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The Large Hadron Collider beauty collaboration reports a test of lepton flavour universality in decays of bottom mesons into strange mesons and a charged lepton pair, finding evidence of a violation of this principle postulated in the standard model.

Using a millimetre-wave molecular line scan, a redshift has finally been determined for the extremely active star-forming galaxy HDF 850.1 in the Hubble Deep Field, which makes it younger than thought at 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang.

It is commonly believed that graphene flakes form electrical percolation networks at low concentration, and thus can be used as conductive materials. Here, Yuan et al. show in graphene polymer composites that the transition to liquid crystals hinders the formation of percolated networks, resulting in high-kmaterials.

Oral squamous cell carcinoma is known to contain altered tumour cells within both the tumour core and leading edge. Here, the authors utilise spatial transcriptomics to characterise differences in gene expression and ligand-receptor architecture between areas of the tumour.

Nature Biotechnology asks a selection of leaders from across biotech to look at the future of the sector and make some predictions for the coming years.

Genotype and exome sequencing of 150,000 participants and whole-genome sequencing of 9,950 selected individuals recruited into the Mexico City Prospective Study constitute a valuable, publicly available resource of non-European sequencing data.

An Indonesia-wide analysis identifies locations for potential mangrove restoration, ranked by scenarios of success likelihood according to biogeomorphology, current and past land use and land tenure, and estimates the restoration costs.

Measurement of the cosmic microwave background temperature using H₂O absorption at a redshift of 6.34 is reported, the results of which were consistent with those from standard ΛCDM cosmology.

A massive starburst galaxy with 100 billion solar masses of gas is identified at a redshift of 6.34; a ‘maximum starburst’ converts the gas into stars at a rate more than 2,000 times that of the Milky Way.

The authors summarize the data produced by phase III of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, a resource for better understanding of the human and mouse genomes.

Massive galaxies in the early Universe have been shown to be forming stars at high rates. Probing the properties of individual star-forming regions is beyond the resolution and sensitivity of existing telescopes. Here, however, observations are reported of the galaxy SMMJ2135–0102 at redshift z=2.3259, which has been gravitationally magnified by a factor of 32 by a galaxy cluster lens in the foreground. The physics underlying star formation here is similar to that in local galaxies, but the energetics are very different.

Stars form from cold molecular interstellar gas, which is relatively rare in the local Universe, such that galaxies like the Milky Way form only a few new stars per year. However, typical massive galaxies in the distant Universe formed stars much more rapidly, suggesting that young galaxies were more rich in molecular gas. The results of a survey of molecular gas in samples of typical massive star-forming galaxies when the Universe was 40% and 24% of its current age now reveal that distant star-forming galaxies were indeed gas rich.

Massive clusters of galaxies have been found as early as 3.9 billion years after the Big Bang. Cosmological simulations predict that these systems should descend from 'protoclusters' — early overdensities of massive galaxies that merge hierarchically to form a cluster. Observational evidence for this picture, however, is sparse because high-redshift protoclusters are rare and difficult to observe. Here, a protocluster region 1 billion years (z = 5.3) after the Big Bang is reported. This cluster extends over >13 megaparsecs, contains a luminous quasar as well as a system rich in molecular gas. A lower limit of >4 × 10¹¹ solar masses of dark and luminous matter in this region is placed, consistent with that expected from cosmological simulations.

Samples of different body regions from hundreds of human donors are used to study how genetic variation influences gene expression levels in 44 disease-relevant tissues.

An optically coupled Bose–Einstein condensate of potassium atoms is used to engineer chiral interactions and perform the quantum simulation of a one-dimensional reduction of the topological Chern–Simons gauge theory.

Epitope engineering of donor haematopoietic stem/progenitor cells endows haematopoietic lineages with selective resistance to CAR T cells or monoclonal antibodies, without affecting protein function or regulation, enabling the targeting of genes that are essential for leukaemia survival and reducing the risk of tumour immune escape.

This is an issue edsumm for ng1939. Identification of the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum in a marine sedimentary sequence. It shows that sea surface temperatures near the North Pole increased from roughly 18 degrees Celsius to over 23 degrees Celsius — such warm values imply the absence of ice and thus exclude the influence of ice-albedo feedbacks on this Arctic warming.

DNA-encoded chemistry enables rapid and inexpensive syntheses and screening of vast chemical libraries, and is generating substantial interest and investment in the pharmaceutical industry. Here, Goodnow and colleagues provide an overview of the steps involved in the generation of DNA-encoded libraries, highlighting key applications and future directions for this technology.

CP violation has deep implications for particle physics and cosmology. Previously observed only in meson decays, signs of CP violation have now been spotted in baryon decays by analysing the proton–proton collision data from the LHCb detector.

An observation of a rare merger of two massive submillimetre bright galaxies that is forming stars at an unexpectedly high rate of 2,000 solar masses a year shows that such mergers can indeed form the most massive elliptical galaxies by about redshift 1.5.

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many correspond to sites of association with human disease.

The host galaxy of the quasar SDSS J114816.64?525150.3 has an infrared luminosity of 2.2 × 10¹³times that of the Sun. In the extremely luminous 'local' galaxy Arp 220, the burst of star formation is concentrated in the relatively small central region of <100 pc radius. This study reports that the star-forming gas of the host galaxy of J114816.64525150.3 is distributed over a radius of about 750 pc around the centre. The surface density of the star formation rate averaged over this region is comparable to the peak in Arp 220, although about two orders of magnitude larger in area.

Single-cell transcriptomes and single-cell chromatin accessibility profiles generated using EasySci provide a global view of aging and Alzheimer’s pathogenesis-associated cell population dynamics in human and mouse brains.

David Goldstein, Mohamad Mikati and colleagues report identification of de novo mutations in ATP1A3 in alternating hemiplegia of childhood, which is a rare neurodevelopmental syndrome characterized by recurrent hemiplegic episodes and distinct neurologic manifestations.

Vascular surfaces are rapidly remodeled during systemic inflammatory responses and sepsis. Here, the authors combine in vivo biotinylation and high-resolution mass spectrometry to characterize organ-level changes of the murine vascular cell surface proteome induced by MRSA sepsis.

A novel internal ribosomal entry site in the 5' end of the dystrophin gene allows for expression of a form of the protein that could be therapeutic for certain forms of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Presented is an experimental analysis of the stability of transgene expression, the perturbation of endogenous expression and the perturbation of epigenetic organization upon site-directed delivery of transgenes to the CCR5 and AAVS1 loci in human cells. It provides guidelines for optimal cassette design for stable and nonperturbative gene transfer.

Marcella Zollino and colleagues report mutations in the chromatin regulator KANSL1 in persons with 17q21.31 syndrome. This disorder is marked by distinctive facial features, moderate-to-severe intellectual disability, hypotonia and friendly behavior.

The Mouse ENCODE Consortium has mapped transcription, DNase I hypersensitivity, transcription factor binding, chromatin modifications and replication domains throughout the mouse genome in diverse cell and tissue types; these data were compared with those from human to confirm substantial conservation in the newly annotated potential functional sequences and to reveal pronounced divergence of other sequences involved in transcriptional regulation, chromatin state and higher order chromatin organization.

Phenotypic variation and diseases are influenced by factors such as genetic variants and gene expression. Here, Barbeira et al. develop S-PrediXcan to compute PrediXcan results using summary data, and investigate the effects of gene expression variation on human phenotypes in 44 GTEx tissues and >100 phenotypes.

Genome-wide association analysis of irritable bowel syndrome identifies genetic susceptibility loci and highlights shared pathways with mood and anxiety disorders.