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Peptide-centric chimeric antigen receptors (PC-CARs) provide a platform to address the challenges involved in targeting intracellular oncoproteins, and PC-CARs based on the neuroblastoma-dependency gene PHOX2B induce elimination of aggressive tumors.

One of President Bill Clinton's early decisions was to lift the ban on federally supported research on human fetal tissue. Under what circumstances can research on this material be justified?

Village cultures, where multiple stem cell lines are cultured in a single dish, provide an elegant solution for population-scale studies. Here, authors show the utility of village models – showing that expression heterogeneity is largely a result of line-specific effects and not village cultures.

Basu et al. find that the transcription factor ThPOK is not restricted to T cells, as it also is expressed in myeloid cell progenitors and contributes to the lineage choice of monocyte-dendritic cells as opposed to neutrophils.

The response to infectious and inflammatory challenges differs among people but the reasons for this are poorly understood. Here the authors explore the impact of variables such as age, sex, and the capacity for controlling inflammation and maintaining immunocompetence, linking this capacity to favourable health outcomes and lifespan.

Neoantigen-targeting vaccines are a feasible therapy for tumours with a low mutation burden and immunologically ‘cold’ tumour microenvironment, as neoantigen-specific T cells from the peripheral blood migrate into intracranial glioblastoma, thereby altering the immune milieu of the glioblastoma.

Mycobacterium tuberculosisis intrinsically resistant to most antibiotics. Here, the authors show that the pathogen’s tolerance to three antibiotics, each one targeting a distinct cellular process, is mediated by an antioxidant response that requires the activation of isocitrate lyases.

The dynamics of antigenic variation in extravascular parasite populations using VSG-seq, a high-throughput sequencing approach for profiling variant surface glycoproteins expressed in populations of Trypanosoma brucei, are explored, showing the role of extravascular spaces in pathogen diversification.

A fibroblast lineage marked by FAP gives rise to POSTN-expressing fibroblasts resembling matrifibrocytes and IL-1β regulates FAP/POSTN fibroblast specification by directly signalling to cardiac fibroblasts, highlighting a role for immunomodulators in targeting cardiac fibrosis.

Viruses often evolve molecular mimicry with host proteins for immune evasion. Here the authors assess short linear mimicry of 134 viruses to find abundance of such mimicry in herpes and pox viruses, while overlaps between Epstein-Barr virus antigens and auto-antibodies from patients with multiple sclerosis hints at a crosstalk between viral infection and autoimmunity.

Here, the authors show structural, biochemical, and functional insights into the discovery of epichaperome‐ directed chemical probes for use in central nervous system diseases. Probes emerging from this work have translated to human clinical studies in Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

Protein turnover underpins biology but is challenging to measure in vivo across the entire proteome. Here, the authors provide a comprehensive resource of protein turnover in mouse tissues and develop a visualization platform to analyze these data.

Fibre snacks that target distinct features of the microbiomes of donors with obesity transplanted into gnotobiotic mice also lead to fibre-specific changes in the microbiome and physiology when used in controlled-diet human studies.

The cessation of nephrogenesis determines nephron endowments in mammals. Here the authors show that differential translation of Wnt antagonists versus agonists determines the tipping point from self-renewal to differentiation of nephron progenitors during nephrogenesis, using mutant mice with elevated nephron numbers.

Dysfunction of the gastrointestinal system, and to the autophagy lysososmal pathway (ALP) have been reported in Parkinson’s disease. Here the authors report epigenetic disruption of ALP related genes in the appendix of individuals with Parkinson’s disease.

A cell-based phenotypic screen led to the discovery of compounds called NVS-STGs, which bind to the N-terminal domain of STING and act as a molecular glue to induce higher-order oligomerization and activation.

While glycolysis inhibition impairs cancer cell tumourigenic capacities, it also affects immune cells anti-tumour activity. Here, the authors show that rescuing glycolytic inhibition of dendritic cells improves the efficacy of combining immunotherapy with glycolysis inhibition.

Visceral pain and anxiety in mice are found to be associated with gut enterochromaffin cells, and genetic models for eliciting visceral hypersensitivity and studying the sex bias of gut pain are proposed.

The contribution of astrocytic Ca²⁺ signaling to the modulation of sensory transmission in different brain states remains largely unknown. Here, the authors show two types of Ca²⁺ signals in the mouse barrel cortex with distinct function in sensory transmission during sleep and arousal states.

Clinical activity and biomarker analysis from the COMBI-i trial evaluating PD-1, BRAF and MEK inhibition in patients with metastatic melanoma demonstrate high response rates and uncover molecular correlates of long-term treatment benefit.

Water-soluble, cell-permeable, inert fluorescent tags called OregonFluors have been developed to withstand environmental changes while resistant towards non-specific binding with subcellular structures. These tags enable quantitative imaging of drug target availability in cells and tissues, providing a route for the future assessment of personalized therapies.

