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Xenium spatial transcriptomic profiling of pulmonary fibrosis characterizes cell composition dynamics and histopathological features associated with the disease.

Severe febrile illnesses in children may be various in presentation and aetiology but involve immune dysfunction amenable to immunomodulation. Here, the authors identify shared neutrophil and T cell dysfunction and a distinct interferon signature in critically ill children with severe febrile illness.

Enhancer-driven genomic recording of transcriptional activity in multiplex (ENGRAM) is used for multiplex recording of the cell-type-specific activities of dozens to hundreds of cis-regulatory elements with high fidelity, sensitivity and reproducibility.

An investigation using various methods reports an association between adeno-associated virus 2 and paediatric hepatitis of unknown aetiology.

Openshaw and colleagues find myeloid inflammation and complement activation signatures in patients with long COVID who were previously hospitalized.

Single-cell quantitative expression reporters enable high-sensitivity quantitative characterization of cis-regulatory elements at the single-cell level in multicellular systems.

An economic evaluation of the E-MOTIVE intervention for postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) compared with usual care in 210,132 women, carried out from a healthcare system perspective, uncovered the cost per case of severe PPH prevented and cost per disability-adjusted life-year averted.

Paediatric therapy-related myeloid neoplasms (tMN) have a dismal prognosis and have not been comprehensively profiled. Here the authors characterise the molecular landscape of 84 paediatric tMN patients, and find that, unlike adult tMNs, these do not emerge from pre-existing clones and that MECOM dysregulation is frequent.

A case–control study investigating the causes of recent cases of acute hepatitis of unknown aetiology in 32 children identifies an association between adeno-associated virus infection and host genetics in disease susceptibility.

Post-international travel quarantine has been widely implemented to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but the impacts of such policies are unclear. Here, the authors used linked genomic and contact tracing data to assess the impacts of a 14-day quarantine on return to England in summer 2020.

In this study, Aggarwal and colleagues perform prospective sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates derived from asymptomatic student screening and symptomatic testing of students and staff at the University of Cambridge. They identify important factors that contributed to within university transmission and onward spread into the wider community.

Genetic and testing data from England show that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern B.1.1.7 has a transmission advantage over other lineages.

Chronic infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to the emergence of viral variants that show reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies in an immunosuppressed individual treated with convalescent plasma.

Sera from vaccinated individuals and some monoclonal antibodies show a modest reduction in neutralizing activity against the B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2; but the E484K substitution leads to a considerable loss of neutralizing activity.

A model of how local relatedness changes with age fits empirical patterns from seven group-living mammal species and reveals that patterns differ between the sexes and the potential behavioural consequences of these changes.

Hypermutation and microsatellite burden determine responses and long-term survival following PD-1 blockade in children and young adults with refractory cancers resulting from germline DNA replication repair deficiency.

The Omicron variant evades vaccine-induced neutralization but also fails to form syncytia, shows reduced replication in human lung cells and preferentially uses a TMPRSS2-independent cell entry pathway, which may contribute to enhanced replication in cells of the upper airway. Altered fusion and cell entry characteristics are linked to distinct regions of the Omicron spike protein.

Analyses of samples from patients with acute myeloid leukaemia reveal that drug response is associated with mutational status and gene expression; the generated dataset provides a basis for future clinical and functional studies of this disease.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

The 300–1,000 Hz band of spiking activity, dominated by local single-unit spikes, can enhance the decoding performance of neural interfaces.

Despite the rapid progress and interest in brain-machine interfaces that restore motor function, the performance of prosthetic fingers and limbs has yet to mimic native function. Here, the authors demonstrate that shallow-layer neural network decoders outperform and enable higher velocity finger movements than the current linear decoding standard.

Smith and colleagues show that embryonic stem cell self-renewal does not rely on extrinsic instruction, and can be enabled by the elimination of factors that induce differentiation and by inhibition of glycogen synthase kinase 3. They interpret the data as showing the ground state of the embryonic stem cell in the absence of extrinsic instruction is self renewal.

Hamazaki, Yang et al. report that an early pulse of retinoic acid robustly induces human gastruloids with a neural tube, segmented somites and more advanced cell types than conventional gastruloids.

The rate at which proteins are imported into the nucleus of a cell is shown to be regulated by their mechanical unfolding, a mechanism that identifies the nuclear pore machinery as a highly sensitive force detector.

The brassinolide biosynthesis enzyme CYP85A2 is controlled by farnesylation (post-translational addition of an isoprenoid tail), which impacts Arabidopsis sensitivity to abscisic acid and drought.

Erik Ingelsson and colleagues report a large-scale genome-wide meta-analysis for associations to the extremes of anthropometric traits, including body mass index, height, waist-to-hip ratio and clinical obesity. They identify four loci newly associated with height and seven loci newly associated with clinical obesity and find overlap in the genetic structure and distribution of variants identified for these extremes of the trait distributions and for the general population.

Richard Houlston and colleagues report a genome-wide association study for colorectal cancer. They report three loci newly associated with colorectal cancer, bringing the total number of common susceptibility loci to 20.