Search

Atomic force microscopy is used to investigate the adsorption and organization of ions on charged surfaces. Trivalent ions adopt complex networks, clusters and layers associated with overcharging, whereas divalent ions follow classical predictions.

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

Applications of optical laser-based techniques are limited by the long wavelengths of the lasers. Now, observations of phonons and thermal transport at nanometre length scales are reported with an all-hard X-ray transient-grating spectroscopy technique.

Lithium-ion battery cathode lifetime is limited by large expansion and contraction during cycling. This study uses electrochemical activation to suppress collapse in LiNi_0.9Mn_0.1O₂ cathodes, achieving improved capacity and cycle life.

Nylon-11 is a common and durable polymer but possess low piezoelectric properties. Here, the authors use mechanical accelerations and strong electric fields to induce crystallization, hydrogen-bonding and dipole alignment in Nylon-11 films, achieving high piezoelectricity.

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.

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.

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.

MultiSTAAR provides a general and flexible statistical framework for functionally informed multi-trait rare variant analysis of biobank-scale sequencing studies by jointly analyzing multiple traits and incorporating annotation information.

Application of multiancestry and ensemble-based approaches yields improved polygenic risk prediction models for breast cancer and its subtypes among women of African ancestry.

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.

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

Polymer electrolytes are promising candidates as separators in lithium metal batteries. Here, authors reveal the existence of local lithium-based crystallites inside the polymer electrolyte in a lithium symmetric cell. A combination of unique operando wide-angle X-ray scattering with a nano-sized beam and complementary spectroscopic techniques identifies these crystallites as lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, and even metallic lithium. It is shown that these crystallites lower the ionic conductivity and the transference number.

Wide-bandgap perovskite solar cells suffer from instability under rapid thermal cycling. Here, Sun et al. investigate the degradation mechanism, showing that temperature-induced structural strain, phase transition, and increased non-radiative defects drive the degradation processes.

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.

The protospacer-adjacent motif specificity of several Cas enzymes is customized using protein language models.

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Genome-wide association studies incorporating data for populations of African ancestry provide an expanded view of the genetic basis of schizophrenia, which has previously been studied mainly in European and East Asian cohorts.

Addressing how the nitrogen-induced changes in plant diversity differ from those in soil organisms is critical. This global meta-analysis suggests that nitrogen enrichment has stronger negative effects on plant diversity but modest to negligible effects on soil bacterial and fungal diversity.

Genomic analyses applied to 14 childhood- and adult-onset psychiatric disorders identifies five underlying genomic factors that explain the majority of the genetic variance of the individual disorders.

High-pressure-temperature experiments that explore the impact of carbon and silicon on the plastic deformation of hexagonal close-packed iron suggest depth-dependent elastic anisotropy in Earth’s inner core may originate from chemical stratification

Here the authors show that tissue-resident memory and exhausted T cells in tumors are distinct populations that are shaped by relative presence or absence of TCR signals, suggesting that a tailored therapeutic strategy is needed to target each subset.

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.

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.

High-depth sequencing of non-cancerous tissue from patients with metastatic cancer reveals single-base mutational signatures of alcohol, smoking and cancer treatments, and reveals how exogenous factors, including cancer therapies, affect somatic cell evolution.

In targeted protein degradation, a degrader molecule brings a neosubstrate protein proximal to a hijacked E3 ligase for its ubiquitination. Here, pseudo-natural products derived from (−)-myrtanol—iDegs—are identified to inhibit and induce degradation of the immunomodulatory enzyme indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) by a distinct mechanism. iDegs prime apo-IDO1 ubiquitination and subsequent degradation using its native proteolytic pathway.

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.

Bioactivity-guided isolation of specialized metabolites is an iterative process. Here, the authors demonstrate a native metabolomics approach that allows for fast screening of complex metabolite extracts against a protein of interest and simultaneous structure annotation.

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.

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.

Olivine iron phosphate (FePO₄) is widely proposed for electrochemical lithium extraction, but particles with different physical attributes demonstrate varying Li preferences. Here, the authors characterize the electrochemical lithiation and sodiation behavior of a series of FePO₄ particles with different morphology to identify critical features that enhance Li selectivity.

Polymer thin films that emit and absorb circularly polarised light are promising in achieving important technological advances, but the origin of the large chiroptical effects in such films has remained elusive. Here the authors demonstrate that in non-aligned polymer thin films, large chiroptical effects are caused by magneto-electric coupling, not structural chirality as previously assumed.

Polygenic scores for body mass index and obesity constructed using data from 5 million people with different ancestries were associated with distinct weight gain trajectories from early childhood to adulthood.

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.

A dynamic interconversion of three nickel states in lithium nickel oxide is demonstrated using evidence from x-ray spectroscopic data and first-principles calculations, which explains many physical properties of this and similar materials.

Standard approaches for identifying pleiotropic genetic variants may lead to spurious results. Here the authors present a new statistical method and show that it uncovers five genes linked to metabolites in METSIM participants, which were previously undetected by existing methods.

Drug-resistant bacterial infections hinder tissue repair and regeneration. Here, authors present a lysozyme nanofibril-based hydrogel that mimics neutrophil extracellular traps, enabling pathogen elimination and promoting tissue regeneration.

Federated learning (FL) algorithms have emerged as a promising solution to train models for healthcare imaging across institutions while preserving privacy. Here, the authors describe the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) challenge for the decentralised benchmarking of FL algorithms and evaluation of Healthcare AI algorithm generalizability in real-world cancer imaging datasets.

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.

A free-standing thin-film solid electrolyte (LiPON) shows remarkable mechanical flexibility and the ability to form uniform and dense lithium metal deposition for future solid-state batteries.

A trans-ancestry meta-analysis of GWAS of glycemic traits in up to 281,416 individuals identifies 99 novel loci, of which one quarter was found due to the multi-ancestry approach, which also improves fine-mapping of credible variant sets.

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.

Lithium tantalate is heterogeneously integrated with silicon photonic integrated circuits via a micro-transfer printing process in a manner fully compatible with existing workflows. A Mach–Zehnder modulator with an insertion loss of 2.9 dB and 70 GHz operation is demonstrated.

Here, the authors report an exome-wide association study for multi-organ imaging traits by leveraging recent bioinformatic tools such as AlphaMissense. The identified signals elucidate the genetic effects from rare variants on human organs and their connections to complex diseases

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.

The efficacy of CAR-T cells against solid tumors is still limited by immunosuppressive factors. Here, the authors show that engineering of CAR T cells with A1R enhances their efficacy against solid tumors in vitro and in vivo.

The proton shuttle plays a critical role in the proton transfer process during lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis. Here, the authors establish the structure-activity relationship and design principles for effective proton shuttles.