Congratulations to the winners of the Editors’ Choice Awards for outstanding articles published in GENETICS in 2018! The journal’s Editorial Board considered a diverse range of articles, finding many papers worthy of recognition. After much deliberation, they settled on one exceptional article for each of the three award categories: molecular genetics, population genetics, and quantitative genetics. Check out some of the best GENETICS had to offer in 2018!


EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN MOLECULAR GENETICS

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance Is Negatively Regulated by the HERI-1 Chromodomain Protein

Roberto Perales, Daniel Pagano, Gang Wan, Brandon D. Fields, Arneet L. Saltzman, and Scott G. Kennedy

Genetics December 2018 210: 1287–1299

Editor’s Note

C. elegans is a well-established model organism for the investigation of the transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TEI) mediated by small RNAs. The mechanisms by which TEI is regulated are not well understood. Perales et al. identified a negative regulator of TEI expressed in the germline that is recruited to target genes via the nuclear RNAi machinery. The authors propose that the generational perdurance of RNAi inheritance is set by competing outputs of this machinery.


EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN POPULATION GENETICS

The Evolution of Polymorphic Hybrid Incompatibilities in House Mice

Erica L. Larson, Dan Vanderpool, Brice A. J. Sarver, Colin Callahan, Sara Keeble, Lorraine L. Provencio, Michael D. Kessler, Vanessa Stewart, Erin Nordquist, Matthew D. Dean, and Jeffrey M. Good

Genetics July 2018 209: 845–859

Editor’s Note

Reproductive barriers are often assumed to arise from fixed genetic differences between species, despite frequent individual variation in the strength of reproductive isolation between populations. Larson et al. report polymorphism at several hybrid male sterility loci in house mice, and their results demonstrate that selection against deleterious hybrid interactions can drive the introgression of hybrid incompatibilities, highlighting the need for more extensive sampling of natural variation in speciation studies.


 EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARD IN QUANTITATIVE GENETICS

Mutational Pleiotropy and the Strength of Stabilizing Selection Within and Between Functional Modules of Gene Expression

Julie M. Collet, Katrina McGuigan, Scott L. Allen, Stephen F. Chenoweth, and Mark W. Blows

Genetics April 2018 208: 1601–1616

Editor’s Note

Collet et al. adopted a high-dimensional quantitative genetic approach to test for the presence of modularity of the genotype-phenotype map. Using gene expression traits, they examined whether traits contributing to the same function (functional modularity) are more strongly genetically correlated (variational modularity) than traits belonging to different functions. They found little evidence that functional modules predict variational modules; however, they detected large variational modules spanning several functional modules.