Despite rapid advances in reading the genetic code of living organisms, scientists still face a major challenge today—knowing a gene’s sequence does not automatically reveal what it does. Even in simple, well-studied bacteria like Escherichia coli (better known as E. coli), about one-quarter of the genes have no known function. Traditional approaches—turning off one gene at a time and studying the effects—are slow, laborious, and sometimes inconclusive due to gene redundancy.

Researchers from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) and collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have developed a new technique called Dual transposon sequencing (Dual Tn-seq), which allows for rapid identification of genetic interactions. It maps how bacterial genes work together, revealing vulnerabilities that could be targeted by future antibiotics.

“This is like mapping the social network for bacterial genes,” said Assistant Professor Chris Sham Lok To from the Infectious Diseases Translational Research Program and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, NUS Medicine, who led the study. “We can now see which genes depend on each other, and which pairs of genes bacteria can’t live without. That’s exactly the insight we need for next-generation antibiotics.”

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is one of the most aggressive and hardest forms of breast cancer to treat, but a new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine suggests a surprising way to stop it from spreading. Researchers have discovered that an enzyme called EZH2 drives TNBC cells to divide abnormally, which enables them to relocate to distant organs. The preclinical study also found drugs that block EZH2 could restore order to dividing cells and thwart the spread of TNBC cells.

“Metastasis is the main reason patients with triple negative breast cancer face poor survival odds,” said senior author Dr. Vivek Mittal, Ford-Isom Research Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery and member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Our study suggests a new therapeutic approach to block metastasis before it starts and help patients overcome this deadly cancer.”

The findings, published Oct. 2 in Cancer Discovery, challenge the popular notion that cancer treatments should boost cell division errors already occurring in tumor cells beyond the breaking point to induce cell death. When normal cells divide, the chromosomes—DNA “packages” carrying genes—are duplicated and split evenly into two daughter cells. This process goes haywire in many cancer cells, leading to chromosomal instability: too many, too few, or jumbled chromosomes in multiple daughter cells.

Our ancient past isn’t always buried history. When it comes to our DNA, nearly 9% of the human genome is made up of leftover genetic material from ancient viruses (called endogenous retroviruses or ERVs) that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and became permanently integrated into our genetic code. In a new study published in the journal Nature, scientists have demonstrated that one piece of this viral junk is essential for the earliest stages of human life.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery leveraged two main studies—one focused on behavior and one focused on genetics—to highlight the correlation between participants’ musical rhythm abilities and developmental speech-language disorders.

These disorders include developmental language disorder, dyslexia and stuttering, among others.

Evidence showed that deficiency in musical rhythm perception is a “modest but consistent risk factor for developmental speech, language and reading disorders,” according to the study’s lead author, Srishti Nayak, Ph.D., assistant professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

An innovative use of skin cells could provide a route for gay couples or women with fertility problems to have children that both partners are genetically related to