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Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

Biological aging clocks predict health outcomes, including morbidity and mortality, more accurately than chronological age alone, yet defining true biological age remains contentious. We propose ‘risk-equivalent’ age as an operationally defined metric that reflects an individual’s position on a continuum of clinically meaningful risk. Reconceptualizing biological age as a dynamic, risk-based vital sign may facilitate the use of aging clocks in clinical practice.

Genome-wide association analyses of intracranial and nine subcortical brain volumes in 74,898 participants of European ancestry identify 254 independent loci and yield polygenic scores accounting for brain variation across ancestries.

Here, the authors perform large trans-ancestry fine-mapping analyses identifying large numbers of association signals and putative target genes for colorectal cancer risk, advancing our understanding of the genetic and biological basis of this cancer.

Infant KMT2A-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia is associated with poor overall survival rates. Here, the authors use WGS and WES of 36 relapsed KMT2A-rearranged ALL and AML patients and find alterations in drug response genes in ALL, which may correspond with relapse time. Longitudinal analyses of >250 samples could track residual leukemia cells, clonal drug responses, and the upcoming relapse.

Dynamic Kerr microscopy enables the tracking of the two-step melting of a magnetic skyrmion lattice from a two-dimensional solid through an intermediate hexatic regime to an isotropic liquid and provides direct insights in the occurrence and dynamics of lattice dislocations, the defects that mediate melting.

Glucocorticoids reprogram the mitochondrial metabolism of macrophages, resulting in increased and sustained production of the anti-inflammatory metabolite itaconate and, as a consequence, inhibition of the inflammatory response.

Magnetic skyrmions are chiral spin structures that can form two-dimensional lattices. Here, the authors show how lattice domains grow under the influence of pinning effects in a non-flat energy landscape and that magnetic field oscillations help to stabilize order.

Genome-wide analysis identifies variants associated with the volume of seven different subcortical brain regions defined by magnetic resonance imaging. Implicated genes are involved in neurodevelopmental and synaptic signaling pathways.

A multi-ancestry genome-wide association study meta-analysis, combined with transcriptome- and methylome-wide association analyses, identifies risk loci associated with colorectal cancer. Credible effector genes and their target tissues are also highlighted, showing that over a third probably act outside the colonic mucosa.

Mechanistic origins of force stability and bond kinetics of interaction of the receptor-binding domain from the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, a key selection factor for mutations, are revealed at the single-molecule resolution using magnetic tweezers and molecular dynamics simulations.

The authors defined a roadmap for investigating the genetic covariance between structural or functional brain phenotypes and risk for psychiatric disorders. Their proof-of-concept study using the largest available common variant data sets for schizophrenia and volumes of several (mainly subcortical) brain structures did not find evidence of genetic overlap.

The hippocampus in mammalian brain varies in size across individuals. Here, Hibar and colleagues perform a genome-wide association meta-analysis to find six genetic loci with significant association to hippocampus volume.

Paul Pharoah and colleagues report the results of a large genome-wide association study of ovarian cancer. They identify new susceptibility loci for different epithelial ovarian cancer histotypes and use integrated analyses of genes and regulatory features at each locus to predict candidate susceptibility genes, including OBFC1.

The filamentous fungus expression system Thermothelomyces heterothallica (C1) is a protein expression system that may be useful for large scale antibody production. Here the authors characterise the production of a human monoclonal antibody that neutralises SARS-CoV-2 and compare functional properties in vitro and in animal models to antibodies produced using other methods.

Cortex morphology varies with age, cognitive function, and in neurological and psychiatric diseases. Here the authors report 160 genome-wide significant associations with thickness, surface area and volume of the total cortex and 34 cortical regions from a GWAS meta-analysis in 22,824 adults.

Liver resident CD8 T cells have an essential role in immunopathology in a mouse model of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, by becoming auto-aggressive following sequential transcriptional and metabolic activation steps .

