Search

Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care handles short-term ones. Here, authors show chronic conditions account for most of the global health burden, with 68% of DALYs and 93% of YLDs attributed to chronic care needs.

Geospatial estimates of the prevalence of anemia in women of reproductive age across 82 low-income and middle-income countries reveals considerable heterogeneity and inequality at national and subnational levels, with few countries on track to meet the WHO Global Nutrition Targets by 2030.

Water plays an essential role in enzyme catalysis, but direct observations linking enzyme catalysis and active-site water pose a significant challenge due to experimental difficulties. Here, the authors employ an ultraviolet photolysis technique with temperature-controlled X-ray crystallography to track the catalytic pathway of carbonic anhydrase II at 1.2 Å resolution.

Lead-free piezoelectric materials with large electromechanical responses are important for nano electromechanical systems devices. Here the authors defect engineer Si integrated BaTiO3 to enhance the electromechanical response and report a large electrostrictive response at frequencies <10 kHz.

Two-dimensional semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides strongly absorb visible light. Kozawa et al.study the photocarrier relaxation in mono- and bilayer MX2 samples and find that loss of photocarriers by direct recombination becomes a second-order process when excitation is in resonance with band nesting.

Fine-scale geospatial mapping of overweight and wasting (two components of the double burden of malnutrition) in 105 LMICs shows that overweight has increased from 5.2% in 2000 to 6.0% in children under 5 in 2017. Although overall wasting decreased over the same period, most countries are not on track to meet the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025.

The advantage of living in cities compared with rural areas with respect to height and BMI in children and adolescents has generally become smaller globally from 1990 to 2020, except in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rajeev Varshney and colleagues resequence the whole genomes of 292 pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) cultivars, landraces and wild species. They find genomic regions that were likely targets of domestication and perform genome-wide association analysis to identify candidate genes for agriculturally relevant traits.

An analysis of 24,202 critical cases of COVID-19 identifies potentially druggable targets in inflammatory signalling (JAK1), monocyte–macrophage activation and endothelial permeability (PDE4A), immunometabolism (SLC2A5 and AK5), and host factors required for viral entry and replication (TMPRSS2 and RAB2A).

A global network of researchers was formed to investigate the role of human genetics in SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 severity; this paper reports 13 genome-wide significant loci and potentially actionable mechanisms in response to infection.

Whole-genome sequencing of 3,171 cultivated and 195 wild chickpea accessions is used to construct a chickpea pan-genome, providing insight into chickpea evolution and enabling breeding strategies that could improve crop productivity.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

Asia is an emerging centre of growth in the field of urology owing to large and varied patient populations, the availability of a trained workforce, the use of English as a common language, and overall low costs. Asian urology has immense potential to expand in areas in which it currently lags behind, especially research. In this Perspective, Kumar uses a strength–weakness–opportunities–threats (SWOT) analysis to discuss the current state of urology in Asia and comment on the future direction of this field in this region.

Some bacteria can feed on live fungi through unclear mechanisms. Here, the authors show that a T3SS-secreted protein, which is homologous to phage tail proteins, allows a Burkholderia gladioli strain to kill and feed on various fungal species.

Successful meiotic homologous recombination relies on the tight regulation of RAD51 and DMC1 strand exchange proteins. This study shows that the conserved FIGNL1-FIRRM complex plays a critical role for fertility by restraining uncontrolled assembly of RAD51 and DMC1 filament during meiosis.

Analysis of HbA1c and FPG levels across 117 population-based studies demonstrates regional variation in prevalence of previously undiagnosed screen-detected diabetes using one or both measures and suggests that use of elevated FPG alone could underestimate diabetes prevalence in low- and middle-income countries.

The metal-insulator transition in VO2 is concomitant with the structural transition, making purely electrical control challenging. Here the authors use a modulation-doped heterostructure to demonstrate modulation of the transition temperature with doping, without introducing structural changes.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

The interaction between seasonally-induced non-tectonic and tectonic deformation along the Himalayan plate boundary is still debated. Here, the authors propose that seasonal hydrological loading can influence tectonic deformation along this plate boundary using continuous GPS measurements and satellite data.

Kramers nodal lines are doubly degenerate nodal lines connecting time-reversal invariant momenta, which are predicted to exist in achiral, non-centrosymmetric crystals with spin-orbit interactions. Here, the authors use ARPES and DFT to demonstrate signatures of Kramers nodal lines in a non-centrosymmetric charge density wave-hosting crystal.

Analyses of the proportions of individuals who have completed key levels of schooling across all low- and middle-income countries from 2000 to 2017 reveal inequalities across countries as well as within populations.

Highly recurrent hotspot r.3A>G mutations are identified in U1 splicesomal small nuclear RNAs in about 50% of Sonic hedgehog medulloblastomas, which result in disrupted RNA splicing and the activation of oncogenes.

Derailed differentiation of human-specific progenitors of the developing cerebellar rhombic lip is the cause of group 4 medulloblastoma, the most common childhood brain tumour. 

Rout et al. sequence ten type 2 diabetes candidate regions identified from genome-wide association studies in endogamous Punjabi Sikh families, unrelated Sikhs and families from three other Indian endogamous ethnic groups. They highlight the increased burden of rare intronic variants in MODY and other genes in diabetic families from Asian Indian endogamous groups, which have low polygenic risk scores.

Koplev et al. apply interactive system analyses to infer and characterize gene-regulatory networks (GRNs) active within and across tissues that cause cardiometabolic disease and coronary artery disease (CAD). By including GWAS in the integrative analysis, the provided multiorgan framework of GRNs is suggested to explain significantly more heritability of CAD than what has been achieved by analyzing GWAS alone.

A study of SARS-CoV-2 variants examining their transmission, infectivity, and potential resistance to therapies provides insights into the biology of the Delta variant and its role in the global pandemic.

Cas13b can be harnessed to target and degrade RNA transcripts inside a cellular environment. Here the authors reprogram Cas13b to target SARSCoV-2 transcripts in infected mammalian cells and reveal its resilience to variants thanks to single mismatch tolerance.

Multi-ancestry genome-wide association analyses identify new risk loci for Parkinson’s disease, and fine-mapping and co-localization analyses implicate candidate genes whose expression is associated with disease susceptibility.

The regulation of the Hedgehog (Hh) pathway by the kinase DYRK1A is controversial. Here the authors uncover a novel inhibitory activity of DYRK1A that functions to destabilize the Hh downstream transcription factor GLI1 by destabilizing actin and preventing the nuclear accumulation of protective MKL1/JMJD1A complexes.