News & Comment

Arboviral infections are major public health threats, with 100 million people estimated to get sick annually from dengue infection alone. Globally, the risk of arboviruses is likely to further increase both within, and outside of, affected regions due to a combination of factors including climate change, human mobility, and other societal factors. Despite the availability of vaccines for some arbovirus infections, there is a lack of specific antiviral treatment options. Professor Johan Neyts at the University of Leuven, Belgium, has been working on developing antiviral strategies for more than 30 years. His current research focuses on developing antiviral drugs and vaccines against emerging and neglected viruses many of which are arboviruses. In this Q&A, he discusses the risks associated with vector-borne virus infections, challenges in developing efficient drugs for treatment, and current promising efforts to address these challenges.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a crucial diagnostic tool within modern healthcare, yet its availability remains largely confined to high-income nations. The imperative to extend MRI accessibility to lower-income countries aligns with the pursuit of universal health coverage, a key target of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3. In an interview with Nature Communications, three scientists dedicated to advancing MRI accessibility in Africa share their insights. These experts include Dr Udunna Anazodo (Assistant Professor at McGill University, Canada and Scientific Director, Medical Artificial Intelligence (MAI) Lab, Lagos, Nigeria), Dr Johnes Obungoloch (Lecturer at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda) and Dr Ugumba Kwikima (Neuroradiologist, Lugalo General Military Hospital, Tanzania). Our discussion considers the current MRI landscape across African countries and the associated challenges and opportunities. We also cover technological innovations making a difference, such as low field MRI, alongside the role of advocacy initiatives in bolstering accessibility. We finally look ahead to the future of MRI in Africa.

Professor Sabine Oertelt-Prigione has been working in the field of sex and gender-sensitive research for the last 15 years. Her current work is focused on trying to understand how sex and gender-sensitive medicine can be successfully implemented in research and practice as well as methods to investigate gender in medical research. Dr. Brandon Turner is a resident physician in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has conducted and is involved in numerous studies looking to evaluate race and ethnicity reporting and representation in clinical trials. In this interview for Nature Communications, Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, and Brandon Turner share their knowledge about the biases that can occur in clinical trials and how they can be minimized.

Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, with over 25% of these occurring in the African region. Multi-drug resistant strains which do not respond to first-line antibiotics continue to emerge, putting at risk numerous public health strategies which aim to reduce incidence and mortality. Here, we speak with Professor Valerie Mizrahi, world-leading researcher and former director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, regarding the tuberculosis burden in South Africa. We discuss the challenges faced by researchers, the lessons that need to be learnt and current innovations to better understand the overall response required to accelerate progress.

On the 12th of April 2010, Nature Communications published its first editorial and primary research articles. The topics of these first 11 papers represented the multidisciplinary nature of the journal: from DNA damage to optics alongside material science to energy and including polymer chemistry. We have spoken with the corresponding authors of some of these very first papers and asked them about their experience of publishing in this then new journal and how they see Nature Communications now.

As part of our tenth-anniversary celebrations, the editorial team at Nature Communications wanted to hear from early career researchers who have published with us. We asked the early career researchers to tell us in an essay what is amazing about the research question(s) that drove them and the highs—and lows—of the journey from hypothesis to publication.

As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations, the editorial team at Nature Communications wanted to hear from early career researchers who have published with us. We asked the early career researchers to tell us in an essay what is amazing about the research question(s) that drove them and the highs—and lows—of the journey from hypothesis to publication.

As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations, the editorial team at Nature Communications wanted to hear from early career researchers who have published with us. We asked the early career researchers to tell us in an essay what is amazing about the research question(s) that drove them and the highs—and lows—of the journey from hypothesis to publication.

As part of our tenth anniversary celebrations, the editorial team at Nature Communications wanted to hear from early career researchers who have published with us. We asked the early career researchers to tell us in an essay what is amazing about the research question(s) that drove them and the highs—and lows—of the journey from hypothesis to publication.

Summary: Cultivated or cultured meat is promising to revolutionize the food industry in the coming years to decades, helping to resolve concerns related to the environmental impact and ethical implications linked to conventional meat production. We talked to Dr. Sandhya Sriram, the Group CEO and Co-founder of Shiok Meats Pte. Ltd., Singapore; Prof. Shulamit Levenberg, the former Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Technion, current Director of the Technion Center for 3D Bioprinting and The Rina & Avner Schneur Center for Diabetes Research, as well as the Co-founder and Chief Scientific Adviser of Aleph Farms, Israel; and Dr. Timothy Olsen, Head of Cultured Meat in the Life Science business at Merck KGaA, Germany; about this relatively new and quickly developing sector. They explain what their teams are working on, including the biggest recent accomplishments, speak about the main challenges facing the field and how they can be resolved, and share their visions about the future of cultivated meat, aiming to provide more equitable and sustainable access to nutritious food for the growing world population.