Similarities in cancers can be studied to interrogate their etiology. Here, the authors use genome-wide association study summary statistics from six cancer types based on 296,215 cases and 301,319 controls of European ancestry, showing that solid tumours arising from different tissues share a degree of common germline genetic basis.

Using a dimensionality reduction approach, Fong et al. generated a clinical aging clock (PCAge) that delineates healthy and unhealthy aging trajectories. They provide a streamlined version (LinAge) that maintains predictive power, and they demonstrate how the clock can be tailored to available data using the CALERIE study.

In a GWAS study of 32,438 adults, the authors discovered five novel loci for intracranial volume and confirmed two known signals. Variants for intracranial volume were also related to childhood and adult cognitive function and to Parkinson's disease, and enriched near genes involved in growth pathways, including PI3K-AKT signaling.

Polynuclear magnetic molecular complexes show promise as electrically controllable spin qubits. Here the authors report evidence of spin-electric transitions in the Fe3 triangle and propose it as a generalized exchange qubit, combining characteristics of spin-chirality and partial-spin sum qubits.

Multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 are inhibited by a trispecific DARPin.

In this Article, the authors identify CcrZ as a protein that coordinates DNA replication and cell division in Streptococcus pneumoniae and other Firmicutes. CcrZ is localized to the division site by binding directly to the divisome protein FtsZ, and there it activates DnaA, the master initiator of DNA replication, through a still unknown mechanism.

Spin-crossover complexes often lose their functionality upon adsorption on metal surfaces. Here, a metal–organic complex adsorbed on a silver surface undergoes reversible interlocked spin and coordination switching, which is enabled by an intramolecular feedback mechanism controlling the position of an axial ligand strapped to the complex.

An atomic force microscope can measure the distances between 5-methylcytidine bases in individual DNA strands with a resolution of 4 Å, which should prove useful in studies of gene expression.

In this prospective cohort study, authors follow 328 households in Germany with at least one confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and find that children are more likely to seroconvert without symptoms and have higher specific antibody levels that persist longer than in adults.

IL6-STAT3 signaling is activated in prostate cancer, however inhibiting this pathway has not lead to a survival advantage in patients. Here, Pencik et al.show that loss of the IL6-STAT3 axis in mice and humans leads to metastasis due to loss of ARF, unravelling STAT3 and ARF as potential prognostic markers in prostate cancer.

Soeren Lienkamp, Carsten Bergmann, Friedhelm Hildebrandt and colleagues show that mutations in ANKS6 cause nephronophthisis, a recessive cystic kidney disease. They further identify ANKS6 as a component of a protein module that includes INVS (NPHP2), NPHP3 and NEK8 (NPHP9).

Two evolutionarily distant SMC–kleisin complexes are shown to contain a bendable coiled-coil discontinuity near the middle of their arms, which permits a folded conformation with potential implications for DNA loading and translocation.

Genome-wide association studies are used to identify common genetic variants that affect the structure of selected subcortical regions of the human brain; their identification provides insight into the causes of variability in brain development and may help to determine mechanisms of neuropsychiatric dysfunction.

The genome of the Southern Ocean phytoplankton Fragilariopsis cylindrus differs markedly from the genomes of its more temperate relatives, with divergent alleles being differentially expressed in environmentally specific conditions such as freezing and darkness.

Sarah von Spiczak, Holger Lerche and colleagues identify mutations in GRIN2A that cause idiopathic focal epilepsy with rolandic spikes.

The imaging of individually labelled sister chromatids allows Nagasaka et al. to conclude that mitotic sister chromatin resolution begins in prophase and depends on the activity of topoisomerase II and condensin II, but not on cohesin dissociation.

The E3 ligase Cbl-b acts on TAM tyrosine kinase receptors and has a critical role in the regulation of natural killer (NK) cell rejection of metastatic tumours; a small molecule TAM kinase inhibitor is shown to enhance the anti-metastatic NK cell activity.