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Ultrasound helps detect early Li-ion battery failures, but linking signals to specific phenomena is difficult. Here, authors combine ultrasound with operando X-ray diffraction and nanodilatometry to correlate ultrasound signals with structural changes in battery materials.

Van Ouwerkerk and colleagues examine the benefits of renewable energy investments for German households during the recent energy crisis. They find a typical household with a heat pump saved 1850 € and reduced emissions by 250 g/kWh annually, leading to greater gains in resilience when compared to temporary price breaks on energy.

Sinking organic particles transport vast amounts of carbon to the deep ocean. This study shows that biogels scavenged during their descent can slow their sinking by up to 45% in one day, regulating a key process in the oceanic carbon cycle.

Adenylate kinase (AdK) plays a key role in cellular energy homeostasis by catalysing the reversible magnesium-dependent formation of ADP from AMP and ATP. Here the authors present a detailed analysis of adenylate kinase’s conformational dynamics and characterize a high-energy state of AdK indispensable for catalysis.

Here, Schubert et al. investigate the metabolic requirements for Salmonella Typhimurium colonization using a barcoded mutant pool across five different mouse models with varying microbiome complexity and identify several monosaccharides that are utilized in a context-(in)dependent manner.

Anatomically resolved maps of small molecules along the gut of colonized and germ-free mice reveal distinct spatial patterns throughout the gut. These patterns can, in part, be associated with specific microorganisms producing bioactive compounds.

Functional implications of A-to-I editing is of broad interest to scientific research. Here, authors introduce the local differential editing index (LoDEI) to detect differential A-to-I editing in RNAseq datasets using a sliding-window approach coupled with an empirical q value calculation.

While phosphorylation is an essential post-translational modification in eukaryotes only recently the phosphoproteome of prokaryotes has been provided. Here, Schastnaya et al. mutate 52 phosphosites on 23 E. coli enzymes and apply metabolomics to provide evidence for the functional relevance of bacterial phosphorylation events.

Bacteria must adapt their metabolism in the face of dynamically changing nutrient availability. Here, using their constraint-based modeling approach the authors analyze E. coli exometabolome data during growth in complex medium, revealing temporal coordination of glucose and amino acid catabolism.

A model of sequential flux bottlenecks explains a universal trade-off between steady-state growth and physiological adaptation time in bacteria exposed to fluctuating growth conditions.

Microbes can cooperate and share resources via metabolic cross-feeding. Here, the authors show that excretion of key metabolites following acid stress provides a collaborative, inter-species mechanism of stress resistance.

With a method involving the rapid injection of living cells into a mass spectrometer, researchers demonstrate the ability to monitor metabolite profiles in real time over the course of several hours.

The ability of marine bacteria to direct their movement in response to chemical gradients influences inter-species interactions, nutrient turnover, and ecosystem productivity. Here, Clerc et al. show that marine bacteria are strongly attracted to algal polysaccharides, and this chemotactic behaviour is enhanced by dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP), a ubiquitous algal metabolite.

The spatial architecture of multiple myeloma remains to be explored. Here, the authors perform bulk and single cell sequencing for samples from newly diagnosed patients and reveal gene signatures associated with focal lesions and spatial heterogeneity in the tumour microenvironment.

A method to screen proteins for enzymatic activity by incubating purified or overexpressed proteins with a metabolite extract and measuring changes in metabolite abundance using mass spectrometry enables high-throughput characterization of functionally uncharacterized proteins in Escherichia coli.

A nontargeted metabolomics approach finds that ubiquinone (Q8) accumulates in E. coli with sustained hyperosmotic stress. A new role for Q8 in stress tolerance does not involve its known roles in radical scavenging or as a respiratory electron carrier.

The authors have demonstrated a method for real-time imaging of the interior of a battery using ultrasound imaging. This approach reveals effects that hinder fast charging, enabling researchers to develop new batteries and optimize their utilization.

