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Polyamides (PAs) or nylons are types of plastics with wide applications, but due to their accumulation in the environment, strategies for their deconstruction are of interest. Here, the authors screen 40 potential nylon-hydrolyzing enzymes (nylonases) using a mass spectrometry-based approach and identify a thermostabilized N-terminal nucleophile hydrolase as the most promising for further development, as well as crucial targets for progressing PA6 enzymatic depolymerization.

Iron–sulfur minerals play critical roles in regulating nitrogen cycling under anoxic conditions. This study shows that pyrrhotite with abundant iron vacancies promotes electron transfer and microbial nitrate reduction to dinitrogen.

BARCODE is an open-access software that automates high throughput screening of microscopy video data to produce a unique fingerprint or ‘barcode’ of performance metrics that enables optimization and accelerates discovery of soft, active materials.

Multidrug efflux pumps help bacteria survive stress and promote antibiotic resistance. Here, authors define the molecular detail of an anaerobic-connected pump MdtF uncovering acid-responsive activity which may enable toxin control in certain niches.

Here, the authors examine the mechanisms behind cheatgrass’s successful invasion of North American ecosystems. Their genetic analyses and common garden experiments demonstrate that multiple introductions and migrations facilitated cheatgrass local adaptation.

Reliability remains challenging for organic light-emitting diodes used in solid-state lighting. Here, the authors reduce the current density needed for a given brightness by fabricating devices on a high aspect ratio substrate with sub-mm texture, resulting in a 2.7x increase in operating lifetime.

Genome-wide association analyses of blood plasma samples using a mass spectrometry-based platform illustrate the complementarity of different proteomics approaches for identifying protein quantitative trait loci.

This study explores the genetic structure of hepatitis C virus outbreaks in rural U.S communities affected by the opioid crisis. Analysis of intra-host viral populations from 692 participants reveals hidden transmission networks.

Multielectron molecular CO₂ reduction in acid is challenged by weak CO binding and competing hydrogen evolution. Here a methanol Faradaic efficiency of 62% is achieved in acid by tuning the microenvironment with cationic, hydrophobic and aerophilic layers.

JWST data show that the exoplanet WASP-18b has thermally distinct regions of its dayside. The authors mapped the sizes of these regions, measured their temperatures and potentially identify water destruction in the hottest region.

Immune aging fosters multimorbidity and compromises control of infection and cancer. In a phase 1 randomized controlled trial in middle-aged adults, Denk and colleagues administer the mitophagy inducer urolithin A and profile cellular and metabolic aspects of immune aging.

KRAB-zinc finger proteins repress retrotransposons and rapidly evolve in mammals. Here, the authors show that ERV insertions drive the emergence and diversification of new KZFP genes in mice, revealing a co-evolutionary mechanism between retroviruses and host repressors.

U.S. market data from 2012 to 2022 show that increasing transmission capacity is cost-effective. Benefits are often balanced across regions and concentrated during peak periods driven by short-term events, yet major barriers still prevent grid infrastructure from being developed.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

Arboviruses transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes have an expanding global distribution and identifying areas at risk is important for public health planning. Here, the authors present global disease maps for dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever through a multi-disease ecological niche modelling approach.

A consensus cell type atlas for the fly brain provides both an intellectual framework and open-source toolchains for brain-scale comparative connectomics.

Pressure overload in the heart, such as from aortic stenosis, triggers early molecular changes before visible damage occurs. Here, the authors show that combining proteomics, transcriptomics, and genetic data reveals key drivers of heart failure, highlighting potential targets for treatment.

Singlet fission is recognized as an enabling process for next-generation solar cells. Here the authors design a molecular system where specific spin sub-levels can be initialized to produce a highly entangled state and demonstrate that the coherence between magnetic sub-levels of that state is preserved at higher temperatures than those encountered in conventional superconducting quantum hardware.

Experimental demonstration of quantum speedup that scales with the system size is the goal of near-term quantum computing. Here, the authors demonstrate such scaling advantage for a D-Wave quantum annealer over analogous classical algorithms in simulations of frustrated quantum magnets.

The authors demonstrate an exciting technique to cancel the common-mode vibration of a photonic resonator upon optical frequency division to microwave frequencies. The resulting 10 GHz microwave achieves 22.6 dB suppression of vibration noise, without incurring any penalty in phase-noise performance.

Since the launch of Nature Water, we have encouraged our authors to deposit their data on public repositories. We are aware that this is sometimes challenging but we believe that it can be rewarding. We have asked some of the authors of papers that we published close to our launch to share with our readers their motivation for sharing their data and the experience of the process.

A pangenome of the Cannabis genus including 193 genomes demonstrates high variability in most of the genome but low diversity in cannabinoid synthesis genes and provides a resource for future genetic studies and crop optimization.

Many of the factors underlying malaria pathogenesis are not well understood, including protection from the development of febrile symptoms. Here, Van Den Ham et al. show that susceptibility to febrile malaria is associated with the composition of the gut microbiome prior to the malaria season in 10-year-old Malian children, but not in younger children.

