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Background: The cost of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) has decreased tremendously in recent years due to advances in next-generation sequencing technologies. Nevertheless, the cost of carrying out large-scale cohort studies using WGS is still daunting. Past simulation studies with coverage at ~2x have shown promise for using low coverage WGS in studies focused on variant discovery, association study replications, and population genomics characterization. However, the performance of low coverage WGS in populations with a complex history and no reference panel remains to be determined. Results: South Indian populations are known to have a complex population structure and are an example of a major population group that lacks adequate reference panels. To test the performance of extremely low-coverage WGS (EXL-WGS) in populations with a complex history and to provide a reference resource for South Indian populations, we performed EXL-WGS on 185 South Indian individuals from eight populations to ~1.6x coverage. Using two variant discovery pipelines, SNPTools and GATK, we generated a consensus call set that has ~90% sensitivity for identifying common variants (minor allele frequency ≥ 10%). Imputation further improves the sensitivity of our call set. In addition, we obtained high-coverage for the whole mitochondrial genome to infer the maternal lineage evolutionary history of the Indian samples. Conclusions: Overall, we demonstrate that EXL-WGS with imputation can be a valuable study design for variant discovery with a dramatically lower cost than standard WGS, even in populations with a complex history and without available reference data. In addition, the South Indian EXL-WGS data generated in this study will provide a valuable resource for future Indian genomic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) are a recently discovered class of small non-coding RNAs whose best-understood function is to repress mobile element (ME) activity in animal germline. To date, nearly all piRNA studies have been conducted in model organisms and little is known about piRNA diversity, target specificity and biological function in human. Results Here we performed high-throughput sequencing of piRNAs from three human adult testis samples. We found that more than 81% of the ∼17 million putative piRNAs mapped to ∼6,000 piRNA-producing genomic clusters using a relaxed definition of clusters. A set of human protein-coding genes produces a relatively large amount of putative piRNAs from their 3'UTRs, and are significantly enriched for certain biological processes, suggestive of non-random sampling by the piRNA biogenesis machinery. Up to 16% of putative piRNAs mapped to a few hundred annotated long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) genes, suggesting that some lncRNA genes can act as piRNA precursors. Among major ME families, young families of LTR and endogenous retroviruses have a greater association with putative piRNAs than other MEs. In addition, piRNAs preferentially mapped to specific regions in the consensus sequences of several ME (sub)families and some piRNA mapping peaks showed patterns consistent with the "ping-pong" cycle of piRNA targeting and amplification. Conclusions Overall our data provide a comprehensive analysis and improved annotation of human piRNAs in adult human testes and shed new light into the relationship of piRNAs with protein-coding genes, lncRNAs, and mobile genetic elements in human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the research paper "Phase Locking and Resetting in Human Subthalamic Neurons," by Shuoguo Wang and colleagues, which was presented at the Twentieth Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting held at Stockholm, Sweden from July 23-28, 2011 is presented.

The article presents a study that focuses on the synchronization properties of neural circuits. It analyzes two reciprocally coupled oscillatory neurons with conduction delays. It uses the Phase Resetting Curves (PRC) that is generated under the assumption of pulsatile coupling to predict what phase-locked solutions will be exhibited in the neuronal circuit with delays.