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Sweeter Dates

Together, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and the Qatar Ministry of Environment's Biotechnology Center are launching a program focused on date palm research, reports Nature Middle East's House of Wisdom blog. The Date Palm Research Program is to include both basic and applied research into the date palm, whose fruit is a dietary staple in the Middle East. The Qatar National Research Fund will provide $4.5 million over five years as seed funding for the program, the House of Wisdom blog says, adding that researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar developed a draft genome of the date palm a few years ago.

"What we aim at now is to translate our basic research know-how into real-world applications," says Karsten Suhre from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

The Scan

International Team Proposes Checklist for Returning Genomic Research Results

Researchers in the European Journal of Human Genetics present a checklist to guide the return of genomic research results to study participants.

Study Presents New Insights Into How Cancer Cells Overcome Telomere Shortening

Researchers report in Nucleic Acids Research that ATRX-deficient cancer cells have increased activity of the alternative lengthening of telomeres pathway.

Researchers Link Telomere Length With Alzheimer's Disease

Within UK Biobank participants, longer leukocyte telomere length is associated with a reduced risk of dementia, according to a new study in PLOS One.

Nucleotide Base Detected on Near-Earth Asteroid

Among other intriguing compounds, researchers find the nucleotide uracil, a component of RNA sequences, in samples collected from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, as they report in Nature Communications.