As technology evolves, so does the way people engage with it—especially when it comes to health information. Over the past 25 years, the explosive growth in internet use has been paralleled by an equally rapid increase in individuals seeking health information online. During this same period, public trust in the United States healthcare system has steadily eroded. While a direct causal link is unlikely, these trends are interconnected. The primary drivers of declining trust – cost and limited accessibility – have pushed many people to seek alternatives. Yet, health systems have historically paid little attention to the underlying motivations driving people to seek health information independently. The rapid emergence of large language models (LLMs), which provide unprecedented access to personalized and context-aware health information, signals a profound shift in this landscape. As LLMs become increasingly integrated into everyday information-seeking behaviors, they may further supplant clinicians as the initial point of contact for health-related information and guidance. Rather than viewing this long-standing, but rapidly accelerating shift towards patients seeking health guidance online as peripheral to traditional care, patient-centric health systems have an opportunity to harness it. By acknowledging their value to patients and integrating the ways people use online resources to inform their health decisions, systems of care can cultivate greater trust, strengthen health literacy, and deepen patient engagement. Informed by past missteps, the path forward for healthcare rests not in competing with these technologies, but in collaborating with the tools people are already choosing to guide their health.

Pol ι forms Hoogsteen base pairs with the incoming nucleotide. Here, the authors use time-lapse X-ray crystallography to show that Hoogsten base pairing is maintained within the pol ι active site throughout the nucleotide incorporation reaction.

Integration of snATAC-seq and snRNA-seq data from brains of individuals with major depressive disorder identifies chromatin accessibility alterations and functional enrichment of risk variants in deep-layer excitatory neurons. Gray matter microglia in these individuals show decreased accessibility at sites bound by regulators of immune homeostasis.

Groundwater resources are coming under increasing pressure leading to water quality loss. Here, the authors find that recent groundwater pumping has led to increasing arsenic concentrations in the San Joaquin Valley, California aquifers from arsenic residing in the pore water of clay strata released by overpumping.

Increased salinity of Subantarctic Mode Water during the initial phase of the Last Deglaciation could have enhanced deep water formation in the North Atlantic, according to proxy records from a sediment core in the southern Indian Ocean.

Integrated single mode lasers capable of extremely narrow linewidths and high output power will enable precision portable quantum, microwave, and sensing applications. Here we demonstrate a simultaneous record low fundamental linewidth and high output power using an integrated Brillouin laser in a meter-scale silicon nitride coil resonator.

Correlating aromatic carbons attached to fluorine with meta-position hydrogens in fluorine-labelled phenylalanines can yield two-dimensional correlations with narrow linewidths in large proteins. Adapting phenylalanine-tRNA synthetase increases the incorporation rate, while expanding the genetic code enables site-specific incorporation of fluorinated phenylalanine. The resulting HC_F-transverse relaxation-optimized spectroscopy can illuminate protein dynamics and drive multiplexed drug discovery campaigns.

Far from frozen and sterile environments, glaciers are biogeochemical reactors and regulators. This Review outlines key biogeochemical and associated physical processes occurring in glacierized environments and the known impacts of glaciers on elemental cycling and the Earth system.

The relationship between pathogenic germline variation, clonal hematopoiesis (CH) and risk of hematologic malignancy is explored in 731,835 individuals across 6 cohorts. Carriers of variants in certain genes show distinct patterns of CH and increased risk of CH progression to malignancy.

Observations from a borehole in the Kamb Ice Stream suggest that discrete subglacial discharge events dominate channel melt and sediment transport.

This Primer discusses key principles and experiments in quantitative ultraviolet–visible spectroelectrochemistry experiments with a focus on data-rich set-ups. The authors demonstrate the various data outputs of these experiments using worked examples and discuss the practical applications of quantitative ultraviolet–visible spectroelectrochemistry in the study of energy materials.

Offshore wind and wave energy may play a key role in the energy transition. Here, authors identify cost targets for these technologies to become cost effective and show how the grid’s installed capacity decreases, and generation and transmission change as offshore energy deployment increase.

Dysfunction in dorsal striatum, a brain region important for reward and habits, is linked to opioid use disorder (OUD). Here, authors delineate diverse cell populations in human dorsal striatum, revealing altered inflammatory and DNA damage signaling in OUD.

Here, Gatica et al show that FAM134B, which resides in the endoplasmic reticulum, can be targeted by and limited by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. This results in restriction of selective autophagy of the endoplasmic reticulum and enhances bacterial survival within host cells.

A Review of the impacts of short-lived halogens on air quality and climate identifies gaps in our knowledge of short-lived halogen emissions, chemistry, and the environmental and climate impacts.

This report from the 1000 Genomes Project describes the genomes of 1,092 individuals from 14 human populations, providing a resource for common and low-frequency variant analysis in individuals from diverse populations; hundreds of rare non-coding variants at conserved sites, such as motif-disrupting changes in transcription-factor-binding sites, can be found in each individual.

To find materials with large anomalous Nernst coefficients, which is useful for energy harvesting, it is common to focus on materials with large anomalous Hall coefficients. Here, Gong et al. find a material where the anomalous Nernst effect does not show the same antisymmetric behaviour as the anomalous Hall effect.

Calorie availability and extent of food shortages for each nation are estimated following regional or global nuclear war, including impacts on major crops, livestock and fishery production.

It is often assumed that systems that can be analyzed accurately via mean-field theory would not be worth looking at using quantum algorithms, given entanglement plays no key role. Here, the authors show instead that a quantum advantage can be expected for simulating the exact time evolution of such electronic systems.

Catenanes can exhibit chirality even when their component rings are achiral. Here an isostructural desymmetrization strategy is developed, demonstrating that two achiral rings, each featuring two mirror planes and a two-fold axis of symmetry, can form a catenane with tuneable mechanical chirality.