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Humanity’s Last Exam, a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, is designed to be an expert-level closed-ended academic benchmark with broad subject coverage.

Here, the authors document the evolutionary dynamics of angiosperm pollen, using pollen morphology and time calibrated phylogeny. They identify two surges in pollen disparity in the mid-Cretaceous and Paleogene that are associated with environmental changes and important pollen adaptations.

To enable a sensed RNA to activate diverse RNA effectors, the authors engineer a programmable dual-site ribozyme that, upon RNA trigger binding, self-cleaves to release an embedded RNA. It enables trigger-dependent release of diverse ncRNAs and controls CRISPR-Cas9 editing in zebrafish and human cells.

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.

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.

Fischer carbenes are typically synthesized by addition of pyrophoric reagents to toxic metal carbonyls. Now access to α-siloxycarbenes from thioesters has been reported via reductive silylation of cobalt acyls, providing a platform to harness carbene reactivity from carboxylates via metal acyls and allowing several new reactions occur, including heterodimerization to acyloin-type products.

A multimodal deep learning model combines molecular sequence, structure and biochemical properties to predict immunogenicity in an interpretable way, providing a framework for smarter molecular prediction and hypothesis generation.

Effective substrates are key to probing and harnessing protease activity. This work presents CleaveNet, an AI tool that generates efficient, selective substrates, revealing known and distinct cleavage motifs and tuning designs to target activity profiles.

The [1,2]-Wittig rearrangement of allylic ethers is traditionally considered to proceed via formation and recombination of radical pairs. Now it has been shown that an alternative reaction cascade, involving initial enantioselective [2,3]-rearrangement followed by base-promoted anionic fragmentation–recombination that proceeds with high enantiospecificity, allows a catalytic enantioselective [1,2]-Wittig process.

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

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

Climate-crop models are important tools for guiding investments and exploring adaptation strategies in climate-resilient agriculture. Here, the authors expand climate-crop model applications for 19 African opportunity crops, including cereals, legumes, oilseeds, roots/tubers, and vegetables.

Ionic liquid additives increase the power conversion efficiency of perovskite solar cells, but their effect on perovskite crystallization remains unclear. Xu et al. provide mechanistic insights and demonstrate improved operational stability under continous illumination and 90 °C thermal stress.

Here authors show loss of AKAP11, a strong genetic risk factor for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, disrupts PKA proteostasis and signaling, leading to widespread transcriptomic alterations across the brain, particularly in striatal neurons, as well as altered behavior.

Genetically encoded sensors are generally optimized to function during exponential growth rather than stationary phase, which limits their potential value for metabolic engineering and bioproduction. Here, authors engineer a stationary phase green light sensor and use pulsatile light to optimize production of industrially relevant small molecules.

Koina is an open-source, online platform that simplifies access to machine learning models in proteomics, enabling easier integration into analysis tools and helping researchers adopt and reuse ML models more efficiently.

African opportunity crops show varied climate resilience, with several projected to outperform staples. Roots and tubers are especially resilient, while legumes and vegetables face declines, particularly in the Sahel.

FACED 2.0 builds on and expands the capabilities of the free-space angular-chirp-enhanced delay microscopy approach. Its high speed, large field of view and volumetric coverage enable two-photon voltage imaging of hundreds of neurons or calcium imaging of thousands of neurons in the mouse or zebrafish brain.

Here the authors report the synthesis of defect-rich boron nitride by flux reconstruction method, which exhibited good reactivity for semihydrogenation of low concentration acetylene in ethylene-abundant gas stream.

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.

Females are more sensitive to social exclusion and loneliness, risk factors for anxiety and stressrelated disorders. Here, the authors identified molecular signals in the amygdala that make females more susceptible to effects of chronic social isolation in mice.

Array microscope with mirrored well plates enables automated, scalable 3D behavioral analysis of 48 zebrafish larvae in parallel, revealing complex kinematics and phenotypes missed by conventional 2D methods.