Rate-limiting steps in synthetic metabolic pathways are difficult to identify. Here, the authors monitor metabolite dynamics and apply kinetic modelling during the start-up phase of the Bacillus subtilisGlcNAc pathway to discover a futile cycle, allowing them to identify a more productive strain.

Using kefir as a natural model microbial ecosystem, the authors apply metabolomics, transcriptomics and large-scale mapping of inter-species interactions to study the drivers of stable coexistence of species in space and time.

Cereghetti et al. report that the glycolytic metabolite fructose-1,6-bisphosphate initiates the disassembly of amyloids formed by the yeast pyruvate kinase Cdc19 to resume ATP production during stress recovery.

Using serial femtosecond X-ray cystallography, we provide structural insights into the final reaction step of Kok’s photosynthetic water oxidation cycle, specifically the S₃→[S₄]→S₀ transition where O₂ is formed.

Here the authors use microfluidics and single-cell microscopy to quantify the growth dynamics of individual E. coli cells exposed to nutrient fluctuations with periods as short as 30 seconds, finding that nutrient fluctuations reduce growth rates up to 50% compared to a steady nutrient delivery of equal average concentration, implying that temporal variability is an important parameter in bacterial growth.

The inner layer of the mucus that covers our intestine is nearly sterile. Here, the authors show in mice that the outer mucus layer constitutes a unique microbial niche hosting bacterial communities with distinct proliferation rates and resource utilization activities.

Microbes survive in dynamic environments by modulating their intracellular metabolism. Here, the authors reveal that mycobacteria employ a rheostat-like mechanism to regulate carbon flux between the oxidative TCA cycle and the glyoxylate shunt during glucose-acetate diauxic shift.

The integration of microarray and metabolite data is important for understanding the physiology of model organisms. This study demonstrates how the integration of these kinds of data can provide novel insights into the growth and protein metabolism of two different yeast strains.

Meta-mirrors may help realize ultra-stable lasers for high-precision metrology, for applications like gravitational wave detection and quantum optics. The authors experimentally realize a new type of microstructured meta-mirror and use it to form a Fabry-Perot cavity with low thermal noise and a high finesse of 12,000.

A new global annotation strategy combines sequence identity and genomic context to provide probabilities for all metabolic assignments in a given species. Application of this method leads to multiple new annotations and validation of three enzymatic activities in B. subtilis.

Integrating metabolomics and computational modeling provides a method to identify allosteric enzyme-metabolite interactions, which have been inaccessible to systematic mapping.

Photosystem II is the biosynthetic machinery that allows the conversion of water to oxygen using light. Here, the authors combine X-ray emission and diffraction data to probe the structural changes that take place during photosystem II catalysis.

Glucose and its metabolic derivatives are increased the plasma of patients with diabetes. Peter Nawroth and colleagues demonstrate that one such metabolite, methylglyoxal, is increased in patients with painful diabetic neuropathy, and find that it acts by modifying the excitability characteristics of a sodium channel protein.

Errors in functional annotations can cause significant problems in later research. A new method to identify misannotations by analyzing the genomic context correlations corrects these errors, such as in the reassignment of genes now demonstrated to have roles in leucine and fatty acid degradation.

High-resolution meta-omics have enabled the discovery of the microbial enzymes that inactivate an ulcerative colitis drug and predict subsequent treatment failure, an approach that could enable more personalized treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.

In battery research, the demand for public datasets to ensure transparent analyses of battery health is growing. Jan Figgener et al. meet this need with an 8-year study of 21 lithium-ion systems in Germany, generating a dataset of 14 billion data points that offers valuable insights into battery longevity for home storage.

Short-term exposure to a high-fat diet reduces colonization resistance to Salmonella Typhimurium infection in mice and is associated with increase bile salts and plasmid transfer; however, E. coli can provide a protective effect under these conditions.

Alexander Blömeke and colleagues investigate the conditions under which the balancing resistors in battery systems can be used for impedance measurements. This helps to improve state estimation and results in safer and more sustainable battery systems.