In this week's Science, investigators at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, and at the Queen's University in Belfast report on "a role for the Arabidopsis RNA silencing enzyme DICER-LIKE 4, DCL4, in transcription termination of an endogenous Arabidopsis gene, FCA." The John Innes-Queen's University team says that DCL4 "promotes transcription termination of the Arabidopsis FCA gene, reducing the amount of aberrant RNA produced from the locus."
An interdisciplinary team from the University of California, San Diego, discusses the genetic organization of the human cerebral cortex in Science this week, saying that "boundaries of the genetic divisions [correspond] largely to meaningful structural and functional regions; however, the divisions [represent] previously undescribed phenotypes different from conventional (non-genetically based) parcellation systems."
Over in Science Translational Medicine, researchers in London discuss intratumor heterogeneity, saying that it "may contribute to this failure by initiating phenotypic diversity enabling drug resistance to emerge and by introducing tumor sampling bias." Further, the team considers how "envisaging tumor growth as a Darwinian tree with the trunk representing ubiquitous mutations and the branches representing heterogeneous mutations" could help researchers develop effective drugs and identify predictive biomarkers for response.