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Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

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.

The authors propose five high-priority areas to close the current gaps in diagnostic testing, providing a path to self-reliance in health security and universal healthcare in Africa.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

This study maps the connections of layer 5 pyramidal neurons in the mouse cortex, revealing distinct local and intercortical wiring patterns, and provides an open framework for exploring the connectivity of cell types.

The Connectome Annotation Versioning Engine (CAVE) is a platform for proofreading, annotating and analyzing datasets reaching the petascale. Currently, CAVE is used for electron microscopy datasets, but it can potentially be used for other large-scale datasets.

A study of several longitudinal birth cohorts and cross-sectional cohorts finds only moderate overlap in genetic variants between autism that is diagnosed earlier and that diagnosed later, so they may represent aetiologically different conditions.

Electron microscopy (EM) is the gold standard for biological ultrastructure but acquisition speed is slow, making it unsuitable for large volumes. Here the authors present a parallel imaging pipeline for continuous autonomous imaging with six transmission EMs to image 1 mm³ of mouse cortex in less than 6 months.

The authors use Patch-seq and electron microscopy datasets to relate synaptic connectivity to the transcriptomic cell type of different types of inhibitory neuron.

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.

Neural Decomposition (NEURD) is a software package that decomposes neuronal data from high-resolution electron microscopy volumes into feature-rich graph representations to facilitate analysis for neuroscience research.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

This Resource paper presents a global SARS-CoV-2 phylogenetic tree of 4,471,579 high-quality genomes consistently constructed by Viridian, an efficient amplicon-aware assembler.

Using volumetric electron microscopy, the authors map and analyze the structure of cortical inhibition with synaptic resolution across a column of visual cortex.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

Sharks and rays are vital coral reef species. This study shows that nearly two thirds (59%) of the 134 coral-reef associated species are threatened with extinction. The main cause of their decline is found to be overfishing, both targeted and unintentional, and extinction risk is greater for larger species found in nations with higher fishing pressure and weaker governance.

Many recent proteomics studies use either Olink or SomaScan platforms to quantify proteins in high-throughput, but the consistency between the two is unclear. Here, the authors measure proteins in the same samples using both platforms, finding only modest correlation, and compare associations with genetic variants and disease.

Estimates of infection rates from the UK COVID-19 Infection Survey may have been biased by the characteristics of people who chose to take part. Here, the authors show that the survey population had unusually high vaccination rates and adjust infection estimates taking this into account.

It is uncertain how much life expectancy of the Chinese population would improve under current and greater policy targets on lifestyle-based risk factors for chronic diseases and mortality behaviours. Here we report a simulation of how improvements in four risk factors, namely smoking, alcohol use, physical activity and diet, could affect mortality. We show that in the ideal scenario, that is, all people who currently smokers quit smoking, excessive alcohol userswas reduced to moderate intake, people under 65 increased moderate physical activity by one hour and those aged 65 and older increased by half an hour per day, and all participants ate 200 g more fresh fruits and 50 g more fish/seafood per day, life expectancy at age 30 would increase by 4.83 and 5.39 years for men and women, respectively. In a more moderate risk reduction scenario referred to as the practical scenario, where improvements in each lifestyle factor were approximately halved, the gains in life expectancy at age 30 could be half those of the ideal scenario. However, the validity of these estimates in practise may be influenced by population-wide adherence to lifestyle recommendations. Our findings suggest that the current policy targets set by the Healthy China Initiative could be adjusted dynamically, and a greater increase in life expectancy would be achieved.

Deconvolution methods infer levels of immune infiltration from bulk expression of tumour samples. Here, authors assess 6 published and 22 community-contributed methods via a DREAM Challenge using in vitro and in silico transcriptional profiles of admixed cancer and healthy immune cells.

Chimeric antigen receptor T cells targeting HIV-infected cells prevent T cell loss and reduce virus in blood and tissues of HIV-infected humanized mice, highlighting a path toward a cell-based therapy for HIV infection.

FlyWire presents a neuronal wiring diagram of the whole fly brain with annotations for cell types, classes, nerves, hemilineages and predicted neurotransmitters, with data products and an open ecosystem to facilitate exploration and browsing.

The MICrONS mouse visual cortex dataset shows that neurons with similar response properties preferentially connect, a pattern that emerges within and across brain areas and layers, and independently emerges in artificial neural networks where these ‘like-to-like’ connections prove important for task performance.

Dense calcium imaging combined with co-registered high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction of the brain of the same mouse provide a functional connectomics map of tens of thousands of neurons of a region of the primary cortex and higher visual areas.

Excitatory neurons in the neocortex exhibit considerable morphological diversity, yet their organizational principles remain a subject of ongoing research. Here, the authors use unsupervised learning to show that most excitatory neuron morphologies in the mouse visual cortex form a continuum, with notable exceptions in deeper layers.

Multi-ancestry genome-wide analyses identify 95 loci associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and implicate candidate genes, pathways and neurobiological systems underlying its pathophysiology.

An analysis demonstrates that quantitative measurements of perisomatic ultrastructure features of neurons can be used to categorize them into cell types.

Genetic and testing data from England show that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern B.1.1.7 has a transmission advantage over other lineages.

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.

Longitudinal tracing of antibody responses to the ChAdOx1 and the BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccines in 45,965 adults from the United Kingdom give indications for vaccine prioritization.

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.

Here the authors identify 128 regions of the genome associated with blood pressure traits in 100,000 Chinese adults. Blood pressure traits contributed differently to CVD risk, with only pulse pressure independently causally associated with carotid plaque.

Precision functional mapping shows that the frontostriatal salience network occupies nearly twice as much of the cortex in people with depression, and this was unaffected by mood changes and detected in children before onset of symptoms.

Federated ML (FL) provides an alternative to train accurate and generalizable ML models, by only sharing numerical model updates. Here, the authors present the largest FL study to-date to generate an automatic tumor boundary detector for glioblastoma.

Getz and colleagues demonstrate a computational approach to estimate the timing of genomic drivers in early tumor progression from cancer types that do not have premalignant disease, using HPV-negative and HPV-positive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma as examples.

Most people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 seroconvert within a few weeks, but the determinants and duration of the antibody response are not known. Here, the authors characterise these features of the immune response using data from a large representative community sample of the UK population.

Study shows PTSD predisposition shares distinct genes and genomic regions with several cardiovascular conditions. Here the findings reveal neuronal, immune, and metabolic pathways, and repurposed drug targets that further the understanding of the comorbidity.

The impact of prior infection on the immune response to COVID-19 vaccination has not been fully characterised. Here, the authors use data from ~100,000 adults in the UK and find that a single vaccine dose in those with prior infection produces a comparable or stronger response to two doses in those without infection.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental health problem. Here, the authors report a GWAS from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in which they identify two risk loci in European ancestry and one locus in African ancestry individuals and find that PTSD is genetically correlated with several other psychiatric traits.

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.

Predicting seizure onsets may allow for seizure prevention in patients. Here, authors show two distinct phases that always preceded temporal lobe seizures in mice, with activity confined within these two phases failing to progress into a seizure.

Blood pressure (BP) is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and more than 200 genetic loci associated with BP are known. Here, the authors perform discovery GWAS for BP in East Asians and meta-analysis in East Asians and Europeans and report ancestry-specific BP SNPs and selection signals.

Analyses of the proportions of individuals who have completed key levels of schooling across all low- and middle-income countries from 2000 to 2017 reveal inequalities across countries as well as within populations.