Reviews & Analysis

Kozlowski, Crook, and Ku review current state-of-the-art techniques in culturing and manipulating organoids without the use of EHS-tumor-derived matrix, the most popular of which is Matrigel by Corning. They cover organoid-based applications of different matrix types, ranging from natural sources (decellularized ECM, purified ECM proteins, polysaccharides), synthetic sources (e.g. PEG-based), and recombinant peptide-based systems.

Zhang et al. describe metrics for evaluating glycaemic variability (GV) in clinical practice and summarize the role and related mechanisms of GV in diabetic neuropathy, including cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy, diabetic peripheral neuropathy and cognitive impairment. They aim to stimulate ideas for the treatment of diabetic neuropathy.

Garbarino et al review recent experimental and epidemiological developments regarding immune responses to sleep deprivation and consider the role for the sleep deprivation induced immune changes in increasing the risk for chronic diseases.

In this Review, Bhat et al. highlight ways to mine crop haplotypes and apply them for dissecting complex traits and genomics-assisted breeding (GAB) approaches. This Review presents new avenues to discover superior haplotypes and assemble them in targeted manner in crop breeding for faster delivery of high-yielding cultivars with better adaptation to future climates.

Melo, Maasch and de la Fuente-Nunez review the current practices in use of artificial intelligence in the discovery of antibiotics and antimicrobials. They also provide details about the best-practices that should be engaged with during computational drug discovery, including open science and reproducibility.

In this review Widden and Placzek synthesize studies characterizing the influence that myeloid cell leukemia-1 (MCL1) has on cell proliferation, DNA damage response, autophagy, calcium handling, and mitochondrial quality control to highlight the broader scope that it plays in cellular homeostasis regulation. They discuss which pathways are likely to be impacted by emerging MCL1 inhibitors, as well as highlight non-cancerous disease states that could deploy BH3-mimetics in the future.

In this Review, Laura Martinez-Vidal et al. summarize current knowledge of factors affecting extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling in the context of pathological mechanical changes to tissue properties. They focus on the importance of research on tissue stiffness to the development of diagnostic tools and therapies to treat urological disease.

Gómez-López and co-authors discuss advances in the development of in vitro and in vivo models for lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) and their role in understanding the cellular and molecular processes driving LUSC development and responses to therapy.

In this Review, Petrus-Reurer et al describe the roles of both innate and adaptive immune responses in allogeneic graft rejection, in addition to discuss how such responses are determined by the cellular therapy of interest. They also describe the range of in vitro and in vivo approaches used to examine the immunogenicity of cellular therapies and consider potential confounders and strategies that can be employed to ameliorate immune rejection.

Carrie Breton and colleagues review the literature supporting evidence for transgenerational health effects of environmental exposures by epigenetic mechanisms. This Review summarizes current knowledge based on animal and human cohort studies, and discusses the ethical, legal, and social implications of epigenetic research in humans

Dessalles et al review the responses of vascular endothelial cells to mechanical forces exerted by both blood flow and physical contact with the basement membrane. Special attention is paid to how endothelial cells respond to multiple mechanical cues that are exerted simultaneously.

Bergmann et al. discuss the construction of synthetic uteri to model the earliest stages of human embryogenesis and associated pathologies. They highlight the constituent components from which a synthetic uterus may be engineered, propose a modular approach to assembling synthetic uteri and discuss how these technologies can shed light on implantation failure and uterine pathologies.

In this review article, Karla Santos-de-Frutos and Nabil Djouder discuss the implication of dormant cancer cells in tumour relapse and the roles quiescent and senescent cells may play in this process.

Cody Aros, Carla Pantoja, and Brigitte Gomperts review the key role of Wnt signaling in all aspects of lung development, repair, and disease progression. They provide an overview of recent research findings and highlight where research is needed to further elucidate mechanisms of action, with the aim of improving disease treatments.

Photoreceptor death is central to vision loss in various retinal diseases. Disruption of nutrient availability and cell metabolism may underlie photoreceptor death. In this review, Pan et al. focus on the recent advances in the understanding of photoreceptor metabolism and suggest novel targets for neuroprotective strategies that prevent blindness.

DNA–protein crosslink (DPC) proteases digest the protein component of crosslinks that otherwise can cause genomic instability and disease. Ruggiano and Ramadan discuss recent insights into the roles of DPC proteases in the repair of DPCs and beyond.