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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 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.

Rodrigues et al. show that exosomal CEMIP derived from brain metastatic cells elicits vascular remodelling and inflammation and supports subsequent metastatic colonization in the brain microenvironment.

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) onsets in COVID-19 patients with manifestations similar to Kawasaki disease (KD). Here the author probe the peripheral blood transcriptome of MIS-C patients to find signatures related to natural killer (NK) cell activation and CD8+ T cell exhaustion that are shared with KD patients.

In this immunological ancillary study of the PREVAC trial, the authors show that approved Ebola virus vaccines induce memory T-cell responses that persist during the five year follow-up after initial vaccination.

A strategy for protecting redox-active ortho-quinones, which show promise as anticancer agents but suffer from redox-cycling behaviour and systemic toxicity, has been developed. The ortho-quinones are derivatized to redox-inactive para-aminobenzyl ketols. Upon amine deprotection, an acid-promoted, self-immolative C–C bond-cleaving 1,6-elimination releases the redox-active hydroquinone. The strategy also enables conjugation to a carrier for targeted delivery of ortho-quinone species.

Gene regulation and metabolism co-ordinate self-renewal and differentiation of neural precursors (NPCs) in the developing brain. Here the authors show that methylglyoxal, a glycolytic intermediate metabolite, promotes GADPH-dependent translational repression of Notch1, thereby promoting NPC differentiation.

Interactions between the host immune response and the commensal microbiota play essential roles in health and disease. Here the authors identify a population of MHC class II, innate like, commensal reactive cells in the gut of mice and humans.

How MICL recognizes and autoregulates the formation of neutrophil extracellular traps is explored in mouse models and human patients where disease severity is associated with aberrant neutrophil extracellular trap formation.

Strontium isotope analysis can be applied to animal and plant tissues to help determine their provenance. Here, the authors generate a strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa using data from 2266 environmental samples and demonstrate its efficacy by tracing the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts.

Analysis of HbA1c and FPG levels across 117 population-based studies demonstrates regional variation in prevalence of previously undiagnosed screen-detected diabetes using one or both measures and suggests that use of elevated FPG alone could underestimate diabetes prevalence in low- and middle-income countries.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

Liquid glycan arrays (LiGAs), presented on M13 bacteriophage surface proteins through bioorthogonal chemistry, link surface glycans to genetic barcodes in phage DNA, enabling lectin–glycan interaction profiling by DNA sequencing.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

Myelodysplastic syndromes are characterised by clonal haematopoiesis, with the affected cells often harbouring mutations in the TET2 gene, an important regulator of DNA methylation state. Here authors show that the same mutations are also found in NK cells, perturbing their DNA methylation pattern and cytolytic function.

Sialic acid-binding immunoglobulin-type lectins (Siglecs) are a family of immunomodulatory receptors expressed on cells of the hematopoietic lineage. Here the authors demonstrate an approach for the identification of the glycan ligands of Siglecs, which is also applicable to other families of glycan-binding proteins.

Contrary to the view that urbanization is a major driver of the global rise in obesity, the global increase in body-mass index is shown to be mostly due to increases in the body-mass indexes of rural populations.

This study presents an extensive global compendium of metagenomically derived sequences that will serve as a foundation for understanding the role of viruses in soil ecosystems.

Analysis of the FGF14-SCA27B repeat locus identifies a common 5′-flanking insertion that represents the major allele, is present exclusively on nonpathogenic alleles, enhances repeat stability and increases chromatin accessibility.

Transcriptomic analyses of acute phase whole blood from a large cohort of patients with COVID-19 identify molecular determinants of post-infection long-term sequelae.

Analysis of whole-genome doubling (WGD) by using cancer sequencing data combined with simulations of tumor evolution suggests that there is negative selection against homozygous loss of essential genes before WGD but not after.

A robust, cost-effective technique based on whole-exome sequencing data can be used to characterize immune infiltrates, relate the extent of these infiltrates to somatic changes in tumours, and enables prediction of tumour responses to immune checkpoint inhibition therapy.

Altered glycosylation helps cancer cells evade immune destruction, and targeted remodeling of glycans in vivo offers the ability to reprogram immune responses. A stable chemical linkage between an antibody and neuraminidase enables the targeted destruction of self-associated sialic acids to enhance antitumor immunity.

A survey of T cell repertoire evolution in the tumors, healthy tissue and blood of patients with early-stage untreated lung cancer offers an opportunity to monitor and identify neoantigen-specific T cells for personalized immunotherapy.

The Impact of Genomic Variation on Function Consortium is combining single-cell mapping, genomic perturbations and predictive modelling to investigate relationships between human genomic variation, genome function and phenotypes and will provide an open resource to the community.

Cataloging microbial genomes from Earth’s environments expands the known phylogenetic diversity of bacteria and archaea.

TRACERx Lung: Intratumoral transcriptional heterogeneity, which often hinders the development of clinically useful RNA-expression-biased biomarkers for cancer, can now be overcome with an approach for the identification of clonal expression biomarkers.

Pulmonary venous tumor cells disseminating before tumor resection are heterogeneous, predict relapse and seed future metastasis of lung cancer

Ghorani et al. use a multiomics approach to characterize the effect of tumour mutational burden on the differentiation of CD4 and CD8 T cell subpopulations in non-small cell lung cancer.

Multiregion spatial histology, exome and transcriptome data from patients with non-small cell lung cancer suggest that cancer subclones from immune cold regions diversify later than subclones from immune hot regions

Walsh et al. examine how dementia impacts daily life and well-being over three years by tracking changes in behaviour, memory, and daily activities, for people with dementia and their carers. They find that as cognitive decline progresses, daily challenges increase, affecting carer stress and the use of community services.

Kitov et al. present the competitive universal proxy receptor assay (CUPRA) that provides a quantitative and high-throughput method for screening glycan libraries against glycan-binding and glycan–processing proteins. This assay measures the activity and substrate specificity of lectins and carbohydrate-active enzymes.

Abhishek Bhattacherjee et al. investigate the functional differences between human and mouse CD33, an immunomodulatory receptor linked to Alzheimer’s disease. They find that loss of mouse CD33 does not affect cargo uptake in macrophages in contrast to human CD33, which represses phagocytosis when expressed in cells or mice.