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Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

BamA is the catalytic core of the BAM complex, which inserts proteins into bacterial outer membranes. Here, the authors show that hinge flexibility between BamA’s β-barrel and POTRA domains is vital, demonstrating how evolution has fine-tuned the BamA sequence and structure for function.

Studies in zebra finches show that dopamine has a key role as a reinforcement signal in the trial-and-error process of learning that underlies complex natural behaviours.

A modeling approach to assess the global risk of Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein 2 and 3 gene deletions identifies ten priority African countries for surveillance and could inform malaria control policies.

A study of several longitudinal birth cohorts and cross-sectional cohorts finds only moderate overlap in genetic variants between autism that is diagnosed earlier and that diagnosed later, so they may represent aetiologically different conditions.

Covert attention to a specific location enhances performance. Here, the authors show that anticipating an attentional target selectively alters visual cortex activity, modulating neural responses and spatial tuning via top-down attentional mechanisms.

The authors model regional electricity grid coordination, which enables access to geographically dispersed resources. Results suggest grid integration can reduce planning uncertainty region-wide but may impact individual countries differently.

This study reports widespread loss of mountain vegetation worldwide from 2000 to 2020, with ∼89% attributable to human expansion, primarily agriculture. Over half of this loss occurred within protected areas and other biodiversity-rich areas, threatening conservation efforts.

Enfortumab vedotin (EV) is the current standard treatment for advanced bladder cancer, but resistance typically develops within a year, highlighting the need for new therapies. This study demonstrates that NECTIN4-targeting CAR T cells are effective against bladder cancer, including EV-resistant cells, and their potency can be further enhanced by using rosiglitazone to boost NECTIN4 expression.

Here Schwämmle et al. develop CRISPR reporter screens to map transcription-factor-regulatory element interactions at the Xist locus, revealing a two-step mechanism integrating developmental and X-dosage signals to initiate X-chromosome inactivation.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

Migration responses to climate are demographically heterogeneous. Accounting for age and education greatly improves predictions, with demographic-specific effects often an order of magnitude larger than population wide averages.

HippoMaps provides an open-source resource for studying the human hippocampus at different scales and with different modalities such as histology, fMRI, structural MRI and EEG.

To what degree do the laws of thermodynamics constrain biological function? This work shows that the amount of free energy dissipated by microbes during growth imposes tight constraints on the versatility of their metabolism.

An optical detection and analysis platform quantifies aggregate density, distribution and size in fluorescently labelled post-mortem human brain tissue.

Polygenic risk scores can help identify individuals at higher risk of type 2 diabetes. Here, the authors characterise a multi-ancestry score across nearly 900,000 people, showing that its predictive value depends on demographic and clinical context and extends to related traits and complications.

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.

The authors estimate genomic vulnerability for closely related species of rainbowfish. They find that narrow endemic species that have hybridized with a warm-adapted generalist show reduced vulnerability to climate change and that hybridization may facilitate evolutionary rescue for such species.

In an integrated analysis of transcriptomic data from the SUBSPACE consortium and public datasets of patients with sepsis, acute respiratory distress syndrome, trauma and burns, dysregulation within four consensus molecular clusters related to myeloid and lymphoid cells is associated with mortality and illness severity.

Cell death contributes to tissue homeostasis and plays critical roles in inflammation and host defense. Our increasing understanding of the physiological importance of cell death underlines the need to more fully elucidate its underlying mechanisms in health and disease. Molecular and structural insight into the cell death apparatus could provide strategies to target the loss of cells in pathophysiological contexts. We asked experts studying a range of cell death types to share with us what they are most excited to tackle and what the field needs for progress.

The authors present a molecular classification of acute leukemia using 5-methylcytosine signatures, together with a neural network-based classifier for clinical use.

This study found higher RSV antibody levels were associated with lower RSV risk in children outside the hospital. An earlier rise in incidence and higher incidence rates were observed among children <5 years compared to older children and adults.

Whether higher-order visual areas exhibit a fine-grained functional organization remains poorly understood. Here, the authors use high-resolution fMRI to reveal that category-selective regions in macaques are organized into mesoscale functional units which form distinct long-range mesoscale functional networks.

