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Detecting phenotypically relevant variation outside the coding sequence of genes and distinguishing it from the neutral variants is not trivial partly because the mechanisms by which a subset of the DNA polymorphisms in these regions affect gene regulation are poorly understood. Here we present an approach of using dominant genetic markers with convenient phenotypes to investigate the effect of cis and trans-acting regulatory variations. In the current study, we performed a forward genetic screen for natural variants that suppress or enhance the semi-dominant mutant allele Oy1-N1989 encoding the magnesium chelatase subunit I of maize. This mutant permits rapid phenotyping of leaf color as a reporter of chlorophyll accumulation, enabling QTL mapping and GWAS approaches to identify natural variation in maize affecting chlorophyll metabolism. Using different mapping approaches, we identified the same modifier locus, very oil yellow 1 (vey1), that was linked to the reporter gene itself. Based on the analysis of OY1 transcript abundance and study of a maize gene expression dataset, vey1 is predicted to be a cis-acting regulatory sequence polymorphism that causes the differential accumulation of OY1 transcripts encoded by the mutant and wildtype alleles. Fine mapping of the vey1 genomic region using multiple independent mapping populations demonstrated the value of multiple cycles of early generation random mating to increase recombination. The vey1 allele appears to be a common polymorphism in the maize germplasm that alters the expression level of a key gene in chlorophyll biosynthesis.

Forward genetics determines the function of genes underlying trait variation by identifying the change in DNA responsible for changes in phenotype. Detecting phenotypically-relevant variation outside protein coding sequences and distinguishing this from neutral variants is not trivial; partly because the mechanisms by which DNA polymorphisms in the intergenic regions affect gene regulation are poorly understood. Here we utilized a dominant genetic reporter to investigate the effect of cis and trans -acting regulatory variation. We performed a forward genetic screen for natural variation that suppressed or enhanced the semi-dominant mutant allele Oy1-N1989 , encoding the magnesium chelatase subunit I of maize. This mutant permits rapid phenotyping of leaf color as a reporter for chlorophyll accumulation, and mapping of natural variation in maize affecting chlorophyll metabolism. We identified a single modifier locus segregating between B73 and Mo17 that was linked to the reporter gene itself, which we call very oil yellow1 ( vey1 ). Based on the variation in OY1 transcript abundance and genome-wide association data, vey1 is predicted to consist of multiple cis -acting regulatory sequence polymorphisms encoded at the wild-type oy1 alleles. The vey1 locus appears to be a common polymorphism in the maize germplasm that alters the expression level of a key gene in chlorophyll biosynthesis. These vey1 alleles have no discernable impact on leaf chlorophyll in the absence of the Oy1-N1989 reporter. Thus, the use of a mutant as a reporter for magnesium chelatase activity resulted in the detection of expression-level polymorphisms not readily visible in the laboratory.

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626 Background: The 2019 Kidney and Kidney Tumor Segmentation challenge (KiTS19) was an international competition held in conjunction with the 2019 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) and sought to stimulate progress on this automatic segmentation frontier. Growing rates of kidney tumor incidence led to research into the use of artificial inteligence (AI) to radiographically differentiate and objectively characterize these tumors. Automated segmentation using AI objectively quantifies complexity and aggression of renal tumors to better differentiate and describe the tumors for improved treatment decision making. Methods: A training set of over 31,000 CT images from 210 patients with kidney tumors was publicly released with corresponding semantic segmentation masks. 106 teams from five continents used this data to develop automated deep learning systems to predict the true segmentation masks on a test set of an additional 13,500 CT images in 90 patients for which the corresponding ground truth segmentations were kept private. These predictions were scored and ranked according to their average Sørensen-Dice coefficient between kidney and tumor across the 90 test cases. Results: The winning team achieved a Dice of 0.974 for kidney and 0.851 for tumor, approaching the human inter-annotator performance on kidney (0.983) but falling short on tumor (0.923). This challenge has now entered an “open leaderboard” phase where it serves as a challenging benchmark in 3D semantic segmentation. Conclusions: Results of the KiTS19 challenge show deep learning methods are fully capable of reliable segmentation of kidneys and kidney tumors. The KiTS19 challenge attracted a high number of submissions and serves as an important and challenging benchmark in 3D segmentation. The publicly available data will further propel the use of automated 3D segmentation analysis. Fully segmented kidneys and tumors allow for automated calculation of all types of nephrometry, tumor textural variation and discovery of new predictive features important for personalized medicine and accurate prediction of patient relevant outcomes.