OnScience

Research Article Title: G-quadruplex structures within the 3’ UTR of LINE-1 elements stimulate retrotransposition. Journal: Nature Str. Mol. Biol., 2017, aop. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.3367 Simple Short Explanation of the Work for Everyone:    Approximately half of our genome is originated from mobile DNA elements, which are DNA segments that insert themselves at different positions in a “host” genome they infiltrate. Some mobile DNA elements increase their genomic copy numbers via a copy-and-paste mechanism, extending the length of our genome in an evolutionary timescale. In this study, we present an evidence that a specific guanine(G)-reach region in LINE-1 retrotransposons, type of mobile DNA elements that played a significant role in shaping mammalian genome architecture, has functional role in LINE-1 mobility.    By a thorough dusting of the low-complexity G-rich regions in ancient LINE-1 remnants, dead at different time epochs, we revealed the or...

Research Article Title: Single genome retrieval of context-dependent variability in mutation rates for human germline. Journal: BMC Genomics, 2017, 18, 81. http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-016-3440-5 (first deposited in bioRxiv on 10 August 2015) Simple Short Explanation of the Work for Everyone:    Our genome is a very long DNA strand holding a sequence of nucleobases. Those nucleobases are of four types - letters A, T, G and C - and there are ~3.5 billion such letters in our genome. However, the letters do not stay the same over evolutionary timescale (millions to billions of years), and very slowly change/swap (or, as we call it, mutate) in our genome, driving the evolution of life. The work presents a technique to retrieve the speed with which those letters change/swap by accounting the full extent on how the neighbouring letters tune the speed. We use only a single genome, rather than requiring thousands of genomes as needed for such ...