News & Comment

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has emerged as the most prevalent liver disease worldwide, mainly because of the massive parallel global increase in obesity. Extensive public-health and political efforts will be needed in the near future to counteract this disturbing development.

A collaborative effort is required by individual scientists, research institutes and funding organizations towards the curation of high-quality, diverse metabolic data for the metabolism community to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence.

Mammalian cell culture represents a cornerstone of modern biomedical research. There is growing appreciation that the media conditions in which cells are cultured can profoundly influence the observed biology and reproducibility. Here, we consider a key but often ignored variable, oxygen, and review why being mindful of this environmental parameter is so important in the design and interpretation of cell culture studies.

Modern mass spectrometric technologies provide quantitative readouts for a wide variety of lipid specimens. However, many studies do not report absolute lipid concentrations and differ vastly in methodologies, workflows and data presentation. Therefore, we encourage researchers to engage with the Lipidomics Standards Initiative to develop common standards for minimum acceptable data quality and reporting for lipidomics data, to take lipidomics research to the next level.

Awareness of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and its symptoms is essential for early detection, and an informed public is also more likely to take action against NASH development.

The field of cellular metabolic research is growing but remains somewhat fragmented. Facilitating the exchange of ideas between cell biologists and the wider metabolism community will create synergies and further advance the field.

This month, we introduce a new series of articles, called Metabolic Messengers, dedicated to molecules involved in cellular communication and inter-tissue cross-talk.

Today, we are proud to launch Nature Metabolism, a new dedicated home for exciting research and commentary that spans the spectrum of metabolism research.

Over the past decade, the field of metabolism has witnessed remarkable scientific discoveries that reshaped the understanding of metabolic physiology and disease. As we launch Nature Metabolism, we look at what the future holds for metabolic research.

Many commonly used inbred mouse strains carry random mutations that can affect the results of metabolic studies. Yet, awareness of such mutations as a source for experimental variation and seemingly contradictory results is lacking. It is time that scientists pay more attention to the identification, tracking and accurate reporting of mouse strains used in experiments.