Editorials
Long-planned genetic catalogue probes gene regulation.
doi: 10.1038/550157a
Organic matter drifts down to the equatorial ocean floor in distinct patterns.
doi: 10.1038/550158b
Annual jamborees fail to ignite public passion but are crucial to progress on global-warming.
doi: 10.1038/550158a
News
Tribal leaders are developing a policy for genetic research and data sharing, potentially ending a 15-year moratorium.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.22780
If officials don't act soon, research institutions could start shutting down next year.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.22757
Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson share the prize for developing a technique to image biomolecules.
doi: 10.1038/nature.2017.22738
Ecologists catalogue bird and mammal populations as warming transforms Death Valley.
doi: 10.1038/550168a
Project obtains tissues from recently deceased individuals to look for the origins of disease.
doi: 10.1038/550169a
News Features
After decades of delays, a challenging clean-up project is gaining ground.
doi: 10.1038/550172a
How Anne Wojcicki led her company from the brink of failure to scientific pre-eminence.
doi: 10.1038/550174a
News & Views
A collection of papers catalogues the associations between genetic variation and gene expression in healthy tissues – the largest analysis of this kind so far. See Article p.204 & Letters p.239, p.244 & p.249
doi: 10.1038/550190a
Pariahs are fundamental building blocks in a branch of mathematics called group theory, but seem to be unconnected from both physics and other areas of mathematics. Such a connection has now been identified.
doi: 10.1038/nature24147
Cancer cells can develop an 'addiction' to the drugs they are treated with, so that they need the drugs to survive. Analysis of the underlying mechanism reveals a potential clinical strategy for harnessing this phenomenon. See Letter p.270
doi: 10.1038/nature24148
Although liquid metals are effective fluids for heat transfer, pumping them at high temperatures is limited by their corrosiveness to solid metals. A clever pump design addresses this challenge using only ceramics. See Article p.199
doi: 10.1038/550194b
The discovery of the receptors for the protein GDF15 suggests that it regulates food uptake through the emergency pathway — a neuronal circuit that causes weight loss in response to cancer, tissue damage and stress. See Letter p.255
doi: 10.1038/nature24143
Observations of the distant dwarf planet Haumea constrain its size, shape and density, and reveal an encircling planetary ring. The discovery suggests that rings are not as rare in the Solar System as previously thought. See Letter p.219
doi: 10.1038/550197a
Articles
By using ceramics for the mechanical and sealing components of a mechanical pump, liquid metal can be circulated continuously at temperatures at least as high as 1,673 kelvin.
doi: 10.1038/nature24054
Samples of different body regions from hundreds of human donors are used to study how genetic variation influences gene expression levels in 44 disease-relevant tissues.
doi: 10.1038/nature24277
In Escherichia coli, the control of RNA polymerase backtracking by transcription elongation factors impairs DNA break repair by affecting RecBCD resection and consequently RecA loading at sites far removed from the original DNA break.
doi: 10.1038/nature23907
Letters
Observations of a stellar occultation of Haumea, one of the four known trans-Neptunian dwarf planets, constrain its size, shape and density, and reveal a ring coplanar with Haumea’s largest moon.
doi: 10.1038/nature24051
Light-field-driven control of electrons in a conductor is demonstrated by inducing a current by laser pulses in graphene that is sensitive to the carrier-envelope phase.
doi: 10.1038/nature23900
High-performance semiconductor films with vertical compositions that are designed to
atomic-scale precision provide the foundation for modern integrated circuitry and
novel materials discovery. One approach to realizing such
films is sequential layer-by-layer assembly, whereby atomically thin two-dimensional
building blocks are vertically stacked, and held together by van der Waals
interactions. With this approach, graphene and
transition-metal dichalcogenides—which represent one- and three-atom-thick
two-dimensional building blocks, respectively—have been used to realize
previously inaccessible heterostructures with interesting physical properties. However, no large-scale assembly method exists at
present that maintains the intrinsic properties of these two-dimensional building
blocks while producing pristine interlayer interfaces,
thus limiting the layer-by-layer assembly method to small-scale proof-of-concept
demonstrations. Here we report the generation of wafer-scale semiconductor films
with a very high level of spatial uniformity and pristine interfaces. The vertical
composition and properties of these films are designed at the atomic scale using
layer-by-layer assembly of two-dimensional building blocks under vacuum. We
fabricate several large-scale, high-quality heterostructure films and devices,
including superlattice films with vertical compositions designed layer-by-layer,
batch-fabricated tunnel device arrays with resistances that can be tuned over four
orders of magnitude, band-engineered heterostructure tunnel diodes, and
millimetre-scale ultrathin membranes and windows. The stacked films are detachable,
suspendable and compatible with water or plastic surfaces, which will enable their
integration with advanced optical and mechanical systems.
doi: 10.1038/nature23905
By exploiting geometric constraints and interfacial forces instead of chemistry, colloidal clusters can be controllably coalesced into particles with uniformly distributed surface patches.
doi: 10.1038/nature23901
The authors show that rare genetic variants contribute to large gene expression changes across diverse human tissues and provide an integrative method for interpretation of rare variants in individual genomes.
doi: 10.1038/nature24267
Multiple transcriptome approaches, including single-cell sequencing, demonstrate that escape from X chromosome inactivation is widespread and occasionally variable between cells, chromosomes, and tissues, resulting in sex-biased expression of at least 60 genes and potentially contributing to sex-specific differences in health and disease.
doi: 10.1038/nature24265
Using the GTEx data and others, a comprehensive analysis of adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing in mammals is presented; targets of the various ADAR enzymes are identified, as are several potential regulators of editing, such as AIMP2.
doi: 10.1038/nature24041
GDNF receptor alpha-like is a brainstem-restricted receptor for growth and differentiation factor 15, regulating appetite and body weight in non-homeostatic conditions by activating the emergency circuit response to disease and toxin stresses.
doi: 10.1038/nature24042
Deletion of the Hippo pathway component Salvador in mouse hearts with established ischaemic heart failure after myocardial infarction induces a reparative genetic program with increased scar border vascularity, reduced fibrosis, and recovery of pumping function.
doi: 10.1038/nature24045
In budding yeast, glucose withdrawal, via the Rag GTPases, leads to TORC1 inhibition through its re-organization into a giant, vacuole-associated helix named a TOROID (TORC1 organized in inhibited domain).
doi: 10.1038/nature24021
The identification of an ERK2–JUNB–FRA1 signalling pathway that drives addiction to therapeutic drugs in cancer cells, and an ERK2-dependent phenotype switch that precedes cell death after drug withdrawal, may help to guide therapies that exploit the addiction phenotype.
doi: 10.1038/nature24037
Herpesvirus saimiri expresses a small nuclear RNA named HSUR2, with which it recruits two cellular microRNAs to repress specific mRNA targets and thereby inhibit apoptosis in infected T cells.
doi: 10.1038/nature24034
The class 2 type VI RNA-guided RNA-targeting CRISPR–Cas effector Cas13 can be engineered for RNA knockdown and binding, expanding the CRISPR toolset with a flexible platform for studying RNA in mammalian cells and therapeutic development.
doi: 10.1038/nature24049