In recent days a new genetic project has been announced to collect and sequence the DNA of orcas living in the Pacific Northwest to try to save them from extinction, which at this point is a serious risk. The project is a collaboration between NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, the non-profit organization Nature Conservancy and the BGI genomics company. Skin or other biological samples of more than one hundred specimens that have been collected over more than two decades will be used to obtain DNA.

An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” describes a paleogenomics research that attempted to reconstruct some migrations of the barbarian populations in the 6th century C.E. through Europe. A team of researchers performed a multidisciplinary analysis that includes genetics, history and archeology to get new information on the movements of various populations during that chaotic period. Genetic data were obtained from 63 samples taken in two 6th century Lombard cemeteries, one in Szólád, in present-day Hungary, and one in Collegno, near Turin, in Italy, discovering that the richest graves tended to have ancestors from northeastern Europe while those in poorer tombs tended to have ancestors in southern Europe.

An article published in the journal “Nature Biotechnology” describes the proposal of a new taxonomic classification for bacteria based on their phylogenetic similarities. A team of researchers led by Philip Hugenholtz of the Australian Center for Ecogenomics (ACE) used metagenomics to analyze known bacteria and subsequently group them according to their genetic similarities and differences in 99 phyla. The results of this research are available in the Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB).

Three articles, two published in the journal “Science” and one in the journal “Science Advances”, describe various aspects of the sequencing of the genome of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). An international consortium sequenced its huge DNA in an operation illustrated in the first article in “Science”. A map of the so-called transcriptome of this plant is described in the second article in “Science”. 828 genes, which for the most part were unknown, illustrated in the “Science Advances” article, are potentially connected with immune reactions to bread wheat.