Investigators at the US National Institutes of Health this week show that temporal shifts in the skin microbiome are associated with atopic dermatitis disease flares and treatment. Among others, the NIH team shows that in atopic dermatitis disease state, "the proportion of Staphylococcus sequences, particularly S. aureus, was greater during disease flares than at baseline or post-treatment and correlated with worsened disease severity." In addition, "representation of the skin commensal S. epidermidis also significantly increased during flares," the team found.
The Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy's Tim Reddy and his colleagues report data they generated to assess the genome-wide differential allelic occupancy of 24 sequence-specific transcription factors in a human lymphoblastoid cell line. Reddy et al. found that "overall, 5 percent of human TF [transcription factor] binding sites have an allelic imbalance in occupancy," they write in a Genome Research paper published online in advance this week.
In another advance access paper, investigators at the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service report their use of a read-depth approach based on next-gen sequencing to assess genome-wide copy-number differences among five taurine and one indicine cattle. The USDA-ARS team reports in Genome Research the "first individualized cattle CNV and segmental duplication maps and genome-wide gene copy number estimates," which it says will "enable future CNV studies into highly duplicated regions in the cattle genome."