Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have important roles in health and disease, but are chemically complex and difficult to measure accurately. This consensus statement proposes guidelines and best practices on the nomenclature and assessment of ROS, oxidative reactions and oxidative damage in cells, tissues and in vivo.

Steuernagel and Lam et al. present HypoMap, an integrated reference atlas of the murine hypothalamus based on 384,925 hypothalamic cells from publicly available single-cell sequencing datasets.

In our tenth instalment of Career pathways, Jin Zhang and Christiane Wrann reflect on their journeys to becoming PIs and the importance of having a vision for your research, finding the right team, and sharing the joy of science through the training of students.

Scientific meetings are the perfect venue for staying on top of the field and building new relationships with researchers from all career stages, as well as solidifying bonds with current authors. Here we explain why editors of Nature Metabolism attend conferences and what we do when we get there.

Mi, Qi et al. identify a mechanism through which defective oxidative phosphorylation in astrocytes deregulates astroglial lipid homeostasis and subsequently impacts neurons and microglial cells, thus triggering neuronal damage and microglial reactivity.

The authors identify a high-pH-activated chloride channel as a taste receptor responsible for the avoidance of alkaline foods in fruit flies, laying the groundwork for future research on alkaline taste sensation in other animals.

Human mutations in PCYT2 result in severe pathology with failure to thrive and progressive degenerative disease. Cikes et al. demonstrate that loss of PCYT2-synthesized phosphatidylethanolamines in muscle impairs sarcolemmal lipid bilayer stability and mitochondrial homeostasis, leading to muscle degeneration and premature ageing in mice.

Doke et al. show that NMN and NR supplementation has protective effects on kidney injury by preventing cisplatin-induced release of cytosolic mitochondrial RNA and subsequent activation of the RIG-I pathway and inflammation.

Sympathetic innervation of brown and white adipose tissue is shown to be promoted by zinc released from thermogenic adipocytes, revealing a positive feedback mechanism for regulation of thermogenesis and thereby energy expenditure.

Primary cilia are shown to adjust length in response to cellular nutrient availability, with a special role for glutamine-mediated anaplerosis via the enzyme ASNS, which was found to be located at the base of cilia. Consistently, cells lacking cilia show an altered response to glutamine during metabolic stress.

The metabolomics literature suffers from ambiguity in the nomenclature for individual metabolites, which introduces a disconnect between publications and leads to misinterpretations. This Comment proposes recommendations for metabolite annotations to engage the scientific community and publishers to adopt a more consistent approach to metabolite nomenclature.

Scientific meetings are the perfect venue for staying on top of the field and building new relationships with researchers from all career stages, as well as solidifying bonds with current authors. Here we explain why editors of Nature Metabolism attend conferences and what we do when we get there.

The environment experienced by an individual early in life has long-term health consequences. Here we summarize key factors that should be considered when designing studies in rodents that aim to address the developmental programming of metabolic disease.