An inhibitor of the deubiquitinase (DUB) USP10 regulates the degradation of oncogenic FLT3, thus defining USP10 as a DUB for FLT3 and providing a therapeutic approach for human acute myeloid leukemia in which FLT3 activation is dysregulated.

The combination of selective 2'-hydroxyl acylation of RNA with high-throughput sequencing of the transcribed cDNA allows identification of chemically modified sites as mutations in the sequence that then yield highly accurate secondary-structure models of the RNA.

During early maturation, the human brain self-organizes into a unified system capable of supporting synergistic processing and cognitive functions. Environmental enrichment can modulate the developmental trajectory of brain synergies.

Targeting NETosis alleviates type-2 immunopathology induced by rhinovirus infection in a mouse model of airway hypersensitivity, and correlative data suggest that a similar mechanism may operate in human rhinovirus-exacerbated asthma.

Proteasomes are vital eukaryotic complexes that recycle unneeded proteins. Here, the authors present the structure of a compacted proteasome derived from the dormant stage of parasitic microsporidia and bound by an endogenous inhibitory protein.

Loss of surface CD19 expression by leukemic cells leads to resistance and relapse to CD19-targeted CAR-T therapies. Here the authors show that loss of SPPL3 in malignant B cells results in hyperglycosylation of CD19.

The structures of both human and yeast mitochondrial ribosomal small subunits undergoing assembly are uncovered.

A self-referenced optical frequency comb with digital electronics is used for real-time attosecond control of the comb’s pulse train, and can be used in quantum-limited sensing.

Breathing is controlled automatically but is also conditionally integrated with behavior and emotion in awake animals. Here, authors identify brainstem neurons that are important for controlling awake-state-dependent breathing patterns in mice.

Senescent cells accumulate with age and contribute to the functional decline of many tissues; however, their role in skeletal muscle is not well understood. Here the authors comprehensively assess cellular senescence in skeletal muscle of young and old mice and detail senescence features in subpopulations of p16⁺ fibroadipogenic progenitors and p21⁺ myofibers.

Psoriasis is a chronic, systemic inflammatory condition primarily affecting skin. Here, the authors investigate the genetic basis of gene expression in skin biopsies from psoriasis patients and interactions with inflammation to better understand mechanisms of the disease.

Here, the authors produce an updated termite classification with genomic scale analyses, highlighting thirteen family-level lineages and resilience of their classification to future termite research.

We provide two procedures to cover distinct approaches for the initiation of lymph node metastases in mice: one for studying the metastatic cascade in tumorigenic cells and the other for studying the effect of metastatic formations in the host.

The advancement of upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) research is hampered by the lack of disease-specific models. Here, the authors report patient derived xenograft and cell line models of UTUC, and show that these models retain the genomic and biological heterogeneity of human disease.

There is increasing evidence that epigenetic mechanisms contribute to therapeutic resistance in cancer. Here the authors study AML patient samples and a mouse model of non-genetic resistance and find that transcriptional plasticity drives stable epigenetic resistance, and identify regulators of enhancer function as important modulators of resistance.

Mutations in the Protein Phosphatase PPM1D are oncogenic in certain cancers including diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). Here, the authors show that PPM1D mutations in DIPG induce the silencing of the nicotinic acid phosphoribosyltransferase gene and display synthetic lethality with nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase inhibitors.

Med-PaLM, a state-of-the-art large language model for medicine, is introduced and evaluated across several medical question answering tasks, demonstrating the promise of these models in this domain.

The bicyclic azetidines, a class of potent, well-tolerated antimalarial compounds that is active against multiple stages of the Plasmodium life-cycle, has been discovered following screens against libraries of compounds reminiscent of natural products.

Shahbandi et al. find that cancer cells that survive chemotherapy (CT) activate two immune-modulatory programs characterized by IFN response genes and CD274 or p53 signaling and CD80 expression. Targeting these pathways enhances the CT response.

Learning induces formation of dendritic spines, but their functional properties are unknown. The authors show that new spines bind new presynaptic inputs into preexisting spine clusters, generating locally coherent inputs representing learned behaviors.

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.

Experiments in mice show that a LINE-1 transposable element, Lx9c11, has a functional role in immunity by negatively regulating the response to viral infection to protect the host from an over-reactive immune response.

An atomistic structure of a toxic pre-fibrillar α-Synuclein intermediate is presented, highlighting structural changes that drive amyloid fibril formation.

One of the primary tools that researchers use to predict risk is the case-control study. Here, the authors identify a flaw, temporal bias, that is specific to and uniquely associated with these studies that occurs when the study period is not representative of the data that clinicians have during the diagnostic process, undermining the validity of predictions.

The histone H3K4 methyltransferase SET1B is recruited to a subset of hypoxia-inducible genes by the HIF complex. Loss of SET1B reduces HIF transcriptional activity in hypoxia and impairs tumor formation in xenograft models.