Browse Articles

This Comment piece summarises current challenges regarding routine vaccine uptake in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides recommendations on how to increase uptake. To implement these recommendations, the article points to evidence-based resources that can support health-care workers, policy makers and communicators.

During the Cambrian Radiation, oxygenation occurred in a series of short pulses. Here, the authors quantify episodic changes in reef size, extent of habitat and in metacommunity ecological complexity associated with these oxygenation pulses by examining archaeocyath sponges.

Qutrits, or quantum three-level systems, can provide advantages over qubits in certain quantum information applications, and high-fidelity single-qutrit gates have been demonstrated. Goss et al. realize high-fidelity entangling gates between two superconducting qutrits that are universal for ternary computation.

The molecular landscape of microphthalmia transcription factor family translocation renal cell carcinoma tumours remain to be characterised. Here, the authors perform proteogenomic analysis and reveal dysregulation of DNA repair, mTOR signalling and metabolic processes.

TRPV2 is activated by temperature and cannabinoids. Here, the authors have used cryo-EM and electrophysiology to identify a cannabinoid binding site distinct from that of cannabidiol as a possible drug target for treatment of inflammation and immune-mediated diseases.

Halogen bonding is widely adopted in organic synthesis and supramolecular crystal engineering but application of halogen bonding in the design of stimuli-responsive materials is challenging. Here, the authors report a liquid crystalline network that contains dynamic halogen-bond crosslinks and possesses reversible thermo-responsive shape memory behaviour.

Target membrane poration is a longstanding enigma in virology. Here, authors show that fusion peptides of the influenza virus’ spike protein aggregate, rotate, and tilt in membranes, facilitating peptide-induced poration during viral fusion.

The filamentous cyanobacterium Nostoc regulates communication between sister cells via a conformational change in septal junctions. Here, the authors identify and characterize protein SepN as a component of septal junctions, and highlight the importance of controlling molecular diffusion between cells to ensure the survival of a multicellular organism.

Carbon capture, utilization and storage technology is limited by the need for a separate CO₂ capture step. Here, the authors propose a strategy and economic analysis for simultaneous dilute CO₂ capture from flue gas and direct electrochemical reduction to synthesis gas via reaction swing absorption.

Federated ML (FL) provides an alternative to train accurate and generalizable ML models, by only sharing numerical model updates. Here, the authors present the largest FL study to-date to generate an automatic tumor boundary detector for glioblastoma.

Decarbonization is essential to achieving climate goals, but myopic decarbonization policies that ignore co-pollutants may leave Black and high-poverty communities with 26-34% higher PM_2.5 exposure over the energy transition.

Circadian rhythms are known to impact a range of biological processes including in the immune system. Here the authors show how circadian rhythms modulate the T cell response to vaccination via regulation of dendritic cell metabolism.

Interaction between APOBEC3G and RNA is critical for its antiviral function. Here, the authors report four co-crystal structures of rhesus macaque APOBEC3G and RNA, demonstrating unpaired AA and GA dinucleotide motifs are preferentially recognized.

Discoid lupus erythematosus (DLE) and systemic LE (SLE) can present as cutaneous lesions. Here the authors characterise an scRNA dataset of cutaneous lesions from these patients and compare these to healthy controls showing differential immune cell recruitment, cell type and gene expression.

Pexophagy plays a pivotal role in the selective removal of ROS-generating peroxisomes, which protects plants from oxidative damage during photosynthesis under high-intensity light.

REM-sleep behavior disorder often precedes Parkinson’s disease or dementia. Here, the authors perform a genome-wide association study for REM-sleep behavior disorder, and discover how it potentially affects gene expression in the brain.

Getting a grip on the chaotic properties of quantum systems is difficult. Now, the effect of translational invariance in space in time in an ensemble of random quantum circuits is shown to lead to largely universal scaling laws describing the system without the need of knowing microscopic details.

Here, the authors characterize the microbiome and resistome in a longitudinal cohort of 159 international students visiting the Andean city of Cusco, Peru. They find that international travel associates with spread of antimicrobial resistance, and that travelers’ diarrhea increases a persons’ risk for acquiring antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, while a diverse, “healthy” microbiome can be protective against diarrhea.

Object detection using machine learning universally requires vast amounts of training datasets. Midtvedt et al. proposes a deep-learning method that enables detecting microscopic objects with sub-pixel accuracy from a single unlabeled image by exploiting the roto-translational symmetries of the problem.

Bacteriophage are natural antibiotic agents and provide natural building blocks for living biomaterials. Here, the authors crosslink self-organised bacteriophages to make sprayable microgels which preserves the natural antibacterial action, have tuneable auto-fluorescence and demonstrate application in food decontamination.