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For the celebration of our tenth anniversary, Nature Microbiology asks the former editors to reflect on their time at the journal.

Genetic predictors of health outcomes often drop in accuracy when applied to people dissimilar to participants of large genetic studies. Here, the authors investigate the root causes and highlight open questions underlying this problem.

Disease heterogeneity complicates precision medicine, which focuses on single conditions and ignores shared mechanisms. Here the authors introduce ‘pan-disease’ analysis using a deep learning model on multi-organ data, identifying 11 AI-derived biomarkers that reveal new therapeutic targets and pathways, enhancing patient stratification for disease risk monitoring and drug discovery.

Nature staff take on the big topics that matter in science.

Dierl, Hinsen et al. investigate long term pulmonary toxicity in pediatric cancer survivors by the use of Free-breathing phase-resolved functional lung (PREFUL) MRI on a low-field system. Subclinical and time-dependent reduction in pulmonary ventilation and perfusion is revealed.

The Evaluation and Enhancement (EVEN) method optimizes automatically the quality of multichannel microscopy images affected by uneven illumination, enabling accurate visual interpretation and image analysis in challenging imaging scenarios.

Superlubric arrays of double-bilayer graphene enable elastically coupled switching between Bernal and rhombohedral graphene polytypes under shear forces below 1 nN with an estimated energy cost of less than 1 fJ per switching event.

Resonant inelastic X-ray scattering interferometry reveals a highly entangled electronic phase in Nd₂Ir₂O₇, enabling extraction of its entanglement structure and confirming the cubic-symmetry-breaking order predicted from complementary Raman spectroscopy.

MedHELM, an extensible evaluation framework including a new taxonomy for classifying medical tasks and a benchmark of many datasets across these categories, enables the evaluation of large language models on real-world clinical tasks.

Floquet engineering is often limited by weak light–matter coupling and heating. Now it is shown that exciton-driven fields in monolayer semiconductors produce stronger, longer-lived Floquet effects and reveal hybridization linked to excitonic phases.

Methane emission occurs in natural wetlands on a large scale, but the corresponding trace element emissions have not been studied. Here, the authors study selenium and arsenic emission in a pristine peatland and show that this causes large amounts of those trace elements to enter the biogeochemical cycle.

A van der Waals heterostructure made from atomic layers of ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ can offer reversible, non-volatile ferroelectric control of two-dimensional magnetism.

Analysis combining multiple global tree databases reveals that whether a location is invaded by non-native tree species depends on anthropogenic factors, but the severity of the invasion depends on the native species diversity.

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.

Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

A vagal reflex to blood volume changes in the heart involves PIEZO2 and helps to stabilize blood pressure in an upright posture and after blood loss.

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.

Current human tandem repeat catalogs are derived from short-read sequencing data, thus limiting the size range and sequence complexity of captured genotypes. Here the authors generate a comprehensive catalog de novo using long-read sequencing data.

Using chemical photoswitchable reagents to exert purely wavelength-dependent control over biological systems in deep tissue and in vivo requires a concentration-independent design paradigm. Here, such photoswitchable ligands are realized by ensuring that E/Z isomers have opposing efficacies yet similarly high affinity, allowing them to probe transient receptor potential C4 and C5 channel functions up to the tissue level.

Projected impacts of climate change on malaria burden in Africa by 2050 highlight the urgent need for climate-resilient malaria control strategies and robust emergency response systems to safeguard progress towards malaria eradication.

The Neurospora circadian clock keeps time through a negative feedback loop involving a protein complex of FRQ bound to FRH. Here, the authors show that slow, stochastic phosphorylation of these proteins dissociates and activates them via two precisely timed switches.

Kinematic measurements of the Perseus galaxy cluster reveal two drivers of gas motions: a small-scale driver in the inner core associated with black-hole feedback and a large-scale driver in the outer core powered by mergers.

A completely solid-state, single-chip, microwave-frequency surface acoustic wave phonon laser can generate coherent phonons from thermal noise or resonantly amplify injected phonons using only a direct current bias field.

Breeding crops with delayed senescence could plausibly increase grain yield. Here the authors show that variation at the rice SGR locus contributes to differences in senescence between indica and japonica subspecies and show that introgression can increase yield in an elite indica rice variety.

Color center magnetometry enables spin-wave imaging in complex magnetic textures. This work overcomes key limitations of current approaches by decoupling sensor spins from control fields and using diamond and hBN color centers for complementary frequency operation, achieving isofrequency imaging of field-controlled spin waves.

Guided by density functional theory, a commercially viable refractory alloy is developed, which exhibits excellent room-temperature ductility and strength, and high strength at elevated temperatures.

