Spread of a SARS-CoV-2 variant through Europe in the summer of 2020.

Following its emergence in late 2019, the spread of SARS-CoV-21,2 has been tracked by phylogenetic analysis of viral genome sequences in unprecedented detail3–5. Although the virus spread globally in early 2020 before borders closed, intercontinental travel has since been greatly reduced. However, travel within Europe resumed in the summer of 2020. Here we report on a SARS-CoV-2 variant, 20E (EU1), that was identified in Spain in early summer 2020 and subsequently spread across Europe. We find no evidence that this variant has increased transmissibility, but instead demonstrate how rising incidence in Spain, resumption of travel, and lack of effective screening and containment may explain the variant’s success. Despite travel restrictions, we estimate that 20E (EU1) was introduced hundreds of times to European countries by summertime travellers, which is likely to have undermined local efforts to minimize infection with SARS-CoV-2. Our results illustrate how a variant can rapidly become dominant even in the absence of a substantial transmission advantage in favourable epidemiological settings. Genomic surveillance is critical for understanding how travel can affect transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and thus for informing future containment strategies as travel resumes. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited

Institutional change in land planning: two cases from Galicia

Why do societies implement land policies? A number of arguments have been put forward in the literature, ranging from economic conceptions based on market failure and the problem of negative externalities to a more social conception based on welfare distribution and collaborative planning. However, neither all societies with similar market failures or negative externalities develop and implement land planning nor implemented land planning always results from collaborative planning. The arguments found in the literature seem not to fit the reality and, in most cases, cannot explain why societies create or undertake innovations in land planning. Within the framework of institutional change theory and based on the analysis of the emergence of two land planning devices—a land use law and a land banking law—in Galicia, Northwest Spain, this paper argues that land planning is developed to tackle negative outcomes of former institutional setups. However, the negativity of such outcomes is measured not in terms of economic performance, but in terms of social acceptance. The search for a workable definition of property within the Galician society seems to be the main driver of institutional change in land use planning analysed in this paper

Processed pseudogenes acquired somatically during cancer development

Contains fulltext : 136602.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Cancer evolves by mutation, with somatic reactivation of retrotransposons being one such mutational process. Germline retrotransposition can cause processed pseudogenes, but whether this occurs somatically has not been evaluated. Here we screen sequencing data from 660 cancer samples for somatically acquired pseudogenes. We find 42 events in 17 samples, especially non-small cell lung cancer (5/27) and colorectal cancer (2/11). Genomic features mirror those of germline LINE element retrotranspositions, with frequent target-site duplications (67%), consensus TTTTAA sites at insertion points, inverted rearrangements (21%), 5' truncation (74%) and polyA tails (88%). Transcriptional consequences include expression of pseudogenes from UTRs or introns of target genes. In addition, a somatic pseudogene that integrated into the promoter and first exon of the tumour suppressor gene, MGA, abrogated expression from that allele. Thus, formation of processed pseudogenes represents a new class of mutation occurring during cancer development, with potentially diverse functional consequences depending on genomic context

Genomic insights into the Ixodes scapularis tick vector of Lyme disease

Ticks transmit more pathogens to humans and animals than any other arthropod. We describe the 2.1 Gbp nuclear genome of the tick, Ixodes scapularis (Say), which vectors pathogens that cause Lyme disease, human granulocytic anaplasmosis, babesiosis and other diseases. The large genome reflects accumulation of repetitive DNA, new lineages of retro-transposons, and gene architecture patterns resembling ancient metazoans rather than pancrustaceans. Annotation of scaffolds representing ∼57% of the genome, reveals 20,486 protein-coding genes and expansions of gene families associated with tick-host interactions. We report insights from genome analyses into parasitic processes unique to ticks, including host 'questing', prolonged feeding, cuticle synthesis, blood meal concentration, novel methods of haemoglobin digestion, haem detoxification, vitellogenesis and prolonged off-host survival. We identify proteins associated with the agent of human granulocytic anaplasmosis, an emerging disease, and the encephalitis-causing Langat virus, and a population structure correlated to life-history traits and transmission of the Lyme disease agent

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes identifies driver rearrangements promoted by LINE-1 retrotransposition

About half of all cancers have somatic integrations of retrotransposons. Here, to characterize their role in oncogenesis, we analyzed the patterns and mechanisms of somatic retrotransposition in 2,954 cancer genomes from 38 histological cancer subtypes within the framework of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) project. We identified 19,166 somatically acquired retrotransposition events, which affected 35% of samples and spanned a range of event types. Long interspersed nuclear element (LINE-1; L1 hereafter) insertions emerged as the first most frequent type of somatic structural variation in esophageal adenocarcinoma, and the second most frequent in head-and-neck and colorectal cancers. Aberrant L1 integrations can delete megabase-scale regions of a chromosome, which sometimes leads to the removal of tumor-suppressor genes, and can induce complex translocations and large-scale duplications. Somatic retrotranspositions can also initiate breakage-fusion-bridge cycles, leading to high-level amplification of oncogenes. These observations illuminate a relevant role of L1 retrotransposition in remodeling the cancer genome, with potential implications for the development of human tumors.J.M.C.T. is supported by European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant 716290 ‘SCUBA CANCERS’, Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2014-14999 and Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) grant SAF2015-66368-P. B.R.-M., E.G.A., M.S.G. and S.Z. are supported by PhD fellowships from Xunta de Galicia (Spain) ED481A-2016/151, ED481A-2017/299, ED481A-2017/306 and ED481A-2018/199, respectively. F.S. was supported by ERC Starting Grant 757700 ‘HYPER-INSIGHT’, MINECO grant BFU2017-89833-P ‘RegioMut’, and further acknowledges institutional funding from the MINECO Severo Ochoa award and from the CERCA Programme of the Catalan Government. Y.S.J. was supported by Korea Health Technology R&D Project through the Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI), funded by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea (grant number HI16C2387). A.L.B. is supported by MINECO PhD fellowship BES-2016-078166. M.T. was supported by MINECO grant SAF2015-73916-JIN. R.B. received funding through the National Institutes of Health (U24CA210978 and R01CA188228). M.G.B. received funding through MINECO, AEI, Xunta de Galicia and FEDER (BFU2013-41554-P, BFU2016-78121-P, ED431F 2016/019). N.B. is supported by a My First AIRC grant from the Associazione Italiana Ricerca sul Cancro (number 17658). J.D. is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement number 703594-DECODE). K.C. and Z.C. are supported by NIH R01 CA172652 and U41 HG007497. Z.C. is supported by an American Heart Association Institutional Data Fellowship Award (17IF33890015). P.A.W.E. is supported by Cancer Research UK. E.A.L. is supported by K01AG051791. I.M. is supported by Cancer Research UK (C57387/A21777). S.M.W. received funding through a SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility fellowship (P2ELP3_155365) and an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship (ALTF 755-2014). J.W. received funding from the Danish Medical Research Council (DFF-4183-00233). J.O.K. is supported by an ERC Starting Grant. This work is supported by The Francis Crick Institute, which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (FC001202), the UK Medical Research Council (FC001202) and the Wellcome Trust (FC001202). H.H.K. is supported by grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (P50GM107632 and 1R01GM099875). K.H.B. is supported by P50GM107632, R01CA163705 and R01GM124531. This work was supported by the TransTumVar project PN013600.. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust grant 0980

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale. Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter; identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation; analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution; describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity; and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes