This Week in Nature: Mar 29, 2007

In an editorial, Nature urges funding agencies to support the newly formed International Mouse Knockout Consortium, a group that aims to systematically knock out every single gene in the mouse genome to build a repository of mutant mice.

Three books on systems biology go under review by Eric Werner from the University of Oxford. The books include An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Uri Alon; Life: An Introduction to Complex Systems Biology by Kunihiko Kaneko; and Systems Biology: Properties of Reconstructed Networks by Bernhard Palsson.

In a paper from Jillian Banfield's lab at Berkeley, lead author Ian Lo describes work involving community genomics and proteomics in an acidophilic biofilm. "The findings suggest that exchange of large blocks of gene variants is crucial for the adaptation to specific ecological niches within the very acidic, metal-rich environment," according to the abstract.

A paper from lead author Istvan Albert at Penn State examines H2A.Z nucleosomes by sequencing 322,000 individual yeast nucleosomes to determine regional context.