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Cellular lysine residues can be both methylated and acetylated on the same sidechain to form N^ε-acetyl-N^ε-methyllysine (Kacme), which is found on histone H4 across a range of species and across mammalian tissues and is associated with active chromatin.

Osteolytic lesions (OL) are frequent in multiple myeloma (MM), but are poorly understood. Here, the authors characterise OLs in MM patient samples using single-cell RNA-seq, revealing genes that are specifically regulated in OL compared to random bone marrow aspirates and that reflect the response to induction therapy.

Data from over 700,000 individuals reveal the identity of 83 sequence variants that affect human height, implicating new candidate genes and pathways as being involved in growth.

A CRISPR-based screen identifies neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) and dipeptidyl-peptidase IV (DPP4) as entry factors for human astrovirus, and targeting them using available therapies effectively prevents infection in human enteroid cultures.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

Bhattacharjee and Schaeffer et al. map exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) in 94 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), finding increased EBF practice and reduced subnational variation across the majority of LMICs from 2000 to 2018. However, only six LMICs will meet WHO’s target of ≥70% EBF by 2030 nationally, and only three will achieve this in all districts.

Analysing plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the authors identify three times more coastal invertebrate taxa than pelagic taxa, along with evidence that coastal taxa are reproducing while rafting on plastic.

Cardiomyocytes generated from induced pluripotent cells hold great promise for understanding and treating heart disease. William Pu and his colleagues apply new technologies for studying such cardiomyocytes from patients with Barth syndrome to explore how the mitochondrial defects characteristic of this syndrome lead to heart dysfunction.

The death cap mushroom Amanita phalloides is invading California but little is known about how it spreads through forests. Wang et al. discover that this fungus can develop mushrooms and sporulate without mating; the nuclei involved in unisexuality appear to have persisted in invaded habitats for decades.

The mode of action of Ap4A on IMPDH to regulate GTP production in Bacillus subtilis is identified.

Doan et al. show that loss of cardiac NAD⁺ is sufficient to drive metabolic derangements, hypertrophic remodeling and lethal arrhythmias in adult mouse hearts, despite maintenance of ejection fraction and bioenergetics.

This study reveals neuronal targets of Lac-Phe in the hypothalamus that mediate its suppression of food intake.

A transancestral exome-wide association study for body-fat distribution identifies protein-coding variants that are significantly associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index.

Selective ERK5 inhibitors target ERK5 kinase activity, but they do not phenocopy the effects of ERK5 genetic depletion. Here, the authors demonstrate that the direct interaction of these inhibitors to ERK5 kinase domain induces conformational changes that promote ERK5 nuclear translocation and transcriptional activities.

Rph7 is a previously mapped barley leaf rust resistance locus, but the causal resistance gene remains unclear. Here, combining a fine mapping approach with RNA-Seq based analysis, the authors clone Rph7 and show it encodes putative NAC transcription factor containing a C-terminal BED domain.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

DNA is capable of self-assembling into a wide range of user-defined structures and so can be used as a scaffold to arrange binding motifs with nanometre precision. Now, DNA has been used to accurately display aptamers that fit the repeated epitope pattern of a dengue viral antigen to produce a nanostructure that can be a potent viral inhibitor or a fluorescent sensor.

Endocrinologists have traditionally focused on studying one hormone or organ system at a time. Here the authors use transcriptomic data from the mouse lemur to globally characterize primate hormonal signaling, describing hormone sources and targets, identifying conserved and primate specific regulation, and elucidating principles of the network.

The authors summarize the data produced by phase III of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, a resource for better understanding of the human and mouse genomes.

A systematic collection for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics is critical for in-depth analysis and novel discovery in AD. Here, authors show ssREAD which covers over 7 million cells and 381 spatial samples from human and mouse, providing a comprehensive resource for AD research.

Soil priming could release large amounts of soil C into the atmosphere. Here the authors show that experimental warming boosts soil priming and CO₂ emissions in grasslands potentially due to microbial changes. Model accuracy could be improved by incorporating these mechanisms.

Silva et al. definitively establish climbing fiber-driven complex spike events as essential instructive signals for associative cerebellar learning while also revealing unexpected features of optogenetic manipulation.

A genomic constraint map for the human genome constructed using data from 76,156 human genomes from the Genome Aggregation Database shows that non-coding constrained regions are enriched for regulatory elements and variants associated with complex diseases and traits.

Combining cytarabine and mitoxantrone with the tricarboxylic acid cycle inhibitor devimistat has been reported in a phase I clinical trial with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Here, the authors report the outcomes of a phase II study, analyse samples from both phases and perform preclinical analyses that show mitochondrial fission or autophagy inhibition sensitizes AML cells to devimistat.

