Three new strains of hepatitis C virus have been found circulating in the general population in sub-Saharan Africa. This discovery could inform hepatitis C vaccine development worldwide and suggests clinical trials of patients in the region are urgently needed. Published in the journal Hepatology, the study could assist the World Health Organisation’s aim of eliminating hepatitis C globally.

Sanger’s use of cloud computing has been recognised by HPCwire, the journal of high performance and data-intensive computing. The IT team won the Readers’ Choice award for Best Use of High Performance Computing in the Cloud

The long-standing efforts of the Wellcome Genome Campus to engage and inspire the public have today (29 November 2018) been rewarded with the Silver Engage Watermark from the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). The Engage Watermark recognises strategic support for public engagement across the organisation, as well as the commitment to develop plans for the future.

The largest study of CRISPR action to date has developed a method to predict the exact mutations CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing can introduce to a cell. Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute edited 40,000 different pieces of DNA and analysed a thousand million resulting DNA sequences to develop the machine learning predictive tool. Reported in Nature Biotechnology (27 November) the new resource will help make CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing more reliable, cheaper and more efficient.

To understand how the mother's immune system is modified to allow both mother and developing fetus to exist, researchers studied more than 70,000 single cells from first trimester pregnancies. They discovered that the fetal and maternal cells were using signals to talk to each other, and this conversation enabled the maternal immune system to support fetal growth.

The Deciphering Developmental Disorders study has discovered that only a small fraction of rare, undiagnosed developmental disorders in the British Isles are caused by recessive genes. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute estimated only 5 per cent of the patients had inherited a disease-causing gene mutation from both parents, far fewer than previously thought.

The largest genomic study of parasitic worms to date identified hundreds of thousands of new genes and predicted many new potential drug targets and drugs. Research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and collaborators will help scientists understand how these parasites invade, evade the immune system and cause disease. Reported in Nature Genetics today (5 November), the study could lead to new de-worming treatments to help prevent and treat diseases caused by parasitic worms worldwide.

The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a global effort to sequence the genetic code, or genomes, of all 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species on Earth, officially launched on 1 November) as key scientific partners and funders from around the globe gathered in London, UK to discuss progress in organising and funding the project

The Sanger Institute will serve as the genomics hub in the UK and will collaborate with the Natural History Museum in London, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Earlham Institute, Edinburgh Genomics, University of Edinburgh, EMBL-EBI and others in sample collection, DNA sequencing, assembling and annotating genomes and storing the data

The report, conducted by Thomas Kibling, at the respected law firm Matrix Chambers, has now been published (Tuesday 30 October).