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Research suggests a combination of behaviours underlie the evolution of human cooperation, and researchers make an optical disc with enormous storage capacity.

We round up some recent stories from the Nature Briefing.

Researchers find that a huge number of roads that don’t appear on official maps, and the protein that could determine whether someone is left-handed.

How a ring around a distant solar system object is puzzling researchers, and understanding the hidden dangers of indoor air pollution.

Brain areas work in tandem to temporarily store important information, and an aurora on a cool brown dwarf.

New insights into the structure of an early galaxy, and why coral-reef fishes grow so quickly.

We highlight some recent stories from the Nature Briefing, including the latest on the James Webb Space Telescope, an ichthyosaur fossil find, and more.

Petrels are wide-ranging, highly threatened seabirds that often ingest plastic. This study used tracking data for 7,137 petrels of 77 species to map global exposure risk and compare regions, species, and populations. The results show higher exposure risk for threatened species and stress the need for international cooperation to tackle marine litter.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

Warm ocean waters and favourable bathymetry caused Cadman Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula to increase speed by 94% from 2018 to 2019. This led to increased ice discharge, glacier retreat of 8 kilometres, and glacier thinning by 20 meters per year.

This meta-analysis of malaria cluster trials highlights that underestimating between-cluster variation reduces statistical power. It provides refined coefficient of variation estimates to inform sample size calculations for future evaluations.

Genome-wide analyses identify 30 independent loci associated with obsessive–compulsive disorder, highlighting genetic overlap with other psychiatric disorders and implicating putative effector genes and cell types contributing to its etiology.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

The MR-PRESSO test detects and corrects horizontal pleiotropy in multi-instrument Mendelian randomization (MR) analyses. Applying the MR-PRESSO test to 4,250 MR tests of complex traits and diseases finds horizontal pleiotropy in >48% of causal relationships.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

In interstitial lung disease, aberrant KRT8+ basaloid cells impair alveolar repair mechanisms. Here they show that Interleukin-11 expression in KRT8+ cells potentiates their pathological properties and causes lung scarring, which can be prevented by anti-IL11 therapy.

Above band-gap photovoltage could be achieved in materials with a net polarization. Here, Cooket al. compute the contribution to the shift current from the band edge and identify two classes of shift current photovoltaics materials, GeS and ferroelectric polymer films.

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

Cancers evolve as they progress under differing selective pressures. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, the authors present the method TrackSig the estimates evolutionary trajectories of somatic mutational processes from single bulk tumour data.

Hidden water beneath Antarctica’s ice can accelerate ice loss, potentially raising sea levels by over 2 meters by 2300. These findings highlight the urgent need to incorporate evolving subglacial hydrology into ice sheet models for more accurate sea-level rise projections.

Bacterial symbionts of the Endozoicomonadaceae family are frequently found in marine animals but are poorly understood. Using data from the Tara Pacific expedition, this study of Endozoicomonadaceae ecology at an ocean basin-scale reveals that corals across the Pacific Ocean have different host-symbiont association strategies that are determined at the bacterial lineage level.

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of type 2 diabetes (T2D) identifies more than 600 T2D-associated loci; integrating physiological trait and single-cell chromatin accessibility data at these loci sheds light on heterogeneity within the T2D phenotype.

Analysis of population decline shows that frequent disturbances enhance a population’s capacity to resist and recover from downturns and that trade-offs exist when adopting new or alternative land-use strategies.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

Fibrous networks constructed from high aspect ratio protein building blocks are ubiquitous in nature, but the functional advantage of such building blocks over globular proteins is not understood. Here, using shear rheology and small-angle neutron scattering, the authors characterise the mechanical and structural properties of photochemically crosslinked protein L and fibrin networks and show that aspect ratio is a crucial property that defines network architecture and mechanics.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

IL-11 is identified as a key regulator of ERK–AMPK–mTORC1 signalling, metabolism, inflammation and age-related disease and lifespan in mouse and human.

Fishing has had a profound impact on global reef shark populations, and the absence or presence of sharks is strongly correlated with national socio-economic conditions and reef governance.

There’s an emerging body of evidence to show how biological sex impacts cancer incidence, treatment and underlying biology. Here, using a large pan-cancer dataset, the authors further highlight how sex differences shape the cancer genome.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

In somatic cells the mechanisms maintaining the chromosome ends are normally inactivated; however, cancer cells can re-activate these pathways to support continuous growth. Here, the authors characterize the telomeric landscapes across tumour types and identify genomic alterations associated with different telomere maintenance mechanisms.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.

Hookworm infection remains a threat to public health where economic factors restrict treatment and lack of effective vaccination have limited successful therapeutic control which results in reinfection in endemic areas. Here the authors use a controlled human hookworm infection model and use high dimensional single cell profiling to show that plasmacytoid dendritic cells and regulatory T cells profiles that resemble those seen during natural infections in endemic areas.

Chronic infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to the emergence of viral variants that show reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies in an immunosuppressed individual treated with convalescent plasma.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

A high-resolution, global atlas of mortality of children under five years of age between 2000 and 2017 highlights subnational geographical inequalities in the distribution, rates and absolute counts of child deaths by age.

Viral pathogen load in cancer genomes is estimated through analysis of sequencing data from 2,656 tumors across 35 cancer types using multiple pathogen-detection pipelines, identifying viruses in 382 genomic and 68 transcriptome datasets.

Many tumours exhibit hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypoxic tumours often respond poorly to therapy. Here, the authors quantify hypoxia in 1188 tumours from 27 cancer types, showing elevated hypoxia links to increased mutational load, directing evolutionary trajectories.

In this study the authors consider the structural variants (SVs) present within cancer cases of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. They report hundreds of genes, including known cancer-associated genes for which the nearby presence of a SV breakpoint is associated with altered expression.

Some cancer patients first present with metastases where the location of the primary is unidentified; these are difficult to treat. In this study, using machine learning, the authors develop a method to determine the tissue of origin of a cancer based on whole sequencing data.