The most viewed preprints on Haldane’s Sieve this month were:
- The Functional Consequences of Variation in Transcription Factor Binding. Cusanovich et al. use RNAi knockdowns of transcription factors followed by expression profiling to argue that most transcription factor binding in humans is not relevant to gene expression. This conclusion inspired a lively conversation on Twitter.
- Thoughts on: The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans. Graham Coop‘s post on Sankararaman et al. was mentioned by David Reich during his plenary talk at ASHG this month (he now thinks the data rejects the model proposed in the post).
- Thoughts on: Worldwide Patterns of Ancestry, Divergence, and Admixture in Domesticated Cattle. Joe Pickrell posted his review of a preprint by Decker et al. on using genetics to learn about the history of cattle domestication.
- Y Chromosomes of 40% Chinese Are Descendants of Three Neolithic Super-grandfathers. Yan et al. report sequencing of Y chromosomes from 78 east Asian men, and conclude that there was an important population expansion in China during the Neolithic.
- Our Paper: Genome-wide inference of ancestral recombination graphs. Adam Siepel describes his preprint (with Matt Rasmussen) on a new model for inferring ancestral recombination graphs.