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A wireless device for measuring bioimpedance during breastfeeding allows accurate quantification of the volume of expressed milk in 12 new mothers in a neonatal intensive care unit and in home settings.

Safely opening university campuses has been a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, the authors describe a program of public health measures employed at a university in the United States which, combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, allowed the university to stay open in fall 2020 with limited evidence of transmission.

Discovery of full-length antibodies can be slow and labor intensive. Here, the authors describe a robust genetic assay for facile isolation of IgG antibodies from combinatorial libraries expressed in the cytoplasm of redox-engineered bacteria.

The availability of longitudinal data in large biobanks is increasing. Here, using data from the UK Biobank, the authors develop and apply analytical approaches to quantify genetic contributions to change over time for traits like height and weight.

A detailed parcellation (map) of the human cerebral cortex has been obtained by integrating multi-modal imaging data, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and the resulting freely available resources will enable detailed comparative studies of the human brain in health, ageing and disease.

Moisture-driven environmental changes in the terminal Pleistocene contributed to megafaunal extinction across four continents, as indicated by stable isotope analysis. Stable grasslands in Africa help to explain maintenance of African megafaunal populations.

Current methods for production of monoclonal antibodies often require refolding steps or secretion across biological membranes. Here, Robinson et al. describe engineered E. colistrains for efficient production of functional immunoglobulin G antibodies in the bacterial cytoplasm.

Comprehensive analyses of 178 lung squamous cell carcinomas by The Cancer Genome Atlas project show that the tumour type is characterized by complex genomic alterations, with statistically recurrent mutations in 11 genes, including TP53 in nearly all samples; a potential therapeutic target is identified in most of the samples studied.

The number and diversity of organisms known to produce the environmentally important sulfur compound dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) is expanded with the discovery of a family of DMSP synthesis enzymes.

Few genome-wide association studies have explored the genetic architecture of age-of-onset for traits and diseases. Here, the authors develop a Bayesian approach to improve prediction in timing-related phenotypes and perform age-of-onset analyses across complex traits in the UK Biobank.

GROWdb defines US river microbiomes at the genome level.

Patient-derived xenograft models (PDX) have been extensively used to study the molecular and clinical features of cancers. Here the authors present a cohort of 536 PDX models from 25 cancers, as well as their genomic and evolutionary profiles and their suitability for clinical trials.

An integrated transcriptome, genome, methylome and proteome analysis of over 200 lung adenocarcinomas reveals high rates of somatic mutations, 18 statistically significantly mutated genes including RIT1 and MGA, splicing changes, and alterations in MAPK and PI(3)K pathway activity.

Bayesian Flow Networks generate diverse, novel, and coherent protein sequences, surpassing prior unconditional generation methods. They also permit flexible conditional generation during inference, which is demonstrated on antibody inpainting tasks.

The genes underlying stripe rust host specificity between wheat and barley remain unknown. Here, the authors report that Rps6, Rps7 and Rps8 determine host species specificity in barley at different stages of the pathogen lifecycle and the barley powdery mildew immune receptor Mla8 and Rps7 are the same gene.

Focusing on the serial differentiation of the presacral column across 1,136 extant mammal species, the authors find evidence of high within-group variation and an evolutionary trend towards increasing complexity.

Electrical excitability in neuroendocrine SCLC cells promotes tumour progression through action potential firing, increasing ATP demand and oxidative phosphorylation dependency, whereas non-neuroendocrine cells provide metabolic support, driving a tumour-autonomous cycle that enhances tumorigenesis and metastasis.

This study describes the integrative analysis of 111 reference human epigenomes, profiled for histone modification patterns, DNA accessibility, DNA methylation and RNA expression; the results annotate candidate regulatory elements in diverse tissues and cell types, their candidate regulators, and the set of human traits for which they show genetic variant enrichment, providing a resource for interpreting the molecular basis of human disease.

Motion detection by the retina is thought to rely largely on the biophysics of starburst amacrine cell dendrites; here machine learning is used with gamified crowdsourcing to draw the wiring diagram involving amacrine and bipolar cells to identify a plausible circuit mechanism for direction selectivity; the model suggests similarities between mammalian and insect vision.

In a cluster-randomized trial conducted across 70 medical centers in six countries, a 16-week structured educational program for healthcare providers improved adherence to guidelines for rhythm control but not for stroke prevention in individuals with atrial fibrillation.

Matthew Robinson and colleagues report an analysis of population genetic differences in human height and body mass index (BMI) across 14 European populations. They estimate the proportion of additive genetic variance attributable to population genetic differences and find evidence for selection increasing height while reducing BMI in European nations.

