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In this study, Aggarwal and colleagues perform prospective sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 isolates derived from asymptomatic student screening and symptomatic testing of students and staff at the University of Cambridge. They identify important factors that contributed to within university transmission and onward spread into the wider community.

Chronic infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to the emergence of viral variants that show reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies in an immunosuppressed individual treated with convalescent plasma.

Here the authors identify upstream open reading frames (uORFs), uORF1 and uORF2 in the Asian/American lineage and African uORF in the African lineage of Zika viruses, and show that uORF1 affects vimentin filaments and that the identified uORFs affect virus replication in neural cells.

Synaptotagmin 1 is involved in dopamine release. Here the authors investigate the effect of loss of Syt1 in midbrain dopaminergic neurons in mice, and find that unconditioned motor behaviour and motivation for food, are intact.

Genetic and testing data from England show that the SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern B.1.1.7 has a transmission advantage over other lineages.

Remdesivir is under evaluation for treatment of COVID-19 in clinical trials. Here, the authors report results of remdesivir treatment in a patient with COVID-19 and the genetic antibody deficiency XLA. They show a temporally correlated clinical and virological response, suggesting that remdesivir can reduce SARS-CoV-2 replication in patients.

A study of the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in England between September 2020 and June 2021 finds that interventions capable of containing previous variants were insufficient to stop the more transmissible Alpha and Delta variants.

Crystallographic, biophysical and in silico analyses indicate that the conformational state of the mechanosensitive channel MscS is determined by the reorganization, due to changes in membrane tension, of the lipids within and around the protein.

Post-international travel quarantine has been widely implemented to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 transmission, but the impacts of such policies are unclear. Here, the authors used linked genomic and contact tracing data to assess the impacts of a 14-day quarantine on return to England in summer 2020.

It is demonstrated that Bragg coherent diffraction imaging can be used to visualize dislocation propagation in three dimensions during the repeated growth and dissolution of calcite crystals.

Roger Milne and colleagues conduct a genome-wide association study for estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer combined with BRCA1 mutation carriers in a large cohort. They identify ten new risk variants and find high genetic correlation between breast cancer risk for BRCA1 mutation carriers and risk of ER-negative breast cancer in the general population.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are vulnerable to subtle adversarial perturbations that yield misclassification errors. Here, behavioral studies demonstrate that adversarial perturbations that fool ANNs similarly bias human choice.

The Omicron variant evades vaccine-induced neutralization but also fails to form syncytia, shows reduced replication in human lung cells and preferentially uses a TMPRSS2-independent cell entry pathway, which may contribute to enhanced replication in cells of the upper airway. Altered fusion and cell entry characteristics are linked to distinct regions of the Omicron spike protein.

The SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant suppresses innate immune responses more effectively than isolates of first-wave SARS-CoV-2, and this is a result of mutations outside of the spike coding region that lead to upregulation of viral innate immune antagonists.

The spike protein of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a higher affinity for ACE2 than Delta, and a marked change in its antigenicity increases Omicron’s evasion of therapeutic and vaccine-elicited neutralizing antibodies.

Frequent dispersal and short-lived local transmission clusters fuelled the 2013–2016 Ebola virus epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein is flexible, and its receptor-binding ___domain (RBD) fluctuates between open and closed conformations. Disulfide bonds are engineered into the spike ectodomain to lock the RBD in the closed state, leading to a construct with high thermostability.

Many enterovirus genomes harbour an upstream ORF (uORF) that is subject to strong purifying selection and encodes a protein (UP) that associates with membranes and facilitates virus release. UP-knockout echoviruses are attenuated at late stages of infection in human intestinal organoids.

Programmed −1 ribosomal frameshifting (−1 PRF) is a mechanism whereby specific signals within mRNAs direct ribosomes to shift into an alternative reading frame. Here the authors describe a mechanism of −1 PRF that is temporally regulated by a viral protein over the course of the virus replicative cycle.

Transcriptomic and proteomic profiling of blood samples from individuals with COVID-19 reveals immune cell and hematopoietic progenitor cell alterations that are differentially associated with disease severity.

In vivo probing of RNA structures with COMRADES yields insight into RNA folding of the ZIKA virus genome and its interaction with host RNAs.

Cryo-electron microscopy structures of feline calicivirus and its cellular receptor show that twelve copies of the minor capsid protein VP2 form a portal-like assembly arranged about a pore in the capsid shell.

Christopher Haiman and colleagues report a genome-wide association study for estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancer in women of African and European ancestry. They identify a variant at the TERT-CLPTM1L locus on 5p15 as associated with ER-negative and triple-negative breast cancer. This locus also harbors multiple variants associated with a range of other cancers.

A genome-wide screen of 16,471 RNAi triggers targeting SARS-CoV-2 genome by Sens.AI. identifies hyper-potent RNAi candidates against SARS-CoV-2 that are further validated in vitro and in vivo.