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A synthetic biology approach was used to engineer Vibrio natriegens into a strain capable of bioremediating complex organic pollutants in saline wastewater and soils, thereby addressing notable threats to marine biosecurity.

Chang’e-6 mission’s analysis of farside lunar soils reveals stronger magnetic properties than nearside samples and identifies distinct magmatic and impact-formed minerals. This offers insights into the Moon’s magnetic history and crustal anomalies.

Current brain-targeted delivery strategies using orthosteric sites of receptors is highly susceptible to cross-reactions limiting efficiency. Here, the authors report on the allosteric targeting of receptors to avoid this and demonstrate application in drug delivery across the blood brain barrier.

Worldwide, the number of only-child families is increasing. This research examines how growing up without siblings affects adult brain structure, function and connectivity, cognition, personality and mental health.

Selectively extracting U(VI) from seawater is challenging. Here, authors propose a dynamically matched spatial coordination strategy to improve the extraction of U(VI). With the size-matching and the spatial coordination, uranium species are precisely captured in confined coordination space.

The suboptimal performance of perovskite solar cells based on non-fullerene acceptor as the electron-transporting layer underscores the need for their molecular engineering. Here, authors substitute the core of Y6 with phenanthroline and crown ether, achieving a certified efficiency of 25.59%.

Reaching the depths of the respiratory tract is hard even with vapor-based drug delivery. Here, the authors devise inhalable biohybrid microrobots that, thanks to their motility, reach deeper regions of the lungs.

Sun et al. report human lifespan changes in the brain’s functional connectome in 33,250 individuals, which highlights critical growth milestones and distinct maturation patterns and offers a normative reference for development, aging and diseases.

Socioeconomic status is multidimensional and can change over time. Xu, Lui, Ji et al. found dimension-specific, late-stage-specific and change-specific socioeconomic effects on brain, cognition, personality and emotion.

Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG promotes intestinal adaptation and stabilizes gut microbiota by activating intestinal FXR signaling in short bowel syndrome. It also enhances secondary while lowering primary bile acids and protects the mucosal barrier.

Anti-Kasha processes have potential in organic luminogens, but design of materials with these characteristics is challenging. Here, the authors report the development of a host-guest system with anti-Kasha behaviour and triplet energy transfer.

Glutamine synthetase (GS) relies on Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to activate glutamate (Glu) and are vital for maintaining ammonia and Glu homeostasis, but GS function is impaired during ATP-deficient neurotoxic events. Here the authors report polyphosphate-manganese nanosheets having GS-like activity independent of ATP to promote the conversion of Glu to glutamine in excitatory neurotoxic cells.

Lin et al. show that MCM8 protects vascular health by mediating nitric-oxide-dependent mitophagy. The common East-Asian MCM8-P276 variant is ineffective in mitophagy, which potentiates cGAS-STING and type I interferon signaling in a mouse model of Kawasaki disease.

Cytochromes bd oxidase (Cyt-bd) catalyzes the reduction of oxygen to water and is the terminal oxidase in the respiratory chain of prokaryotes. Here, the authors present the 2.8 Å cryo-EM structure of Mycobacterium smegmatis Cyt-bd and identify two potential oxygen access channels in the structure, which is of interest for the development of novel antituberculosis drugs.

Glycogen can be metabolized via glycogenolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway as well as into the production of UDP glucose, which when secreted can bind the P2Y₁₄ receptor. Here the authors show how these glycogen metabolism pathways contribute to proinflammatory macrophage activation and susceptibility to sepsis.

The authors combine 393,139 forest inventory plots with satellite data to understand the impact of biodiversity on the sensitivity of spring leaf-out dates to temperature (S_T). They show that high diversity significantly weakens S_T, a relationship that Earth system models largely fail to reproduce.

Sun et al. identify a stem cell population of CD133⁺ endothelial-like cells (ELCs) that contribute to neovascularization. ELCs become dysfunctional with age, but ELC supplementation or pamidronate treatment to counter ELC aging promotes longevity.

Patients treated for multiple myeloma often experience relapse due to antigen loss, thus necessitating the identification of additional therapeutic targets. In this study, the authors demonstrate that FcRH5 is expressed on MM cells and can be targeted using chimaeric antigen receptor T cells in mice.

The FarmGTEx Project aims to understand genetic control of gene activity under diverse biological and environmental contexts in domestic animals, providing a foundation for improving animal precision breeding, adaptation and human health.

