Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change

International network of cancer genome projects

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) was launched to coordinate large-scale cancer genome studies in tumors from 50 different cancer types and/or subtypes that are of clinical and societal importance across the globe. Systematic studies of over 25,000 cancer genomes at the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic levels will reveal the repertoire of oncogenic mutations, uncover traces of the mutagenic influences, define clinically-relevant subtypes for prognosis and therapeutic management, and enable the development of new cancer therapies

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