Necroptosis, the death traded for regeneration. See page 1063-1077 by Shen’ao Zhou et al. for details.

Mn2+ pushes antitumor vehicles full speed ahead and revives immunotherapy in cancer patients. See page 966-979 by Mengze Lv et al. for details.

The cover illustrates the arrangements of the portal (cyan) and the capsomers (hexons in orange and pentons in yellow) of the quasi-icosahedral capsid of Epstein-Barr virus enclosed within a lipid bilayer envelope (grey). The viral dsDNA (red) is translocated through the portal, a “devil’s claw”-like apparatus located at a unique 5-fold vertex of the capsid. See Page 873-884 by Zhihai Li et al. for details.

ChinaMAP, The China Metabolic Analytics Project analyzed deep whole genome sequences and metabolic traits of 10,588 individuals across 8 ethnic populations and 27 provinces in China. See page 717-731 by Yanan Cao et al. for details.

Intensive genomic analyses reveal that chickens were domesticated from one red jungle fowl subspecies

The main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain, GABA, influences neuronal and glial activity in a prolonged manner via GABAB receptor, a prototypical class C GPCR. GABAB receptor is an obligatory heterodimer of two subunits. They perform a complicated “pas de deux” to transduce the extracellular stimuli into cells. See page 564-573 by Chunyou Mao et al. for details.

Blossoms of the nuclear pore complexes (pink) are fenced by the luminal rings (blue) and decorated with ribosomes (cyan & yellow), illustrating the sociology of supra-molecular complexes on a piece of nuclear envelope of the Xenopus laevis. See page 532-540 by Yanqing Zhang et al. for details.

The jumping carps firstly turned right and secondly jumped up towards Longmen, like two steps of fate choice for the endothelial cells on the way to a final hematopoietic stem cell destiny.

The cover implies that the human coronavirus family consists of some evil members like the Hydra in Greek myth, while the entry inhibitor (EK1C4) like an arrow shoots the heart of the viruses, the conservative HR1-trimer, to block six-helical bundle (6-HB) formation and inhibit viral infection. See page 343-355 by Shuai Xia et al. for details.

The cover image describes a Chinese fairy tale, the “Calabash Brothers”, in which an old man grows calabash seedlings (in vitro spermatogenesis), via germination (mitosis), vine elongation (meiosis), flowering and fructification (spermiogenesis) to produce seven calabash brothers of different colors (fertilization-competent spermatids). See page 244-255 by Yan Yuan et al. for details.

‘Artificial spermatids’ (androgenetic haploid embryonic stem cells) can be used to model complex human disease-related genetic defects in mouse in one step. See page 133-145 by Qi Yin et al. for details.

The cover implies that when the translation of the proteins en route to the ER (symbolized by the high speed train going through a tunnel) is stopped by a poly-A stalling sequence, this scenario will trigger ribosome UFMylation in the cell to lauch a translocation-associated protein quality control. See page 5-20 by Lihui Wang et al. for details.