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In the flagship article, The ENCODE Project Consortium et al.5 provide a bird's-eye view of the updated encyclopedia, which contains newly added data sets from 6,000 experiments, performed on around 1,300 samples. By integrating these data sets, the consortium has created an online registry of candidate CREs. Most are classified as promoters or enhancers - CREs respectively located at or some distance from the genomic site at which transcription of a gene begins. The consortium tracked the activity of each candidate CRE, along with the proteins that bind to it in many different samples from various tissues. They used chromatin-looping data to link enhancers to genes that they might regulate. This online registry marks a true milestone, turning an overwhelming amount of genomic information into a searchable, filterable and retrievable encyclopedia of DNA elements, which is freely accessible at https://screen.encodeproject.org.

Breeders have been working to develop new Miscanthus hybrids for years, but the clonal crop's sterility, complex genome, and long time to maturity make conventional breeding difficult. In a new study, University of Illinois researchers mine the crop's vast genomic potential in an effort to speed up the breeding process and maximize its most desirable traits.

The phenomenon where a mutation overrides another genetic defect is known as genetic suppression and it is not unique to yeasts. Genome sequencing studies have revealed individuals who remain healthy despite carrying catastrophic inborn errors whose usual harmful effects are somehow masked by other unknown changes in their genomes.

Wheat is a staple food across all parts of the world and is one of the most widely grown and consumed crops7. As the human population continues to grow, wheat production must increase by more than 50% over current levels by 2050 to meet demand7. Efforts to increase wheat production may be aided by comprehensive genomic resources from global breeding programs to identify within-species allelic diversity and determine the best allele combinations to produce superior cultivars2,8.

A sweeping effort to map a hospital's microorganisms has found that infectious pathogens hide in a place that's all about cleaning: the sink. Niranjan Nagarajan at the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues sampled bacteria from bed rails, sinks and other sites in a Singapore hospital. Microbes that tend to grow in slimy 'biofilms' and cause hospital-acquired infections were prevalent on sink traps and faucet aerators, whereas skin-dwelling bacteria were abundant on objects, such as door knobs and bed rails, that are often touched. Frequently touched sites harboured multidrug-resistant microbes such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which might persist in the hospital environment for more than eight years, the team suggested.