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A team led by Pablo Tamayo and Jill Mesirov of the ӳý and University of California, San Diego, and ӳý bioinformatician Arthur Liberzon, has generated “hallmark” gene sets from the (MSigDB), one of the most comprehensive and widely used databases for gene set enrichment analysis. Through both automated and manual approaches, the team curated a refined collection of MSigDB gene sets that reduce redundancy and produce more robust analyses. Their paper is published in .

The human brain is notoriously difficult to study. The organ is home to billions of cells that come in hundreds of flavors, woven into a network of trillions of dynamic cellular connections that make it one of the most complex structures in the body. It is the seat of decidedly human traits like language, creativity, and higher cognition that set us apart from other organisms, making animal models less than ideal for studying human illnesses like psychiatric disease.

In a new paper published online by , researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and the ӳý systematically investigated somatic copy number alterations of noncoding regions across cancers, integrating genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic data.

The team found six super-enhancer regions that are focally amplified across different cancer types, including two that are associated with overexpression of the MYC oncogene, suggesting that this type of modification may be a common mechanism activating cancer driver genes. The team, which was led by senior author Matthew Meyerson and first authors Xiaoyang Zhang, Peter Choi, and Joshua Francis – all of ӳý and DFCI – also used genome-editing technologies to validate the oncogenic function of these focally amplified super-enhancers.