Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

About: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Genome. The organization has 4009 authors who have published 9671 publications receiving 1224479 citations.

The knockout mouse project

Abstract: Mouse knockout technology provides a powerful means of elucidating gene function in vivo, and a publicly available genome-wide collection of mouse knockouts would be significantly enabling for biomedical discovery. To date, published knockouts exist for only about 10% of mouse genes. Furthermore, many of these are limited in utility because they have not been made or phenotyped in standardized ways, and many are not freely available to researchers. It is time to harness new technologies and efficiencies of production to mount a high-throughput international effort to produce and phenotype knockouts for all mouse genes, and place these resources into the public domain.

Generation of transgene-free induced pluripotent mouse stem cells by the piggyBac transposon

Abstract: Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have been generated from somatic cells by transgenic expression of Oct4 (Pou5f1), Sox2, Klf4 and Myc. A major difficulty in the application of this technology for regenerative medicine, however, is the delivery of reprogramming factors. Whereas retroviral transduction increases the risk of tumorigenicity, transient expression methods have considerably lower reprogramming efficiencies. Here we describe an efficient piggyBac transposon-based approach to generate integration-free iPSCs. Transposons carrying 2A peptide-linked reprogramming factors induced reprogramming of mouse embryonic fibroblasts with equivalent efficiencies to retroviral transduction. We removed transposons from these primary iPSCs by re-expressing transposase. Transgene-free iPSCs could be identified by negative selection. piggyBac excised without a footprint, leaving the iPSC genome without any genetic alteration. iPSCs fulfilled all criteria of pluripotency, such as pluripotency gene expression, teratoma formation and contribution to chimeras. piggyBac transposon-based reprogramming may be used to generate therapeutically applicable iPSCs.

Chromosome 21 and down syndrome: from genomics to pathophysiology.

Abstract: The sequence of chromosome 21 was a turning point for the understanding of Down syndrome. Comparative genomics is beginning to identify the functional components of the chromosome and that in turn will set the stage for the functional characterization of the sequences. Animal models combined with genome-wide analytical methods have proved indispensable for unravelling the mysteries of gene dosage imbalance.

High-density genetic mapping identifies new susceptibility loci for rheumatoid arthritis

Abstract: Using the Immunochip custom SNP array, which was designed for dense genotyping of 186 loci identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), we analyzed 11,475 individuals with rheumatoid arthritis (cases) of European ancestry and 15,870 controls for 129,464 markers. We combined these data in a meta-analysis with GWAS data from additional independent cases (n = 2,363) and controls (n = 17,872). We identified 14 new susceptibility loci, 9 of which were associated with rheumatoid arthritis overall and five of which were specifically associated with disease that was positive for anticitrullinated peptide antibodies, bringing the number of confirmed rheumatoid arthritis risk loci in individuals of European ancestry to 46. We refined the peak of association to a single gene for 19 loci, identified secondary independent effects at 6 loci and identified association to low-frequency variants at 4 loci. Bioinformatic analyses generated strong hypotheses for the causal SNP at seven loci. This study illustrates the advantages of dense SNP mapping analysis to inform subsequent functional investigations.

A practical guide to single-cell RNA-sequencing for biomedical research and clinical applications.

Abstract: RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) is a genomic approach for the detection and quantitative analysis of messenger RNA molecules in a biological sample and is useful for studying cellular responses. RNA-seq has fueled much discovery and innovation in medicine over recent years. For practical reasons, the technique is usually conducted on samples comprising thousands to millions of cells. However, this has hindered direct assessment of the fundamental unit of biology—the cell. Since the first single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) study was published in 2009, many more have been conducted, mostly by specialist laboratories with unique skills in wet-lab single-cell genomics, bioinformatics, and computation. However, with the increasing commercial availability of scRNA-seq platforms, and the rapid ongoing maturation of bioinformatics approaches, a point has been reached where any biomedical researcher or clinician can use scRNA-seq to make exciting discoveries. In this review, we present a practical guide to help researchers design their first scRNA-seq studies, including introductory information on experimental hardware, protocol choice, quality control, data analysis and biological interpretation.