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News & Views Forum |
Skin colour affects the accuracy of medical oxygen sensors
COVID-19 broadened the use of pulse oximeters for rapid blood-oxygen readings, but it also highlighted the fact that skin pigmentation alters measurements. Two groups of researchers analyse this issue, and its effects on people with dark skin.
- Matthew D. Keller
- , Brandon Harrison-Smith
- & Mohammed Shahriar Arefin
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Article |
HRG-9 homologues regulate haem trafficking from haem-enriched compartments
HRG-9 (also known as TANGO2) is an evolutionarily conserved haem chaperone that traffics haem from sites of storage or synthesis in eukaryotic cells.
- Fengxiu Sun
- , Zhenzhen Zhao
- & Caiyong Chen
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Article
| Open AccessPersonalizing exoskeleton assistance while walking in the real world
A portable ankle exoskeleton uses a data-driven method and wearable sensors to adapt to the user as they walk in a natural setting.
- Patrick Slade
- , Mykel J. Kochenderfer
- & Steven H. Collins
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Research Highlight |
‘Undruggable’ cancer-causing protein meets its match
Researchers have found a compound that can block a mutant protein linked to many tumours.
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Research Highlight |
Huge trial yields disappointing results on colonoscopy benefits
Analysis suggests that the screening method cuts risk of colorectal cancer by only a modest amount.
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Outlook |
Psychedelic research and the real world
Clinical trials of psychedelic drugs impose constraints that make it difficult to judge how effective they will be in treating people.
- Paul S. Appelbaum
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Outlook |
The psychedelic remedy for chronic pain
Drugs best known for their hallucinogenic properties, such as psilocybin, could help people beat the agony of migraines and other painful maladies.
- Clare Watson
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Article
| Open AccessPD-1-cis IL-2R agonism yields better effectors from stem-like CD8+ T cells
Binding of the PD1-IL2v immunocytokine to PD-1 and IL-2Rβγ on the same cell leads to an alternative differentiation of stem-like CD8+ T cells into better effectors rather than exhausted T cells in models of both chronic infection and cancer.
- Laura Codarri Deak
- , Valeria Nicolini
- & Pablo Umaña
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Article |
A mechanism for oxidative damage repair at gene regulatory elements
The nuclear mitotic apparatus protein NuMA helps to protect genes from oxidative damage by occupying regions around transcription start sites, binding DNA repair factors and promoting transcription following damage.
- Swagat Ray
- , Arwa A. Abugable
- & Sherif F. El-Khamisy
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News & Views |
The origins of medulloblastoma tumours in humans
How certain subgroups of a childhood brain tumour called a medulloblastoma arise has been unclear. Evidence now implicates a cell type found only in developing human brains as the originator of these tumours.
- Timothy N. Phoenix
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News Feature |
The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research
Funders and publishers are increasingly asking researchers to account for the role of sex in experiments — a requirement that’s contentious and hard to get right.
- Emily Willingham
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News |
Prehistoric child’s amputation is oldest surgery of its kind
Skeleton missing lower left leg and dated to 31,000 years ago provides the earliest known evidence for surgical limb removal.
- McKenzie Prillaman
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News & Views |
From the archive: school physics, and Shakespeare’s cause of death
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News & Views |
From the archive: pollution link to mental health, and museum envy
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
Could long COVID be linked to herpes viruses? Early data offer a hint
Low cortisol levels and herpes-virus reactivation are associated with prolonged COVID-19 symptoms, preliminary research suggests.
- Emily Waltz
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Article
| Open AccessBrain–phenotype models fail for individuals who defy sample stereotypes
Predictive models that relate brain activity to phenotype reliably fail when applied to subgroups of participants who do not fit stereotypical profiles, showing that the utility of a one-size-fits-all modelling approach is limited.
- Abigail S. Greene
- , Xilin Shen
- & R. Todd Constable
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Research Highlight |
Designer antiviral takes aim at one of influenza’s soft spots
Influenza A could have trouble mutating its way past a molecule that damages a crucial structure in the viral genome.
