Daily Digest | December 12, 2018

A map of constrained coding regions in the human genome | Nature Genetics

Deep catalogs of genetic variation from thousands of humans enable the detection of intraspecies constraint by identifying coding regions with a scarcity of variation. While existing techniques summarize constraint for entire genes, single gene-wide metrics conceal regional constraint variability within each gene. Therefore, researchers have created a detailed map of constrained coding regions (CCRs) by leveraging variation observed among 123,136 humans from the Genome Aggregation Database.

Research paper

 

Aurora kinase A drives the evolution of resistance to third-generation EGFR inhibitors in lung cancer | Nature Medicine

How tumors transition between drug responsiveness, tolerance and resistance, especially in the absence of preexisting subclones, remains unclear. In epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutant lung adenocarcinoma cells, researchers demonstrate that residual disease and acquired resistance in response to EGFR inhibitors requires Aurora kinase A (AURKA) activity. Nongenetic resistance through the activation of AURKA by its coactivator TPX2 emerges in response to chronic EGFR inhibition where it mitigates drug-induced apoptosis.

Research paper

 

Grasp2Vec: Learning Object Representations from Self-Supervised Grasping | Google AI Blog

Grasp2Vec is a simple yet highly effective algorithm for acquiring object representations. Grasp2Vec is based on the intuition that an attempt to pick up anything provides several pieces of information — if a robot grasps an object and holds it up, the object had to be in the scene before the grasp. Furthermore, the robot knows that the object it grasped is currently in its gripper, and therefore has been removed from the scene. By using this form of self supervision, the robot can learn to recognize the object by the visual change in the scene after the grasp.

Original article | Research paper

 

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