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Tong et al. chemically trapped the structure of the E4 enzyme Ufd2, which mediates K48 branched ubiquitination on K29diUb and K29triUb, identifying Ufd2’s core region as a K29diUb binding domain and a dimeric conformation for distal ubiquitin stabilization.

Caesium cations promote the coagulation of 2D and 3D perovskite colloids, synchronizing their nucleation kinetics and enabling the formation of homogeneous 2D/3D heterostructured lead-free photovoltaics with a certified power conversion efficiency of 16.65%.

Porous crystals have been engineered to trap ‘oily’ molecules — enabling X-ray structures to be determined for these compounds that defy standard crystallographic analysis.

Solid-state thermoelectrics can convert waste heat to electrical energy, but applications are hindered by long-term stability issues. Here cobalt is used as a contact layer with direct bonding to thermoelectric MgAgSb, enabling a thermoelectric module to achieve 10.2% conversion efficiency over 1,440 h of thermal cycling.

Asymmetric catalytic methods for the divergent construction of phosphoryl derivatives are not widely available. Here, the authors show nickel-catalyzed dienylation and enantioselective allenylation of phosphine oxides with high chemo-, regio-, and enantioselectivity.

It has been show that monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit tightly bound excitons with a valley pseudospin that can be optically addressed by polarization selection rules. Here, the authors show the valley pseudospin is strongly coupled to the exciton centre-of-mass motion through electron-hole exchange.

Single layers of group-VI transition metal dichalcogenides have emerged as direct bandgap semiconductors in the two-dimensional limit. The authors show that monolayer molybdenum diselenide is an ideal system enabling electrostatic tunability of charging effects in neutral and charged electron-hole pairs, so-called excitons.

Van der Waals heterostructures offer a platform for harnessing the spin-valley degree of freedom for information processing. Here, the authors transfer optically generated spin-valley polarization from one layer to another in a two-dimensional molybdenum diselenide–tungsten diselenide heterostructure.

Exploiting as many degrees of freedom of the electron as possible will make future electronic devices more versatile. Here, the authors show that coupling of spin, layer pseudospin and valley degrees of freedom in transition metal dichalcogenide bilayers makes them a promising platform for this purpose.

The authors present a 3.5-million-year-long pollen record from the Zoige Basin of the eastern Tibetan Plateau, 3,442 m above sea level. The ~5,000 pollen assemblages retrieved from the core reveal many ecosystem transitions during this time and, when correlated with climatic curves, indicate what effects future warming may have on regional vegetation.

Micro-crystal electron diffraction (MicroED) has shown great potential for the structure determination of crystals that are too small for X-ray diffraction but MicroED sample preparation remains challenging. Here, the authors present Preassis, a pressure-assisted method for the preparation of MicroED specimens and demonstrate that Preassis can be applied to a wide range of protein crystal suspensions with low and high viscosities, as well as those with low crystal concentrations.

Starch is a primary food ingredient and bulk industrial feedstock. Here, the authors employ metabolic engineering and cell morphology control strategies to engineer oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica for starch biosynthesis using acetate as sole carbon source.

Qi et al. show that bile acids produced by the gut microbiota can suppress platelet activation and reduce atherothrombosis, protecting atherosclerotic mice from myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury.

Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) usually metastasizes to the lungs. Here, the authors discover that SWI/SNF ATPase subunit SMARCA4 silencing of HLF regulates ccRCC lung metastasis by modulating the integration of collagen's mechanical cues with the actin cytoskeleton through leupaxin.

A new aluminosilicate zeolite called ZMQ-1 is introduced that has an intrinsic meso-microporous channel system and shows high thermal and hydrothermal stability and tunable framework Si/Al molar ratios.

Metabolic dysregulation in the development of clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remains to be understood. Here the authors identify that a carnitine synthesis enzyme BBOX1, which inhibits TBK1-mTORC1 signaling and glycolysis, is often lost in ccRCC.

A machine learning force-field framework is proposed to predict the density, viscosity and ionic conductivity of liquid electrolytes with accuracy that is higher than classical force fields.

Liu, Gu, Chen, Zhang et al. propose KUTS, a foundational triage model that integrates knowledge prompt-tuning and uncertainty-based classification to enhance emergency acuity level prediction. The model achieves superior AUC performance across all levels, especially for moderate acuity cases, offering a robust and efficient solution for real-world triage applications.

Enhancing electrode capacitance without compromising one other metrics for solid-state supercapacitors is of high interest yet difficult to achieve. Here the authors demonstrate a strategy of using nanofluidic electrode with very low porosity to increase the electrochemical capacitance of gel-based solid state supercapacitor.

