Search

Forests are essential for both climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation, yet how to balance these goals in managed forests remains unclear. Here, using a Europe-wide dataset, the authors find that biodiversity increases with carbon stocks, but mostly when deadwood is included.

Soil water uptake is a major determinant of plant performance and stress tolerance. Here the authors show that, by affecting xylem formation in the root, natural variation at the Arabidopsis XND1 locus has contrasting effects on root hydraulics and drought tolerance versus pathogen resistance.

Pre-treatment dual immune checkpoint blockade in cervical cancer remains understudied. In this trial, the authors show that neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade enhances immune activation and correlates with improved response to subsequent chemoradiation in patients with cervical carcinoma.

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.

Variation in responses to bacterial and viral stimuli between Batwa rainforest hunter-gatherers and Bakiga agriculturalists from Uganda suggests population-level divergence under natural selection, with hunter-gatherers disproportionately showing signatures of positive selection.

S protein interacts with and activates PBP1a during cell division, as part of a larger GpsB-associated multiprotein complex that coordinates peptidoglycan remodelling in Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Live-cell fluorescence microscopy and polymer simulations in human HCT116 cells show similar cohesin density, residence times and extrusion speed across multiple genomic regions.

Variants in the PSMC5 gene impair proteasome function and cellular homeostasis, altering brain development in children. This study reveals underlying molecular mechanisms contributing to this neurodevelopmental phenotype, and suggests therapeutic leads for neurodevelopmental proteasomopathies.

New hominin fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés at Thomas Quarry I (ThI-GH) in Casablanca, Morocco, dated to around 773 thousand years ago are similar in age to Homo antecessor, yet are morphologically distinct.

In this study, researchers show that season and exposure to light affect different nuclei of the amygdala and that these effects are related to mood. This may explain in part the benefits of light therapy for mood disorders.

During development, blood is generated in the yolk sac by differentiation of haemato-endothelial mesoderm into haematopoietic progenitors. Using CRISPR-Cas9 screens, the authors identify Etv2, Smad1, Ldb1, Six4 and Zbtb7b as regulators of haemato-endothelial mesoderm commitment. Lack of these regulators gave rise to mesodermal subsets with a defined lineage differentiation bias.

How the nervous system controls social behaviours of bees is poorly understood. This study finds that social feeding of male honeybees is hardwired into the nervous system by the fruitless (fru) gene, and that expression of this transcription factor is restricted to the nervous system of males.

Zhang, Lahry, Cipurko et al. show that the microbial metabolites queuine and preQ₁ modify the same host tRNA. PreQ₁-tRNA reduces cell proliferation, slows tumour growth, decreases the translation of ribosomal proteins and is cleaved by IRE1 on the ER ribosome.

Unambiguous identification of double-strangeness hypernuclei is a challenging task in nuclear physics. Here, the AUs demonstrate identification of 13ΛΛ-B hypernuclei from an AI pipeline applied to the analysis of nuclear emulsion data from the JPARC-E07 experiment.

There is compelling mechanistic rationale for combining PARP inhibitors with topoisomerase I (TOP1) inhibitors but hindered by dose-limiting toxicities. Here this group proposes a dose-escalation strategy integrating tumor-targeted TOP1 inhibitor with optimized PARP inhibitor scheduling, and evaluate the safety and efficacy in a phase 1 trial of 24 patients with advanced solid tumors.

Nanofibrils constructed from oat protein and carrying iron nanoparticles can increase absorption compared with ferrous sulfate in human studies, offering a promising fortification strategy for treating iron deficiency and improving human nutrition.

IL-6 blockade represents a promising therapeutic approach for the treatment of osteoarthritis (OA), although durable effects have yet to be explored in clinical trials. Here, the authors report the results of a phase I randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy and safety of PPV-06, an anti-IL-6 active immunotherapy able to modulate the activity of circulating IL-6 in patients with knee OA.

The performance of inverted perovskite solar cells has been limited by non-radiative recombination at the perovskite surfaces. Here, authors employ phosphonic acids and piperazinium chloride for homogeneous passivation, achieving certified efficiency of 28.9% for 60 cm² perovskite-silicon tandems.

Autoimmune encephalitis (AIE) may involve neuron-specific cytotoxic T cells, but evidence is still lacking. Here the authors use induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with AIE and single cell RNA-sequencing of ex vivo CD8 T cells to find neuron-specific, KIR⁺CD8⁺ T cells with altered transcriptome that potentially contribute to AIE etiology.

Using a new method called FoldTree, the authors compare proteins on the basis of their shape to construct more accurate family trees over long evolutionary timescales and capture distant relationships where sequence information becomes less reliable.

Arsenic-rich globules are thought to be evidence of early microbial life. Here, the authors show how microbialite arsenic enrichment patterns vary with microbial activity and environmental conditions, reinforcing arsenic’s value as a biosignature.

