Volume 14, Issue 10, October 2024

The effective size (Ne) is crucial in population genetics for assessing genetic diversity loss. Estimating Ne are limited. Hong et al. introduce ONeSAMP 3.0, an algorithm using approximate bayesian computation and local linear regression to estimate Ne from single population SNP data without extensive genetic information. Tested on simulated and real data, ONeSAMP 3.0 outperforms traditional methods and is adaptable to various biological contexts. Moreover, with parallel processing, it is both time and memory efficient, allowing for estimations for large datasets.

Chronic pain has an enormous impact on the quality of life of billions of patients, families, and caregivers worldwide. Current therapies do not adequately address pain for most patients. A basic understanding of the conserved genetic framework controlling pain may help us develop better, non-addictive pain therapies. Here, Hamoudi et al. identify new conserved and druggable analgesic targets using tissue-specific functional genomic screening of candidate “pain” genes in the fly.

Some cells, such as neurons, must exist for the lifetime of an organism in a non-cycling state. Here, Fogarty et al. examine how the expression of cell cycle genes is robustly kept off in postmitotic cells. Using the wings, eyes, and brain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, as well as published work in the mouse retina, the authors provide evidence that stable gene repression alongside chromatin accessibility changes cooperate to prevent ectopic re-activation of cell cycle gene expression in postmitotic cells.

In this manuscript, Coyle et al. report the discovery of Entomophthovirus, a virus infecting the fungal pathogen Entomophthora muscae. E. muscae itself infects flies, notably manipulating their behavior in various ways during the course of infection. The authors show that this virus infects E. muscae in laboratory cultures, providing evidence from RNA sequencing, electron microscopy, and patterns of RNA fragments generated by the fungal immune system to combat viral infection. Furthermore, they show that Entomophthovirus co-occurs with previously undetected E. muscae infection in published metagenomic studies. This study opens new questions about E. muscae infection and evolution.

The aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is the only extant member of the Daubentoniidae primate family. Versoza and Pfeifer present a novel, fully annotated, chromosome-level hybrid de novo assembly for the species – a community resource that will improve future conservation efforts as well as primate comparative analyses.

Plant breeding simulations have been used by breeders to assess the merits of alternative breeding strategies and assist in decision making. This paper introduces Python Breeding Optimizer and Simulator (PyBrOpS), a Python package capable of performing multi-objective optimization of breeding objectives and simulations of breeding pipelines. In this paper, Shrote and Thompson describe some of the main features of PyBrOpS and demonstrate its ability to map Pareto frontiers for breeding possibilities and perform multi-objective selection in a simulated breeding pipeline.