T-cell–mediated rejection (TCMR) remains a major cause of kidney transplant failure with incompletely understood mechanisms. Here the authors use single-nucleus RNA sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and immunofluorescence to show that injured kidney epithelial cell states associate with poor transplant outcomes after T-cell–mediated rejection.

The HIV-1 RNA-binding protein rev facilitates nuclear export of viral RNA. Here, the authors use native mass spectrometry to study the interactions between rev-derived peptides and rev response elements of HIV-1 RNA, providing mechanistic insights into rev recognition and recruitment.

DNA methylation and gene expression data integration identify aging-related genes in blood that predict health outcomes, offering new insights into aging biology and potential therapeutic targets.

The authors develop textile electronic substrates with tailored stiffness and interfacial affinities by selective and controllable laser-matter interaction, addressing the mechanical mismatch between hybrid electronics and elastic textiles.

Climate change can alter when and how animals grow, breed, and migrate, but it is unclear whether this allows populations to persist. This global study shows that shifts in seasonal timing are key to helping vertebrate species maintain population growth under global warming.

Eight decades of forest plot monitoring show a pervasive increase in tree mortality across Australia’s forest biomes driven by climate change, jeopardizing their role as enduring carbon sinks.

This research finds a strong recency bias in information gathering, attenuated in those on the OCD spectrum—a possible mechanism for indecisiveness. Behavioural and MEG data show reduced evidence updating in high-OC individuals.

There is a growing body of research on disease clusters in multimorbidity, necessitating a systematic review and meta-analysis of methods and findings. Here, the authors show the range of methods applied, and identify six disease clusters with moderate stability across the multimorbidity literature.

Analysis of a placebo-controlled trial of a BCMA-targeting CAR-T cell therapy in patients with myasthenia gravis shows that CAR-T cell infusion selectively remodels the systemic immune environment, with elimination of BCMA-high plasma cells and activated plasmacytoid dendritic cells and changes in the autoreactive B cell repertoire.

The authors estimate genomic vulnerability for closely related species of rainbowfish. They find that narrow endemic species that have hybridized with a warm-adapted generalist show reduced vulnerability to climate change and that hybridization may facilitate evolutionary rescue for such species.

Anti-phased changes in Antarctic Circumpolar Current strength between the Indian and Pacific sectors of the Southern Ocean occurred on orbital timescales over the past one million years, linked to glacial cycles and obliquity forcing, according to proxy records and modelling.

The impact of variants of uncertain significance (VUS) on protein function and cancer risk remain unclear. Here, the authors focus on the functional impact of VUS of the PALB2 gene and identify defects in DNA damage repair by homologous recombination associated with increased risk of breast cancer.

How the pulvinar represents complex visual information, its functional topography, and its relationship to cortical processing of visually presented objects remains unclear. Here authors show that responses to natural scenes in the human pulvinar reveal organized spatial maps for both low-level visual features, such as local contrast, as well as high-level visual features, such as bodies and faces.

High-harmonic generation from metasurfaces is believed to follow conventional power laws with integer exponents. In this work, authors discover that the strong local fields related to a metasurface high-Q resonances can modify the effective nonlinear response and enable the generation of high harmonics following non-integer-power laws.

In a multicenter, randomized trial of patients with atrial fibrillation and a low risk of thromboembolic events, treatment with the anticoagulant rivaroxaban showed no benefit in reducing cognitive decline, stroke or transient ischemic attack when compared to placebo.

iGluSnFR4f and iGluSnFR4s are the latest generation of genetically encoded glutamate sensors. They are advantageous for detecting rapid dynamics and large population activity, respectively, as demonstrated in a variety of applications in the mouse brain.

A wearable paper-based microfluidic device tracks cortisol in sweat via gold nanoflower colorimetric assays and captures circadian rhythms, stress responses and jet lag disruptions.

Affinity-proteomics platforms often yield poorly correlated measurements. Here, the authors show that protein-altering variants drive a portion of inter-platform inconsistency and that accounting for genetic variants can improve concordance of protein measures and phenotypic associations across ancestries.

Improved vaccines and antivirals are needed for many enveloped viruses. Here, the authors identify sulfur-based small molecules that disrupt viral membrane properties, inhibiting fusion and entry, and safely inactivate influenza virus. The resulting inactivated influenza vaccine is protective in mice.

Combining high-resolution mapping of foliar and herbivore faecal sodium concentrations across Africa, the authors show that plant-derived sodium availability constrains megaherbivore densities at a continental scale.

In a phase 1b/2 trial, an off-the-shelf vaccine using gorilla adenoviral and modified vaccinia Ankara vectors with over 200 mutated peptides known to be present in persons with mismatch-repair-deficient tumors is safe and elicits neoantigen-specific T cells in individuals with Lynch syndrome.