Search

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.

Using two wavelengths to activate different photoreactions in a resin system has attracted attention in the scientific community. Here, the authors use wavelength orthogonal photochemistry to spatially control the curing kinetics of a thiol-ene photopolymerization reaction.

Mauthe et al. find that protein aggregate clearance requires fragmentation of the aggregate by a chaperone module and a proteasomal regulatory particle for recruitment and clustering of selective autophagy receptors to initiate phagophore formation.

Targeting histone deacetylases (HDACs) alone has shown limited success in solid tumours. Here, authors report that the HDAC1/2 inhibitor romidepsin confers responsiveness to receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors, with enhanced therapeutic effects in models of hepatocellular carcinoma, leading to tumour regression and an immune-stimulatory profile.

Exsolution enables the formation of active catalytic nanoparticles, but their thermal stability remains limited. Here, the authors use secondary-electron imaging at atomic resolution to directly visualize the coarsening of exsolved nanoparticles.

The authors demonstrate deeply subwavelength light confinement in the terahertz spectral range by exploiting the strong light–matter coupling and hyperbolicity of phonon polaritons in hafnium-based dichalcogenides.

Pathology-oriented multiplexing (PathoPlex) represents a framework for widespread access to multiplexed imaging and computational image analysis of clinical specimens at a relatively high throughput and subcellular resolution.

The Apelin receptor (APLNR) plays a key role during cardiovascular development. Here, authors develop genetically encoded APLNR conformation biosensors, which enable the measurement of temporally and spatially resolved APLNR activity in model cell lines and living organisms.

The brain vasculature comprises a heterogenous network of blood vessel. Here Herdt et al. uncovered a meningeal-vascular crosstalk mediated by Apelin signaling which is specifically required for the formation of fenestrated blood but not for blood-brain-barrier vessels.

Spinal cord injury leads to lasting motor and sensory loss, with limited treatment options. Here, the authors show that subdural electric field stimulation delivered across the injury via an ultra-thin implant improves functional recovery in rats.

Mechanical forces at the immunological synapse are believed to influence antigen recognition by the T cell receptor (TCR). Here the authors analyse these forces at single-molecule resolution to show that the ligand-engaged TCR of CD4+ T-cells create a stable environment with only a small fraction of TCR:pMHC complexes experiencing mechanistic forces at any given time during antigen surveillance and upon T-cell activation.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

Visual uncertainty impairs reach accuracy. The authors show that uncertainty about the target always impairs cortical motor goal encoding in rhesus monkeys, while feedback uncertainty does so only when it is task-critical.

Glucose uptake in astrocytes is thought to rely on GLUT1. Here, the authors show that adult mice tolerate astrocyte-specific GLUT1 deletion, which increases astrocytic glucose metabolism and confers neuroprotection in a model of stroke.

Eusociality evolved independently in Hymenoptera and in termites. Here, the authors sequence genomes of the German cockroach and a drywood termite and provide insights into the evolutionary signatures of termite eusociality.

53BP1 is marker of double-strand breaks and accumulates in nuclear foci. These foci are shown to accumulate in G1 at lesions generated by replication stress and may shield lesions from erosion.

DNA damage arising from replication stress is well studied, but the effect of mitotic errors on genome integrity is less understood. Here the authors knock down 47 mitotic regulators and record how they impact on DNA breakage events, providing a resource for future studies on the relation between cell division and genome integrity.

A FRET-based biosensor reveals a conformational change in the actin-binding domain of α-catenin during the maturation of epithelial adherens junctions.

This study identifies a unique multiple sclerosis lesion, the broad rim lesion, which is associated with rapid disease progression and marked by a distinct inflammatory profile involving innate inflammation, cellular stress, unfolded protein response and apoptosis.

The reduction of food loss and waste is urgent, yet strict food waste regulations can be costly and unpopular. Drawing on a large set of survey experiments conducted in a high-income country, this study assesses the positive impact that specific policy framing, design and feedback may have on citizens’ level of support to these regulations.

Lukas Lehner wanted to capture how different economies are addressing COVID-19 challenges. His Twitter call-out helped to create a global directory of policy resources based on swarm intelligence, and led to a research project.

A convolutional network that approaches the fundamental Cramér–Rao bound is demonstrated to localize a reflective target hidden behind a dynamically fluctuating scattering medium, advancing algorithmic developments in the field of computational imaging.

Bat influenza viruses use MHCII, not sialic acids, for entry. Using high-resolution microscopy. on live cells, the authors show at the nanoscale that viral particles attach to clusters of MHCII. and attract additional molecules to the attachment site.

The Neolithic site of Dispilio, Northern Greece, is a pile-dwelling site with 900+ piles excavated. Here, the authors use the 5259 BC Miyake event to date the juniper tree-ring chronology constructed from these piles to 5140 BC, making it the first Neolithic site in the region to be absolutely calendar dated.

Contractile rings are formed from cytoskeletal filaments, specific crosslinkers and motor proteins during cell division. Here, authors form micron-scale contractile DNA rings from DNA nanotubes and synthetic crosslinkers, with both simulations and experiments showing ring contraction without motor proteins, offering a potential first step towards synthetic cell division machinery.

