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A genome-wide association study in rice identifies variation in SBRR1 associated with sheath blight resistance. Introducing the SBRR1-R allele into a commercial rice variety reduces yield loss under severe exposure to sheath blight disease.

Aqueous two-phase systems have potential as biomimetic materials, but often lack stability and are prone to collapse. Here, the authors use interfacial assembly of chitin nanofibres and cellulose nanocrystals to prepare a biobased system with permeability and switchable motility.

Zhang et al. show that the activation of RIPK1 is suppressed by acetylhypusination in a spermidine-dependent manner. Disruption of this axis contributes to RIPK1-mediated vascular pathology to promote insulin resistance and diabetic kidney pathology.

Zhu, Fu, Zhu, Li and colleagues found that the key DNA repair enzyme poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase 1 promotes transcriptional restart after DNA damage through PARylating and stabilizing AFF1 by preventing its ubiquitylation by the E3 ligase Siah1.

This study analyzes the impact of 1,436 air-quality-monitoring stations in Chinese cities. It found that these stations led to an 8.03% reduction in PM_2.5 concentrations in urban areas. Within these areas, they resulted in 0.57% more reduction in PM_2.5 concentrations in technically accessible areas compared to non-accessible areas, which also experienced an increase in housing prices and a decrease in air-quality-induced mortality.

Conditional knockout of LARP4 in naive CD4⁺ T cells leads to attenuated quiescence exit and clonal expansion.

Alkynes are well known to undergo linear 1,2-addition polymerisations, but their 1,1 addition is much rarer and more challenging. Here, the authors use a Cd-catalysed 1,1-carboboration process to polymerise acetylene via 1,1-addition.

Here the authors reveal that the prostate cancer risk variant rs4519489 enhances binding of the oncogenic transcription factor USF1, upregulating NOL10. Elevated NOL10 promotes tumor progression, highlighting the rs4519489–USF1–NOL10 axis as a potential biomarker and therapeutic target.

Monolayer amorphous carbon (a-C) has attracted attention due to its structural and electronic properties, but its synthesis has so far required the use of metal substrates. Here, the authors report the Te-assisted growth of large-scale 2D a-C patterns on various insulating substrates, confirming their insulating properties in quantum tunnelling devices.

EndoKED is a knowledge extraction and distillation method that connects large language models and large vision models to automate the transformation of raw colonoscopy records into annotated image datasets.

Fungal diseases threaten crops worldwide. By resolving the cryo-EM structure of fungal succinate dehydrogenase, researchers designed an inhibitor with broad antifungal activity, strong field performance, and reduced environmental toxicity.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

The yin–yang codec transcoding algorithm is proposed to improve the practicality and robustness of DNA data storage.

Genetic muscle diseases are difficult to treat due to challenges in delivering gene editors to muscles throughout the body. Here, authors engineer muscle-specific virus-like particles that fuse with skeletal muscle cells to deliver CRISPR tools and restore dystrophin in a DMD model.

This study reports that the gene SMPED1, located in a previously identified dichogamy-determining region in Alpinia species, controls the timing of sex-organ synchrony, improving our understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms of plant sexual diversity.

The mechanisms resulting in muscle satellite cell dysfunction in diabetes are not well understood. Here, the authors show that AS160 functions in the nucleus to regulate satellite cell proliferation and that its impaired nuclear entry is linked to diabetic myopathy.

Drought stress threatens global food security. This study shows that drought-induced changes in wheat metabolites selectively enrich drought-tolerant bacteria in the rhizosphere, which enhance plant growth through key functional traits, offering promising avenues to strengthen crop resilience and sustain food production under climate change.

A single umbilical cord blood unit of CD34⁺ HSPCs produces a high number of CD19 CAR-iNK cells using a modified cell culture method.

Monkeypox or Mpox represents a worldwide health emergency, and efficient vaccines are urgently needed. Here authors present a modified vaccinia virus as vaccine candidate, generated from the Tiantan strain by targeted gene deletion to make it replication-deficient, which elicits robust immune response in both mouse and macaque models, with favourable safety and long-lasting protection profiles in the non-human primates.

Thermal lepton pairs are ideal probes for the temperature of quark-gluon plasma. Here, the STAR Collaboration uses thermal electron-positron pair production to measure quark-gluon plasma average temperature at different stages of the evolution.

Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) models to replace human decision-making in medical intervention need thorough testing. Here authors present the results of a clinical trial, NCT05600855, in which daGOAT, a conditional autonomous artificial intelligence agent successfully makes the decision whether to prescribe an immune suppressive drug to prevent severe acute graft-versus-host disease following HLA-mismatched haematopoietic cell transplantation.

A manually operated portable water disinfection system can rapidly inactivate pathogens in water, offering a promising approach for safe water treatment in low-resource settings.

Uncontrolled crystallization of perovskite limits the performance of solar cells. Zhou et al. address this through aromatic interactions between naphthalene ammonium salts and naphthalenesulfonates, achieving improved efficiency in cells and modules.

Antiferromagnets have negligible stray magnetic fields and are robust against magnetic perturbations, making them ideal for high-density magnetic memory. However, these features make electrically switching the Néel vector challenging. Here, Guo, Lin and coauthors demonstrate layer-dependent electrical switching of a van der Waals antiferromagnet.

