An editorial in this week's Nature points out that the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which Congress is expected to pass, excludes military personnel from its protection. Already, the editorial adds, the defense department discharges some employees without benefits if their health problems can be attributed to a genetic predisposition. Another editorial encourages biologists to play well with physicists and cultivate two-way relationships where their collaborative research enlightens both the biologists and the physicists. "Otherwise, calling such work 'interdisciplinary' is little more than lip service," the editorial says. John Atkins and Pavel Baranov write about the flexibility of the genetic code in a News and Views piece. In addition to the 20 common amino acids, a few others such as selenocysteine and pyrrolysine have been found encoded in a few genes, showing that there is more to the genetic code and codons than originally thought. Atkins and Baranov draw on Yan Zhang and Vadim Gladyshev's report in Nucleic Acids Research that identified a bacterium with an usually large proportion of proteins with selenocysteine and pyrrolysine. In a paper, Perlegen's Kelly Frazer and collaborators report creating a genome-wide haplotype map of the common laboratory mouse from 8.27 million SNPs. The researchers hope that this map will provide insight into the evolutionary history of the lab mouse.
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