Search

Analyses of more than 10,000 participants from the Human Phenotype Project revealed distinct, persistent food–microbiome associations that can be used to simulate personalized dietary interventions to improve cardiometabolic health.

Over five years, implementation of the NHS England Lung Cancer Screening Programme achieved high early-stage detection rates and demonstrated that the programme is both feasible and scalable for reaching high-risk and underserved populations.

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.

This study uses two large fundus cohorts to show that retinal foundation models generalize well across populations but exhibit age-related fairness gaps. It highlights how pre-training data composition shapes model generalisability and fairness.

Viral pathogen load in cancer genomes is estimated through analysis of sequencing data from 2,656 tumors across 35 cancer types using multiple pathogen-detection pipelines, identifying viruses in 382 genomic and 68 transcriptome datasets.

Some cancer patients first present with metastases where the location of the primary is unidentified; these are difficult to treat. In this study, using machine learning, the authors develop a method to determine the tissue of origin of a cancer based on whole sequencing data.

Many tumours exhibit hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypoxic tumours often respond poorly to therapy. Here, the authors quantify hypoxia in 1188 tumours from 27 cancer types, showing elevated hypoxia links to increased mutational load, directing evolutionary trajectories.

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a fatal human disease driven by the accumulation of apoptosis-resistant fibroblasts that impede homeostatic lung repair. Here, the authors show that elevated BCL-2 expression in fibroblasts drives their survival and senescence prolonging fibrosis in mice, while BCL-2 inhibition reverses persistent fibrosis.

A modified amphotericin antifungal that is less toxic to human cells, owing to its increased preference for its fungal ergosterol target versus human cholesterol, can still evade the evolution of resistance.

Within quantum electrodynamics electric charge is energy dependent, and there is a previous claim that charge is affected by gravity (general relativity) with the implication that the charge is reduced at high energies. But that claim has been very controversial. This author reports an analysis demonstrating that quantum gravity corrections to quantum electrodynamics have a quadratic energy dependence that results in the electric charge vanishing at high energies.

An improved faba bean reference genome and resequencing of winter and spring faba bean accessions identify genetic determinants of winter hardiness.

INSTALL overcomes fundamental challenges for DNA delivery and integration methods by synergizing immune-stealth nucleic acids with recombinases to enable kilobase-scale integration strategies without viral vectors.

From 2014–2017, marine heatwaves caused global mass coral bleaching, where the corals lose their symbiotic algae. The authors find, this event exceeded the severity of all prior global bleaching events in recorded history, with approximately half the world’s reefs bleaching and 15% experiencing substantial mortality.

Evo 2 is an artificial intelligence-based biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs spanning all domains of life that predicts functional properties from genomic sequences and provides a rich generative model for researchers in biology.

Global Burden of Disease estimates show that between 1990 and 2023, the prevalence and burden of drug use disorders, inclusive of amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and opioid use, have been increasing in high-income countries, particularly in the USA.

Here researchers reveal a microexon in the Ank3 gene encoding Ankyrin G allows cortical interneurons to fine-tune calcium signaling and firing, revealing the contribution of alternative splicing to the functional diversity among different types of neurons.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

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.

A machine-learning model that integrates data from wearable devices (such as smartwatches) with blood biomarkers and demographic data can predict whether someone has insulin resistance, enabling timely lifestyle interventions to prevent progression to type 2 diabetes.

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

Allcott et al. conducted an experiment in 2020, removing political ads from the feeds of randomly selected Facebook and Instagram users. There were no statistically significant effects on political outcomes such as knowledge, polarization and turnout.

Hierarchical nanostructures in ferroelectric ceramics greatly enhance light-driven strain, yielding a photostriction rate two orders higher than conventional bulk materials and enabling remote ultrasonic sensing for structural health monitoring.

Yang et al. identify RHOA, a GTP hydrolyzing enzyme, as a key regulator of contact sites between mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum. It controls contact sites by modulating a tethering complex between the two organelles.

