Uncovering the genetic architectures of brain morphology offers valuable insights into brain development and disease. Genetic association studies of brain morphological phenotypes have discovered thousands of loci. However, interpretation of these loci presents a significant challenge. One potential solution is exploring the genetic overlap between...

Bacteriophages and plasmids drive horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in bacteria. Phage-plasmids (P-Ps) are hybrids of plasmid and phages. Pfeifer and Rocha recently demonstrated that P-Ps can serve as intermediates in gene exchanges between these two types of elements, identified categories of preferentially transferred genes, and reconstructed gene flows...

Progressive recombination loss is a common feature of sex chromosomes. Yet, the evolutionary drivers of this phenomenon remain a mystery. For decades, differences in trait optima between sexes (sexual antagonism) have been the favoured hypothesis, but convincing evidence is lacking. Recent years have seen a surge of alternative hypotheses to explain...

The ability to tolerate and recover from desiccation is an adaptation that permitted primitive plants to colonize land, and it persists in select species today. Zhang et al. dissected desiccation tolerance in moss species, and traced a key regulator through evolution to identify a conserved mechanism of water sensing in angiosperms.

Using genetic methods, aneuploidies can be detected in ancient human remains, which is so far the only way to reliably prove their existence in the past. As highlighted in recent studies by Rohrlach et al. and by Anastasiadou et al., this initial step enables a deeper exploration of the history of rare diseases, encompassing the social and historical...

Population-scale sequencing efforts have catalogued substantial genetic variation in humans such that variant discovery dramatically outpaces interpretation. We discuss how single-cell sequencing is poised to reveal genetic mechanisms at a rate that may soon approach that of variant discovery. The functional genomics toolkit is sufficiently modular...