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Welcome to the October 12, 2018 installment of Research Roundup, a recurring snapshot of recent studies published by scientists at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and their collaborators.

Colitis clues in children's microbiomes

Forecasting how a child with ulcerative colitis (UC) will respond to treatment is a tricky proposition, but the microbiome may hold useful clues. To help find them, Melanie Schirmer, Hera Vlamakis, associate member Curtis Huttenhower, core institute member and Ó³»­´«Ã½ Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program co-director Ramnik Xavier, and colleagues from the study tracked the gut microbiomes of more than 400 children with UC for a year after diagnosis. They found clear associations between microbiome composition and disease severity at diagnosis, and between composition changes and treatment response. Their findings, published in , could help doctors use the microbiome as a therapeutic resource, and as a prognostic biomarker. Learn more in a Ó³»­´«Ã½ news story.

The functional architecture of uncommon alleles

Uncommon genetic variants can have disproportionately large effect sizes on complex traits, providing a valuable source of biological insight, but their relative contributions from coding and noncoding regions of the genome remain unclear. To examine this architecture, a team led by postdoctoral scholar Steven Gazal and Ó³»­´«Ã½ associate member Alkes Price in the Program in Medical and Population Genetics compared the heritability contribution of uncommon and common genetic variants underlying 40 traits in the UK Biobank, across a broad set of coding and non-coding regions of the genome. The study offers guidance for the design of association studies targeting low-frequency or rare genetic variants. Read more about their results in .

To learn more about research conducted at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, visit broadinstitute.org/publications, and keep an eye on broadinstitute.org/news.