In this week’s Nature, Spanish and American researchers report on the sequencing of 79 wild- and captive-born great apes from all great ape species and seven subspecies as part of an effort to understand their genetic diversity. The work provides a genome-wide view of the major patterns of evolutionary diversification among the great apes, revealing the level of genetic variation, subpopulation structure, patterns of selection, and differences in the rate of gene loss.
GenomeWeb Daily News has more on this work here.
Meanwhile, in Nature Genetics, a multi-institute team publishes the results of a study in which they sequenced the genomes from three Brassicaceae species and their joint analysis with previously sequenced genomes of six other crucifers including Arabidopsis thaliana. The researchers found that at least 17 percent of the Arabidopsis genome is under selection, with nearly one quarter of the sequence under selection lying outside of coding regions. Much of this sequence can be localized to approximately 90,000 conserved noncoding sequences that show evidence of transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation.