Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Property Law

This article reviews selected judicial decisions and legislation affecting real property law in Virginia during the past year. Part I discusses some of the more significant cases decided by the Supreme Court of Virginia. Part II discusses some of this year\u27s most significant legislation enacted by the Virginia General Assembly

Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Property Law

This article reviews some of the more significant cases and legislation affecting Virginia property law over the past year. The Virginia Supreme Court revisited a wide range of issues, including the level of visibility to which an adverse use must rise to establish title by adverse possession. The court also revisited the steps that a mechanic\u27s lienor must take in order to protect his or her lien. Additionally, the court also explored some new issues, such as the applicability of the rule against perpetuities to a purchase option contained in a lease

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead