A common virus discovered in human gut metagenomes
Odds are, there’s a virus living inside your gut that has gone undetected by scientists for hundreds, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of years. A new study led by Utrecht Bioinformatics Center scientist Dr. Bas E. Dutilh has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage. […]
UBC kick-off symposium was a great success
On September 15th 2014, the UBC celebrated it’s kick-off with a symposium. The UBC was overwhelmed by the enthusiastic registrations for this symposium. Where we at first estimated that about 100-130 people would attend, about 200 people registered and came to listen to four great talks given by the invited speakers. We want to thank […]
Evolution of Functional Diversification within Quasispecies
According to quasispecies theory, high mutation rates limit the amount of information genomes can store (Eigen’s Paradox), whereas genomes with higher degrees of neutrality may be selected even at the expenses of higher replication rates (the “survival of the flattest” effect). Introducing a complex genotype to phenotype map, such as RNA folding, epitomizes such effect […]
Large-scale genetic perturbations reveal regulatory networks and an abundance of gene-specific repressors.
To understand regulatory systems, it would be useful to uniformly determine how different components contribute to the expression of all other genes. We therefore monitored mRNA expression genome-wide, for individual deletions of one-quarter of yeast genes, focusing on (putative) regulators. The resulting genetic perturbation signatures reflect many different properties. These include the architecture of protein […]
Systematic integrative genomics, transcriptomics and ultra-deep proteomics analysis reveals novel insight in disease biology
Experts in proteomics from Utrecht University and next-generation DNA sequencing from the Hubrecht Institute/UMC Utrecht collaborated in a study to systematically determine the consequences of genetic variation on the transcriptome and proteome. The researchers applied ultra-deep quantitative proteomics, whole genome sequencing and RNA-seq to liver tissues from different inbred rat strains. One of these inbred […]