In PNAS, there's no shortage of clinically oriented research. This paper from senior author Jeremy Nicholson and team use pharmacometabonomics to identify metabolic interactions in humans that depend on their microbiome; they urge an assessment of these microbial communities as "an integral part of pharmaceutical development and of personalized health care." Ian Wilson offers a commentary.
Meanwhile, this paper links mutations in the BLK gene to maturity-onset diabetes of the young after an effort to resequence 732 kb of genomic sequence in six affected families, and this paper suggests that "chromosome 14 harbors tumor suppressor genes associated with [nasopharyngeal carcinoma] and that a candidate gene, MIPOL1, is associated with tumor development."
Eric Brouzes from Harvard and RainDance Technologies is lead author on a paper about using a droplet microfluidic platform for high-throughput screening of single mammalian cells. The research was validated "by conducting a droplet-based cytotoxicity screen," the authors write.
Scientists used genome-wide location analysis to demonstrate that the yeast ortholog Sub1 is important for optimal transcription using RNA polymerase III; in another paper, researchers studied the S. cerevisiae genome and found that phosphorylation of the RNA polymerase II C-terminal domain by TFIIH kinase is surprisingly not essential.