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I want to make a difference – but what kind of difference?

Composing a manuscript is a laborious task. Could there be a better way some day?

As a scientist, I crave collaboration.

Research on the computer has an interesting life of its own.

Nervously, and with much trepidation, I've decided to leave science research.

The newly recognized Fusarium wilt pathogen tropical race 4 is threatening worldwide banana production. Here, the authors transform Cavendish bananas with a resistance gene, RGA2, from diploid banana or a nematode-derived gene, Ced9, and confer resistance to natural infection under field conditions.

Should I feel ashamed that my research is sometimes just a job rather than a calling?

Marrying into citizenship and job opportunities

I actually seem to be enjoying my postdoc.

The immune suppressive tumour microenvironment drives recurrence and metastatic disease in prostate cancer. Here authors provide a detailed analysis of the microenvironment via single cell RNA sequencing and high-resolution spatial transcriptomics to identify tumour-dependent changes compared to healthy tissue.

Persistent diabetic complications despite controlled blood glucose levels, known as hyperglycemic memory, remain a poorly understood phenomenon in diabetic kidney disease. Here the authors identify senescence-associated gene p21 as a regulator of hyperglycemic memory, the suppression of which improves hyperglycemic memory and renal function.

Constructing genome graphs directly from genome assemblies overcomes single-reference bias.

How constrained is the ecology of a species by its phylogenetic history? The authors assess the extent of biome conservatism — the tendency of a species to occupy the same niche as its ancestors — in over 11,000 Southern Hemisphere plants, 15% of the total flora of the Southern Hemisphere continents. They show that only 3.6% of the evolutionary divergences in their study involved a shift of biome, demonstrating the strong influence of biome conservatism.

North Pacific dust flux and modelling results provide new evidence for long-term land-atmosphere-ocean interactions associated with the onset and intensification of the Northern Hemisphere Glaciation.

How a lasso cyclase ties a lasso peptide into its characteristic knot has remained poorly understood. Here the authors identify key molecular interactions that guide lasso peptide folding and cyclase substrate tolerance to inform cyclase engineering for expanded lasso peptide diversity.

Although immune checkpoint blockade is a standard treatment for patients with malignant mesothelioma, only a minority of patients exhibit radiological response. In a phase II clinical trial (MIST4) investigating the efficacy, safety and molecular correlates of response following treatment with atezolizumab and bevacizumab, the authors demonstrate that the gut microbiota may modulate responsiveness to treatment.

Cox and colleagues develop PXS-5505, a first-in-class selective pan-lysyl oxidase inhibitor and show that it reduces chemotherapy-induced desmoplasia and stiffness, thereby improving chemotherapy response and survival in pancreatic cancer models.

The authors analyse tree responses to an extreme heat and drought event across South America to understand long-term climate resistance. While no more sensitive to this than previous lesser events, forests in drier climates showed the greatest impacts and thus vulnerability to climate extremes.

Time-resolved measurements of the X-ray photoemission delay of core-level electrons using attosecond soft X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser can be used to determine the complex correlated dynamics of photoionization.

Better analytical methods are needed to extract biological meaning from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of psychiatric disorders. Here the authors take GWAS data from over 60,000 subjects, including patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, and identify common etiological pathways shared amongst them.

The next step after sequencing a genome is to figure out how the cell actually uses it as an instruction manual. A large international consortium has examined 1% of the genome for what part is transcribed, where proteins are bound, what the chromatin structure looks like, and how the sequence compares to that of other organisms.

Analyses of genomes from 914 children, adolescents, and young adults provide a comprehensive resource of genomic alterations across a spectrum of common childhood cancers.

A systematic census at 1,636 sites around Australia from 2008 to 2021 finds that more than 30% of shallow invertebrate species in cool latitudes exhibit a high extinction risk due to declining populations and oceanic barriers, but tropical coral species remain relatively stable.

A machine learning algorithm, developed to detect occlusion myocardial infarction with no-ST elevation from electrocardiogram, outperforms clinicians in diagnostic assessments.

