Search

Critical life-history traits, like growth and body size, can influence species’ survival. Using more than 7500 observations, this study suggests that the growth performance of marine fish has declined by 9% over the past century as a result of commercial size-based harvesting.

From 2014–2017, marine heatwaves caused global mass coral bleaching, where the corals lose their symbiotic algae. The authors find, this event exceeded the severity of all prior global bleaching events in recorded history, with approximately half the world’s reefs bleaching and 15% experiencing substantial mortality.

Baked sediment, heat-shattered artefacts and introduced pyrite in a 400,000-year-old Palaeolithic occupation site in Suffolk, UK provide evidence of intentional fire-making, marking a pivotal moment in human development.

Estimates from the Global Burden of Disease study reveal declines in chronic respiratory disease mortality between 1990 and 2023—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic—but the burdens on people affected remain substantial.

A bookkeeping approach shows that disturbed tropical humid forests experienced net aboveground carbon loss during 1990–2020, primarily driven by small but persistent deforestation clearings owing to persistent land-use conversion without forest regrowth.

This study examines long-term changes in species richness across tropical forests in the Andes and Amazon. Hotter, drier and more seasonal forests in the eastern and southern Amazon are losing species, while Northern Andean forests are accumulating species, acting as a refuge for climate-displaced species.

Three BRAF inhibitors are used to treat melanoma and colorectal cancer. Here, the authors demonstrate that these drugs bind and activate the protein kinase GCN2, a previously unappreciated off-target effect that may modulate tumour cell responses.

The authors synthesize bee assemblage data from 681 crop fields across three continents, finding that local pesticide hazards and decreasing adjacent semi-natural habitats both negatively affected wild bee abundance and species richness in crop fields, while pesticides also reduced functional diversity.

With over 2,000 newly identified data points, this study estimates 2,525 million m³ of wood fuel removals globally in 2019, approximately 30% higher than previously understood. Global production of wood charcoal is estimated at 70.5 million tonnes, approximately 50% higher than previous values.

The study presents an updated global inventory of glacial lake outburst floods, revealing a sharp rise in event frequency since the 1980s and a strong delayed link to climate warming, highlighting growing risks to downstream communities.

Glaciers have profoundly shaped Earth’s surface, but glacial erosion models lack a strong empirical basis. Cook et al. have compiled a dataset that illustrates how the speed at which glaciers move controls the rate at which they erode, and that climate is crucial in modulating glacier sliding speed and erosion rates.

Colorectal cancer cells can acquire resistance to MEK inhibition due to BRAF or KRAS amplification. Here, the authors show that while MEK inhibitor withdrawal in BRAF mutant cells restores sensitivity to the inhibitor through the loss of BRAF amplification mediated by a p57-dependent mechanism, drug withdrawal from KRAS mutant cells does not restore sensitivity but results in EMT and chemoresistance.

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.

A global research network monitoring the Amazon for 30 years reports in this study that tree size increased by 3% each decade.

Visual hallucinations are a prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. Here the authors use a structural mega-analysis to show cortical regions and networks involved in visual hallucinations and associations with receptor density maps.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Four decades after a test mining experiment that removed nodules, the biological impacts in many groups of organisms persist, although populations of several organisms have begun to re-establish despite persistent physical changes at the seafloor.

The first apicomplexan, Chromera velia, with a functional photosynthetic plastid has been isolated and characterized, providing insight into early apicomplexan evolution.

Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

Pilcher et al. present a single-cell transcriptomics-based immune atlas of participants with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma, reporting on the association of cell types, gene expression and intercellular interactions with disease progression phenotypes.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

A single MRI scan can provide reliable estimates of human lifetime brain atrophy, helping overcome lifespan data collection challenges. This may enhance genetic studies of late-life neurodegeneration and reveal new insights into its underlying mechanisms.

Comparative analysis of genetic variations of bread wheat accessions created in the last 150 years and 45 related species revealed a major contribution of introgressions and chromosomal rearrangements to cultivated wheat diversity.

In this article, the authors use survey data from youth in three countries from the Caribbean to provide an evidence-based model of the association of climate distress and generalized anxiety and well-being more broadly.

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

There’s an emerging body of evidence to show how biological sex impacts cancer incidence, treatment and underlying biology. Here, using a large pan-cancer dataset, the authors further highlight how sex differences shape the cancer genome.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

In somatic cells the mechanisms maintaining the chromosome ends are normally inactivated; however, cancer cells can re-activate these pathways to support continuous growth. Here, the authors characterize the telomeric landscapes across tumour types and identify genomic alterations associated with different telomere maintenance mechanisms.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Whole-genome sequencing data from more than 2,500 cancers of 38 tumour types reveal 16 signatures that can be used to classify somatic structural variants, highlighting the diversity of genomic rearrangements in cancer.

Viral pathogen load in cancer genomes is estimated through analysis of sequencing data from 2,656 tumors across 35 cancer types using multiple pathogen-detection pipelines, identifying viruses in 382 genomic and 68 transcriptome datasets.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

Some cancer patients first present with metastases where the location of the primary is unidentified; these are difficult to treat. In this study, using machine learning, the authors develop a method to determine the tissue of origin of a cancer based on whole sequencing data.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

Many tumours exhibit hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypoxic tumours often respond poorly to therapy. Here, the authors quantify hypoxia in 1188 tumours from 27 cancer types, showing elevated hypoxia links to increased mutational load, directing evolutionary trajectories.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

The characterization of 4,645 whole-genome and 19,184 exome sequences, covering most types of cancer, identifies 81 single-base substitution, doublet-base substitution and small-insertion-and-deletion mutational signatures, providing a systematic overview of the mutational processes that contribute to cancer development.