Do you remember when 1000 genomes sounded like a large number? The team that gave us ExAC released GnomAD in its full form today, which includes the exomes of 123,126 individuals and the genomes of a further 15,496 individuals.

And just in case that didn’t sound ambitious, this week the Earth BioGenome Project was announced, a plan with a name, an estimated $20b price tag and no funding to date, which aims to be a Noah’s ark of genomes: “the first step would be to sequence in great detail the DNA of a member of each eukaryotic family (about 9000 in all) to create reference genomes on par or better than the reference human genome. Next would come sequencing to a lesser degree a species from each of the 150,000 to 200,000 genera. Finally, EBP participants would get rough genomes of the 1.5 million remaining known eukaryotic species.”

My favorite read of the week is a STAT interview with Jeantine Lunshof, a bioethicist embedded in George Church’s group — a very unusual setup for a very unusual lab.

Meanwhile, in the somatic world:

• NewGuidelines for “Molecular Biomarkers for the Evaluation of Colorectal Cancer” have been set. The 21 recommendations make it clear that NGS has a clear future in the treatment of this type of cancer.
• The NCI-MATCH Trial, which aims to assess the effectiveness of molecular based treatment decision for cancer patients, has enrolled 4500 patients to date, 4000 who have had results returned. They reporta 18% match rate (lower than expected) to one of 24 treatment arms, with 72% of patients enrolling in the matched trials (higher than expected)
• In an oncology sample, you have dozens of somatic variants, but only a small handful will be “drivers” (functional roles that confer cell fitness advantages), and the rest will be hangers along, or passengers. Which are the driver mutations? Many efforts have focused on molecular level properties, such as frequency and amino acid effect. Here’s an approachbased on patient outcomes.
• A new computational toolfrom UCSD for somatic samples, Haploinsufficient/Triplosensitive Gene (HAPTRIG), which focuses on single gene copy number losses/gains and how these may aggregate up to effect a cancer pathway, has demonstrated utility for Serous Ovarian cancer patients, and is expected to be useful for other cancer types.
• Cynvenio, who offer ClearID, a test for late stage breast cancer patients, and Color, who offer a hereditary cancer screening test, have partneredto enable a low cost, high convenience option for oncologists.

23andMe and Celmatix are launching a 4,500 women project aimed at understanding factors underlying fertility

Korean start up 3billion is launching an exome DTC for rare disease patients at a TBD price tag less than $1000. They will be presenting “annotated rare disease variants along with published information about them”, and thus hope to avoid the ire of the FDA

In the world of bacteria:

• A studyreports that ribozomal mutations in bacteria cause resistance to a broad range of antibiotics.
• A group trying to use CRISPR to fight bacterial resistance, this time with the “chainsaw” Cas3 as supposed to the “scissors” of Cas9.
• A studyon the use of an NGS test to detect meningitis and encephalitis is being run to assess both clinical utility and cost-effectiveness. The clinical pathway involved use of a clinical microbial sequencing board. The group, which is also developing a test for Lyme disease, is already looking at complementing the metagenomic DNA data with RNA expression data.

The wooly mammoth may be de-extinct soon, but do we want to go there?  “It’s better to spend the money on the living than the dead.” says one commentator, in reaction to a study that looks at whether de-extinction will be good for conservation efforts.

Most translation starts with an AUG. Before this week, we knew of a couple of other “non-canonical” start codons. But now, translation start has been shown from 47 of the 64 codons.