The clinical application of T cell bispecific antibodies (TCBs) is often limited by the lack of tumour-specific antigens. In this study, the authors present a strategy to increase TCB tumour-selectivity by adding an anti-CD3 moiety that can be specifically activated by tumor specific proteases in the tumor microenvironment.

Cellular nuisance compounds are a burden in chemical biology and drug screening. Here the authors profile prototypical cytotoxic and nuisance compounds using the cell painting assay to systematically characterise cellular morphologies associated with compound-dependent cellular injury and nuisance activity.

A sequencing chemistry that separates nucleotide identification from nucleotide incorporation achieves high accuracy.

In the observational ZERO Childhood Cancer Precision Medicine Program PRecISion Medicine for Children with Cancer (PRISM) trial, children with high-risk cancer were treated with molecular tumor board-recommended therapies, resulting in overall clinical response rates that translated into survival benefit after long-term follow-up.

Chemotherapy can cause severe damage to cardiomyocytes in some patients but it is unclear how cardiomyocytes protect themselves against such stress. Here the authors show that cardiomyocytes initiate an endogenous protective response when exposed to chemotherapeutic agents by translocating mitochondrial enzymes to the nucleus.

Differentiating neutrophil functional states is difficult. Here the authors show, using single cell RNA-sequencing and trajectory analyses, that mouse neutrophils can be presented as a transcriptome continuum rather than discrete subsets, but are affected by inflammation to express distinct transcriptional states.

In a prespecified interim analysis of a pivotal phase 2 trial, tisagenlecleucel, an autologous CD19-targeting CAR-T cell therapy, produced a high rate of complete responses with a manageable safety profile in adults with relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma

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.

Mosquitoes are nearly eradicated in three suburbs of California using accurately sorted sterile male mosquitoes.

Analysis of temperate lakes finds a widespread decline in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface and deep waters, which is associated with reduced solubility at warmer surface water temperatures and increased stratification at depth.

Developmental and epileptic encephalopathies are devastating neurological disorders. Here, the authors establish a cohort of patients with variants in the gene DENND5A and use human stem cells to discover a disease mechanism involving altered cell division.

Targeting cellular glucose metabolism is a therapeutic strategy in human diseases such as autoimmunity or cancer. Here, the authors demonstrate the druggability of phosphoglycolate phosphatase, and validate an alternative approach to control glycolysis.

Lean body mass is a highly heritable trait and is associated with various health conditions. Here, Kiel and colleagues perform a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for whole body lean body mass and find five novel genetic loci to be significantly associated.

Quantum-classical variational techniques are combined with a programmable analogue quantum simulator based on a one-dimensional array of up to 20 trapped calcium ions to simulate the ground state of the lattice Schwinger model.

Results of the TRACERx study shed new light into the association between body composition and body weight with survival in individuals with non-small cell lung cancer, and delineate potential biological processes and mediators contributing to the development of cancer-associated cachexia.

Hypermutation and microsatellite burden determine responses and long-term survival following PD-1 blockade in children and young adults with refractory cancers resulting from germline DNA replication repair deficiency.

FlyWire presents a neuronal wiring diagram of the whole fly brain with annotations for cell types, classes, nerves, hemilineages and predicted neurotransmitters, with data products and an open ecosystem to facilitate exploration and browsing.

An online approach for the DNA methylation-based classification of central nervous system tumours across all entities and age groups has been developed to help to improve current diagnostic standards.

The authors investigated associations of brain-derived-tau (BD-tau) with Aβ pathology, changes in cognition and MRI signatures. Staging Aβ-pathology according to neurodegeneration, using BD-tau, identifies individuals at risk of near-term cognitive decline and atrophy.

Ice nucleation proteins have the same tandemly arrayed water-organizing motifs seen in some antifreeze proteins, but on a larger scale. The authors show that mutation, interruption, and truncation of these arrays reduce ice nucleation activity indicating that the two protein types share a common mechanism.

Ten stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud exhibit very low elemental abundances, suggesting that they have experienced enrichment by the earliest generations of stars only. These stars provide a window into a distant region of the high-redshift universe.