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Sugars are common components of organisms on Earth. So their discovery in a meteorite from a lifeless part of the asteroid belt has implications for theories of the origin of life.

Timothy Frayling, Joel Hirschhorn, Peter Visscher and colleagues report a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for adult height in 253,288 individuals. They identify 697 variants in 423 loci significantly associated with adult height and find that these variants cluster in pathways involved in growth and together explain one-fifth of the heritability for this trait.

Whole-genome sequencing analysis of individuals with primary immunodeficiency identifies new candidate disease-associated genes and shows how the interplay between genetic variants can explain the variable penetrance and complexity of the disease.

Josephson junctions have been intensely studied from a fundamental and technological point of view. It is now shown how by using ferromagnetic insulators for the barrier it is possible to strongly affect the superconducting current and in particular its magnetic and spin properties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many tumours exhibit hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypoxic tumours often respond poorly to therapy. Here, the authors quantify hypoxia in 1188 tumours from 27 cancer types, showing elevated hypoxia links to increased mutational load, directing evolutionary trajectories.

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.

A large genome-wide association study of more than 5 million individuals reveals that 12,111 single-nucleotide polymorphisms account for nearly all the heritability of height attributable to common genetic variants.

Openshaw and colleagues find myeloid inflammation and complement activation signatures in patients with long COVID who were previously hospitalized.

A porous organic-cage molecule is shown to exhibit unprecedented performance for the separation of rare gases, with selectivity arising from a precise size match between the rare gas and the organic-cage cavity.

A low-cost 3D printer is used to combine chemical reactions and the reactor to produce an active ‘reactionware’ system for organic and inorganic synthesis. Active elements such as catalysts can be incorporated into the walls of printed reactors, and other printed-in components that enable electrochemical and spectroscopic analysis can also be included.

African ancestry is a known risk factor for prostate cancer development, but the genetic determinants of this are incompletely understood. Here, the authors identify 172 potentially pathogenic variants which are enriched in an African population.

Enhanced geothermal systems can provide clean energy in areas where conventional geothermal systems are not viable. This Review discusses energy production through these systems and the technological developments that could enable its future expansion.

For all the latest news on quarks and quasars, join Mark Peplow at the 16-19 April meeting of the American Physical Society in Tampa, Florida. Here some 1600 physicists have converged to discuss the extremes of the Universe, presenting their latest discoveries about the very large and the very small.

Whole-genome sequencing and phenotype data sharing are introduced in a national health system to streamline diagnosis and to discover coding and non-coding variants that cause rare diseases.

Ferromagnetic resonance experiments show enhanced spin pumping in superconductors in the presence of spin sink layers.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

The BCM theory of synaptic plasticity is now 30 years old. In this Perspective article, Cooper and Bear discuss how this theory has advanced our understanding of synaptic plasticity, learning and memory and highlight the important role that theory can have in neuroscience research.

The influence of pregnancy on Long COVID is not well understood. Here, the authors use electronic health record data from the United States to compare the incidence of Long COVID in females after infection in pregnancy with matched non-pregnant females of reproductive age.

Safely opening university campuses has been a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, the authors describe a program of public health measures employed at a university in the United States which, combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, allowed the university to stay open in fall 2020 with limited evidence of transmission.

The MAGIC investigators report results of a large genome-wide association study meta-analysis to identify common variants influencing fasting glucose homeostasis. They further show that several of the newly discovered loci influencing glycemic traits are also associated with risk of type 2 diabetes.

To better understand the etiology of frailty, the authors perform a large genetic study. They identified 45 additional variants and implicated MET, CHST9, ILRUN, APOE, CGREF1 and PPP6C as potential causal genes, linking frailty to immune regulation, metabolism and cellular signaling.

A challenge in psychiatric drug discovery is to predict the therapeutic potential of a novel compound. Here, the authors show that brain-wide imaging of immediate early gene expression can be used to classify a panel of drugs including psychedelics and antidepressants with high accuracy.

Analysis of mitochondrial genomes (mtDNA) by using whole-genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancer samples across 38 cancer types identifies hypermutated mtDNA cases, frequent somatic nuclear transfer of mtDNA and high variability of mtDNA copy number in many cancers.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is highly prevalent among the Ashkenazi Jewish population. Here, the authors identify novel IBD-associated variants and genes, validated by transcriptomic and phenome-wide associations.