2D semiconductors hold promise for solution-processed circuits requiring low-cost components and manufacturing scalability. Here, the authors investigate the criteria for the electrochemical exfoliation of high aspect-ratio nanosheets from 28 different layered materials, identifying the most promising candidates and key bottlenecks for solution-processed complementary electronics and functional circuits.

The location of EGFR exon 20 loop insertions (EGFRex20ins) has been shown to alter sensitivity to lung cancer therapy. Here, the authors report the results of the ZENITH20 clinical trial investigating poziotinib (EGFR TKI) in lung cancer patients and, combining with a similar trial, investigate how structural differences due to location of EGGFRex20ins alters sensitivity to EGFR TKI.

Enterololin is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that selectively kills Enterobacteriaceae in vitro and in a mouse model of adherent-invasive Escherichia coli gut infection. AI-guided mechanism-of-action studies identified LolCDE as its molecular target.

In the past three decades, fish abundance, richness and uniqueness have diverged across cold and warm streams, and the effects on native fish communities of stream warming and increases in introduced fishes have magnified each other.

The Akt-mTOR axis influences cell activation, differentiation and metabolism. Jordan and colleagues show that thymic and inducible T_H17 cells exhibit different requirements for mTORC1 and mTORC2 as well as Akt isoforms.

Variation in responses to bacterial and viral stimuli between Batwa rainforest hunter-gatherers and Bakiga agriculturalists from Uganda suggests population-level divergence under natural selection, with hunter-gatherers disproportionately showing signatures of positive selection.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

In this Perspective, Estrela and Huang discuss nutrient starvation in the context of the gut microbiome, outlining what is known and highlighting key questions for future research to address knowledge gaps.

UCHL5 is a deubiquitinating enzyme that cleaves Lys-48-linked polyubiquitin chains. Here, the authors discover through in-vivo CRISPR-Cas9 screens that Uchl5 is involved in immune evasion and modulation of extracellular matrix deposition in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

RNA base editing represents an exciting modality in precision genetic medicine. Here the authors develop short, metabolically stable RNA oligonucleotides (RESTORE 2.0) that enable precise and efficient RNA base editing, demonstrating successful in-vivo correction of a disease-causing human mutation.

Gut bacteria digest dietary fiber and release molecules as energy for the host. Here, Yu et al. find that the ability of certain gut bacteria to digest different fibers influences host consumption of food containing these fibers.

Engineering of semiconductor nanocrystals requires a detailed understanding of their formation. Here, the authors use signal-enhanced NMR and theoretical calculations to decode the structural transition from metastable CdSe clusters to mature quantum dots.

Using MPXV genomes specific to New York City, phylogenetic clusters were identified. Most mutations were driven by ABOBEC3. The prevalence of coinfections with distinct strains was ~4.2% and results may improve MPXV genomic epidemiology applications.

Population history learning by averaging sampled histories is a new Bayesian method for estimating historical effective population size from recombining sequence data that offers improved speed and accuracy and enables uncertainty quantification and testing for ancient bottlenecks.

What we eat, as well as where and how it is grown, impacts species extinction risks through agricultural land use. Using a new global biodiversity impact data product, this study estimates how many species extinctions may potentially be caused by the production and consumption of different food types on a country-by-country basis.

Due to racial stereotypes, innocuous objects (e.g. a tool) can be misperceived as a gun when presented immediately after a Black individual’s face. Here, the authors examine the neural basis of this effect, showing that neural response patterns to tools in visual perception regions become more similar to those typically elicited by guns, contributing to racially biased responding.

Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

Opposing forces generated by exopolysaccharide trail binding versus type IV pilus retraction generate a high cyclic diGMP–high cyclic AMP state in Pseudomonas aeruginosa that promotes social motility.

A redox reaction network, comprising concurrent oxidation and reduction pathways, is described that can drive autonomous unidirectional motion about a C–C bond in a structurally simple synthetic molecular motor based on an achiral biphenyl.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

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.

Phylogenetic mining and protein language models uncover improved PiggyBac transposase sequences.

Rizzollo et al. show that BDH2 participates in iron distribution between cellular compartments, which sets the threshold for the ferroptosis vulnerability of the melanoma cell phenotypes, ultimately affecting their metastatic capacity

A report from the first 2,000 newborns enrolled in the Early Check program, which offered genome screening covering 198 genes associated with early-onset diseases, shows the feasibility and potential clinical utility of the approach, leading to 28 true positive results.