Search

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

Understanding collective behaviour is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies in the context of the pandemic.

Vitamin K-dependent carboxylation is vital for human health. Here, authors present cryo-EM structures of the relevant γ-glutamyl carboxylase, uncovering substrate recognition, processive modification, and a bicarbonate-mediated CO₂ fixation mechanism.

A natural variant of RCN2 enhances nitrogen assimilation and grain yield in rice by restricting chromatin loop extrusion and competitive interaction with the OsSPL14–SLR1 regulatory module.

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

The performance of single-crystal perovskite solar cells has been limited by interfacial loss at the perovskite/charge transport layer. Here, authors fabricate an asymmetric substrate stack through space-confined inverse temperature crystallization, achieving maximum device efficiency of 24.32%.

This study provides structural insights into human AE3’s role in pH regulation in excitable tissues, highlighting its structural differences from AE2 in anion transport regulation and their sensitivity to inhibitors.

Researchers unveiled the structural details of sphingomyelin synthase (SMSr), shedding light on its role in sphingolipid biosynthesis. SMSr transfers the phosphoethanolamine from PE to ceramide, adding complexity to the field of lipid homeostasis.

KarmaDock, a deep learning approach, is proposed to improve the speed, accuracy and pose quality of molecular docking and is validated on multiple datasets and a real-world virtual screening.

During phosphatidylcholine (PC) remodeling re-acylation is catalyzed by lysophosphatidylcholine acyltransferases (LPCAT). Here, the authors present crystal and cryo-EM structures of chicken LPCAT3 in the apo-, acyl donor-bound and acyl receptor-bound states, and based on the structures and further functional analysis they discuss the mechanism of the enzyme.

Cells maintain a narrow physiological pH by exchanging intracellular bicarbonate for extracellular chloride. Here, authors determine the cryo-EM structures of human anion exchanger 2 (AE2) in five major operating states and one transitional state, to collectively demonstrate the process of pH-balancing.

Generating novel molecules that bind to specific protein targets is a challenging but important task in computational drug design. Zhang and colleagues present a molecular generation method based on hierarchical auto-regression.

A key feature of the evolutionary transformation of grass cell walls is the cross-linking of interwoven arabinoxylans via ferulate units. This study discovered an unexpected sucrose ferulate cycle that mediates the feruloylation of arabinoxylan.

Wang et al. propose EasIFA, an efficient enzyme active site annotation algorithm, to advance various fields including drug discovery, disease research, enzyme engineering, and synthetic biology.

Collisionless shock waves at relativistic velocities are ubiquitous in the universe and lead to the generation of energetic ions and radiation. Here, the authors demonstrate the generation of subrelativistic collisionless shock of astrophysical relevance in the laboratory, by means of table-top femtosecond laser pulses focused onto solid targets.

Transition metal carbides exhibit outstanding performance in the selective hydrogenation of acetylene, but carburizing Pd-based intermetallic compounds has been challenging. Here, the authors present a successful synthesis of Pd₃ZnC_x intermetallic carbide for selective hydrogenation of acetylene through a one-step co-infiltration of zinc and carbon using syngas.

A high-resolution, global atlas of mortality of children under five years of age between 2000 and 2017 highlights subnational geographical inequalities in the distribution, rates and absolute counts of child deaths by age.

Hypophosphatasia (HPP) is a bone disease caused by mutations in tissue non-specific alkaline phosphatase (TNAP). Here, authors solved the crystal and cryoEM structures of TNAP, shedding light on the molecular mechanisms underlying HPP.

The low-cost synthesis of high-quality MXenes is crucial for applications, yet challenges remain. The authors report a one-step gas-phase method to fabricate single-phase Ti₂(C/N)Cl₂ with low defects, offering a chance to address these challenges.

Self-powered sensors are of interest in wearable technology and other applications. Here, the authors report on the creation of a metal-air redox reaction humidity sensor where the conductance and charge generated is influenced by the amount of absorbed water and demonstrate application in respiration monitoring.

“Reinvigoration of antitumor immunity has recently become the central theme for the development of cancer therapies. Here the authors present an adaptable gene circuit to harness the CRISPRa for tumorlocalized immune activation.”

Designing molecules in drug design is challenging as it requires optimizing multiple, potentially competing qualities. Wu and colleagues present a prompt-based molecule optimization method that can be trained from single-property data.

The electrocatalytic NO reduction reaction enables sustainable NH₃ synthesis and NO removal but faces challenges in achieving industrial-level efficiency and durability. Here the authors present an in situ-formed copper nanowire array monolithic electrode integrated into a pressurized electrolyzer for stable ammonia electrosynthesis at around 1000 mA cm^–2 for 100 h.

SurfGen is a structure-based drug design approach that delves into topological and geometric deep learning techniques for interaction learning, echoing the classical lock-and-key model.

By focusing a sub-relativistic infrared laser pulse onto a silica target, a periodic deflection pattern of attosecond electron pulse trains is observed. It reveals these subcycle charge dynamics with a streaking speed of ~60 μrad as⁻¹.

Generative models face challenges with low synthesizability of generated molecules. Here, authors develop ClickGen, a deep learning model using modular reactions and reinforcement learning to generate highly diverse, novel, and synthesizable molecules

Structural insights into the Derlin-1/p97 complex reveal a dynamic 6:6 architecture that expands the ERAD retrotranslocation pathway, highlighting ATPase-powered plasticity in processing bulky substrates.

Bhattacharjee and Schaeffer et al. map exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) in 94 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), finding increased EBF practice and reduced subnational variation across the majority of LMICs from 2000 to 2018. However, only six LMICs will meet WHO’s target of ≥70% EBF by 2030 nationally, and only three will achieve this in all districts.

Functional features in the spatiotemporal regulation of blood chemistry are not much explored. Here authors show vascular network-inspired fluidics, functionalizable for different region-specific trans-wall transport to regulate fluids over space and time.

Although progress in the coverage of routine measles vaccination in children in low- and middle-income countries was made during 2000–2019, many countries remain far from the goal of 80% coverage in all districts by 2019.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

Stimulated emission by free electrons is used to amplify terahertz surface plasmon polaritons in a manner resembles that of light amplification in a high-gain free-electron laser.

The balance of DELLA and GRF4 proteins in plants ensures the co-regulation of growth with metabolism and tipping this balance towards GRF4 leads to higher efficiency of nitrogen use.

Optical manipulation of nanomaterials usually requires fluidic environments or microfibers. Here, the authors report a pulsed laser-induced photoacoustic driving force able to overcome the van der Waals adhesion forces between 2D semimetallic nanosheets and insulating substrates.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-based docking and scoring methods demonstrate considerable potential for virtual drug screening. Gu et al. go further by assessing the structural rationality of AI-predicted complex conformations from various sources.

Developing thymocytes carry out precise assembly of D-to-J followed by V-to-DJ rearrangements at the Tcrb locus. Liu and colleagues show that the transcription factor Fos directs ordered temporal recombination of D segments.