• A new, “complete” human genome assembly (CHM13) was posted on bioRxiv, notable for being telomere-to-telomere and gap-free; discussion centered on the fact that nanopore reads captured 5-methyl-cytosine but not 5-hydroxymethyl-, 5-formyl-, or 5-carboxyl-cytosine, leaving the epigenetic map still incomplete.

• Participants debated whether the field will now adopt CHM13 as the single canonical reference genome, noting that the current GRCh38 reference is a mosaic drawn largely from one male donor (RP11) plus smaller contributions from 12 other Buffalo, NY volunteers, raising questions about population bias and what “The Canonical Human” should mean.

• Sci-Hub’s prolonged downtime was lamented as a barrier to accessing the new 2021 meta-analysis on quinolinic acid, kynurenine pathway dysfunction, and NMDA hypofunction in schizophrenia, highlighting ongoing reliance on the site for open literature access.

• A UC San Diego press release announcing the first clinical trial of AAV-BDNF gene therapy for Alzheimer’s disease (funded at $5 M) prompted sarcastic remarks that BDNF over-expression should have been tested decades ago, given the long-standing animal data and earlier nerve-growth-factor trials.

• A Nature Communications paper on longitudinal blood biomarkers (“Longitudinal analysis of blood markers reveals progressive loss of resilience and predicts human lifespan limit”) was circulated as evidence that systemic physiological resilience declines predictably and may set an upper bound on human lifespan.

• The iGEM 2021 registration deadline was noted, with a half-serious call for anyone willing to field a Wuhan team, underscoring the channel’s interest in grassroots synthetic-biology competitions.

• Technical side-conversation clarified that large copy-number variations and long tandem repeats—not single-nucleotide differences—account for much of the 1–2 % of sequence that fails to map to the reference genome, and that these regions evolve on timescales much shorter than classical mutation rates would suggest.