Search

In a prospective study, a smartwatch-based alerting system was able to detect pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in a high percentage of cases.

Data from wearable sensors, including heart rate, body temperature, electrodermal activity and movement, can predict clinical laboratory measurements, with highest accuracy for hematological tests such as hematocrit.

Tau accumulation is associated with disease progression in Alzheimer’s disease. Here the authors use resting state fMRI and tau-PET to demonstrate that baseline connectivity in Alzheimer's disease is associated with tau spreading.

Phenotypic variation and diseases are influenced by factors such as genetic variants and gene expression. Here, Barbeira et al. develop S-PrediXcan to compute PrediXcan results using summary data, and investigate the effects of gene expression variation on human phenotypes in 44 GTEx tissues and >100 phenotypes.

RNA polymerase III changes its subunit composition during mammalian development. Here the authors report that loss of subunit POLR3G, which re-emerges in cancer, promotes expression of small NF90-associated RNA (snaR-A), a noncoding RNA implicated in cell proliferation and metastasis.

On the anniversary of the Boyden et al. (2005) paper that introduced the use of channelrhodopsin in neurons, Nature Neuroscience asks selected members of the community to comment on the utility, impact and future of this important technique.

Synthetic long-read sequencing technology (TruSeq) identifies substrain diversity in microbiome samples.

Bone loss is common in patients with diabetes, but the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms are unclear. Here the authors show high succinate levels in mice with type 2 diabetes and that succinate can signal through succinate receptor 1 on osteoclasts to induce bone resorption.

The functions of non-coding regulatory elements can be systematically studied genome-wide at high throughput in human cells via their Cas9-mediated deletion through libraries of paired single-guide RNAs targeting both ends of each element.

STELLAR (spatial cell learning) is a geometric deep learning model that works with spatially resolved single-cell datasets to both assign cell types in unannotated datasets based on a reference dataset and discover new cell types.

The authors summarize the history of the ENCODE Project, the achievements of ENCODE 1 and ENCODE 2, and how the new data generated and analysed in ENCODE 3 complement the previous phases.

This study finds that sST2 is a disease-causing factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Higher sST2 levels impair microglial Aβ clearance in APOE4⁺ female individuals. A genetic variant, rs1921622, is associated with a reduction in sST2 level and protects against AD in APOE4⁺ female individuals.

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

Papsdorf et al. show that mono-unsaturated fatty acids extend lifespan of C. elegans through induction of peroxisomes and lipid droplets in fat tissues and of a lipid signature predictive of decreased lipid oxidation.

Reproducibility, traceability, and transparency have been long-standing issues in metabolomics data analysis. Here, the authors present tidyMass, an R-based computational framework that allows designing traceable, shareable, and reproducible data processing and analysis workflows for untargeted metabolomics.

Arany and colleagues integrate metabolomics data, tissue RNA-sequencing data and proteomics data from explanted hearts of patients with end-stage heart failure to provide a comprehensive ‘multi-omic’ evaluation of the metabolic pathways affected by heart failure.

To understand the contribution of variants to transcript expression regulation, long-read transcriptome data are generated from the GTEx resource, and a new software package to perform allele-specific analysis is developed.

Fibroblasts from old mice are heterogeneous, which affects the ability of these fibroblasts to reprogram into induced pluripotent stem cells in vitro and influences wound healing rate in vivo.

Macrophages alter their metabolism in response to infection. The authors show that resting macrophages generate nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide via de novo synthesis, but activated and aged cells suppress the rate-limiting enzyme quinolinate phosphoribosyltransferase to regulate mitochondrial and immunological functions.

The development of high-throughput DNA sequencing methods provides a new method for mapping and quantifying transcriptomes — RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq). This article explains how RNA-Seq works, the challenges it faces and how it is changing our view of eukaryotic transcriptomes.

Predicting the structure of a folded protein from first principles for any given amino-acid sequence remains a formidable computational challenge. To recruit human abilities to the task, these authors turned their Rosetta structure prediction algorithm into an online multiplayer game in which thousands of non-scientists competed and collaborated to produce new algorithms and search strategies for protein structure refinement. This shows that computationally complex problems can be effectively 'crowd-sourced' through interactive multiplayer games.

By leveraging paired microbiome and human gene expression data from pediatric patients who underwent hematopoietic cell transplantation, distinct lung–immune system–microorganism interactions were identified as important drivers of fatal lung injury.

Alzheimer’s disease is heterogeneous in its neuroimaging and clinical phenotypes. Here the authors present a semi-supervised deep learning method, Smile-GAN, to show four neurodegenerative patterns and two progression pathways providing prognostic and clinical information.

