In a paper published online in advance in Nucleic Acids Research this week, Jiri Vohradsky from the Czech Republic Academy of Sciences' Institute of Microbiology presents a procedure for the stochastic simulation of gene expression, which he used to investigate the expression dynamics of yeast cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases. In his simulations, Vohradsky found that the "level of influence of individual regulators in control of the regulated genes is defined," he writes.
And researchers at the US Department of Defense Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute present an approach to reduce allelic bias in RNA-seq read-mapping based on the "construction of an enhanced reference genome that includes the alternative alleles at known polymorphic loci." In a Nucleic Acids Research paper published online in advance the team this week shows that "mapping to this enhanced reference reduced the read-mapping biases, leading to more reliable estimates of ASE [allele-specific expression]."