viruses have the "potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by reassortment," the researchers write.

Also in Science, researchers from the University of Oxford publish data giving clues about how one type of long, non-coding RNA, or lncRNA, is regulated. The investigators found that an lncRNA they had identified in Arabidopsis is regulated through its interaction with an R-loop, a triple-stranded nucleic acid structure formed by an RNA/DNA hybrid and a displaced single-stranded DNA. Based on the findings, the team concludes that differential stabilization of R-loops could be a "general mechanism influencing gene expression in many organisms."

A Florida teen was expelled and charged with a felony after a science project she was working on led to what Riptide, a news blog at the Miami New Times, describes as a "tiny pop and a small amount of smoke." No one was injured and there was no damage.

Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student at Bartow High School, was known to have a good record, and the principal there, Ron Pritchard, said Wilmot "is a good kid," according to Tampa Bay's News 10.

"She made a bad choice," Pritchard said, adding that "she wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did." Riptide adds that she mixed toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a plastic water bottle.

Wilmot is to be tried as an adult on charges of possessing/discharging a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. The school district adds that she was expelled as students need to know "there are consequences to their actions," according to Riptide

At Southern Fried Science, Andrew David Thaler wonders if responses like that will stifle scientific curiosity. "Many young scientists have a brush with danger due to a combination of curiosity and experimentation," he writes. "High school programs should be nurturing that curiosity and fostering responsible experimentation, not punishing it."

Thaler also asked Twitter followers, many of whom he says are current scientists, whether they had had any such lab mishaps in high school. He has a Storify of their responses. For example, @rasliche tweeted: "Launched rocket in hs that tipped after igniting, shot at class, hit building window. No damage, but def not safe. Got A+."

While Daily Scan never caused the sprinklers to go off, there was a harrowing incident with some ethidium bromide.

Based on genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses of nearly 400 tumors, the Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network team uncovered four subtypes of endometrial cancer, as it reports in Nature this week. These four categories subdivide the tumors based on their mutation frequency: POLE ultramutated, microsatellite instability hypermutated, copy-number low, and copy-number high tumors. "This integrated analysis provides key molecular insights into tumour classification, which may have a direct effect on treatment recommendations for patients, and provides opportunities for genome-guided clinical trials and drug development," the researchers write.

Daily Scan sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News has more on this study here.

Also in Nature, researchers led by Roland Beckmann from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany present the structures of both the human and fruit fly 80S ribosomes in complex with translation factor eEF2, E-site transfer RNA, and Stm1-like proteins. Using high-resolution cryo-electron-microscopy density maps, predicted secondary structures for rRNA expansion segments, and the yeast and Tetrahymena 80S crystal structures, the researchers built molecular models of the Homo sapiens and Drosophila melanogaster subunits. "These structures not only illustrate the co-evolution of metazoan-specific ribosomal RNA with ribosomal proteins but also reveal the presence of two additional structural layers in metazoan ribosomes, a well-ordered inner layer covered by a flexible RNA outer layer," the authors note.

Over in Nature Genetics, BGI researchers and their colleagues report on the draft genomes of two turtles, the soft-shell turtle and the green sea turtle. Their results point to a split from the bird-crocodilian lineage about 267.9 million years ago to 248.3 million years ago. In addition, they uncover evidence of expansions in olfactory receptor genes in these two turtles, which may be due to a gene duplication event. All in all their "results suggest that turtle evolution was accompanied by an unexpectedly conservative vertebrate phylotypic period, followed by turtle-specific repatterning of development to yield the novel structure of the shell," the researchers write.

GWDN also covers this article here.

The new H7N9 avian flu virus was quickly sequenced, shared, and published, but not without some concerns regarding credit, Nature reports. A team from Beijing's Chinese National Influenza Center uploaded the genetic sequence of the virus, determined from the first three patients, on March 31st to Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data database, and it submitted its H7N9 paper to the New England Journal of Medicine on April 5th.

At the same time, Nature says, Novartis and the J. Craig Venter Institute were working on using those uploaded sequences to develop a vaccine in collaboration with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but not with the Chinese National Influenza Center team — something the CNIC team thought was not in the cooperative spirit of GISAID. Novartis says it looked into working with the Chinese CDC, which includes the CNIC, Nature notes.

GISAID was able to help address these concerns and open lines of communication between thr groups, Nature adds. The Chinese team and the vaccine developers are now working together.

The CNIC team was also worried about being scooped by a Tokyo group that analyzed the viral data. That group's Eurosurveillance paper was scheduled to come out before Chinese team's NEJM article, so to avoid the issue of scooping the Chinese team, the publication of the Eurosurveillance paper was delayed. An author of the Eurosurveillance paper adds that the delay had no effect on public health as the group shared its analyses with the World Health Organization's network of flu researchers earlier in the month.

Japanese researchers report on efforts to characterize gene expression, metabolism, growth patterns, and more in a fission yeast strain with a whittled down, or reduced representation, genome. In an effort to define a core set of essential genes, the team used a large-scale gene deletion strategy to lop off four large stretches of sequence from the already compact Schizosaccharomyces pombe genome. The resulting strain, which was missing hundreds of thousands of bases and an estimated 223 protein-coding genes, was somewhat hindered in taking up glucose and amino acids, they report. It also showed shifts in some metabolic, gene expression, and protein patterns.

Washington University's Robi Mitra and colleagues outline a method for charting DNA methylation marks in heterogeneous cells from normal or diseased tissue samples. The team demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach — called laser capture microdissection-reduced representation bisulfite sequencing, or LCM-RRBS — using tissue from mice with a type of tumor called gonadectomy-induced adrenocrotical neoplasia. The approach proved useful for comparing methylation profiles in the tumor and nearby normal tissue, study authors note, arguing that the method "will facilitate the investigation of DNA methylation in cancer and organ development."

Finally, a team from Belgium, the UK, and the US explore approaches for detecting structural variants that crop up in a single cell over the course of a cell cycle. Using paired-end sequence data from DNA from individual breast cancer or blastomere cells that had undergone whole-genome amplification, the researchers showed off their analytical methods, which make it possible to pick up copy number changes or rearrangements affecting a few dozen to thousands of DNA bases. Their analyses also looked at the artifacts introduced during whole-genome amplification process with an eye to weeding them out during structural variant detection.