Medicinal chemistry is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary research area which aims to improve human life by developing drugs to combat diseases. Nature Communications interviewed three scientists, Daniele Castagnolo (Associate Professor at University College London), Paramita Sarkar (postdoctoral researcher at University of Würzburg) and Dani Schulz (Director, Discovery Process Chemistry at Merck), about their careers and the past and future in medicinal chemistry research. We asked the researchers what medicinal chemistry means to them, and their opinions on the current relevance of the Rule of Five and new chemical modalities beyond the Rule of Five. We also discuss the differences between academic and industry research in medicinal chemistry and how Open Science can support collaborations for drug development.

The process of patenting inventions may be complex. Academic researchers whose primary goal is getting their work published in scientific journals often face daunting doubts when it comes to understanding the interplay between publishing and patenting their findings. We asked Prof Frank Tietze questions from the perspective of academic researchers who wish to understand how the patenting process works and—most importantly—the relation between patenting and publishing.

Organizations have been founded to build communities by bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds but with one shared identity and the common goal of strengthening their roles, increasing their visibility, and promoting their representation. In this conversation, representatives from three such organizations share their experiences and advice with Nature Communications. Priscilla Kolibea Mante (a Co-Chair), Encieh Erfani (a member of the Executive Committee) and Lisa Herzog (an alumna) of the Global Young Academy (GYA) discuss the role of their organization in supporting early career researchers. Kaela Singleton, the president-elect of Black In Neuro, discusses their mission to empower Black neuroscientists. Jennifer Thomson, the president of the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD), informs us about their efforts in providing career development, networking and leadership opportunities to women from the developing (and developed) world.

We spoke to Professor Kylie Vincent – professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford, co-founder of HydRegen Ltd, and Academic Champion for Women in Entrepreneurship – about turning academic research into industrial products.

Earthquakes are a natural hazard affecting millions of people globally every year. Researchers are working on understanding the mechanisms of earthquakes and how we can predict them from various angles, such as experimental work, theoretical modeling, and machine learning. We invited Marie Violay (EPFL Lausanne), Annemarie Baltay (USGS), Bertrand Rouet-Leduc (Kyoto University) and David Kammer (ETH Zürich) to discuss how such a multi-disciplinary approach can advance our understanding of Earthquakes.

We recently published our first Registered Report entitled ‘Value-free random exploration is linked to impulsivity’. We believe the format offers many benefits to strengthen hypothesis-driven research and are keen to share our experience with our readers as we open up the format to all fields of research. We interviewed the authors of the manuscript (Magda Dubois and Tobias Hauser) and one of the reviewers (Trevor Robbins) about their experience of the review process. We are editorially committed to take their comments on board to further improve our guidance and to optimally support our future authors.

Nature Communications is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: Shinichi Nakagawa (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and Rose O’Dea (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.

Advances in geospatial and Machine Learning techniques for large datasets of georeferenced observations have made it possible to produce model-based global maps of ecological and environmental variables. However, the implementation of existing scientific methods (especially Machine Learning models) to produce accurate global maps is often complex. Tomislav Hengl (co-founder of OpenGeoHub foundation), Johan van den Hoogen (researcher at ETH Zürich), and Devin Routh (Science IT Consultant at the University of Zürich) shared with Nature Communications their perspectives for creators and users of these maps, focusing on the key challenges in producing global environmental geospatial datasets to achieve significant impacts.

Lockdowns due to the pandemic in the last two years forced a critical number of chip-making facilities across the world to shut down, giving rise to the chip shortage issues. Prof. Meng-Fan (Marvin) Chang (National Tsing Hua University, TSMC—Taiwan), Prof. Huaqiang Wu (Tsinghua University—China), Dr. Elisa Vianello (CEA-Leti—France), Dr. Sang Joon Kim (Samsung Electronics—South Korea) and Dr. Mirko Prezioso (Mentium Techn.—US) talked to Nature Communications to better understand whether and to what extent this crisis has impacted the development of in-memory/neuromorphic chips, an emerging technology for future computing.

Chemical probes are selective small-molecule modulators, usually inhibitors, of their target protein’s function, that can be used in cell or even animal studies to interrogate the functions of their target proteins. Cheryl Arrowsmith, the leader of a new initiative called Target 2035, which seeks to identify a pharmacological modulator for most human proteins by the year 2035, and Paul Workman, the Executive Director of the nonprofit Chemical Probes Portal, an online resource dedicated to chemical probes, talked to Nature Communications about chemical probes, their respective paths to leadership positions in the field, the online resources available to those interested in the topic and the promise and value of open — collaborative — science. The below material is a modified transcript of a long discussion, preserving the conversational tone, but streamlined and edited for clarity, and thus we do not attribute the particular parts to Cheryl or Paul specifically except for when they shared their personal experiences.