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‘Ultrathin’ gold interlayers are shown to form nanoparticles that balance optical losses and electrical contact, enabling efficient perovskite–perovskite integration for scalable and durable triple-junction photovoltaics.

Bats harbor diverse viruses but it’s less clear how they tolerate infection. Here, by characterizing innate immune responses in bat cells the authors show that IFN-beta signaling resists antagonistic activity by viruses and identify interferon stimulated genes with enhanced antiviral activity.

Together with an accompanying paper presenting a transcriptomic atlas of the mouse lemur, interrogation of the atlas provides a rich body of data to support the use of the organism as a model for primate biology and health.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Buchanan et al. show evidence confirming the phenomenon of semantic priming across speakers of 19 diverse languages.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

The genetic susceptibility to breast cancer remains understudied in non-European populations. Here, the authors analyse pathogenic variants associated with breast cancer susceptibility in Hispanic/Latina women using genomics, and find that loss of function variants in FANCM are strongly associated with ER-negative breast cancer risk.

Researchers show how a viral collagen glucosyltransferase works by solving its 3D structure, revealing dimerization-driven activity and its surprising ability to make the prebiotic sugar kojibiose, offering clues for drug and prebiotic development.

Artis and colleagues show that enteric neurons produce CGRP-related ADM2 to promote intestinal tissue-protective functions in ILC2s.

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.

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.

The spike protein of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a higher affinity for ACE2 than Delta, and a marked change in its antigenicity increases Omicron’s evasion of therapeutic and vaccine-elicited neutralizing antibodies.

Histone H2AX has a known role in DNA damage repair but interestingly, its loss is associated with resistance to poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibition in BRCA-deficient tumours. Here, the authors identify a role of γH2AX in the degradation of replication forks and demonstrate that H2AX loss drives PARP inhibitor resistance via increased stressed fork stability in BRCA-deficient tumours.

In space radiation-exposed cells, targeting specific microRNAs with antagomirs can reduce cardiovascular damage and improve cellular function. Here the authors describe a reduction in inflammation and DNA double-strand break activity within these cells upon antagomir treatment.

PARP inhibitor treatment triggers histone release from the chromatin in cancer cells; consequently, targeting the histone chaperone NASP renders cells vulnerable to PARP inhibition.

Mouse models show that respiratory infections from viruses such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2 can trigger metastasis of dormant breast cancer cells in the lungs, a finding supported by epidemiological data from two large human cohorts.

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can be used to treat infections but there is a risk of driving viral resistance to antibodies. Here the authors characterise SARS-CoV-2 escape mutants from an immunocompromised patient treated with anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies using mouse protection studies and structural prediction.

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.

Exon 27 of the tumor suppressor BRCA2 encodes a portion of the protein crucial for DNA repair, genome maintenance, and tumor suppression. Here the authors show that this domain binds DNA and the RAD51 recombinase to enhance the assembly of RAD51-DNA complexes.

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.

Health monitoring based on measuring circulating antibodies may enable the presymptomatic detection of diseases. Here, the authors report a large-scale peptide array platform that allows for a detection of the profile of circulating antibodies associated with cancers and infectious diseases.

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.

Eusociality evolved independently in Hymenoptera and in termites. Here, the authors sequence genomes of the German cockroach and a drywood termite and provide insights into the evolutionary signatures of termite eusociality.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have improved our understanding of the genetic basis of lung adenocarcinoma but known susceptibility variants explain only a small fraction of the familial risk. Here, the authors perform a two-stage GWAS and report 12 novel genetic loci associated with lung adenocarcinoma in East Asians.

An Omicron BA.4/BA.5 mRNA booster vaccine elicits high neutralizing responses to the BA.4/BA.5 variant and to ancestral SARS-CoV-2, supporting tailoring booster vaccines to the predominant Omicron variant.

Homologous repair of DNA double strand breaks in Saccharomyces cerevisiaeis dependent on several conserved Rad51 paralogs. Here the authors provide biochemical evidence that Rad55-Rad57 synergistically interacts with the Shu complex to promote Rad51 filament formation and homology directed repair.

There is ongoing research into new electrocatalysts for hydrogen production from water splitting. Here, the authors report the electrocatalytic performance of nickel/nickel oxide heterostructures on carbon nanotubes, and are able to assemble a water electrolyzer operated by a single-cell 1.5 V battery.

A bivalent vaccine encoding the ancestral and Beta variant SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins boosts neutralizing antibody responses against multiple viral variants, suggesting that a bivalent approach is an effective strategy to broadly enhance protection against COVID-19.

A challenge for synthetic biology is the design and construction of prototissue. Here, the authors spatially segregate layers of enzyme-decorated coacervate protocells as a model prototissue capable of chemical signal processing and modulating outputs of nitric oxide to inhibit blood clot formation.

MultiSTAAR provides a general and flexible statistical framework for functionally informed multi-trait rare variant analysis of biobank-scale sequencing studies by jointly analyzing multiple traits and incorporating annotation information.

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.

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.

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.

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.