Multiple human diseases are associated with a liquid-to-solid phase transition resulting in the formation of amyloid fibers or protein aggregates. Here, we present an alternative mechanism for cellular toxicity based on a ...

A goal of biology is to predict how mutations combine to alter phenotypes, fitness and disease. It is often assumed that mutations combine additively or with interactions that can be predicted. Here, we show using simulations ...

Non-additive interactions between mutations occur extensively and also change across conditions, making genetic prediction a difficult challenge. To better understand the plasticity of genetic interactions (epistasis), we ...

Many eukaryotic genes contain embedded antisense transcripts and repetitive sequences of unknown function. We report that male germline-specific expression of an antisense transcript contained in an intron of C. elegans ...

Cancer genome sequencing has revealed considerable variation in somatic mutation rates across the human genome, with mutation rates elevated in heterochromatic late replicating regions and reduced in early replicating ...

The molecular details underlying the time-dependent assembly of protein complexes in cellular networks, such as those that occur during differentiation, are largely unexplored. Focusing on the calcium-induced differentiation ...

The effects of cell-to-cell variation (noise) in gene expression have proven difficult to quantify because of the mechanistic coupling of noise to mean expression. To independently quantify the effects of changes in mean ...

The classic two-hit model posits that both alleles of a tumor suppressor gene (TSG) must be inactivated to cause cancer. In contrast, for some oncogenes and haploinsufficient TSGs, a single genetic alteration can suffice ...

Background: More than 50% of human genes initiate transcription from CpG dinucleotide-rich regions referred to as CpG islands. These genes show differences in their patterns of transcription initiation, and have been ...

Background: The genetic code is redundant, meaning that most amino acids can be encoded by more than one codon. Highly expressed genes tend to use optimal codons to increase the accuracy and speed of translation. Thus, ...