Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

This Week in PLOS: Jan 26, 2015

For a study in PLOS Genetics, University of Toronto researchers consider potential ties between disease- or trait-related genetic variants and protein post-translational modification. Based on variant patterns in 7,500 human genomes, the team saw signs of negative selection involving regions of the genome related to post-translational modification. Many of the same sites seemed to overlap with variants falling in disease-related genes, the study authors found, including Noonan syndrome-associated variants that appear to interfere with protein phosphorylation.

A team from Sweden and Germany used RNA sequencing to track expression patterns in samples of the foodborne pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis collected from mice during different stages of infection. As they report in PLOS Pathogens, the researchers detected transcriptional reprogramming in the bug during the shift to persistent infection, including a dip in expression by virulence genes and a jump in genes related to stress response and other features found in the intestinal environment.

The expression levels of at least half a dozen microRNAs show promise for distinguishing between pancreatic neoplasms prone to progression to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas, according to a PLOS One study. Researchers from the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center assessed genome-wide miRNA expression levels in 19 high-risk and nine low-risk intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms. The search uncovered lower-than-usual levels of six miRNAs in the high-risk IPMNs — findings they confirmed in another 13 high-risk and eight low-risk IPMN samples.