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Andre Franke and colleagues perform a genome-wide association study for the gut microbiome, examining the influence of host genetics on overall microbial variation and individual taxa. They find significant associations at the VDR (vitamin D receptor) locus and observe correlations between microbiota and metabolites of VDR, including bile acids.

Exosomes are known to contain microRNAs (miRs). Here the authors show that dorsal root ganglion neurons release exosomes containing miR-21-5p, which contributes to inflammatory cell recruitment following peripheral nerve injury.

John Rioux and colleagues report results of a large genome-wide association meta-analysis and follow-up study of ulcerative colitis. They identify 29 new risk loci for this inflammatory disease and show that many risk loci are shared between ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

A class of enzymes known as alkyltransferase-like proteins (ATLs) can protect against alkylation damage to DNA. To gain insight into how this occurs, the structure of a yeast ATL has been solved in the presence and absence of damaged DNA, revealing that ATL flips the alkylated base out of the DNA helix, leaving the lesion to be acted on by proteins of the nucleotide excision repair pathway.

Cigarette smoking is an established risk factor for inflammatory bowel disease. The authors suggest that smoking may affect the risk of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis by modulating the DNA methylation status of the DNMT3A, LTA/TNF, and AHRR region, respectively.

A globular cluster-like system in the Galactic bulge hosts two stellar populations with remarkably different ages, identifying it as a site of recent star formation and providing observational proof for the hierarchical assembly of the Milky Way spheroid.

A gene regulatory network, including the transcription factor Nkx2-5, regulates cardiac development. Here, the authors show that on deletion of NKX2-5 from human embryonic stem cells, there is impaired cardiomyogenesis and changes in action potentials, and that this is regulated via HEY2.

Piezoelectronic materials are attractive for force sensing and as energy harvesting components in electronics that interface directly with the human body. Here, the authors synthesize large area, flexible, electrospun materials capable of ultra-high sensitivity force measurements in the low-pressure regime.

Primary biliary cirrhosis is an autoimmune liver disease with poor therapeutic options. Here Cordell et al. a perform meta-analysis of European genome-wide association studies identifying six novel risk loci and a number of potential therapeutic pathways.

Jan Veldink and colleagues show that loss-of-function variants in NEK1 are associated with susceptibility to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In addition to finding an excess of rare loss-of-function NEK1 variants in ALS cases, they report a significant association between a specific NEK1 missense variant (p.Arg261His) and disease risk.

Global images of helium and hydrogen emission are used to directly derive the helium abundance out to 2.2R_⊙. The helium abundance is shaped by the large-scale coronal magnetic field. Helium is almost completely depleted near the equator in the quiet Sun.

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.

The Microarray Quality Control consortium pitted 36 teams against each other to evaluate methods for creating genomic classifiers, computational tools for interpreting gene expression profiles. The performance of the classifiers on blinded validation data—and metadata on the analytic methods—reveal the challenges facing the field.

David Ellinghaus and colleagues report a combined association analysis of five chronic inflammatory diseases. They identify 27 new associations and highlight disease-specific association patterns at shared susceptibility loci.

Most of the more than 200 known genetic risk loci for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) reside in regulatory regions. Here, the authors provide eQTL datasets for six circulating immune cell types and ileal, colonic and rectal biopsies to map regulatory modules and identify potential causative genes for IBD.

Miles Parkes and colleagues report results of a large genome-wide association meta-analysis and replication study for Crohn's disease. They identify 30 new susceptibility loci for this inflammatory bowel disease and implicate several interesting candidate genes in disease pathogenesis.

Measurements of observables sensitive to the neutron’s spin precession are extended to a regime that probes distances of the size of the nucleon. They are found to disagree with predictions from chiral effective field theory.

A meta-analysis of previous genome-wide association studies of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two most common forms of inflammatory bowel disease, with a combined total of more than 75,000 cases and controls, finds that most loci contribute to both phenotypes and other immune-mediated disorders.

Lipoprotein nanoparticles delivering an inflammation-targeting signalling inhibitor reduce vascular inflammation in atherosclerotic mice.

Mark Seielstad and colleagues report results of a large genome-wide association and replication study of ulcerative colitis. The work identifies several new risk loci for this disease and provides further insight into the shared pathogenesis of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.

John Rioux, Andre Franke, Tom Karlsen and colleagues perform a fine-mapping study of the HLA region in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. They identify a primary role for HLA-DRB1*01:03 in both diseases and find evidence of heterozygous advantage in protection against ulcerative colitis.

This Resource article provides detailed expression data from the striatum and cerebral cortex of early prenatal human samples, ranging in age from 2 to 20 weeks post-conception. Using a number of different analyses, the authors describe the transcriptional, spatio-temporal expression and functional profile that distinguish human striatal from neocortical neurons while also elucidating some differences between human and mouse striatal development.

A meta-analysis of individual-level patient data from 66 clinical studies supports the utility of glomerular filtration rate as a surrogate endpoint in clinical trials for chronic kidney disease, with potential to enable detection of events earlier in the disease course.

Graham Heap, Tariq Ahmad and colleagues show that common variants in the HLA-DQA1–HLA-DRB1 region confer susceptibility to thiopurine-induced pancreatitis in individuals undergoing treatment for inflammatory bowel diseases. These findings could help identify patients at risk of developing this serious adverse reaction to thiopurine therapy.

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.

This Perspective describes new single-molecule protein sequencing and identification technologies alongside innovations in mass spectrometry that will eventually enable broad sequence coverage in single-cell proteomics.