Metagenomic analysis of viruses in toilet waste from long distance flights-A new procedure for global infectious disease surveillance.

Human viral pathogens are a major public health threat. Reliable information that accurately describes and characterizes the global occurrence and transmission of human viruses is essential to support national and global priority setting, public health actions, and treatment decisions. However, large areas of the globe are currently without surveillance due to limited health care infrastructure and lack of international cooperation.

Algorithm for post-clustering curation of DNA amplicon data yields reliable biodiversity estimates.

DNA metabarcoding is promising for cost-effective biodiversity monitoring, but reliable diversity estimates are difficult to achieve and validate. Here we present and validate a method, called LULU, for removing erroneous molecular operational taxonomic units (OTUs) from community data derived by high-throughput sequencing of amplified marker genes. LULU identifies errors by combining sequence similarity and co-occurrence patterns.

Importance of nonsynonymous OCA2 variants in human eye color prediction.

Background: The color of the eyes is one of the most prominent phenotypes in humans and it is often used to describe the appearance of an individual. The intensity of pigmentation in the iris is strongly associated with one single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs12913832:A>G that is located in the promotor region of OCA2 (OMIM #611409). Nevertheless, many eye colors cannot be explained by only considering rs12913832:A>G.

Next-generation sequencing of multiple individuals per barcoded library by deconvolution of sequenced amplicons using endonuclease fragment analysis.

The simultaneous sequencing of samples from multiple individuals increases the efficiency of next-generation sequencing (NGS) while also reducing costs. Here we describe a novel and simple approach for sequencing DNA from multiple individuals per barcode. Our strategy relies on the endonuclease digestion of PCR amplicons prior to library preparation, creating a specific fragment pattern for each individual that can be resolved after sequencing.

The effect of gender on eye colour variation in European populations and an evaluation of the IrisPlex prediction model.

In two recent studies of Spanish individuals, gender was suggested as a factor that contributes to human eye colour variation. However, gender did not improve the predictive accuracy on blue, intermediate and brown eye colours when gender was included in the IrisPlex model. In this study, we investigate the role of gender as a factor that contributes to eye colour variation and suggest that the gender effect on eye colour is population specific.