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Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders.

Baleen whales migrate from high latitude feeding grounds to subtropical reproductive winter grounds, translocating limiting nutrients across ecosystems. This study estimates the latitudinal movement of nutrients from carcasses, placentas and urea for four species of baleen whales that exhibit annual migrations.

JWST observations of the planetary nebula NGC 3132 reveal a rich molecular environment containing evidence of multiple stellar interactions on a variety of scales.

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 genome-wide association study including over 76,000 individuals with schizophrenia and over 243,000 control individuals identifies common variant associations at 287 genomic loci, and further fine-mapping analyses highlight the importance of genes involved in synaptic processes.

Inventory data from more than 1 million trees across African, Amazonian and Southeast Asian tropical forests suggests that, despite their high diversity, just 1,053 species, representing a consistent ~2.2% of tropical tree species in each region, constitute half of Earth’s 800 billion tropical trees.

Transmission spectroscopy observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show the detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-39b.

It is reported using a consistent climate model that pure steam atmospheres are commonly shaped by radiative layers, making their thermal structure strongly dependent on the stellar spectrum and internal heat flow.

Data collected from more than 2,000 taxa provide an unparalleled opportunity to quantify how extreme wildfires affect biodiversity, revealing that the largest effects on plants and animals were in areas with frequent or recent past fires and within extensively burnt areas.

A number of natural occurring small-molecule splicing modulators are known. Here, the authors combine chemogenomic, structural and biochemical methods and show that these compounds also target the spliceosome-associated protein PHF5A and propose a potential modulator binding site in the PHF5A–SF3B1 complex.

An analysis based on data from the Global Dietary Database shows mean animal-sourced food intakes among children and adolescents increased modestly from 1990 to two portions per day in 2018, but remain low in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Bangladesh.

Ball, Webb et al develop a method to identify drug targets based on quantification of shifts in thermal stability. They show that this proteome-wide isothermal shift assay (iTSA) can be used for target identification in cell lysates and living cells, with improved throughput over existing methods.

Dietary quality is reported at the global, regional and national level across 185 countries. Though diet quality increased modestly since 1990 at the global level, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa it did not improve. In some regions, children’s dietary quality is lower than that of adults.

The Phoenix stream in the Milky Way halo is shown to be a tidally disrupted remnant of an unusually metal-poor globular cluster, which was possibly destroyed during Galactic evolution.

CCR5 is a co-receptor for many transmitted HIV strains. Here, the authors show that biweekly injection of the CCR5-specific antibody Leronlimab protects rhesus macaques against infection following repeated intrarectal challenges of a CCR5-tropic SHIV.

A measurement of the infrared spectrum (7.5–13.2 micrometres) of the transiting extrasolar planet HD 209458b reveals that there is a broad emission peak centred near 9.65 micrometres, which they attribute to emission by silicate clouds, and a narrow, unidentified feature at 7.78 micrometres.

Hubble observations of the TRAPPIST-1 system exclude the presence of H₂-dominated cloud-free atmospheres for the three planets within or around the system’s habitable zone. This result supports the hypothesis that these planets are terrestrial in nature.

The Arctic lowlands are characterized by a large number of lakes that cover a substantial part of the surface in some regions. Here, the authors apply a machine learning approach to satellite data to show that permafrost thaw since 2000 has caused a decline in surface water in these regions.

GIANT, a genetically informed brain atlas, integrates genetic heritability with neuroanatomy. It shows strong neuroanatomical validity and surpasses traditional atlases in discovery power for brain imaging genomics.

The viral Protein Kinase-1 (PK-1) phosphorylates the regulatory protein p6.9, which facilitates baculoviral genome release. Here, the authors combine X-ray crystallography with biophysical and biochemical analyses as well as molecular dynamics simulations to characterize Cydia pomenella granulovirus PK-1, which forms a dimer with a parallel side-to-side arrangement of the kinase domains and furthermore, they provide insights into its catalytic mechanism and evolutionary relationships with other kinases.

Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) is an anti-inflammatory drug proposed as a treatment for COVID19. Here the results are reported from a randomised trial testing DMF treatment in 713 patients hospitalised with COVID-19. DMF was not associated with any improvement in day 5 outcomes.

This Registered Report presents evidence from 87 countries and regions showing that brief emotion-regulation interventions consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stratified medicine promises to tailor treatment for individual patients, however it remains a major challenge to leverage genetic risk data to aid patient stratification. Here the authors introduce an approach to stratify individuals based on the aggregated impact of their genetic risk factor profiles on tissue-specific gene expression levels, and highlight its ability to identify biologically meaningful and clinically actionable patient subgroups, supporting the notion of different patient ‘biotypes’ characterized by partially distinct disease mechanisms.

Sexual dimorphism in genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjögren’s syndrome is linked to differential protein abundance from alleles of complement component 4.

Kedzierska et al. report an association between low production of receptor-binding domain antibodies after mRNA vaccination and altered glycosylation of IgG before vaccination in people with comorbidities, and show that this condition disproportionately affects Australia’s First Nations peoples because of the high burden of comorbidities in this population.

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.

Time-series observations from the JWST of the transiting exoplanet WASP-39b show gaseous water in the planet’s atmosphere and place an upper limit on the abundance of methane.

He et al. develop a network-based metric of amyloid-β burden by integrating individualized brain connectomes with amyloid-PET imaging. This approach improves prediction of future cognitive decline in older adults and may support earlier identification of individuals at risk of dementia.

Single-molecule calibrated live microscopy and computational modelling have revealed that human nuclear pore complex assembly takes different pathways during the exit from mitosis and during nuclear growth in interphase.

Human OPA1 embeds itself into cardiolipin-containing membranes through a lipid-binding paddle domain, and OPA1 oligomerization through multiple assembly interfaces promotes the helical assembly of a flexible OPA1 lattice on the membrane, driving mitochondrial fusion in cells.

The CNV analysis group of the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium analyzes a large schizophrenia cohort to examine genomic copy number variants (CNVs) and disease risk. They find an enrichment of CNV burden in cases versus controls and identify 8 genome-wide significant loci as well as novel suggestive loci conferring either risk or protection to schizophrenia.

Bioconjugation is a promising process to manufacture conjugate vaccines, but currently employed enzymes cannot generate the full spectrum of bacterial glycoproteins. Here, the authors use an O-linking oligosaccharyltransferase to generate a polyvalent pneumococcal bioconjugate vaccine with polysaccharides containing glucose at their reducing end.

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.

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.

This study uses gene expression predictors for the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and other brain regions to perform a transcriptomic imputation analysis of schizophrenia, identifying 413 genic associations across 13 brain regions and 36 significantly enriched pathways.

Circulating tumour DNA profiling in early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer can be used to track single-nucleotide variants in plasma to predict lung cancer relapse and identify tumour subclones involved in the metastatic process.