In a paper published online in advance in PNAS this week, investigators at the University of California, Davis, "describe a unique technique for rapidly creating recombinant doubled haploid populations in Arabidopsis thaliana: centromere-mediated genome elimination." The team says its approach shows that "haploid populations offer a rapid, easy alternative to RILs [recombinant inbred lines] for Arabidopsis genetic analysis."
Elsewhere in this week's Early Edition, a team led by researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presents genetic evidence of "a distinct lineage of influenza A virus from bats." The CDC-led team says that "despite its divergence from known influenza A viruses, the bat virus is compatible for genetic exchange with human influenza viruses in human cells, suggesting the potential capability for reassortment and contributions to new pandemic or panzootic influenza A viruses."
Investigators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City this week show that REST-dependent epigenetic remodeling plays a role in neurodegeneration associated with ischemic stroke. The authors show that REST binds a subset of so-called transcriptionally responsive genes, and that it "assembles with CoREST, mSin3A, histone deacetylases 1 and 2, histone methyl-transferase G9a, and methyl CpG binding protein 2 at the promoters of target genes, where it orchestrates epigenetic remodeling and gene silencing."
Finally, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and at the University at Albany in New York show that there are "multiple self-splicing introns in the 16S rRNA genes of giant sulfur bacteria" in a PNAS paper published online in advance this week. "The detection of elongated 16S rRNA genes has profound implications for common methods in molecular ecology and may cause systematic biases in several techniques," the authors write.