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Personal names vary across cultures. Here, the authors show how historical name systems share a common information structure, reflecting pressure for efficient communication, as well as laws changing these systems and introducing systematic bias.

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.

WGS data were used from 347,630 individuals with European ancestry in the UK Biobank to obtain high-precision estimates of coding and non-coding rare variant heritability for 34 complex traits and diseases.

AvrPm4 is a chimeric powdery mildew effector that is recognized by the wheat kinase fusion resistance protein Pm4. The pathogen can evade Pm4 recognition by expressing the suppressor SvrPm4, an RNase-like effector with multiple roles.

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.

PFAS are “forever chemicals” that build up in living things and can move through food webs. This study shows their levels roughly double with each step up the food chain, highlighting widespread chemical magnification in nature.

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.

Andrew Morris, Mark McCarthy, Michael Boehnke and colleagues report a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for type 2 diabetes, including 26,488 cases and 83,964 controls from populations of European, east Asian, south Asian and Mexican and Mexican American ancestry. They identify seven loci newly associated with type 2 diabetes and examine the genetic architecture of disease across populations.

With the generation of large pan-cancer whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing projects, a question remains about how comparable these datasets are. Here, using The Cancer Genome Atlas samples analysed as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the authors explore the concordance of mutations called by whole exome sequencing and whole genome sequencing techniques.

A global research network monitoring the Amazon for 30 years reports in this study that tree size increased by 3% each decade.

Wood density is a key control on tree biomass, and understanding its spatial variation improves estimates of forest carbon stock. Sullivan et al. measure >900 forest plots to quantify wood density and produce high resolution maps of its variation across South American tropical forests.

Aqueduct-supported cultivation of rice resulted in liquefaction of the alluvial soils that led to the landslides triggered by the Palu 2018 earthquake, according to satellite analyses.

Genome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in ancestrally diverse populations implicate candidate causal genes and mechanisms underlying type 2 diabetes. Trans-ancestry genetic risk scores enhance transferability across populations.

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.

Asthma is a heterogeneous, complex syndrome that arises in individuals with various genetic and exposure variations. Here, the authors show that disease comorbidity patterns can serve as a surrogate for these variations, and identify asthma endotypes distinguished by comorbidity patterns, asthma risk loci, gene expression, and health-related phenotypes.

Ocean simulations and proxy-constrained climate reconstructions suggest that the rapid retreat of West Antarctic outlet glaciers was initiated by local northerly wind trends over the twentieth century.

Strontium isotope analysis can be applied to animal and plant tissues to help determine their provenance. Here, the authors generate a strontium isoscape of sub-Saharan Africa using data from 2266 environmental samples and demonstrate its efficacy by tracing the African roots of individuals from historic slavery contexts.

The current expansion of oil palm in India is occurring at the expense of biodiversity-rich landscapes. This study shows that on the national scale India has the potential to become self-sufficient in palm oil production without compromising either its biodiversity or its food security, while economic, social, political and nutritional factors will require attention at finer spatial scales.

The authors report that, in mice without hepatic insulin signaling, diets high in fructose cause acute hepatic steatosis without increasing hepatic de novo lipogenesis, dependent upon hepatic follistatin secretion and associated adipose insulin resistance.

The brushtail possum is a treasured Australian marsupial, but also a harmful pest introduced into New Zealand. Here, using functional genomics and a new chromosome-level genome assembly of New Zealand possums, Bond et al. quantify their genome admixture and identify unique parent-specific and weaning associated gene expression.

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.

Higgins et al. present an AI tool that uses patient data to personalise treatment for Helicobacter pylori, the leading agent of gastric cancer, demonstrating improved eradication rates over prescribed therapies in retrospective clinical analysis.

Atmospheric rivers provide the majority of water vapour transport to the high latitudes. This Review summarizes Antarctic atmospheric river dynamics and climatology and discusses their impacts on the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Explosive volcanic eruptions of Kīlauea in Hawaii can be explained by sudden subsidence of reservoir roof rock causing gas and lithic debris venting by a mechanism similar to that of a stomp rocket, according to seismic inversions for reservoir pressure changes.

Analysis of the genomes of 50 species of Lemuriformes shows high levels of genomic diversity, likely due to allele sharing, as well as population declines and inbreeding patterns resulting from ecological factors and human impacts in Madagascar.

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.

Multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) together with deep-learning-based nucleus segmentation enabled the construction of a highly detailed and informative spatially resolved single-cell atlas of human fetal cortical development.

Analysis of cancer genome sequencing data has enabled the discovery of driver mutations. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium the authors present DriverPower, a software package that identifies coding and non-coding driver mutations within cancer whole genomes via consideration of mutational burden and functional impact evidence.

There is a genetic component to the risk of severe COVID-19, but the genetic effects are difficult to separate from social constructs that covary with genetic ancestry. To address this, the authors identify determinants of COVID-19 severity using admixture mapping, viral phylodynamics, and host immune and metagenomic sequencing.

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

How the carbon stocks of the Arctic–Boreal Zone change with warming is not well understood. Here the authors show that wildfires and large regional differences in net carbon fluxes offset the overall increasing CO₂ uptake.

Kyle Gaulton, Mark McCarthy, Andrew Morris and colleagues report fine mapping and genomic annotation of 39 established type 2 diabetes susceptibility loci. They find that the set of potential causal variants is enriched for overlap with FOXA2 binding sites in human islet and liver cells, and they show that a likely causal variant near MTNR1B increases FOXA2-bound enhancer activity, providing a molecular mechanism to explain the effect of this locus on disease risk.

Sequencing data from two large-scale studies show that most of the genetic variation influencing the risk of type 2 diabetes involves common alleles and is found in regions previously identified by genome-wide association studies, clarifying the genetic architecture of this disease.

Surface air temperatures at the South Pole warmed at over three times the global rate in recent decades. Research shows this trend was driven remotely by the tropics and locally by a positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode, increasing the influx of warm moist air atop anthropogenic warming.

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.

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.

A multi-ancestry analysis in large cohorts of patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) identified 12 disease genetic clusters with distinct cardiometabolic trait associations, including two lipodystrophy-related clusters that could provide insights on the increased T2D susceptibility in East Asian ancestries at a given body mass index level.

The precipitation intensity of Antarctic Atmospheric Rivers is governed by synoptic and planetary-scale dynamic processes, including teleconnections with amplified Rossby waves, suggests an analysis of a 40-year reanalysis record.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.