HERMES: a molecular-formula-oriented method to target the metabolome | Nature Methods
Comprehensive metabolome analyses are essential for biomedical, environmental, and biotechnological research. However, current MS1- and MS2-based acquisition and data analysis strategies in untargeted metabolomics result in low identification rates of metabolites. Here researchers present HERMES, a molecular-formula-oriented and peak-detection-free method that uses raw LC/MS1 information to optimize MS2 acquisition.
Viral loads of Delta-variant SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections after vaccination and booster with BNT162b2 | Nature Medicine
The effectiveness of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) BNT162b2 vaccine in preventing disease and reducing viral loads of breakthrough infections (BTIs) has been decreasing, concomitantly with the rise of the Delta variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). By analyzing viral loads of over 16,000 infections during the current, Delta-variant-dominated pandemic wave in Israel, researchers found that BTIs in recently fully vaccinated individuals have lower viral loads than infections in unvaccinated individuals. However, this effect starts to decline 2 months after vaccination and ultimately vanishes 6 months or longer after vaccination. Notably, thet found that the effect of BNT162b2 on reducing BTI viral loads is restored after a booster dose.
Population-scale detection of non-reference sequence variants using colored de Bruijn Graphs | Bioinformatics
With the increasing throughput of sequencing technologies, structural variant (SV) detection has become possible across tens of thousands of genomes. Non-reference sequence (NRS) variants have drawn less attention compared to other types of SVs due to the computational complexity of detecting them. Researchers introduce PopIns2, a tool to discover and characterize NRS variants in many genomes, which scales to considerably larger numbers of genomes than its predecessor PopIns.