Causal discovery reveals complex patterns of drought-induced displacement.

The increasing frequency and severity of droughts present a significant risk to vulnerable regions of the globe, potentially leading to substantial human displacement in extreme situations. Drought-induced displacement is a complex and multifaceted issue that can perpetuate cycles of poverty, exacerbate food and water scarcity, and reinforce socio-economic inequalities. However, our understanding of human mobility in drought scenarios is currently limited, inhibiting accurate predictions and effective policy responses.

Exploring interactions between socioeconomic context and natural hazards on human population displacement.

Climate change is leading to more extreme weather hazards, forcing human populations to be displaced. We employ explainable machine learning techniques to model and understand internal displacement flows and patterns from observational data alone. For this purpose, a large, harmonized, global database of disaster-induced movements in the presence of floods, storms, and landslides during 2016-2021 is presented.

VISMapper: ultra-fast exhaustive cartography of viral insertion sites for gene therapy.

Background: The possibility of integrating viral vectors to become a persistent part of the host genome makes them a crucial element of clinical gene therapy. However, viral integration has associated risks, such as the unintentional activation of oncogenes that can result in cancer. Therefore, the analysis of integration sites of retroviral vectors is a crucial step in developing safer vectors for therapeutic use.

HGVA: the Human Genome Variation Archive.

High-profile genomic variation projects like the 1000 Genomes project or the Exome Aggregation Consortium, are generating a wealth of human genomic variation knowledge which can be used as an essential reference for identifying disease-causing genotypes. However, accessing these data, contrasting the various studies and integrating those data in downstream analyses remains cumbersome. The Human Genome Variation Archive (HGVA) tackles these challenges and facilitates access to genomic data for key reference projects in a clean, fast and integrated fashion.

A new parallel pipeline for DNA methylation analysis of long reads datasets.

Background: DNA methylation is an important mechanism of epigenetic regulation in development and disease. New generation sequencers allow genome-wide measurements of the methylation status by reading short stretches of the DNA sequence (Methyl-seq). Several software tools for methylation analysis have been proposed over recent years.