Comment

Johnstone and Galloway contend that, to support complex patterning within engineered tissues, synthetic biology should be able to manage transcriptional noise.

Mehta and Vanderschuren advocate for more stringent standards in reporting agricultural biotechnology research.

Solovei and Mirny discuss features and functions of three types of chromatin loops and the differences between them.

Wu and Zamore discuss models of piRNA function and suggest experimental criteria to be followed in order to validate them.

Spencer Freeman draws attention to the role of ion fluxes and vesicular solute composition in regulating dynamics of endomembranes.

Michael Levin and colleagues discuss how computer-designed organisms ― biobots and xenobots ― are driving a new research field with applications in biomedicine and engineering, and associated ethical and philosophical questions.

Circadian clocks control our immune system, infections and pharmacokinetics. Ray and Reddy argue that better understanding the effects of circadian biology on SARS-CoV-2 infection would improve COVID-19 management.

The Human Cell Atlas consortium in collaborative work on COVID-19

Anne Brunet discusses the different model organisms that are used for the study of ageing mechanisms and their advantages and disadvantages.

Hans Clevers discusses the value of organoids as an experimental platform for understanding the biology of novel viruses.

Shivashankar and Uhler propose a link between cell mechano-genomics and coronavirus replication with implications for understanding the pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2.

Avraham Ashkenazi draws attention to the role of lipids in the pathology of Parkinson disease.

Mutations perturb molecular networks; thus, a model of molecular interactions will be required to fully understand complex phenotypes.

Michiel Vermeulen and Jérôme Déjardin recommend how best to characterize the proteins that bind any specific genomic locus.

Roop Mallik argues for the importance of considering the impact that membrane lipids have on motors, and the dynamics of the membrane–motor interface, in studies of cytoskeletal motors.

Filamentation is a relatively unknown mode of enzyme regulation, which increases functional diversity.

David Jones discusses problems associated with the application of machine learning to biology and advocates for improving publishing standards in this area through a more thorough reporting on the design of the computational experiments.

Stahl and Raposo discuss the emerging paradigm of cell–cell signalling via extracellular vesicles, highlighting key questions that need to be answered to firmly establish extracellular vesicles as important signalling entities.

Rodríguez-Paredes and Lyko argue that non-histone proteins should be considered when assessing cancer drugs that target protein methylation.

Kroemer and Lopez-Otín discuss how the induction of autophagy could slow down human ageing and thus also delay the onset of ageing-associated diseases, by decelerating biological clocks.