Mounting evidence implicates microglia in neurodegeneration, but linking disease-associated genetic variants to target genes and cellular phenotypes is hindered by the inaccessibility of these cells. ...

Nature Biotechnology - Defining and benchmarking open problems in single-cell analysis

Alzheimer’s disease is a severe neurodegenerative disorder, with multifactorial mechanisms of disease development and progression. Evidence from genetic association studies, animal models, and clinica...

Crohn's disease (CD) is a heterogeneous disease characterized by chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract driven by an aberrant immune response. To understand the immune mechanisms underlyin...

Total cell cycle duration is a key hallmark of cancer initiation, and determines whether defects in apoptosis, senescence, immune surveillance, angiogenesis, DNA repair, polarity and proliferation lea...

Metabologenomics integrates metabolomics with other omics data types to comprehensively study the genetic and environmental factors that influence metabolism. These multi-omics data can be incorporated into genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs), which are highly curated knowledge bases that explicitly account for genes, transcripts, proteins and metabolites. By including all known biochemical reactions catalysed by enzymes and transporters encoded in the human genome, GEMs analyse and predict the behaviour of complex metabolic networks. Continued advancements to the scale and scope of GEMs — from cells and tissues to microbiomes and the whole body — have helped to design effective treatments and develop better diagnostic tools for metabolic diseases. Furthermore, increasing amounts of multi-omics data are incorporated into GEMs to better identify the underlying mechanisms, biomarkers and potential drug targets of metabolic diseases. Metabologenomics integrates multi-omics data into geno

Cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer cells destroy target cells using a mechanically active cytolytic immune synapse. This Review examines the various ways in which mechanical forces contribute ...

Germinal centre B cells modify their mutation rate to preserve high-affinity receptors, thereby safeguarding high-affinity B cell lineages and enhancing the outcomes of antibody affinity maturation.

Whole-gene sequencing of microdissected gastric glands from individuals with and without gastric cancer reveals distinct patterns of somatic mutations and provides insights into influen...

The pleotropic nature of interleukin-2 (IL2) has allowed it to be used as both a pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory therapeutic agent, through pro…

The cobraa model extends the pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent to identify structured population history by examination of the model transition matrix. Applied to human polymorphism data, cob...

We lack tools to edit DNA sequences at scales necessary to study 99% of the human genome that is noncoding. To address this gap, we applied CRISPR prime editing to insert recombination handles into re...

Research highlights from the week

Nature Communications - The authors applied a genomic and evolutionary approach to study Staphylococcus aureus in host adaptation during colonisation revealing signals of adaption in metabolic...