Mother cells recycle parental MCMs and simultaneously synthesize nascent MCMs, both of which are inherited by daughter cells, in which the former are preferentially used to form active replisomes and the latter adjust the pace of replisome movement to minimize errors during DNA replication.

The GelMap workflow adds a fluorescent grid into samples before expansion, allowing for precise determination of expansion factor and subsequent deformation correction in ExM. GelMap works with diverse samples and expansion methods.

Targeting of diseased cells is key to the development of next-generation pharmaceuticals, but is often hindered by a lack of specific cell surface markers. Here the authors develop an RNA-based approach, which allows precise control of gene expression, with translation only occurring within preselected cell types of interest.

Müller-Tidow and colleagues perform a randomized clinical trial and show that administration of convalescent plasma improves COVID-19 outcome in patients with cancer who are unable to generate an adequate immune response.

Reproduction in numerous marine organisms is timed to specific moon phases, but the mechanisms for sensing moon phases are incompletely understood. Here the authors report that an ancient, light-sensitive protein L-Cryptochrome in a marine bristle worm can discriminate between sun- and moonlight, enabling the animals to properly decode moon phases.

DNA damage induces silencing of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) transcription. Stucki and colleagues reveal that rRNA silencing is an ATM-dependent pan-nuclear response to irradiation, in which the nucleolar protein Treacle targets DNA-damage protein NBS1 to nucleoli.

Spies et al. report that 53BP1 nuclear bodies restrain duplication of under-replicated DNA until the late S phase, thus promoting RAD52-mediated repair of these lesions.

Bristleworms possess dedicated cells that can synthesize highly stereotypical bristles with sub-micrometric precision. Here, Ikeda and colleagues shed light on the underlying dynamics of cellular protrusions, revealing an extension-disassembly cycle that resembles a 3D printer.

For several decades the MCM2-7 proteins, the core of the DNA replicative helicase, eluded detection at DNA replication sites. Here, the authors solve this conundrum by gene editing, which enables visualization of replication dynamics in living cells.

Cytokinin receptors predominantly localize to the endoplasmic reticulum. Here, Kubiasová et al. use a cytokinin fluoroprobe to show that ER-localized cytokinin receptors can enter the secretory pathway, reach the plasma membrane and undergo vesicular recycling, suggesting multiple sites of cytokinin perception.

Single-cell RNA sequencing efforts have made large amounts of data available for transcriptomics research. Simon and colleagues develop a neural network embedding approach that avoids batch effects, such that it can rapidly and efficiently integrate large datasets from different studies.

Hypericum plants contain complex compounds with promising medicinal properties. Here, the authors report a pair of enzymes catalyzing prenylation and regiodivergent cyclization. The forged scaffolds are characteristic of hyperforin analogs.

Interaction between Cooper pairs and other collective excitations may reveal important information about the pairing mechanism. Here, the authors observe a universal jump in the phase of the driven Higgs oscillations in cuprate thin films, indicating the presence of a coupled collective mode, as well as a nonvanishing Higgs-like response at high temperatures, suggesting a potential nonzero pairing amplitude above Tc.

Analyses of genome and exome sequencing data identify rare coding and structural variants associated with atrial fibrillation and highlight genetic links between atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathies.

A genome-wide association meta-analysis study of blood lipid levels in roughly 1.6 million individuals demonstrates the gain of power attained when diverse ancestries are included to improve fine-mapping and polygenic score generation, with gains in locus discovery related to sample size.

A vascular cell atlas integrating single-cell data of 19 organs and tissues from 62 donors identifies angiotypic and organotypic characteristics of endothelial and mural cells.

Cells employ integrin-based adhesions with different molecular compositions to adhere to substrates. Here, the authors show that so-called “non-canonical” adhesions lacking focal adhesion components can convert to focal adhesions (and vice versa), through the selective exchange of components.

An optogenetic strategy allowing light-mediated recruitment of distinct cytoskeletal motor proteins to specific organelles is established; this technique enabled rapid and reversible activation or inhibition of the transport of organelles such as peroxisomes, recycling endosomes and mitochondria with high spatiotemporal accuracy, and the approach was also applied to primary neurons to demonstrate optical control of axonal growth by recycling endosome repositioning.

A new study reveals that 53BP1 influences high-fidelity homology-directed repair by showing that its depletion in the presence of increasing DNA-damage levels triggers a shift from RAD51-dependent gene conversion, an error-free process, to RAD52-mediated single-strand annealing, which is mutagenic.

In neurons and other cells, contacts between organelles regulates function and subcellular organization, but the precise mechanisms and effects are unclear. Here the authors show that endoplasmic reticulum (ER) tubules in the soma of neurons regulate lysosome localization and function by regulating lysosomal fission, suggesting a role for ER – lysosome inter-organelle membrane contact sites in lysosomal axonal availability.

Trans-ancestry meta-analysis of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from 1,046,070 individuals identifies 264 associated loci, providing a resource of molecular targets for translational research of chronic kidney disease.

Using single-neuron recordings in patients with epilepsy, Kunz et al. show that stimulus-specific neurons activate together during hippocampal ripples when humans encode and retrieve associative memories.

Iron homeostasis is known to influence plant immune signaling. Here the authors characterize SRF3, a receptor kinase that acts as a negative regulator of callose synthesis, that is required for root responses to iron deficiency and pathogen signals.