"Until recently, in vitro diagnostics were priced nearly at commodity levels and were relegated to the backwaters of the life science universe," Soren Peterson, Vivek Mittal, and Kristen Pothier write this month in In Vivo.

Lately, though, that's changed, says the trio, made up of a senior analyst, VP, and partner, respectively, of life sciences strategy consulting firm Health Advances.

With the emergence in recent years of high clinical value molecular diagnostics, they write, developers of such tests have become attractive acquisition targets with traditional clinical and laboratory firms like Quest Diagnostics and Beckman Coulter now competing with nontraditional buyers such as pharma firms, life science tool companies, and diversified conglomerates that have entered the sector.

In fact, they write, deals between diagnostics firms and such nontraditional buyers have grown from 33 percent of molecular diagnostic M&A in 2007-2008 to 63 percent in 2011-2012.

Among the Dx firms the authors think are currently primed for acquisition? BG Medicine, Biodesix, CardioDx, and a number of other names no doubt familiar to GenomeWeb readers.

Jeremy Farrar has been named as the new head of the Wellcome Trust, the charity says. Farrar, an infectious disease specialist, currently oversees the Wellcome Trust's Major Overseas Programme in Vietnam as well as the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit there.

Beginning October 1, he is to replace Mark Walport who left that post to become Britain's chief scientific adviser. The current interim director is Ted Bianco who had been heading up the agency's technology transfer office.

The University of Oxford's Colin Blakemore, who is also a former director of the Medical Research Council, tells the Nature News Blog that Farrar is a good fit for the Wellcome Trust, which has been increasing its support for research affecting the developing world.

"He may bring some new ways of working to the Trust, which would be more oriented toward public health and downstream research, applying tools we have today in addition to developing new tools," adds David Heymann, the chair of Public Health England's advisory board.

University of Massachusetts researcher Albertha Walhout and colleagues describe diet-related gene expression networks delineated multiple genetic screening methods. The group used a mutagenesis screen, RNA interference, and other approaches to track down a gene network involved in dietary response when Caenorhabditis elegans worms munch on Comamonas bacteria rather than their standard Escherichia coli fare. Through analyses of this set of 146 apparent activators and 38 repressors, the study authors unearthed "a transcriptional response system that is poised to sense dietary cues and metabolic imbalances, illustrating extensive communication between metabolic networks in the mitochondria and gene regulatory networks in the nucleus."

German researchers report on findings from an RNA interference-based search for genetic factors involved in liver regeneration. The team used small hairpin RNAs to systematically knock down genes in a mouse model of liver regeneration, looking for targets that enhanced or suppressed this liver regeneration. The search led them to a kinase-coding gene called MKK4 that seems to have a central regulatory role in liver regeneration. This process got a boost in mouse models when the gene is silenced, researchers found, even when underlying acute or chronic liver disease was present.

The succession of players that come together in protein complexes appears to be under evolutionary selection, according to a UK team, suggesting this assembly order contributes to biological function. The researchers considered protein assembly in general and in the context of proteins produced from fused genes. With the help of genome sequence data, for example, they found evidence that protein assembly pathways tend to be conserved in the face of gene fusion events. These and other data "reveal the intimate relationships among protein assembly, quaternary structure, and evolution," study authors say, "and demonstrate on a genome-wide scale the biological importance of ordered assembly pathways."

By adding genes from a variety sources — including other microorganisms and the camphor tree — researchers have coaxed Escherichia coli to produce diesel, Scientific American's David Biello reports.

As John Love from University of Exeter and his colleagues write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they engineered E. coli to metabolize fatty acids into different hydrocarbons by inserting a Photorhabdus luminescens fatty acid reductase complex along with aldehyde decarbonylase from Nostoc punctiforme, a thioesterase from Cinnamomum camphora, and the branched-chain α-keto acid dehydrogenase complex and β-keto acyl-acyl carrier protein synthase III from Bacillus subtilis.

The E. coli were fed sugar and yeast extract and could produce diesel, which it appears to be able to expel from the cell through an unknown mechanism.

"We wanted to make biofuels that could be used directly with existing engines to completely replace fossil fuels," Love tells Biello. "Our next step will be to try to develop a bacterium that could be deployed industrially."

Columbia University's Ian Lipkin led an international team that unearthed dozens of hepaciviruses and pegiviruses in bats. As they report in the early, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers started with an RNA sequencing-based look at viral diversity in blood samples from more than 400 African and Central American bats. When they tossed out host sequences and compared the remaining reads with RNA and amino acid databases, investigators identified various viral representatives from the Flaviridae family. Among them: representatives from the Hepacivirus and Pegivirus genera that contain hepatitis C and related GB viruses, respectively. Follow-up experiments in more than 1,200 samples from bats in seven countries indicated that a significant proportion of bats — almost 5 percent of those tested — carried hepaciviruses and/or pegiviruses.

An international team led by investigators at the University of California, Davis, describes a new four billion base physical map for Aegilops tauschii — a diploid plant with a genome that's thought to correspond to the hexaploid wheat plant's "D genome." Using an Ae. tauschii SNP array and contigs assembled from fingerprinting information on hundreds of thousands of bacterial artificial chromosomes, researchers put together a 4.03 billion base physical map for Ae. tauschii. Through comparisons with sequenced plants, authors of that study gained insights into gene density, disease resistance gene profiles, recombination, chromosome structure, and other features related to grass plant evolution.

Finally, for another study slated to come out online this week in PNAS, researchers from Cornell University outline a single-molecule analysis strategy that they are using to tally up multiple epigenetic marks in combination with one another. The "single chromatin molecule analysis in nanochannels," or SCAN, approach centers on a nanofluidic manipulation of bits of chromatin with fluorescent labels recognizing methylated DNA and other epigenetic marks, study authors explain. In the new study, for example, they demonstrated that this method could assess combinations of epigenetic marks in both normal and cancerous cell lines.

BMC Genomics has issued an expression of concern regarding a 2011 article on an adaptive role for subfunctionalization in modulating the effect of gene dosage, Retraction Watch reports. According to a statement from the journal, one of the institutions to which first author Ariel Fernandez was affiliated found that the data he generated was not reproducible while a second institution he was associated with did not find anything wrong with the methods or data. "Given the conflicting conclusions of these investigations, the Editors advise the readers to interpret the data with due caution," the statement says.

Retraction Watch notes that Fernandez was affiliated with the National Research Council of Argentina, the University of Chicago, and the Morgridge Institute for Research in Wisconsin.