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Singling out microbes in the mountains of metagenomic data from complex samples, such as soil or seawater, is computationally intensive. To address this challenge, a team of researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½, led by institute member and senior author Eric Alm, and graduate student and first author Brian Cleary, created a new method – latent strain analysis (LSA) – that separates sequencing reads into biologically informed partitions and enables assembly of individual genomes, including those of bacteria that are relatively low-abundance. The team also showed that LSA is sensitive enough to separate reads from several strains of the same species. can be found in Nature Biotechnology.

Working with the Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Proteomics Platform, a team led by Norbert Perrimon of Harvard Medical School and the Ó³»­´«Ã½ built a novel proteomic mapping platform that they used in fruit flies. The approach uses a new protein labeling technique that is applied to live tissues, enabling the characterization of organelle proteomes. The team used the technique to map the mitochondrial matrix proteome in Drosophila muscle and then built , a database of Drosophila mitochondrial proteins with subcompartmental annotation. Read more in .

Monoclonal antibodies that target cytotoxic T lymphocyte–associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) have shown great clinical benefit in patients with metastatic melanoma, generating a long-term response in 20 percent of treated cases. Last week , an international team that included researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ released the largest comprehensive genomic study aimed at identifying the factors that determine response to CTLA-4 blockade therapy in melanoma patients.

Ó³»­´«Ã½ and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston will become the flagship data-production centers for a pioneering five-year project supported by the National Cancer Institute to characterize the genomic changes found in tumors. GCC funding comes via a research subcontract with Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc., operations and technical support contractor for NCI’s Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.