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Arctic shrubs cool permafrost in winter by acting as a thermal bridge through the snowpack, according to ground temperature observations and heat transfer simulations.

Molecular glue degraders have consistently been discovered retrospectively, despite their increasing importance. Herein, a high-throughput approach is described that modifies existing ligands into molecular glue degraders.

Redox potential pattern in the permafrost soil active layer showed large seasonal differences, with reducing conditions in the summer and autumn, and oxidizing conditions in winter and spring, according to three years of soil redox potential measurements, at three sites near Fairbanks, Alaska.

In targeted protein degradation, a degrader molecule brings a neosubstrate protein proximal to a hijacked E3 ligase for its ubiquitination. Here, pseudo-natural products derived from (−)-myrtanol—iDegs—are identified to inhibit and induce degradation of the immunomodulatory enzyme indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) by a distinct mechanism. iDegs prime apo-IDO1 ubiquitination and subsequent degradation using its native proteolytic pathway.

Identifying jets originating from heavy quarks plays a fundamental role in hadronic collider experiments. In this work, the ATLAS Collaboration describes and tests a transformer-based neural network architecture for jet flavour tagging based on low-level input and physics-inspired constraints.

Inhibitor-induced kinase degradation is a common event that positions supercharging of endogenous degradation circuits as an alternative to classical proximity-inducing degraders.

How inflammation spreads from the skin to the joints in psoriatic disease is unclear. Here, the authors show that joint-resident fibroblasts can control differentiation of infiltrating skin-derived myeloid precursors that can become inflammatory macrophages.

A pangenome of oat, assembled from 33 wild and domesticated oat lines, sheds light on the evolution and genetic diversity of this cereal crop and will aid genomics-assisted breeding to improve productivity and sustainability.

Implementation of a genomics-informed prebreeding strategy in a global winter wheat collection enhances the use of genebank accessions and uncovers the value of genetic resources for wheat improvement.

By quantifying changes in lake area before glacier lake outburst floods (GLOFs) worldwide from 1990 to 2023, this study shows that despite the overall growth in total lake area and hazard potential, pre-GLOF lake areas barely changed or even decreased regionally and are dependent on a decreasing number of ice-dammed lakes.

Available wheat genomes are annotated by projecting Chinese Spring gene models across the new assemblies. Here, the authors generate de novo gene annotations for the 9 wheat genomes, identify core and dispensable transcriptome, and reveal conservation and divergence of gene expression balance across homoeologous subgenomes.

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.

The International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium reports sequencing and assembly of a reference genome for barley, Hordeum vulgare.

Annually resolved Fennoscandian tree-ring anatomy records show that the climate of the current industrial era is substantially warmer than that of the medieval period.

The Omicron variant is partially attenuated, likely because it fails to efficiently infect lung cells. Here, Hoffmann et. al. show that this defect can be lost during Omicron evolution as demonstrated for the subvariant BA.5 that robustly infects lung cells in vitro and in vivo.

Forest carbon source and sink processes may have contrasting climatic sensitivities. This analysis on 177 coniferous forest sites shows that carbon fluxes and wood formation are coupled but not fully synchronous at intra-annual scales, with peaks in cambial activity preceding those in photosynthesis and respiration.

The International Brain Laboratory presents a brain-wide electrophysiological map obtained from pooling data from 12 laboratories that performed the same standardized perceptual decision-making task in mice.

Long-term increases in heavy daily and hourly precipitation in Austria from different climatic mechanisms emphasize the need for flood management adaptation, especially in smaller catchments affected by the increased hourly rainfall.

Functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity are expected to be positively correlated. Here the authors show that the covariation between these metrics in vascular plant communities around the world is often either inconsistent or negative.

The Tibetan Kobresia pastures store 2.5% of the world’s soil organic carbon. Here the authors show that soil degradation and microbial shifts may irreversibly diminish the carbon sink function and accelerate nutrient losses.

Wastewater surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 at the national scale tracks emerging variants.

Targeted protein degradation uses small molecules to recruit proteins to E3 ligases to induce their ubiquitylation and degradation, but only a few human E3 ligases are amenable to this strategy. Here, the authors identify and characterize SP3N, a specific degrader of the prolyl isomerase FKBP12, containing an FKBP12 ligand appended with a flexible alkylamine tail that is metabolized to an active aldehyde species which recruits the SCF^FBXO22 ligase for FKBP12 degradation.