Sweet potato weevils (SPWs) pose one of the most significant challenges to sweet potato production. This study identifies two major SPW-resistant genes, SPWR1/2, and provides new insights into the mechanism of sweet potato defence against SPWs.

The authors develop a molecular dopant to avoid the dimerization of the electron-selective material phenyl-C₆₁-butyric acid methyl ester, resulting in enhanced stability and efficiency in inverted perovskite solar cells.

Developing high-current-density catalysts is key to efficient water splitting. Here, the authors report a single-atom Ru-doped amorphous Ni–Mo oxide that dynamically self-reconstructs to retain high activity at industrial current densities in an anion-exchange membrane water electrolyzer.

Basalt clasts returned by Chang’e-6 suggest a lunar farside mantle potential temperature that is approximately 100 °C cooler than the nearside mantle, according to a petrologic study combined with thermobarometric modelling and remote sensing data.

Integrating functional materials with microfibers for optical tuning remains challenging. Here, the authors present a conformal strategy to integrate homogeneous and inhomogeneous nanomembranes—including metals, oxides, semiconductors and polymers—onto microfibers, which are further developed into on-fiber sensors, modulators, filters, and photodetectors.

Single-atom catalysts, particularly metal/nitrogen-doped carbons, have become a versatile platform for fine-tuning electronic interactions with reactants and controlling thermodynamic selectivity. Here, the authors show that the catalytic ozonation activity of single-atomic Co–N₄ sites can be electronically modulated by adjusting the density of Co nanoparticles on the carbon matrix.

‘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.

Dihydrouridine (D) is an abundant RNA modification but its functions are currently unclear. Here, authors develop CRACI, a sensitive method for transcriptome-wide, single-base D mapping, identifying sites across mammalian and plant transcriptomes and identifying DUS2L as a mitochondrial D writer.

Radiative cooling is an emerging technology for cooling with reduced energy consumption. Here the authors present photoluminescent composites that combine subambient cooling with aesthetic colour, hydrophobicity and durability.

In this Perspective, members of the Aging Biomarker Consortium outline the X-Age Project, an Aging Biomarker Consortium plan for building standardized aging clocks in China. The authors discuss the project roadmap and its aims of decoding aging heterogeneity, detecting accelerated aging early and evaluating geroprotective interventions.

The dorsal peduncular area of the mouse brain functions as a network hub that integrates diverse cortical and thalamic inputs to regulate neuroendocrine and autonomic responses.

Transition metal dichalcogenide nanotubes possess symmetry-breaking properties promising for fundamental physics research. Here, the authors report a direct synthesis of crystalline MoS₂ nanotubes exhibiting strong polarization and bulk photovoltaic effects.

Wheat powdery mildew resistance is typically controlled by single-gene-encoded resistance protein. Here, the authors report the cloning of powdery mildew resistance locus PmWR183 and show that it encodes two adjacent nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat proteins originated from wild emmer wheat.

Here, the authors find that high-pressure treatment in a diamond anvil cell turns initially non-emissive organic small molecules emissive after decompression, where their color can be tuned through the maximum applied pressure.

Efficient exchange of long-chain ligands has been challenging for high-performing perovskite quantum dot photovoltaics. Here, the authors construct alkaline environments for antisolvents to promote their hydrolysis into conductive surface capping, enabling a certified solar cell efficiency of 18.3%.

Polar skyrmions are nanoscale topological structures of electric polarizations. Their collective modes, dubbed as “skyrons”, are discovered by the terahertz-field-excitation, femtosecond x-ray diffraction measurements and advanced modeling.

Polygenic background effects can confound transcriptome-wide association studies aimed at identifying causal genes. Here, the authors show that TGVIS improves gene and variant prioritisation by accounting for infinitesimal effects in multivariate TWAS across tissues.

Here, the authors structurally and biochemically characterise the YcfA-YcfC enzyme system, crucial for biosynthesis of the anticancer and antimicrobial agent 6-thioguanine.

Azetidine is a pharmacophore present in drug-related molecules. Here the authors unveil a two-metalloenzyme cascade leading to the azetidine-containing polyoximic acid, in which PolE functions as an Fe²⁺/pterin-dependent l-isoleucine desaturase, while PolF is a haem-oxygenase-like diiron oxidase, orchestrating the sequential desaturation and cyclization. These findings expand our knowledge of metalloenzymes.

An ex vivo model and pre-clinical study in a brain-dead recipient provide enzyme-converted O organs to avoid hyperacute rejection in ABO-incompatible kidney transplant patients.

Genetic basis of the drought tolerance of upland rice is unclear. Here, the authors report the cloning of a COBRA-like protein encoding gene DROT1 and reveal that it is repressed by ERF3 and activated by ERF71 to help control the balance between growth and drought tolerance in upland rice.

Spherical polar topological structures are of interest as they could enable high-density memory applications; however, such texture formation requires superlattices with delicately balanced boundary conditions to form. Here it is found that these textures can form in free-standing CuInP₂S₆, and that mechanical force can generate high-density domains.

The primary entry route of vanilloid ligands to the vanilloid-binding site in transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) is found to be a distinct and targetable hydrophobic pathway at the TRPV1–cell membrane interface rather than through direct membrane penetration.