Ultraconserved RNAs are a class of long non-coding RNAs whose functions are yet to be identified. Here Guo and colleagues show that an ultraconserved RNA uc.372 promotes lipogenesis and lipid accumulation within the hepatocytes by suppressing the maturation of miR-195/miR-4668 that inhibits lipogenic gene expression.

Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than previously thought, perhaps by initially scavenging with humans. Here Zhang et al. present genetic evidence that genes positively selected during dog domestication show extensive parallelism with human analogues.

Sustained Mars exploration requires in situ synthesis of vital chemicals such as oxygen. Now a data-driven platform for synthesizing oxygen-producing electrocatalysts from Martian meteorites using robotics and artificial intelligence is developed, allowing automated screening of the optimal catalyst formula. This approach demonstrates materials discovery under challenging circumstances and without human intervention.

Complex morphology in donor/acceptor organic heterostructures hampers the understanding of device performance. Here, the origin of the high voltage loss in organic solar cells is ascribed to the too small spacing between the donor/acceptor molecules in the active layer, and the voltage loss can be reduced by increasing the donor/acceptor spacing.

Chan et al. report that 3′ UTR splicing is widespread and enhanced across different cancer types and is associated with more advanced tumour progression.

A-to-I editing in animals is catalyzed by enzymes of the Adenosine Deaminase Acting on RNA family, orthologues of which do not exist in fungi. Here, Feng et al. characterise the enzymes involved in A-to-I mRNA editing in Fusarium graminearum.

Diheme-containing succinate:menaquinone oxidoreductases (Sdh) are members of the complex II superfamily. Here, the authors present the 2.8 Å cryo-EM structure of Mycobacterium smegmatis Sdh2, which reveals membrane-anchored SdhF as a component of the complex and they discuss the electron/proton transfer pathway in the Sdh2 trimer.

Modifiers of diverse materials exhibit structures or compositions that differ from a solute molecule but often contain similar functional motifs that facilitate molecular recognition for modifier binding to crystal surfaces. Here the authors examine the intrinsic capability of tautomers, or structural isomers, to operate as crystal growth inhibitors.’

A reproductive barrier between japonica and indica rice subspecies hinders hybrid breeding. Here, the authors reveal that structural and copy number variations of a pollen-essential gene, which encodes a DUF1618-___domain protein, result in allelic suppression and subsequently cause hybrid male sterility.

Cross-ancestry genome-wide association studies of 3,414 brain imaging phenotypes in Chinese Han and white British participants identify autosomal and X-chromosomal associations in more diverse populations.

Lymphoid progenitors migrate from the bone marrow into the thymus to give rise to T and NK cell lineages. Here the authors characterize a lymphotoxin receptor beta-dependent population of thymic endothelial cells that guide lymphoid progenitor homing in the thymus.

By using several decades of hydrographic data and an inverse biogeochemical model that implicitly accounts for all known export pathways, a top-down estimate of the strength of the biological carbon pump is calculated.

A simple acid treatment can improve high-temperature annealed electrolyte surfaces, resulting in improved performance and stability at lower temperatures for protonic ceramic fuel/electrolysis cells, offering new understanding for sustainable energy infrastructures.

Obesity is often accompanied by chronic inflammation. Li and colleagues show that, in mice fed high-fat diets, IL-1 signaling in adipocytes induces an unconventional IRAK2 translocation to mitochondria and suppresses respiratory super-complex formation to alter mitochondrial function, and exacerbates obesity.

Non-trivial topological magnetic textures, such as skyrmions, merons or vortices, possess topological charges Q with absolute values smaller or equal to one. Now, skyrmion bundles, multi-Q three-dimensional skyrmionic textures, are observed and their current-driven dynamics are studied.

The sluggish oxygen evolution reaction kinetics severely hinder the development of photoelectrochemical water splitting. Here the authors introduce Fe-In-S clusters onto the surface of photoanode to effectively lower the electrochemical reaction barrier.

The immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment impairs immunotherapy in poorly immunogenic cancer. Here, the authors load an alginate gel with GM-CSF, CpG oligonucleotides and doxorubicin-iRGD to promote immunogenic death of tumour cells and improve immunotherapy efficacy in triple negative breast cancer models.

Observational analyses from the China Kadoorie Biobank found that alcohol consumption was associated with higher risks of 61 diseases in Chinese men, with most of these associations confirmed by genetic analyses.

Genome-wide association meta-analyses in populations of East Asian and European ancestries identify variant–trait associations for 44 hippocampal traits and provide insight into the genetic architectures of hippocampal and subfield volumes.