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Chemical probes — small molecules that interact with a protein’s function — can be powerful tools to reveal the roles of targeted proteins in health and disease, but probes are sometimes of low quality, and high-quality ones can be misused. , a multi-institutional team, including Ó³»­´«Ã½â€™s Stuart Schreiber, Nathanael Gray, and Joanne Kotz, describe plans for a new community-driven wiki-like site, called the , that crowdsources medicinal chemistry and pharmacology expertise to catalog the best chemical probes for a given protein target. The resource aims to support research in basic biology and the pursuit of new therapeutics.

Native Americans living in the Amazon bear an unexpected genetic connection to indigenous people in Australasia, suggesting a previously unknown wave of migration to the Americas thousands of years ago, a new study has found.

  by researchers from the Ó³»­´«Ã½ of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggests that esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) progresses differently than previously suspected.

Variation in human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes accounts for one-half of the genetic risk in type 1 diabetes (T1D), but scientists have found it challenging to pinpoint the specific variants that account for this risk. This week, a team led by Soumya Raychaudhuri and Xinli Hu of Ó³»­´«Ã½ and Brigham and Women’s Hospital published a study that used new genotype imputation methods to identify independent amino acid positions, as well as interactions within the HLA region, that account for T1D risk. Taking this approach, they found that three key amino acid positions in HLA-DQ and HLA-DR molecules drive the vast majority of T1D risk. To learn more, online in Nature Genetics.