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News |
How much virus does a person with COVID exhale? New research has answers
One ‘superspreader’ with Omicron shed 1,000 times as much viral RNA as those with Alpha or Delta.
- McKenzie Prillaman
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News |
COVID rebound is surprisingly common — even without Paxlovid
Viral levels resurge in more than 10% of untreated people with COVID-19, but early data hint that the rebound is even more pronounced after antiviral treatment.
- Ewen Callaway
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News & Views |
Immune cells use hunger hormones to aid healing
Immune cells called monocytes have long been implicated in the killing of invading bacteria. However, a closer look reveals a surprising role for them: monocytes partner with a hormone to improve skin healing after bacterial infection.
- Vishwa Deep Dixit
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Article
| Open AccessDiverse mutational landscapes in human lymphocytes
Sequencing of individual human lymphocyte clones shows that they are highly prone to mutations, with higher burdens in memory cells than in naive cells arising from mutational processes associated with differentiation and tissue residency.
- Heather E. Machado
- , Emily Mitchell
- & Peter J. Campbell
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News Feature |
Long-COVID treatments: why the world is still waiting
After a slow start, researchers are beginning to test ways to combat the lasting symptoms of the disease.
- Heidi Ledford
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Article
| Open AccessDOCK2 is involved in the host genetics and biology of severe COVID-19
A genome-wide association study highlights a variant in DOCK2, which is common in East Asian populations but rare in Europeans, as a host genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19.
- Ho Namkoong
- , Ryuya Edahiro
- & Yukinori Okada
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Comment |
Partially revived pig organs could force a rethink of critical-care processes
Procedures used in life support and to preserve organs in deceased human donors might one day need to be re-evaluated in the wake of a study that restored some cell function in pigs one hour after death.
- Brendan Parent
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Career Feature |
Decriminalization of marijuana opens doors for some scientists
A growing interest in cannabis has led to new career opportunities.
- Chris Woolston
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News & Views |
Improved organ recovery after oxygen deprivation
A modified method for delivering oxygen to the whole body can restore function in pig organs one hour after the animals have died. The achievement points to ways to improve transplants and the treatment of strokes and heart attacks.
- Robert J. Porte
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Nature Podcast |
Massive Facebook study reveals a key to social mobility
Friendships with people from different economic backgrounds could boost your income, and reviving pig organs after death.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Benjamin Thompson
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Article |
Cellular recovery after prolonged warm ischaemia of the whole body
OrganEx—an extracorporeal pulsatile-perfusion system with cytoprotective perfusate for porcine whole-body settings—preserved tissue integrity, decreased cell death and restored selected molecular and cellular processes across multiple vital organs after 1 h of warm ischaemia in pigs.
- David Andrijevic
- , Zvonimir Vrselja
- & Nenad Sestan
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Article
| Open AccessBrown-fat-mediated tumour suppression by cold-altered global metabolism
Mild cold exposure activates a substantial amount of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in a patient with cancer, reducing tumour-associated glucose uptake, and activation of BAT in mice inhibits the growth of tumours by decreasing blood glucose and impeding glycolysis-based metabolism in cancer cells.
- Takahiro Seki
- , Yunlong Yang
- & Yihai Cao
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Article
| Open AccessTeixobactin kills bacteria by a two-pronged attack on the cell envelope
Using a combination of methods, the mechanism of the antibiotic teixobactin is revealed.
- Rhythm Shukla
- , Francesca Lavore
- & Markus Weingarth
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News Feature |
Heart disease after COVID: what the data say
Some studies suggest that the risk of cardiovascular problems, such as a heart attack or stroke, remains high even many months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection clears up. Researchers are starting to pin down the frequency of these issues and what is causing the damage.
- Saima May Sidik
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Research Briefing |
Whole-genome sequencing of the UK Biobank
We determined the whole-genome sequences of 150,119 individuals from the UK Biobank and identified more than 600 million sequence variants. The comprehensive data identify novel associations with human traits and show the functional importance of sequence variants inside and outside protein-coding regions.
