A novel role for Friend of GATA1 (FOG-1) in regulating cholesterol transport in murine erythropoiesis.

Friend of GATA1 (FOG-1) is an essential transcriptional co-factor of the master erythroid transcription factor GATA1. The knockout of the Zfpm1 gene, coding for FOG-1, results in early embryonic lethality due to anemia in mice, similar to the embryonic lethal phenotype of the Gata1 gene knockout. However, a detailed molecular analysis of the Zfpm1 knockout phenotype in erythropoiesis is presently incomplete.

Fusion Transcript Detection from Short-Read RNA-Seq.

Fusion proteins have been shown to play an important role in many different cancers and other diseases. While the causal mutation can often be found in the genome as a structural variant (SV), differentiating between normal variation within individuals and somatic variants with functional consequences can be time-consuming as well as expensive since it requires a whole-genome sequencing (WGS) method. RNA Sequencing (RNA-Seq) provides a much cheaper and more straightforward approach to the detection of functional somatic events such as overexpression of proto-oncogenes as well as gene fusion.

Combining Short- and Long-Read Sequencing Technologies to Identify SARS-CoV-2 Variants in Wastewater.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater was used to track the evolution and emergence of variant lineages and gauge infection levels in the community, informing appropriate public health responses without relying solely on clinical testing. As more sublineages were discovered, it increased the difficulty in identifying distinct variants in a mixed population sample, particularly those without a known lineage. Here, we compare the sequencing technology from Illumina and from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, in order to determine their efficacy at detecting variants of differing abundance, using 248 wastewater samples from various Quebec and Ontario cities.