Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
In this Tools of the Trade article, Pablo Librado describes a novel computational method to infer the time between successive generations from genomic data, including ancient genomes, which offers new insights into the timing of evolutionary and demographic events.
A study in Science investigating bacterial defence mechanisms against phages reports a novel mode of gene regulation through reverse transcription of a non-coding RNA template, leading to the formation of a toxic repetitive gene.
Yimiao Qu and Kyle Loh discuss a 2004 paper by Xie et al., who demonstrated that B cells can be reprogrammed into macrophages through the enforced expression of a single transcription factor, providing insights into cellular plasticity and lineage conversion.
Filtering genomic data is a crucial step to ensure the quality and reliability of downstream analyses. The authors provide guidance on the choice of filtering strategies and thresholds, including filters that remove sequencing bases or reads, variants, loci, genotypes or individuals from genomic datasets to improve accuracy and reproducibility.
Despite their impact on human complex traits and diseases, gene–environment interactions (G × E) remain challenging to assess statistically. The authors review considerations for the conceptualization, methodology, interpretation and reporting of G × E studies, and provide recommendations on how to avoid common pitfalls.
In this Review, the authors summarize DNA packaging in bacteriophage, bacteria and eukaryotic cells. They describe the difficulties each system faces when packaging its DNA, outline the molecular motor components involved, and provide insights from new studies that reveal how DNA organization is achieved.
In this Review, Pamula and Lehmann describe how distinct membraneless germ granules organize the germ cell cytoplasm at different stages of the germline life cycle to determine germ cell identity, maintain genome integrity and regulate gamete differentiation.