Comparison of multiple genome assemblies from wheat reveals extensive diversity that results from the complex breeding history of wheat and provides a basis for further potential improvements to this important food crop.

Detailed analysis of the structure–activity relationship for cyclin K degraders reveals diverse compounds that acquire glue activity through simultaneous binding to the CDK12 kinase pocket and engagement of several key DDB1 interfacial residues.

The hypothesis that species are most abundant at the centre of their geographic range has been widely debated. Here, by analysing over 3,600 species, the authors find that this pattern is generally not true for animals but does occur in some plant groups, being influenced by dispersal traits and evolution.

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) has emerged as a new paradigm for modulating protein activity. Here, the authors develop bifunctional degraders combining a putative ligand of the autophagy-related LC3 protein with different protein targets, which direct proteins of interest to the proteasome by covalently targeting the DCAF11 E3 ligase substrate receptor.

A pangenome analysis of 76 wild and domesticated barley accessions in combination with short-read sequence data of 1,315 barley genotypes indicates that allelic diversity at structurally complex loci may have helped crop plants to adapt to agricultural ecosystems.

Studies using genetic screening, biophysical characterization and structural reconstitution elucidate the mechanism of action and enable rational design of a new class of functional compounds that glue target proteins to E3 ligases via intramolecularly bridging two domains to enhance intrinsic protein–protein interactions and promote target ubiquitination and degradation.

A long- and short-read barley pan-transcriptome assembled from 20 diverse barley genotypes offers insights into genotype- and tissue-dependent gene expression and function.

Oxybipins were identified as potent selective inhibitors of oxysterol-binding protein, promoting Golgi fragmentation, inhibiting retrograde trafficking and attenuating Shiga toxin toxicity.

The liver has the remarkable ability to regenerate. Applying single-cell transcriptomics and iterative immunofluorescence imaging on patient-derived samples, this study revealed cellular gene expression changes linked to altered tissue architecture.

Chemical profiling in hyponeddylated cells coupled with multi-omics target deconvolution led to the identification of molecular glue degraders of cyclin K that function by inducing proximity between the CRL adaptor DDB1 and a CDK12–cyclin K complex.

As Nature Chemical Biology approaches its third decade we asked a collection of chemical biologists, “What do you think are the most exciting frontiers or the most needed developments in your main field of research?” — here is what they said.

Microbes are often assumed to reproduce as much as possible, but it has now been shown that soil microbes actually store a large part of their carbon intake. This could help microbial communities withstand environmental changes.

An assessment of ice-dam failures in six mountain regions shows that extreme peak flows and volumes have declined sharply since 1900, and that ice-dam floods today originate at higher elevations and earlier in the year.

Here the authors show that extremes in the summer jet stream position over Europe create a beech forest productivity dipole between northwestern and southeastern Europe and can result in regional anomalies in forest carbon uptake and growth.

Chemical, genetic and proteomic approaches were used to elucidate the mode of action of orpinolide, a withanolide-inspired OSBP inhibitor, revealing sterol transport as a druggable metabolic dependency in leukemia.

Microbiomes in connected aquifers are more vulnerable to surface disturbances but highly resilient, while those in hydrologically more isolated aquifers resist short-term change yet lose stability under prolonged stress, according to a decade-long study in the Hainich CZE, Germany.

A study of patients with COVID-19 and healthy donors found CD4⁺ T cells that react to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and human endemic coronaviruses; however, the effect of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 cross-reactive T cells on clinical outcomes remains to be determined.

Gut microbiome composition has a role in health and disease. Here the authors show that microbiome signatures related to the Enterobacteriaceae family are associated with cause-specific mortality risk in a well phenotyped Finish population over a 15-year follow-up.

Analysis of genotyping-by-sequencing data for more than 20,000 barley accessions from a German genebank provides a framework for genomics-assisted genebank management and analysis of large germplasm collections for important crops.

A chromosome-scale genome assembly of rye inbred line ‘Lo7’ provides insights into its incomplete genetic isolation from wild relatives, mechanisms of genome structural evolution and the yield benefits of rye–wheat introgressions.