Articles in 2016

Presenting science to politicians in a way they can understand can have good outcomes.

Gene exploration is providing unexpected insights into inflammatory bowel disease, and getting scientists closer to finding treatments that target the biological mechanisms.

Cage-like structures can self-assemble from suitable metal ions and organic linkers, but the size of the assemblies was limited. The surprise discovery of a new series of cages opens up fresh horizons for self-assembly. See Letter p.563

The week in science: 16–22 December 2016.

As holiday feasts begin, Laura Lawson surveys the fruitful history of urban farming.

Freeze on genetic technology would have been a disaster, say scientists, but activists plan to renew the fight.

Quantum spin liquids are exotic states of matter first predicted more than 40 years ago. An inorganic material has properties consistent with these predictions, revealing details about the nature of quantum matter. See Letter p.559

Four regenerative and immune-system therapies taking on the toughest cases of inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammatory bowel disease is a growing problem in Asia. But that increase presents a golden opportunity for research.

Transplants of faecal matter have done wonders for the treatment of certain gastrointestinal infections. Will they ever work for inflammatory bowel disease?

In these tumultuous times, Nancy Baron urges scientists to speak from the heart to build public trust in research.

Low phosphorus burial in shallow marine sedimentary rocks before about 750 million years ago implies a change in the global phosphorus cycle, coinciding with the end of what may have been a stable low-oxygen world.

Some CLC proteins are channels that conduct chloride ions passively, whereas others are active co-transporters, a difference that has been hard to understand given their high degree of sequence homology; now, cryo-electron microscopy is used to determine the structure of a mammalian CLC channel, shedding light on this question.

A large-scale epigenome-wide association study identifies changes in DNA methylation associated with body mass index in blood and adipose tissue, and correlates DNA methylation sites with high risk of incident type 2 diabetes.

Biallelic mutations in human XRCC1 are associated with ocular motor apraxia, axonal neuropathy, and progressive cerebellar ataxia.

The phosphorous transporter SPDT is identified in rice; depletion of the transporter gene alters the phosphorus distribution in rice grains and leaves, suggesting that the strategy could be used for agricultural purposes.

Fat mass and obesity-associated protein (FTO) preferentially demethylates m⁶A_m, a modified adenosine that, when present at the 5′ end of certain mRNAs, positively influences mRNA stability by preventing DCP2-mediated decapping.

Graph theory is used to guide the self-assembly of a complex consisting of 48 palladium ions and 96 ligands, with the topology of a tetravalent Goldberg polyhedron.

The crystal structure of bat influenza A polymerase bound to a serine-5 phosphorylated peptide mimic from the C-terminal domain of cellular RNA polymerase II shows how the two polymerases are directly coupled and suggests that the interaction site could be targeted for antiviral drug development.

Spin–orbit coupling is implemented in an optical lattice clock using a narrow optical transition in fermionic 87Sr atoms, thus mitigating the heating problems of previous experiments with alkali atoms and offering new prospects for future investigations.