The term Ecological Armageddon was first coined when researchers documented a drastic 75% decline of insect biomass in protected nature areas over the course of nearly three decades [1]. Since then a worldwide decline of insects has been corroborated by a concerning number of studies [2–4]. Given the crucial roles of insects in the food chain, pollination, and nutrient cycling, this unprecedented…

ATRX is a chromatin remodeler and transcriptional regulator that belongs to the SWItch/Sucrose Non-Fermentable (SWI/SNF) protein family [1] discovered in patients bearing the ATRX syndrome [2]. Patients with the ATRX syndrome display severe mental retardation, genital abnormalities, dysmorphic facial appearance, and α-thalassemia [3]. This has been sustained by several mouse studies, where mouse…

Determining the mechanisms responsible for maintaining genetic variation in natural populations has been a central goal of evolutionary biologists for more than a century [1]. In the past decade, the availability of population genomic datasets for numerous species has allowed this question to be directly evaluated in natural populations, reigniting historical debates regarding the role of genetic…

Behaviors represent the ultimate expression of the nervous system. They are also fitness (see Glossary) determinants and present the stage on which adaptive evolution unfolds. From a genetic perspective, behaviors are complex traits that arise from genetic context-dependent and environmentally sensitive interactions between multiple segregating alleles [1–7]. Behaviors can be broadly categorized…

About 2000 genera of microorganisms are distributed in the gastrointestinal tract of the normal human body [1], and the total number of bacteria is approximately 3.8 × 1013 in the 70 kg ‘reference man’, which is approximately the same number as human cells [2]. The genomes of the gut microbiota (see Glossary, also known as the gut microbiome) contain approximately five million genes and thus have…

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) (see Glossary) are small noncoding RNAs that play an essential role in gene silencing to control the translation of mRNAs. The miRNA life cycle involves numerous genes, including DROSHA, DGCR8 (DiGeorge syndrome critical region 8), DICER1, and AGO1/2 (encoding Argonaute protein 1/2). Although this biological process has been extensively studied since the early 2000s, it was…

Distilling insomnia genome-wide association study (GWAS) variants, Palermo and colleagues identified several genes that participate in sleep regulation in two different model organisms. This workflow sets off an innovative strategy to extract biological relevance from large human genomic databases.

In the past decade, genomics and related technologies have become essential for studying the complex genetic architectures of various human diseases [1–3]. The continued decline in the cost of sequencing and the rapid growth of computational methods for genome interpretation have enabled the regular use of genomics in the clinic [4–6]. Furthermore, genomics-based approaches promise to usher us…