Reviews & Analysis

Bacterial infections with Pseudomonas aeruginosa can shift between chronic and acute. An investigation of P. aeruginosa gene expression during human infection identified a small RNA that is expressed in low-oxygen conditions and controls this transition.

Analyses of chromosome organization across diverse animals and non-animals provide evidence that a group of marine creatures called ctenophores, or comb jellies, are the sister clade of all other animals, bringing to bear new methods to answer a long-standing evolutionary question.

Polygenic scores can estimate the likelihood of an individual having a certain trait by using the contributions of thousands of genetic variants in their genome. An analysis shows that the accuracy of these scores varies between individuals across a continuum of genetic ancestry, even in populations conventionally considered homogeneous.

Most light-field sensors — devices that detect the angles of incoming light rays to reconstruct 3D scenes — can detect light only in the ultraviolet and visible wavelength ranges. A newly developed light-field sensor comprising perovskite nanocrystals encodes the angles of incoming visible-light beams and X-rays as different colours.

An innovative method was used to obtain a woman’s rich DNA record from a 20,000-year-old pendant found in Siberia, providing the first direct genetic evidence for the identity of an individual who handled an object in the deep past.

Crassviruses are the most abundant, and among the most genetically diverse, viruses found in the human gut. New structural information about these viruses has shed light on the functions of previously uncharacterized proteins in virus-particle assembly and infection.

CEBRA is a machine-learning method that can be used to compress time series in a way that reveals otherwise hidden structures in the variability of the data. It excels at processing behavioural and neural data recorded simultaneously, and it can decode activity from the visual cortex of the mouse brain to reconstruct a viewed video.

It emerges that copper ions found in cell organelles called mitochondria regulate the cellular changes that underlie transitions in cell state. A small molecule that inhibits copper-mediated catalysis can suppress the activation of immune cells called macrophages, conferring therapeutic benefits in models of acute inflammation.

Multisensory information improves subsequent memory performance. In Drosophila flies, learning re-routes activity through neuronal networks in the brain such that individual components of a multisensory experience can trigger retrieval of the memory of the whole event. As a result, memory performance for both the combined and individual components of the experience is improved.

Biodiversity experiments show that a high diversity of plants increases the accumulation of soil carbon and nitrogen, but whether such conclusions hold in natural ecosystems is debated. An analysis of Canada’s National Forest Inventory provides strong evidence that the build-up of soil carbon and nitrogen on a decadal timescale increased with improved tree diversity in natural forest ecosystems.

Creating protein interactions through computational design is a key challenge in the fields of both basic and translational biology. An approach that uses the machine-learned fingerprints of protein-surface features was used to produce synthetic proteins that engage immunotherapeutic or viral targets with binding affinities comparable to those of naturally occurring proteins.

Gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs cannot survive without the cell-surface machinery that builds a β-barrel pore structure from outer membrane proteins. Snapshots of different stages in the assembly process provide insights into this crucial mechanism, and could lead to the development of new antibiotics.

An innovative approach has been developed to break down plastic polymers into their monomer building blocks. It uses a continuous melting, wicking, vaporization and reaction process in a porous carbon-bilayer structure, and can convert two model plastic polymers to their monomers at high yields without a catalyst.

Quantum materials can host exotic phases of matter in which electrons form unusual collective states. Scientists have struggled to observe the quantization that these electronic states are expected to show, but this phenomenon has now been detected in heavy states at the surface of a superconducting quantum material.

Intracellular machines called ribosomes use messenger-RNA sequences to synthesize proteins. Investigations using single-molecule imaging and cryo-electron microscopy techniques reveal structural and kinetic differences in how human ribosomes function compared with those of bacteria. These differences explain why ribosomes in cell-nucleus-bearing species are slower and more accurate than their bacterial counterparts.

Landforms across the mid-Norwegian sea floor reveal that a former ice sheet retreated at up to 600 metres per day at the end of the last ice age. Pulses of similarly rapid retreat could soon be observed across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Land-use changes alter the exchange of greenhouse gases, but the magnitudes of these effects remain uncertain. Estimates of net greenhouse-gas emissions associated with different uses of tropical peatland in Indonesia — including intact forest and Acacia tree plantations — could inform science-based practices for managing peatlands as nature-based mitigators of climate change.

A catalyst with a hydrophobic cavity that contains an active iron centre has been developed to convert methane into methanol. It has a ‘catch-and-release’ mechanism whereby a hydrophobic methane molecule enters the cavity for oxidation and the resulting hydrophilic methanol molecule is released into the surrounding aqueous solution.

Genetic scores for predicting levels of several types of biomolecule have been developed and validated in people of diverse ancestries, and used to uncover insights into disease biology. An open resource to disseminate these scores, OmicsPred, will enable researchers to predict various molecular traits from genetic profiles in their own data sets.

Analyses of ancient DNA from 80 individuals buried in medieval Swahili stone towns along the East African coast revealed that these individuals had both African and Asian ancestry. The findings suggest that in most cases, African women began having children with Asian men at least 1,000 years ago, at several locations along the coast.