Chalk and Cheese: A comparison of England and Scotland’s emerging approaches to regeneration

To suggest that the Department for Communities and Local Government’s (DCLG’s) publication Regeneration to Enable Growth: What Government Is Doing in Support of Community-Led Regeneration, issued in early 2011, was a disappointment to many is something of an understatement. Consequently, the House of Commons Communities and Local Government (CLG) Select Committee’s verdict on the Coalition Government’s regeneration strategy for England was keenly awaited by commentators and practitioners alike. Regeneration, the CLG Select Committee’s report published on 3 November 2011, certainly did not pull any punches, focusing in particular on the Government’s ‘different approach’ to regeneration and its likely effectiveness. This article reviews the current condition of regeneration policy in England – set against the views of the Select Committee and those submitting evidence to it and the Government’s response to its findings, and in comparison with the Scottish Government’s new regeneration strategy, set out in Achieving a Sustainable Future – and considers whether it is fit for purpose

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