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This Week in Nature: Oct 27, 2016

In this week's Nature, a team led by University of Arizona researchers describes the arrival of HIV to New York City around 1970 and used a combination of historical data and genomic analyses to clear the name of a man previously identified as the source of the disease in North America. By sequencing eight full-length HIV genomes from serum samples collected in the US from the 1970s, the investigators showed that the strain of HIV that infects men who have sex with men likely emerged from an existing Caribbean epidemic. Further, by recovering the HIV-1 genome from the man known as "Patient Zero," who had been named as the first person infected with this lineage of the virus, the investigators found no evidence that he was the primary case in the US or for this particular HIV strain as a whole. GenomeWeb has more on this study here.

And in Nature Methods, an international research team presents a benchmarking study of high-throughput sequencing data compression tools using an automated framework. The scientists found "no overall winner that can perform well on each data type and under every performance measure" used, and concluded that an integrated solution using different approaches based on the input data types and specific applications for the data would yield the best outcome for both raw an aligned sequence data.