In this week's Nature Methods, University of Utah researchers present GIGGLE, a genomics search engine designed to identify and rank the significance of genomic loci shared between query features and thousands of genome interval files. Like search engines for the Internet, GIGGLE provides users with the ability to conduct large-scale comparisons of their results with thousands of reference datasets and genome annotations in seconds, the authors say. At three orders of magnitude faster than existing methods, the tool "extends the accessibility and utility of resources such as ENCODE, Roadmap Epigenomics, and GTeX by facilitating data integration and hypothesis generation," they add.
And in Nature Genetics, a team led by scientists from the University of Copenhagen reports the identification of a gene variant that associated with a significantly increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes in individuals from Greenland. The variant is found in the gene ADCY3 and disrupts a splice acceptor site, and its carriers have decreased ADCY3 RNA expression. Additionally, an enrichment of rare ADCY3 loss-of-function variants was observed among individuals with type 2 diabetes in trans-ancestry cohorts. GenomeWeb has more on this and related articles, here.