The study reports the arrival of avian influenza H5N1 virus clade 2.3.4.4b into the Indian Ocean sub-Antarctic archipelagos of Crozet and Kerguelen. Using phylogeographic analyses, the virus likely came from the distant South Georgia islands.

Tuberculosis is a major global health threat. Here, the authors develop a single-cell drug discovery approach and identify a compound that tunes bacterial phenotypic variation. This enhances the activity of anti-tubercular drugs against the pathogen.

In vertebrates parasite-mediated selection is thought to maintain polymorphism in MHC genes where specific resistance MHC alleles increase under emerging selection. Here, experimental evidence is shown from six stickleback fish populations that varying parasite selection helps maintain MHC polymorphism.

Exploiting the full structuration of light fields for storing multiple degrees of freedom holds great promise for applications in classical and quantum optics. Here, the authors demonstrate the storage of spatio-polarization-patterned beams into an optical memory, and its retrieval at the single-photon level.

High-affinity ligands were developed that specifically bind aggregated TDP-43, are selective over common co-pathologies, and possess pharmacokinetic profiles suitable for PET imaging to visualize TDP-43 pathology in the brains of patients.

Heterologous expression in the Drosophila empty neuron system, coupled with transcuticular calcium imaging and electrophysiology, allowed to deorphanize two odorant receptors of the honey bee which detect constituents of the alarm pheromone.

Pangenome analyses of 133 wild accessions of the model bryophyte Marchantia polymorpha identify adaptive features and provide insights into the mechanisms of plant adaptation to the terrestrial environment.

This study reveals that females with isolated REM sleep behavior disorder show less neurodegeneration than males. The least affected regions in females are regions that overexpress estrogen-related genes, suggesting potential sex-specific neuroprotection.

This study shows that two distinct progenitor populations build embryonic muscle in birds—one forms primary fibers via Wnt signaling, the other gives rise to secondary fibers and satellite cells—and that this dual origin is conserved in humans.

Angiotensin II contracts blood vessels and has been implicated as a causative factor in hypertension. Christophe Guilluy et al. now demonstrate that the guanine exchange factor Arghef1 is required for the hypertensive effects of angiotensin II in mice, and describe a new signaling pathway by which angiotensin II triggers Jak2-dependent activation of Arghef1 to cause smooth muscle cell contraction (pages 165–166).

The authors use spatial and single-cell transcriptomics to examine spatial dynamics during early human cardiogenesis, yielding insights into the development of the cardiac pacemaker-conduction system, autonomic innervation, heart valves and atrial septum, and heterogeneity of cardiac mesenchymal cells.

By integrating large-scale genomic and proteomic data in cerebrospinal fluid and plasma, the authors identify 49 proteins linked to MRI markers of cerebral small vessel disease, highlighting extracellular matrix and immune pathways, with biomarker and therapeutic potential.

Sepsis induces a period of immunosuppression which can be problematic in the face of subsequent infectious challenge. Here the authors show the presence of PD-L1 expressing regulatory plasma cells that can inhibit T cells in a murine model and in patients with sepsis.

The behaviour of water impacting on surfaces is crucial to many applications, including anti-icings and self-cleaning. Here, Gauthier et al.show that the contact time of drops on a straight wire decreases with impact speed in a step manner due to the fragmentation of water in evenly divided subunits.

Append editing of ADP-ribosyl to thymine is used for precise modifications in bacteria and eukaryotes.

Targeted therapies matched to genomics improved progression-free survival when genomic alterations were classified as level I/II (according to ESCAT), and genomics should thus be driven by target actionability in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

Biomass-derived monomers are a renewable resource for the production of polymers. Robertet al. develop an auto-tandem catalytic transformation for the synthesis of aliphatic polyesters—'activated' monomers are prepared from dicarboxylic acids, which can be copolymerized with epoxides.

Metastasis of urothelial carcinoma remains incurable due to insufficient treatment options for advanced disease. Here, the authors combine whole exome sequencing and RNA-seq from metastatic biopsies, and show temporal evolution when compared with primary tumour.

The precise pairing of cysteine residues in proteins is routinely achieved in nature. However, the comparable pairing within polypeptides is a long-standing challenge for the preparation of multicyclic species. Here, a straightforward approach to direct the inter-/intramolecular pairing of cysteine residues within peptides using a minimal CXC motif is presented.

This study examines the function of G-quadruplex DNA secondary structures in mammalian promoters, revealing that they represent core promoter elements contributing to gene regulation by nucleosome exclusion and by promoting RNA polymerase II pause–release.

Analysis of snRNA genes in individuals with rare disorders identifies de novo and recurrent variants in RNU5B-1 and RNU5A-1, in addition to previously unreported cases with pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants in RNU4-2.