Introns and their splicing are tightly coupled with the subsequent mRNA maturation steps, especially nucleocytoplasmic export. A remarkable fraction of vertebrate introns have a minimal size of about 100 bp, while majority of introns expand to several kilobases even megabases in length.

Glioma is a type of tumor that develops in the central nerve system, mainly the brain. Alterations of genomic sequence and sequence segments (such as copy number variations or CNV and copy neutral loss of heterozygosities or cnLOH) are thought to be a major determinant of the tumor grade.

Public health emergency of SARS-CoV-2 has facilitated diagnostic testing as a related medical countermeasure against COVID-19 outbreak. Numerous serologic antibody tests have become available through an expedited federal emergency use only process. This paper highlights the analytical characteristic of an ELISA based assay by AnshLabs and three random access immunoassay (RAIA) by DiaSorin, Roche, and Abbott that have been approved for emergency use authorization (EUA), at a tertiary academic center in a low disease-prevalence area. The AnshLabs gave higher estimates of sero-prevalence, over the three RAIA methods. For positive results, AnshLabs had 93.3% and 100% agreement with DiaSorin or Abbott and Roche respectively. For negative results, AnshLabs had 74.3% and 78.3% agreement with DiaSorin and Roche or Abbott respectively. All discrepant samples that were positive by AnshLabs and negative by RAIA tested positive by all-in-one step SARS-CoV-2 Total (COV2T) assay performed on the automated Siemens Advia Centaur XPT analyzer. None of these methods, however, are useful in early diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2.

Divergently paired genes (DPGs), also known as bidirectional (head-to-head positioned) genes, are conserved across species and lineages, and thus deemed to be exceptional in genomic organization and functional regulation. Despite previous investigations on the features of their conservation and gene organization, the functional relationship among DPGs in a given species and lineage has not been thoroughly clarified. Here we report a network-based comprehensive analysis on human DPGs and our results indicate that the two members of the DPGs tend to participate in different biological processes while enforcing related functions as modules. Comparing to randomly paired genes as a control, the DPG pairs have a tendency to be clustered in similar "cellular components" and involved in similar "molecular functions". The functional network bridged by DPGs consists of three major modules. The largest module includes many house-keeping genes involved in core cellular activities. This module also shows low variation in expression in both CNS (central nervous system) and non-CNS tissues. Based on analyses of disease transcriptome data, we further suggest that this particular module may play crucial roles in HIV infection and its disease mechanism.

We previously have studied the insertion and deletion polymorphism by sequencing no more than one hundred introns in a mixed human population and found that the minimal introns tended to maintain length at an optimal size. Here we analyzed re-sequenced 179 individual genomes (from African, European, and Asian populations) from the data released by the 1000 Genome Project to study the size dynamics of minimal introns.