Daily Digest

Drug hunters are moving into the clinic with human-first'no-hypothesis' target discovery, applying the full force of machine learning to massive collections of human omics data. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common childhood cancer. Here, using whole-genome, exome and transcriptome sequencing of 2,754 childhood patients with ALL, researchers find that, despite a generally low mutation burden, ALL cases harbor a median of four putative somatic driver alterations per sample, with 376 putative driver genes identified varying in prevalence across ALL subtypes. Statistical and scientific programming has quickly become a necessary skill in the sciences, often conducted in the programming language, R. Here, the authors focus specifically on self-learning the programming language, R. These 10 rules will not provide technical instruction for using R--as there are many wonderful and thorough resources for that --but rather provide a nonexhaustive list of practical strategies for building or honing R programming skills.