News & Comment

Searching for evidence of life on Mars is a major impetus for exploration. A new study published in Nature Communications finds that current Mars mission instruments lack the essential sensitivity to identify life traces in Chilean desert samples that strongly resemble the martian area currently under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Esophageal cancers feature distinct manifestations between and within patients which complicate precision diagnosis, prognosis, and patient care. New genomic and epigenomic research uncovers novel mechanisms underlying both inter- and intra-tumoral heterogeneity in esophageal cancer, with significant biological and translational implications.

Carbon dioxide removal technologies are gaining prominence in academia, industry and policy, yet the need for substantial funding raises serious challenges. This comment discusses these issues and offers suggestions for future funding efforts in this area.

Climate change is an expensive collective problem that will be felt unequally around the world and within communities. Sustainable and equitable financing is needed to address disparities and reduce the economic costs of loss and damage from climate change.

Every area of science can contribute to the changes that are required for a sustainable future through the application of its fundamental discoveries. While some fields have clear paths to application, Nature Communications believes that there is great potential for utility and application to be found in, and across, all of  the different disciplines that we publish.

Prostate cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease. Progression on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) to castration-resistant (CRPC), or neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC), is associated with poor patient survival. This comment highlights recent evidence on the epigenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of lineage plasticity and neuroendocrine differentiation in treatment-resistant prostate tumors.

Two new studies exploring PROTAC-mediated degradation of SMARCA2 for cancer therapy solve an apparently intractable selectivity challenge with SMARCA4 by utilising the requirement for a productive ternary complex between the protein, PROTAC and ligase complex.

Chalcogenide aerogels are receiving widespread attention due to their unique properties. Here we comment on a recent work about amorphous Na–Mn–Sn–S chalcogels featuring local structural control, and provide an outlook for the development of chalcogels and the metal-organic sulfide framework.

The development of photocatalysts is greatly hindered by false positives or non-reproducible data. Here, The authors describe the current known causes of non-reproducible results in the literature and present solutions to mitigate these false positive results.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can harm mental health across the lifespan and reduce life expectancy. We provide a commentary of evidence on the health impacts, and how creative arts and digital interventions may support prevention and recovery.

We spoke to Professor Kylie Vincent – professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Oxford, co-founder of HydRegen Ltd, and Academic Champion for Women in Entrepreneurship – about turning academic research into industrial products.

In this work, Morgenstern and colleagues describe an approach involving functionalized nanobodies which decrease the activity of voltage-gated Ca²⁺ channels associated with β₁ subunits and promote their removal from the surface membrane of neurons and muscle.

Earthquakes are a natural hazard affecting millions of people globally every year. Researchers are working on understanding the mechanisms of earthquakes and how we can predict them from various angles, such as experimental work, theoretical modeling, and machine learning. We invited Marie Violay (EPFL Lausanne), Annemarie Baltay (USGS), Bertrand Rouet-Leduc (Kyoto University) and David Kammer (ETH Zürich) to discuss how such a multi-disciplinary approach can advance our understanding of Earthquakes.

This Comment piece summarises current challenges regarding routine vaccine uptake in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides recommendations on how to increase uptake. To implement these recommendations, the article points to evidence-based resources that can support health-care workers, policy makers and communicators.

Disability has too often been peripheral to efforts to widen the STEMM pipeline, hampering research quality and innovation. Inspired by change in education delivery and research collaborations during the pandemic, we offer a structure for efforts to recruit and retain disabled scientists and practitioners.

The rapid expansion and globalization of the seaweed production industry, combined with rising seawater temperatures and coastal eutrophication, has led to an increase in infectious diseases and pest outbreaks. Here, we propose a novel Progressive Management Pathway for improving Seaweed Biosecurity.

Association genetic studies and genome-scale CRISPR screens have recently identified ARF3 and TMEM251/LYSET/GCAF as Golgi-resident factors essential to brain and skeletal development. Here we discuss how even though the consequences of mutations in these genes affect endosomal and lysosomal compartments, the problem originates in the Golgi complex and may involve either the identity of the carrier vesicles or that of cargo molecules.

Since 2020 Nature Communications has been considering Registered Reports for publication in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and psychology, and epidemiology. We are excited to announce the publication of our first Registered Report. With this milestone, we also want to open the format to all other areas of research.

We recently published our first Registered Report entitled ‘Value-free random exploration is linked to impulsivity’. We believe the format offers many benefits to strengthen hypothesis-driven research and are keen to share our experience with our readers as we open up the format to all fields of research. We interviewed the authors of the manuscript (Magda Dubois and Tobias Hauser) and one of the reviewers (Trevor Robbins) about their experience of the review process. We are editorially committed to take their comments on board to further improve our guidance and to optimally support our future authors.

Nature Communications is now welcoming Registered Report submissions from all fields of research (read our editorial here), and we want to encourage submissions from the ecology and evolutionary biology fields. To introduce this format to researchers in those fields, we interviewed two founding members of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE), a network of researchers aimed at improving research practices in ecology, evolutionary biology, and related fields: Shinichi Nakagawa (Professor of Evolutionary Ecology and Synthesis at the University of New South Wales, UNSW) and Rose O’Dea (Secretary of SORTEE, postdoctoral researcher and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Below, they share their thoughts on how the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology can advance in reproducibility and transparency.