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.

Okabe and Uchiyama provide their perspective on the work performed during the past decade on intracellular thermometry and major challenges of the field. Describing the importance of the temperature at both large and cellular scale, they highlight the possible contribution of intracellular thermometry to new biological studies.

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.

This perspective by Ziegler et al. explores the impact of mitochondria-endoplasmic reticulum contacts (MERCs) biology on cellular senescence. The authors also explore the potential impacts of MERCs perturbation and how this relates to the increase in cellular senescence observed in common age-related diseases.

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.

Golesorkhi et al. discuss recent literature on intrinsic neural timescales, their potential role in input processing including computational mechanism, and how they relate to mental features, psychiatric disorders and artificial intelligence.

In this Perspective, Diane Dickel and colleagues review recent progress and opportunities in applying single-cell sequencing and microfluidics methods to plants. The authors highlight the need for new tools developed with plants in mind, and advocate for the creation of a centralized, open-access database to house plant single-cell data.

Soldan and co-authors propose an evolutionary framework for understanding how host control of the microbiota is influenced by artificial selection. They go on to discuss the potential effect of domestication syndrome on the seed microbiome and plant-microbe interactions in the spermosphere.

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.

Simeoni et al discuss how recent structural work has improved our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 Nsp1-mediated translation inhibition and how Nsp1 inhibition could impact host immune responses and suppress viral replication.

Pudewell et al. discuss and advance our understanding of accessory proteins, which are crucial for the RTK-RAS-MAPK signalling cascade. They consider the therapeutic potential of targeting such modulators as an alternative to targeting constituent components of the RTK-RAS-MAPK signalling cascade in the treatment of diseases such as cancer.