Zhang et al. performed a multi-regional multi-omics study, identifying brain-wide mitochondrial and synaptic defects in neurons and glial inflammation as key mechanisms underlying central nervous system impairment in COVID-19, potentially triggering neurodegeneration.

China’s crowded coasts must balance seafood demand with conserving migratory shorebirds that rely on tidal flats along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. This study suggests that well-managed mariculture feeds shorebirds and limits overharvest, benefiting seafood production and biodiversity.

The fluorescence-based protein assembly platform GEMINI is able to record the history of individual cells by leveraging a computationally designed protein assembly as an intracellular memory device.

Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) and alcoholic liver disease (ALD) are drivers of liver cancer, promoting its development through chronic liver injury and inflammation. In this Review, Rahbari et al. highlight the distinct pathophysiological mechanisms of progression and therapeutic advancements for MASLD and ALD, emphasizing the need for more tailored approaches to manage these complex diseases and their cancer risks.

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.

Sensory encoding and memory retrieval are oppositely modulated across the cycle of infra-slow brain dynamics in both humans and mice, revealing a conserved brain mechanism coordinating seconds-scale sensory and mnemonic processing.

Immune imprinting narrows the vaccine recall response towards dominant epitopes but protection against rapidly evolving viruses is enhanced if the breadth of responses is preserved. Here authors show in a ferret model that introducing optimized antigenic variation between prime and boost vaccines diversify the targeted epitopes and thus broadens immunity in a ferret model of influenza vaccination.

A European project calls for help to verify whether carbon quantum dots are really able to sense chemicals in cells.

Lung adenocarcinomas bearing the ID2 mutational signature display increased LINE-1 retrotransposon activity, which contributes to their fast evolutionary dynamics and aggressive phenotype.

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.

GGC repeat expansions causing oculopharyngeal myopathy with or without leukoencephalopathy are located in small open reading frames and translated into polyglycine proteins that form cellular aggregates, driving neuronal and muscle cell dysfunction.

A molecular-level understanding of structural evolution upon electrochemical doping in organic mixed ionic-electronic conductors is required. A pronounced reduction in mass and thickness is observed in an n-type ladder polymer upon doping with protic cations owing to water expulsion.

Many vascular‑disease risk loci lack defined causal genes. Here, the authors integrate functional genomics and CRISPR screens to identify genes influencing smooth muscle cell behaviour, validating roles for FES, BCAR1, CARF and SMARCA4, with Fes loss promoting atherosclerosis and hypertension.

The lowest-frequency gravitational wave background may be shaped by supermassive black hole binaries that scatter nearby stars or dark matter. In this case, the NANOGrav 15-year dataset favours dense galactic centres with 10⁶ solar masses per cubic parsec.

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.

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.

Analysis of mitochondrial genomes (mtDNA) by using whole-genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancer samples across 38 cancer types identifies hypermutated mtDNA cases, frequent somatic nuclear transfer of mtDNA and high variability of mtDNA copy number in many cancers.

Analysis of whole-genome sequencing data across 2,658 tumors spanning 38 cancer types shows that chromothripsis is pervasive, with a frequency of more than 50% in several cancer types, contributing to oncogene amplification, gene inactivation and cancer genome evolution.

Most advanced triple-negative breast cancers remain resistant to immunotherapy. Here, the authors discover that RIPK1-driven necroptosis in both tumor and stromal compartments is essential for effective immunogenic cell death-based therapy and immune checkpoint blockade.

The herpes simplex virus lytic-latent balance is incompletely understood. In this study, the authors show that it is controlled by the relative abundance of host activating and repressive forkhead box (FOX) transcription factors that recruit epigenetic cofactors to the viral genome to remodel viral chromatin.

The vacuum process is scalable and solvent free, yet all-vacuum-deposited perovskite solar cells still trail solution-processed counterparts. Facet-directed co-evaporation yields (100)-oriented mixed-halide wide-bandgap films for efficient, stable single-junction cells and perovskite–silicon tandem cells.