MAL and MyD88 are downstream adaptors of Toll-like receptors (TLR) and the MAL TIR domain forms filaments in vitro, which in turn nucleate the assembly of crystalline arrays of the MyD88 TIR domain. Here, the authors present the structure of these MyD88 TIR crystalline arrays solved by both microcrystal electron diffraction and serial femtosecond crystallography, and they show with mutagenesis experiments that MyD88 interface residues are important for TLR4 signaling in vivo.

Epitaxial growth of heterostructures composed of materials with large lattice mismatch is challenging. Here, the authors reported the epitaxy of II-VI semiconductor nanorods on plasmonic noble metal, despite a lattice mismatch of more than 40%.

BTR1 is an electrogenic H+ transporter belonging to the bicarbonate transporter family. Here, the authors present structures of BTR1 in different conformations and uncover PIP2 as the activator of BTR1.

Catalytic asymmetric synthesis of optically pure 1,n-diols from bulk chemicals in a stereoselective and atom-economical manner remains a challenge. Here, the authors report a modular method for the synthesis of enantioenriched 1,2-diols and 1,3-diols from the high-production-volume chemicals ethylene glycol and 1,3-propanediol, respectively.

Continuous-rotation 3D electron diffraction is a powerful technique to determine structures from nanocrystals. A data treatment method that takes into account dynamical diffraction effects has now been shown to lead to more accurate structure models, better sensitivity to weak signals and a reliable determination of absolute configuration—even for materials containing only light atoms.

The development of broad-spectrum antivirals is an important part of pandemic preparedness and response. Here the authors present ALICE, synthetic biology designer immune-like cells that act as a sense-and-destroy antiviral system can detect viruses from seven different genera, mimicking the human innate immune system.

Zheng et al. generate and utilize a biobank of colorectal cancer PDOs to find that high LGR4 is linked to chemoresistance. They develop a monoclonal antibody against LGR4 that activates ferroptosis and is therapeutically beneficial.

Engineering moiré superlattices by stacking two-dimensional crystals could enable lateral superstructures to be formed where the local topological phase is periodically modulated, creating topological mosaics that are electrically switchable.

An upconversion from negatively charged to neutral excitons is observed in monolayer tungsten diselenide, which could provide a route for cooling two-dimensional semiconductors using lasers.

Monolayer and few-layer materials present interesting spin and pseudospin states. A study of the coupling between spin, valley and layer degrees of freedom in bilayer WSe₂ reveals coherent superpositions of distinct valley configurations and suggests the possibility of electrical control of the spin states.

Excitonic valley quantum coherence is optically generated and detected by polarization-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy in the monolayer semiconductor WSe₂.

Technical advancements have significantly improved early diagnosis of cervical cancer, but accurate diagnosis is still difficult due to various practical factors. Here, the authors develop an artificial intelligence assistive diagnostic solution to improve cervical liquid-based thin-layer cell smear diagnosis according to clinical TBS criteria in a large multicenter study.

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is highly prevalent in China. Here, the authors carry out multi-region sampling of Chinese ESCC samples, and find recurrent ERBB4 mutations, BRCA1/2 variants, and amplification of CD274; together with high levels of genomic and T-cell receptor heterogeneity.

Strong dipole–dipole interactions between excitons in a moiré superlattice create a manifestation of the Bose–Hubbard model with a ground state similar to a Mott insulator.

The practical use of zinc-organic batteries has been hindered by their low energy density and rapid capacity decay. Here, the authors introduce a super electron-delocalized hydrogen-bonded organic framework by tuning electron delocalization as a cathode material for high-performance zinc-organic batteries.

In monolayer semiconductors phonons with momentum vectors pointing to the corners of the hexagonal Brillouin zone couple strongly to carriers’ spin and valley degree of freedom. Here, the authors report the observation of multiple valley phonons and the resulting exciton complexes in the monolayer semiconductor WSe₂.

Gold nanoparticles typically exhibit hard-sphere-like assembly behaviour, but now the size, morphology and symmetry of crystals of Au₂₅ nanoparticles have been tuned. The presence of excess tetraethylammonium cations has been shown to promote the one-dimensional assembly of the nanoparticles, which in turn form rod-like crystals, by stabilizing dynamically detached ligands from adjacent particles into interparticle linkers through CH⋯π and ion-pairing interactions.

Dysregulation of the post-translational modification neddylation has been implicated in liver diseases such as fibrosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Here the authors report that hepatic neddylation deficiency via genetic deletion of NEDD8 Activating Enzyme E1 Subunit 1 (NAE1) causes acute liver failure due to mitochondrial dysfunction and aberrant activation of NF-κB-inducing kinase in mice.

The limits of topological protection in photonic systems remain unclear. Here, Gao et al. construct photonic topological edge states and probe their robustness against a variety of defect classes, including some common time-reversal-invariant photonic defects that can break the topological protection.

Here, the authors report intrinsic donor bound dark exciton states with associated phonon replicas in monolayer WSe₂, and defect control crystal synthesis for the deterministic creation of these states.