SCIENCE: 31. 5. 2013

SCIENCE: Italian Parliament Orders €3 Million Trial of Disputed Therapy

"The Italian Parliament has decided that the administration of a controversial stem cell treatment for neurodegenerative diseases, provided by the Stamina Foundation in Turin, can continue—although on only a small scale. Lawmakers also ordered a formal clinical trial of the therapy and allocated €3 million to pay for it. The law, opposed by many stem cell scientists, became official after it was approved by Italy's Chamber of Deputies on 20 May and by the Senate 2 days later. Although some patients say that they have benefited from the treatment, researchers contend that the Stamina Foundation's therapy hasn't been properly described, let alone shown to be effective."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6136/1028.summary

NATURE: Tepid showing for genomics X prize

"It was never meant to be a piece of cake — but neither was it meant to be a flop. Yet as the 31 May registration deadline looms for the Archon Genomics X Prize — a challenge to sequence 100 complete human genomes in 30 days at unparallelled accuracy and low cost — only two teams have entered.

The lacklustre showing is a testament to both the difficulty of the challenge and the maturation of the DNA-sequencing industry in the seven years since the prize was first conceived, genetics and innovation researchers say.

“The business has become bigger than the prize,” says Jonathan Rothberg, founder of the sequencing company Ion Torrent in Guilford, Connecticut, which was acquired in 2010 by Life Technologies in Carlsbad, California — which was, in turn, recently snapped up for US$13.6 billion by Thermo Fisher in Waltham, Massachusetts. Ion Torrent plans to compete, but other firms have apparently decided that they have little to gain.

Yet the goal of the prize — to drive down the cost of sequencing while improving its quality — matters just as much as it did in October 2006, when the X Prize Foundation, based in Playa Vista, California, first announced the challenge, experts say. Although sequencing costs have fallen drastically (see ‘Plummeting costs’), that decline has plateaued recently."

http://www.nature.com/news/tepid-showing-for-genomics-x-prize-1.13081

NATURE: The Norway spruce genome sequence and conifer genome evolution

"Conifers have dominated forests for more than 200 million years and are of huge ecological and economic importance. Here we present the draft assembly of the 20-gigabase genome of Norway spruce (Picea abies), the first available for any gymnosperm. The number of well-supported genes (28,354) is similar to the >100 times smaller genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, and there is no evidence of a recent whole-genome duplication in the gymnosperm lineage. Instead, the large genome size seems to result from the slow and steady accumulation of a diverse set of long-terminal repeat transposable elements, possibly owing to the lack of an efficient elimination mechanism. Comparative sequencing of Pinus sylvestris, Abies sibirica, Juniperus communis, Taxus baccata and Gnetum gnemon reveals that the transposable element diversity is shared among extant conifers. Expression of 24-nucleotide small RNAs, previously implicated in transposable element silencing, is tissue-specific and much lower than in other plants. We further identify numerous long (>10,000 base pairs) introns, gene-like fragments, uncharacterized long non-coding RNAs and short RNAs. This opens up new genomic avenues for conifer forestry and breeding."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7451/full/nature12211.html