Rosenblatt et al. run over 900 million resampling-based simulations in functional and structural connectivity data to show that low and medium effect size predictions require training and external samples in the hundreds to thousands of participants.

Sustained drug delivery is critical for patient adherence to chronic disease treatments. Here the authors apply machine learning to engineer multifunctional peptides with high melanin binding, high cell-penetration, and low cytotoxicity, enhancing the duration and efficacy of peptide-drug conjugates for sustained ocular delivery.

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many correspond to sites of association with human disease.

Improving inference in large-scale genetic data linked to electronic medical record data requires the development of novel computationally efficient regression methods. Here, the authors develop a Bayesian approach for association analyses to improve SNP-heritability estimation, discovery, fine-mapping and genomic prediction.

Genetic prediction of complex traits so far has limited accuracy because of insufficient understanding of the genetic risk. Here, Maier et al. develop an improved method for trait prediction that makes use of genetic correlations between traits and apply it to summary statistics of psychiatric diseases.

BRAF or MEK1/2 inhibitors are cytostatic in melanoma and the surviving cells develop drug resistance. This study shows that the pro-survival pool is biased towards MCL1 in melanoma so that BRAF or MEK1/2 inhibitors are synthetic lethal with the MCL1 inhibitor AZD5991, improving tumour growth inhibition.

Gasdermin D (GSDMD) is a pore forming protein activated by inflammasome derived caspases. Here the authors characterize the function of GSDMD in mouse influenza virus infection and show that immunopathology is reduced in the absence of GSDMD and involves changes in neutrophil function.

Prostate cancer (PrCa) involves a large heritable genetic component. Here, the authors perform multivariate fine-mapping of known PrCa GWAS loci, identifying variants enriched for biological function, explaining more familial relative risk, and with potential application in clinical risk profiling.

Resistance exercise training (RET) is an effective countermeasure to sarcopenia, related frailty and metabolic disorders. Here, the authors show that an RET-induced increase in PGC-1α4 expression not only promotes muscle hypertrophy but also enhances glycolysis, providing a rapid supply of ATP for muscle contractions.

Arboviruses are transmitted by arthropods and include a number of critical human and zoonotic pathogens. Here the authors report a phage display library, ArboScan, for evaluating antibody binding to the peptidome of 691 human and zoonotic arthropod borne viruses, and use it to profile anti-arbovirus antibodies from diverse samples.

The efficacy of carbapenem antibiotics can be compromised by metallo-β-lactamases, but a high-throughput screen followed by optimization has now enabled the discovery of indole-2-carboxylates (InCs) as potent broad-spectrum metallo-β-lactamase inhibitors. The results highlight the potential of InC–carbapenem combinations for clinical use as well as mechanism-guided approaches to combatting globally disseminated antibiotic resistant mechanisms.

A randomized trial in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 showed no benefit and potentially increased harm associated with the use of convalescent plasma, with subgroup analyses suggesting that the antibody profile in donor plasma is critical in determining clinical outcomes.

Mixed responses to targeted therapy within a patient are a clinical challenge. Here the authors show that TP53 loss-of-function cooperates with whole genome doubling which increases chromosomal instability. This leads to greater cellular diversity and multiple routes of resistance, which in turn promotes mixed responses to treatment.

A spectroscopic thermal phase curve of GJ 1214b obtained with the JWST in the mid-infrared is reported and a planet with a high metallicity atmosphere blanketed by thick and reflective clouds or haze is found.

One way of discovering genes with key roles in cancer development is to identify genomic regions that are frequently altered in human cancers. Here, high-resolution analyses of somatic copy-number alterations (SCNAs) in numerous cancer specimens provide an overview of regions of focal SCNA that are altered at significant frequency across several cancer types. An oncogenic function is also found for the anti-apoptosis genes MCL1 and BCL2L1, which reside in amplified genome regions in many cancers.

The Cancer Genome Atlas consortium reports on their genome-wide characterization of somatic alterations in colorectal cancer; in addition to revealing a remarkably consistent pattern of genomic alteration, with 24 genes being significantly mutated, the study identifies new targets for therapeutic intervention and suggests an important role for MYC-directed transcriptional activation and repression.

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of somatic mutations in liver samples from patients with chronic liver disease identifies driver mutations in metabolism-related genes such as FOXO1, and shows that these variants frequently exhibit convergent evolution.

Whole-genome sequencing of medulloblastoma samples reveals several recurrent mutations in genes not previously implicated in the disease, many of which affect components of the epigenetic machinery in different disease subgroups.