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Article
| Open AccessThe sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank
To measure selection on variants, whole-genome sequencing of approximately 150,000 individuals from the UK Biobank is used to rank sequence variants by their level of depletion.
- Bjarni V. Halldorsson
- , Hannes P. Eggertsson
- & Kari Stefansson
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Obituary |
Colin Blakemore (1944–2022)
Neuroscientist, science communicator and advocate for openness in research.
- Fiona Fox
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News |
The hunt for drugs for mild COVID: scientists seek to treat those at lower risk
People who are unlikely to develop severe COVID-19 have no widely approved medications to ease the illness.
- Saima May Sidik
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News |
CRISPR ‘cousin’ put to the test in landmark heart-disease trial
Gene-therapy test launches pivotal year for precise genome-editing technique known as base editing.
- Heidi Ledford
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News & Views |
Persister cells that survive chemotherapy are pinpointed
A close look at the cells that drive cancer growth after chemotherapy, and thereby contribute to fatal tumour progression, provides new insights into the identity of the cells that manage to survive treatment.
- Sumaiyah K. Rehman
- & Catherine A. O’Brien
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News |
Clinical trials for pig-to-human organ transplants inch closer
US regulatory agency signals willingness to allow first xenotransplant trials.
- Max Kozlov
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Research Highlight |
Painkillers are dispensed less freely by night-shift doctors
Physicians show less empathy at the end of a night shift than after a daytime stint — and are less likely to prescribe drugs for treating pain.
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Outlook |
Olfactory receptors are not unique to the nose
The hundreds of receptors that give us our sense of smell have been found to have important roles in other parts of the body, and the prospect of targeting them with drugs is growing.
- Liam Drew
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News & Views |
Cancer cells spread aggressively during sleep
The deadly spread of cancer occurs predominantly during sleep, as revealed by an analysis of migrating human tumour cells in the bloodstream. What are the implications of this finding for the treatment of cancer?
- Harrison Ball
- & Sunitha Nagrath
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News |
These cancer cells wake up when people sleep
Researchers make ‘striking’ discovery that breast cancer cells are more likely to jump into the blood when people are resting.
- Freda Kreier
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News |
How common is long COVID? Why studies give different answers
Enormous databases do not necessarily allow scientists to solve long COVID mysteries, such as how well vaccination protects against the condition.
- Heidi Ledford
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Article |
Androgen receptor blockade promotes response to BRAF/MEK-targeted therapy
Treatment with neoadjuvant BRAF/MEK-targeted therapy results in higher rates of major pathological response in female compared with male patients with melanoma, and pharmacological inhibition of androgen receptor signalling improved the responses of male and female mice to BRAF/MEK-targeted therapy.
- Christopher P. Vellano
- , Michael G. White
- & Jennifer A. Wargo
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News |
New COVID drugs face delays as trials grow more difficult
Fewer people are eligible for the massive studies needed to test treatments for severe COVID-19.
- Saima May Sidik
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News & Views |
Mutation and tissue lineage lead to organ-specific cancer
Cancer-promoting mutations tend to result in tumours arising only in certain organs, but the reasons for this specificity are not fully understood. The analysis of human kidney cancer provides clues to solving this mystery.
- Emily N. Arner
- & W. Kimryn Rathmell
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Nature Podcast |
Audio long read: The brain-reading devices helping paralysed people to move, talk and touch
As implants that decode thoughts become more sophisticated, the companies making them are attracting major financial backing.
- Liam Drew
- & Benjamin Thompson
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News & Views |
Designer protein circuits enable safe cancer immunotherapy
Synthetic receptor proteins can enable customized and flexible control of immune cells called T lymphocytes. A defined framework for the proteins’ design now improves their potential for use in cancer immunotherapy.
- Mohamad Hamieh
- & Maria Themeli
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Nature Podcast |
Robot exercises shoulder cells for better tissue transplants
A robot shoulder that stretches tendon tissue, and identifying misperceptions that can lead to vaccine hesitancy.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Nick Petrić Howe