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Global analysis of obesity trends from 1980 to 2024 in 200 countries and territories using data from 4,050 population-based studies reveals that framing obesity as a single global epidemic masks the highly varied dynamics across countries and age groups.

Chemically induced dimerization (CID) systems allow control over cellular processes. Here, the authors present a proof-of-principle demonstration that a complete CID system can be de novo designed, reporting a designed ligand and protein pair where a protein homodimer is induced by a macrocyclic peptide.

A permanently porous organic framework assembled and stabilized solely by non-covalent chalcogen bonding is reported. Empirical and computational studies reveal the characteristic influence of the operative Te···N chalcogen bonds on assembly, electronic structure, framework regeneration and lattice dynamics.

Part of the Hong Kong Genome Project, genomic analyses of more than 20,000 participants provide information on clinically relevant variants for the Chinese population and offer insights on the implementation of genomic medicine initiatives.

Vascular smooth muscle cells undergo complex transitions to multiple disease-related phenotypes in coronary artery disease. Using vascular smooth muscle lineage-traced single-cell RNA and ATAC sequencing, the authors map molecular spatiotemporal patterns of murine atherosclerosis and discover molecular mechanisms of TCF21-mediated coronary artery disease risk.

Mucosal barriers play critical roles in the interaction with commensal and pathogenic microbes. Here the authors show non-canonical IL-22 signalling results in mucosal remodelling in a murine model during the immune response to Candida albicans.

A large-scale study on the replicability of claims from social and behavioural science journals reports that about half of the results replicate in the same patterns as the original study.

cellSTAAR advances noncoding rare variant association analysis by integrating single-cell genomics data.

The authors resolve 63 structurally diverse haplotype structures for the 22q11.2 deletion syndrome region. Deletion risk differs depending on structure; individuals of African ancestry are enriched for inverted repeats that predispose to inversion.

In this work, the authors demonstrate that engineered ‘spaceplates’-devices that replace physical space in optical systems-can achieve free space compression up to 176 × their thickness.

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.

A study of reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences finds higher reproducibility among more recent papers and papers from journals that require data sharing.

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.

A spatial and single-cell transcriptomics study across multiple mammalian species identifies epidermal BMP signalling as a functional requirement for rete ridge formation, providing insight into mechanisms underlying hair density loss and wound healing.

Prima is an AI foundation model for neuroimaging based on clinical magnetic resonance imaging that offers accurate and explainable diagnostics, worklist priority for radiologists and clinical referral recommendations with equitable performance on diverse groups.

A study of human and mouse models of pancreatic cancer finds that inhibiting the lipid kinase PIKfyve interferes with the cancer’s lipid homeostasis, making it a potential target for drug development.

Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) onsets in COVID-19 patients with manifestations similar to Kawasaki disease (KD). Here the author probe the peripheral blood transcriptome of MIS-C patients to find signatures related to natural killer (NK) cell activation and CD8+ T cell exhaustion that are shared with KD patients.

Conventional and time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy reveal how NTSR1 dynamically engages and releases different G proteins, capturing over 20 intermediates and uncovering key mechanistic steps in GDP- and GTP-driven activation, subtype selectivity and distinct dissociation pathways.

Using data from a single time point, passenger-approximated clonal expansion rate (PACER) estimates the fitness of common driver mutations that lead to clonal haematopoiesis and identifies TCL1A activation as a mediator of clonal expansion.

Quantum computers may help to solve classically intractable problems, such as simulating non-equilibrium dissipative quantum systems. The critical dynamics of a dissipative quantum model has now been probed on a trapped-ion quantum computer.

A trans-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS of glycemic traits in up to 281,416 individuals identifies 99 novel loci, of which one quarter was found due to the multi-ancestry approach, which also improves fine-mapping of credible variant sets.

Large-effect variants in autism remain elusive. Here, the authors use long-read sequencing to assemble phased genomes for 189 individuals, identifying pathogenic variants in TBL1XR1, MECP2, and SYNGAP1, plus nine candidate structural variants missed by short-read methods.

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.

A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies of type 2 diabetes (T2D) identifies more than 600 T2D-associated loci; integrating physiological trait and single-cell chromatin accessibility data at these loci sheds light on heterogeneity within the T2D phenotype.

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.

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 large genome-wide association study of more than 5 million individuals reveals that 12,111 single-nucleotide polymorphisms account for nearly all the heritability of height attributable to common genetic variants.

Transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit diverse and tunable electronic states. Here the authors reveal a cascade of phase transitions upon increasing hydrostatic pressure in the few-layer 1T’-WS₂, including a re-entrant superconducting phase emerging from a normal state exhibiting anomalous Hall effect.

STAARpipeline is a comprehensive framework for flexible and scalable rare-variant association analysis using whole-genome sequencing data and annotation information.

Typical quantum error correcting codes assign fixed roles to the underlying physical qubits. Now the performance benefits of alternative, dynamic error correction schemes have been demonstrated on a superconducting quantum processor.

Genome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in ancestrally diverse populations implicate candidate causal genes and mechanisms underlying type 2 diabetes. Trans-ancestry genetic risk scores enhance transferability across populations.

In this study the authors consider the structural variants (SVs) present within cancer cases of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. They report hundreds of genes, including known cancer-associated genes for which the nearby presence of a SV breakpoint is associated with altered expression.

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.

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

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.

This overview of the ENCODE project outlines the data accumulated so far, revealing that 80% of the human genome now has at least one biochemical function assigned to it; the newly identified functional elements should aid the interpretation of results of genome-wide association studies, as many correspond to sites of association with human disease.

Khan et al. report a non-catalytic function of the methyltransferase SETD2 in regulating nuclear morphology and genome integrity. The SETD2 amino terminus functions as a scaffold helping CDK1 associate with lamins during nuclear-envelope disassembly

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 goals, resources and design of the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) programme are described, and analyses of rare variants detected in the first 53,831 samples provide insights into mutational processes and recent human evolutionary history.

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.

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.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

Experimental measurements of high-order out-of-time-order correlators on a superconducting quantum processor show that these correlators remain highly sensitive to the quantum many-body dynamics in quantum computers at long timescales.

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.