Articles in 2017

The authors inject mouse pluripotent stem cells into pancreatogenesis-disabled rat blastocysts and thereby generate rats with mouse pancreata from which the islets, when transplanted into mice, can provide a long-term cure for symptoms of diabetes, without continuous immunosuppression.

The application of genome-wide CRISPR–Cas9 screening coupled with a fluorescent reporter to interrogate the microRNA pathway reveals that continual transient phosphorylation of Argonaute 2 is required to maintain the global efficiency of microRNA-mediated repression.

This paper describes molecular subtypes of cervical cancers, including squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma clusters defined by HPV status and molecular features, and distinct molecular pathways that are activated in cervical carcinomas caused by different somatic alterations and HPV types.

Some phages—viruses that infect bacteria—encode peptides that are secreted from infected cells and that, beyond a certain threshold, stimulate other viruses to switch from the lytic (killing the host cell) to lysogenic (dormant) phase.

Interleukin-17 functions as a neuromodulator in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, acting directly on RMG hub interneurons to alter their response properties and contribution to behaviour.

A robust and scale-independent strategy for the design of reconfigurable architected materials (in which properties are adjusted by altering structure rather than composition) is described, based on space-filling assemblies of polyhedra.

The first high-resolution (3.5 Å) structure of a full-length cyclic-nucleotide-gated channel, revealing an unconventional, voltage-insensitive voltage-sensor domain and a unique coupling mechanism between cyclic-nucleotide-binding and pore-opening.

A reactive astrocyte subtype termed A1 is induced after injury or disease of the central nervous system and subsequently promotes the death of neurons and oligodendrocytes.

Combinatorial inputs from temporal and spatial axes act together to promote medullary neural diversity in the optic lobes of Drosophila.

The translation of upstream open reading frames in skin tumour models protects some cancer-related mRNAs from global reductions in protein synthesis during the early stages of tumour initiation, suggesting that unconventional translation has a crucial role in tumorigenesis.

The cryo-EM structure of the splicing intermediate known as the C* complex from human.

This work describes the Asgard superphylum, an assemblage of diverse archaea that comprises Odinarchaeota, Heimdallarchaeota, Lokiarchaeota and Thorarchaeota, offering insights into the earliest days of eukaryotic cells and their complex features.

Genomic analyses of localized, non-indolent prostate cancer identify recurrent aberrations that can predict relapse, and also highlight differences between early prostate cancer and metastatic, castration-resistant disease.

The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network report integrated genomic and molecular analyses of 164 squamous cell carcinomas and adenocarcinomas of the oesophagus; they find genomic and molecular features that differentiate squamous and adenocarcinomas of the oesophagus, and strong similarities between oesophageal adenocarcinomas and the chromosomally unstable variant of gastric adenocarcinoma, suggesting that gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma is a single disease entity.

Wnt signalling is shown to be required for specification of the gastric fundus in mice, and was used to develop human gastric organoids with functional fundic cell types.