Whole-genome sequencing data for 2,778 cancer samples from 2,658 unique donors across 38 cancer types is used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of cancer, revealing that driver mutations can precede diagnosis by several years to decades.

The authors present SVclone, a computational method for inferring the cancer cell fraction of structural variants from whole-genome sequencing data.

Cancers evolve as they progress under differing selective pressures. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, the authors present the method TrackSig the estimates evolutionary trajectories of somatic mutational processes from single bulk tumour data.

Inhibition of the histone methyltransferase NSD2 and the androgen receptor in preclinical models can reverse lineage plasticity to suppress tumour growth and promote cell death in multiple subtypes of castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Despite often being poorly immunogenic, some subsets of patients with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative (HR + /HER2-) breast cancer benefit from immunotherapy. Here, the authors present a randomised pilot clinical trial comparing a neoadjuvant run-in of either nab-paclitaxel or pembrolizumab (anti-PD-1) monotherapy, followed by the combination, in patients with stage II-III HR + /HER2- breast cancer.

A room-temperature double-layer WS₂ microcavity is used to explore spin anisotropy and tune it with interlayer spacing.

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).

LARGE1 glycosyltransferase synthesizes matriglycan (xylose-glucuronate)_n on dystroglycan, and short matriglycan can cause neuromuscular disorders. Authors show that LARGE1 processively polymerizes matriglycan of defined length on prodystroglycan.

Xenotransplantation of a genetically edited pig kidney with a thymic autograft into a brain-dead human for 61 days with immunosuppression resulted in stable kidney function without proteinuria, and xenograft rejection was treated and reversed by the end of the study.

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.

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.

Analyses of 2,658 whole genomes across 38 types of cancer identify the contribution of non-coding point mutations and structural variants to driving cancer.

Single cell analysis of histologic variant bladder tumors detects a shared CA125+ tumor cell state associated with aggressive clinical features and reveals enriched expression of TM4SF1, a membrane protein that can be targeted with CAR T cells.

In somatic cells the mechanisms maintaining the chromosome ends are normally inactivated; however, cancer cells can re-activate these pathways to support continuous growth. Here, the authors characterize the telomeric landscapes across tumour types and identify genomic alterations associated with different telomere maintenance mechanisms.

The flagship paper of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium describes the generation of the integrative analyses of 2,658 cancer whole genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types, the structures for international data sharing and standardized analyses, and the main scientific findings from across the consortium studies.

Integrative analyses of transcriptome and whole-genome sequencing data for 1,188 tumours across 27 types of cancer are used to provide a comprehensive catalogue of RNA-level alterations in cancer.

Whole-genome sequencing data from more than 2,500 cancers of 38 tumour types reveal 16 signatures that can be used to classify somatic structural variants, highlighting the diversity of genomic rearrangements in cancer.

A pan-cancer genomic analysis reports the effects of structural variations on chromatin domains (TADs). Most TAD disruptions do not result in appreciable changes in expression of nearby genes.

An analysis of 2,954 genomes from 38 cancer subtypes identified 19,166 retrotransposition events in 35% of samples. Aberrant LINE-1 retrotranspositions can lead to the deletion of tumor-suppressor genes as well as the amplification of oncogenes.

The characterization of 4,645 whole-genome and 19,184 exome sequences, covering most types of cancer, identifies 81 single-base substitution, doublet-base substitution and small-insertion-and-deletion mutational signatures, providing a systematic overview of the mutational processes that contribute to cancer development.

In this study the authors consider the structural variants (SVs) present within cancer cases of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium. They report hundreds of genes, including known cancer-associated genes for which the nearby presence of a SV breakpoint is associated with altered expression.

This work presents a fully implantable wireless optogenetic device that delivers spatiotemporally patterned cortical stimulation through the skull and generates artificial perception in mice.

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 credit assignment problem involves assigning credit to synapses in a neural network so that weights are updated appropriately and the circuit learns. Max et al. developed an efficient solution to the weight transport problem in networks of biophysical neurons. The method exploits noise as an information carrier and enables networks to learn to solve a task efficiently.