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This week in the journal Nature, Ó³»­´«Ã½ scientists Nathan Yozwiak, Stephen Schaffner, and Pardis Sabeti shared lessons they have learned from sequencing and sharing genomic data on the Ebola virus during the ongoing outbreak in West Africa. In , the researchers called on the international scientific and medical communities to establish new principles for sharing data during epidemics. The also covered the story.

In 1610, Galileo Galilei set a scientific precedent for the next half millennium: he published his notebooks. , as the publication was officially dubbed, documented Galilei’s observation of several astronomical features, including the orbit of Jupiter’s moons around the planet and the play of light and shadow on the earth’s moon.

The completion of the human reference genome over a decade ago served as a springboard for countless studies of genetic variation and its role in disease, but understanding how the body operates at the DNA sequence-level isn’t enough to resolve some of the finer points of human biology. Specifically: how can the same sequence of genetic code give rise to over 200 different cell types that perform distinct biological functions? And how might the processes that give rise to that functional variation contribute to human disease?