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.

It is not clear to what degree activity in dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) reflects perceptual-deliberation versus action-selection aspects of decision-making. Here, the authors report that monkey PMd neurons do not express correlates of the perceptual decision independently of the action choices.

Horitani, Chavkin et al. report that the loss of the Y chromosome in macrophages from failing human hearts correlates with cardiac fibroblast activation and that the deficiency of a single Y chromosome gene, Uty, triggers an epigenetic rewiring in macrophages toward a profibrotic phenotype and increases cardiac fibrosis and dysfunction that can be prevented by TGFβ-neutralizing antibodies.

There is lack of therapies targeting the PAX3-FOXO1 fusion oncogene in fusion-positive rhabdomyosarcoma (FP-RMS). Here, the authors identify and characterise an inhibitor with highest inhibition of histone lysine demethylase 3B that suppresses PAX3-FOXO1 activity in FP-RMS.

The archaeological site Shinfa-Metema 1 in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia provides early evidence of intensive riverine-based foraging aided by the likely adoption of the bow and arrow.

A new study from the eMERGE consortium provides insights on the development of a pipeline for the generation and reporting of polygenic risk scores for ten diseases to diverse populations in a clinical setting.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental health problem. Here, the authors report a GWAS from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in which they identify two risk loci in European ancestry and one locus in African ancestry individuals and find that PTSD is genetically correlated with several other psychiatric traits.

ABCB6 has been implicated in dyschromatosis universalis hereditaria, a condition that can present with hearing loss. Here, the authors use zebrafish and mice to perform experiments suggesting that ABCB6 plays a role in inner ear development.

Phenome-wide association is a novel method that links sequence variants to a spectrum of phenotypes and diseases. Here the authors generate detailed mouse genetic and phenome data which links their phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) of mouse to corresponding PheWAS in human.

Unmet need exists for a vaccine against Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Here the authors report the establishment and evaluation, in mice and primates, of a series of MERS-CoV immunogens and show that they can serve as promising leads for vaccine development.

A systematic analysis of lignin biosynthetic genes to quantitatively understand their effect on wood properties is still lacking. Here, the authors integrate transcriptomic, proteomic, fluxomic and phenomic data to quantify the impact of perturbations of transcript abundance on lignin biosynthesis and wood properties.

Exome-wide analysis identifies rare and low-frequency coding variants associated with body mass index. Gene-based meta-analysis and functional studies implicate 13 genes, eight of which are novel, and neuronal pathways as factors in human obesity.

Cancer can result from mutations in more than one gene and these multiple mutated genes are often functionally dependent on each other; this interaction is known as epistasis. Here, the authors use a combinatorial RNAi screen to identify epistatic genes that are mutated in breast cancer and reveal large numbers of previously unreported gene interactions.

A paleogenome from an approximately 100,000-year-old polar bear shows massive prehistoric, and largely unidirectional, gene flow from polar bears into brown bears at a time of climate change-induced overlap in the ranges of the two species. This admixture event cannot be detected using genomic data from living polar bears.

The Atr-Check1 pathway is involved in cell cycle and the DNA damage response. Here, the authors show that the Atr-Check1 pathway can inhibit axon regeneration in response to Piezo-mediated mechanosensation, affecting functional recovery.

African Americans have an elevated risk of developing chronic kidney disease, yet only a fraction of those with high-risk genotypes develop the disease. Here, the authors show that a missense variant in APOL1 has a strong protective effect when co-inherited with the high-risk G2 allele of APOL1, with important implications for clinical practice and translational research.

Minichromosome maintenance protein 10 (MCM10) is critical for eukaryotic DNA replication. Here, by modelling MCM10 variants in human cell lines, the authors reveal a mechanism of MCM10-associated disease, finding that loss of MCM10 function constrains telomerase activity.

Gene-edited waxy corn lines have higher yields in field trials than hybrids produced by traditional trait introgression.

Exome-sequencing analyses of a large cohort of patients with type 2 diabetes and control individuals without diabetes from five ancestries are used to identify gene-level associations of rare variants that are associated with type 2 diabetes.

This study presents the assembly and analysis of the genome sequence of a female domestic Duroc pig and a comparison with the genomes of wild and domestic pigs from Europe and Asia; the results shed light on the evolutionary relationship between European and Asian wild boars.

The BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network has constructed a multimodal cell census and atlas of the mammalian primary motor cortex in a landmark effort towards understanding brain cell-type diversity, neural circuit organization and brain function.