In this week's Nature Biotechnology, a team of Dutch scientists report on the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in functional genetic screens for enhancer elements in the human genome. By targeting the genome-editing molecules to transcription factor binding sites in enhancer regions, the investigators were able to identify several functional enhancer elements, with two found to have roles in cancer. The work, the authors note, extends the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to studying the functions of the non-coding genome.
And in Nature Genetics, a University of Chicago-led group reports on the genomic analysis of 38 species of the human pathogen Legionella pneumophila, which is responsible for the Legionnaires' disease. By sequencing, assembling, and characterizing the genomes of the species, the scientists identified large and diverse effector repertoires for the pathogen, most of which did not overlap, as well as numerous new conserved effector domains and domain combinations. GenomeWeb has more on this study here.