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.

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 Cancer Genome Atlas Network describe their multifaceted analyses of primary breast cancers, shedding light on breast cancer heterogeneity; although only three genes (TP53, PIK3CA and GATA3) are mutated at a frequency greater than 10% across all breast cancers, numerous subtype-associated and novel mutations were identified.

Tagging and tracking the blood plasma proteome as a discovery tool reveals widespread endogenous transport of proteins into the healthy brain and the pharmacologically modifiable mechanisms by which the brain endothelium regulates this process with age.

It is unknown whether unrepaired DNA damage in lung endothelial cells causes persistent pulmonary arterial hypertension. Here, the authors combine oxidative stress with impaired BMPR2 signaling to link a reduction in FOXF1 to unrepaired DNA damage and impaired regeneration of normal endothelium.

Comprehensive multi-tissue single-cell atlas of human knee osteoarthritis reveals distinct chondrocytes, inflammatory macrophages, osteogenic stem cells, and synovial fibroblasts offering critical insights into mechanisms and therapies.

CTLA-4 is an important co-inhibitory receptor for T cells. Here, the authors show that CTLA-4 also has a function on B-1a cells, as conditional deletion results in activation of these cells and knockout mice develop an autoimmune profile.

Over 90% of human whole-genome sequencing has been performed using instruments from two companies, Illumina and Complete Genomics. Lam et al. sequence the same DNA samples with both instruments and compare their performance for calling insertions, deletions and single-nucleotide variants.

Harnessing information from whole genome sequencing in 185 individuals, this study generates a high-resolution map of copy number variants. Nucleotide resolution of the map facilitates analysis of structural variant distribution and identification of the mechanisms of their origin. The study provides a resource for sequence-based association studies.

Seasonal patterns of molecular markers in humans have not been extensively studied. Here, the authors combine host components (transcriptome, metabolome, proteome, immunome, clinical lab tests) and microbiome to profile 105 individuals, identifying over 1000 markers in two major seasonal patterns.

The SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PLpro) is of interest as an antiviral drug target. Here, the authors synthesize and characterise naphthalene-based inhibitors for PLpro and present the crystal structures of PLpro in its apo state and with the bound inhibitors, which is of interest for further structure-based drug design efforts.

Using the GTEx data and others, a comprehensive analysis of adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in mammals is presented; targets of the various ADAR enzymes are identified, as are several potential regulators of editing, such as AIMP2.

The increasing scale and scope of biomedical data is generating tremendous opportunities for improving health outcomes, but also raises new challenges ranging from data acquisition and storage to data analysis and utilization. To meet these challenges, the authors develop the Personal Health Dashboard, which provides an end-to-end solution for deep biomedical data analytics.

Multiple transcriptome approaches, including single-cell sequencing, demonstrate that escape from X chromosome inactivation is widespread and occasionally variable between cells, chromosomes, and tissues, resulting in sex-biased expression of at least 60 genes and potentially contributing to sex-specific differences in health and disease.

The authors show that rare genetic variants contribute to large gene expression changes across diverse human tissues and provide an integrative method for interpretation of rare variants in individual genomes.

STAAR is a powerful rare variant association test that incorporates variant functional categories and complementary functional annotations using a dynamic weighting scheme based on annotation principal components. STAAR accounts for population structure and relatedness and is scalable for analyzing large whole-genome sequencing studies.

In this study the authors identify a possible link between the gene FAM222A and brain atrophy. The protein it encodes is found to accumulate in plaques seen in Alzheimer’s disease, and functional analysis suggests it interacts with amyloid-beta.

Illumina-based synthetic long read RNA-seq enables comprehensive analysis of alternative splicing in transcriptomes.

Intestinal cell types are organized into distinct neighbourhoods and communities within the healthy human intestine, with distinct immunological niches.

MaxFuse enables data integration between modalities even when features are weakly correlated.

William Greenleaf, Michael Snyder, Carlos Araya and colleagues use density-based clustering methods on ~4,700 exomes from 21 tumor types to detect significantly mutated regions (SMRs), which show recurrent alterations in coding and noncoding elements and often associate with changes in gene expression and signaling. Mutation frequencies in SMRs demonstrate that distinct protein regions are differentially mutated across tumor types.

Genomic and cell-free DNA sequencing clarify the clinical diagnosis and inform treatment initiation in a cohort of 356 patients with vascular anomalies.

Single-cell profiling studies of the human gastrointestinal tract are increasing, offering an excellent opportunity to generate the first Human Gut Cell Atlas. This Roadmap presents a structured direction towards this goal and provides a detailed overview of the major challenges.