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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.

The likelihood of severe COVID-19 increases with age upon SARS-CoV-2 infection and even milder disease manifestations might differ among age groups. Here authors show, by immune transcriptome analysis of samples from the upper respiratory tract and peripheral blood of participants from different age groups, that interferon responses are more typical for the young, while activation of myeloid, inflammatory, and coagulation pathways is exclusive to adults.

A subcortical circuit that regulates food consumption in mice is described, involving neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus that are directly linked to motor centres that regulate feeding and jaw movements.

Nonlinear light-matter coupling has applications in quantum technologies, for instance in quantum-non-demolition measurements, but its strength is typically limited. Here the authors demonstrate near-ultrastrong nonlinear light-matter coupling in a superconducting circuit with two transmons and a quarton coupler.

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.

Adaptation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to the host environment is principally mediated through its transcription factors. Here, the authors report the DNA binding and transcriptional profile of ~80% of all predicted M. tuberculosistranscription factors, and find wide-spread dormant DNA binding.

MISO (MultI-modal Spatial Omics) integrates two or more spatial omics modalities, despite differences in data quality and spatial resolution for improved feature extraction and clustering to reveal biologically meaningful tissue organization.

Dense calcium imaging combined with co-registered high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction of the brain of the same mouse provide a functional connectomics map of tens of thousands of neurons of a region of the primary cortex and higher visual areas.

Clinical and genetic phenotyping of consanguineous family cases of neonatal syndromic diabetes and type 2 diabetes, combined with in-depth functional studies in pluripotent stem cells, reveals a role for genetic variants of ONECUT1 in monogenic and multifactorial diabetes.

The local delivery of a calcium channel blocker and a Rho-kinase inhibitor, determined by screening for small molecules that cause ureteral relaxation, significantly reduce ureteral contraction in pigs.

Analysis of 97,691 high-coverage human blood DNA-derived whole-genome sequences enabled simultaneous identification of germline and somatic mutations that predispose individuals to clonal expansion of haematopoietic stem cells, indicating that both inherited and acquired mutations are linked to age-related cancers and coronary heart disease.

PMOs (phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers) have huge potential for antisense therapy but complex and slow synthesis limits application. Here, the authors report the development of automated flow synthesis methods which reduce nucleobase coupling times from hours to minutes removing human errors and allow for high-throughput production.

A high-throughput screen of substances generally recognized as safe identifies species-specific materials that stabilize live microbial therapeutics as powders, making them robust to pharmaceutical manufacturing workflows.

Characterization of medulloblastoma tissues using single-cell transcriptomics shows that the different molecular subtypes consist of distinct developmental phenotypes.

Rationally designed polymer vesicles increase cytosolic delivery of cGAMP, activating the STING pathway and increasing the immunogenicity of the tumour microenvironment in in vivo murine models of melanoma and in human metastatic melanoma tissues.

An integrated analysis of over 100 single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomics studies illustrates severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 viral entry gene coexpression patterns across different human tissues, and shows association of age, smoking status and sex with viral entry gene expression in respiratory cell populations.

Using several ultrafast diffraction and microscopy techniques, demagnetization-driven interlayer shear of a van der Waals antiferromagnet is visualized at the nanoscale.

Emergent quantum phenomena such as quantized anomalous Hall effect may be realized in magnetic topological materials. Here, Hu et al. discovered an intrinsic natural heterostructural Z₂ antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi₄Te₇ with low out-of-plane saturation fields.

A quantitative high-throughput screen identified an inhibitor of phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase (PHGDH), a key enzyme for serine synthesis. This inhibitor limits one-carbon unit availability for nucleotide synthesis.

Ordovas-Montanes and colleagues describe the composition of the nasal cellular ecosystem and signatures of disease severity in vaccinated and unvaccinated adults during infection with the ancestral, Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2.

A small-molecule activator specific for PKM2 binds to a site distinct from the endogenous activator fructose-1,6-bisphosphate, promoting tetramerization and constitutive activation of PKM2, to inhibit xenograft tumor growth in mice.

Common polygenic variation at chromosome 16p and rare recurrent deletions of 16p11.2 influencing autism risk are associated with reduced expression of genes throughout the 16p region, suggesting functional convergence of rare and common variant effects.

The next step after sequencing a genome is to figure out how the cell actually uses it as an instruction manual. A large international consortium has examined 1% of the genome for what part is transcribed, where proteins are bound, what the chromatin structure looks like, and how the sequence compares to that of other organisms.

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.

Using the software GRIN, GWAS results are refined by reducing false positive genes using biological network topology, allowing users to lower GWAS significance thresholds to identify additional genes associated with complex traits

Liquid crystalline elastomers are stimuli-responsive polymeric materials whose mechanical properties can be programmed by patterning their local orientation, making them promising candidates to serve as low-density actuators and functional elements in various applications. This Review discusses the synthesis and processing of liquid crystalline elastomers, with a focus on alignment methods and potential applications.