We are thrilled to share two pieces of good news!

First, very recently our Chenchen Ma has been awarded “国家自然科学基金青年学生基础研究项目（博士研究生）”, a highly competitive grant for PhD students from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). This is also the first year of the NSFC PhD grant, and we wish future COmics students can also obtain this. Chenchen will use this funding to develop a special pipeline for improving the prediction of colorectal cancer based on metagenome data.

Second, in collaboration with Prof. Jan Korbel’s group at EMBL, we have a paper co-authored by COmics members (Nuo Xu and Shimin Shuai) online at Nature Genetics on 28 May, 2024. In this paper, Grimes et al. used Strand-Seq to identify mosaic structural variants (mSVs) in normal human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells and associated them with clonal expansion. We contributed to the validation of certain mSVs using whole exome sequencing and blood count data from the UK Biobank.