The therapeutic principle of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation, one the most common forms of cancer immunotherapy, is alloreactivity, yet its molecular determinants remain largely unknown. An analytical framework now enables personalized assessment of alloreactivity from whole-exome sequencing of donor–recipient pairs, to help with prognostication of disease relapse and immune-mediated complications.

We have discovered an effect, termed stacking-induced intermolecular charge transfer-enhanced Raman scattering (SICTERS), that enhances the Raman signal intensities of small molecules by relying on their self-stacking rather than external substrates. This effect enables the design of substrate-free small-molecule probes for high-resolution, non-invasive transdermal Raman imaging of lymphatic drainage and microvessels.

To handle increasingly large protein databases, a new ultrafast, highly sensitive method — Dense Homolog Retriever (DHR) — detects remote homologs using dense retrieval and protein language models. Its alignment-free nature makes it much faster than traditional approaches, and the newly found remote homologs benefit our understanding of protein evolution, structure and function.

Epigenome editing has versatile applications in biomedical research and disease treatment.