News & Comment

Single cell transcriptomics technologies have vast potential in advancing our understanding of biology and disease. Here, Sarah Aldridge and Sarah Teichmann review the last decade of technological advancements in single-cell transcriptomics and highlight some of the recent discoveries enabled by this technology.

Knowing about the diversity of planetary processes is of paramount importance for understanding our planet Earth. An integrated, comparative planetology approach is required to combine space missions, autonomous surface exploration, sample return laboratories, and after-mission data exploitation.

Controlling the hybridization of single atoms in suitable host materials opens unique opportunities for catalyst design, but equally faces many challenges. Here, we highlight emerging directions from the last, highly productive, decade in single-atom catalysis and identify frontiers for future research.

Weather may marginally affect COVID-19 dynamics, but misconceptions about the way that climate and weather drive exposure and transmission have adversely shaped risk perceptions for both policymakers and citizens. Future scientific work on this politically-fraught topic needs a more careful approach.

The Montreal Protocol has begun to heal the Antarctic ozone hole and avoided more global warming than any other treaty. Still, recent research shows that new unexpected emissions of several chlorofluorocarbons, carbon tetrachloride, and hydrofluorocarbons, are undermining the Protocol’s success. It is time for policymakers to plug the holes in the ozone hole treaty.

A clinical trial published in Nature Communications examined the effect of fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) during chemotherapy in breast cancer patients. The overall negative study results highlight the need for ameliorating future trial design and investigating alternative FMD-based therapeutic combinations.

There is an urgent need for drugs, therapies and vaccines to be available to protect the human population against COVID-19. One of the first approaches taken in the COVID-19 global response was to consider repurposing licensed drugs. This commentary highlights an extraordinary international collaborative effort of independent researchers who have recently all come to the same conclusion—that chloroquine or hydroxchloroquine are unlikely to provide clinical benefit against COVID-19.

Robert S. Langer is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leading one of the largest biomedical engineering labs in the world his research covers many areas of biotechnology including tissue engineering, drug delivery, biofabrication and the development of medical devices. Mark Tibbitt is an Assistant Professor of Macromolecular Engineering at ETH Zürich. His research focuses on combining polymer engineering, synthetic chemistry, mechanical and bioengineering for biofabrication, drug delivery and mechanobiology applications.

Discovering chemicals with desired attributes is a long and painstaking process. Curated datasets containing reliable quantum-mechanical properties for millions of molecules are becoming increasingly available. The development of novel machine learning tools to obtain chemical knowledge from these datasets has the potential to revolutionize the process of chemical discovery. Here, I comment on recent breakthroughs in this emerging field and discuss the challenges for the years to come.

Andrew J. Boydston is the Yamamoto Family Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a trained chemist he worked on catalysts for the synthesis of polymers during his postdoc time and started his independent career as an assistant professor of Chemistry in 2010 at the University of Washington. In 2014 he involved in a project with colleagues at the mechanical engineering department at the University of Washington which piqued his interest in additive manufacturing and which remained one of his research lines after moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. He is interested in organocatalysts for polymerization reactions, mechanophores, polymers for controlled release and additive manufacturing.

Professor Peter D Lee is a materials scientist at the University College London. His group focuses on X-ray imaging and computational simulation of materials at a microstructural level for materials design and advanced manufacturing.

Professor Julia R Greer is a materials scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Her group focuses on designing, fabricating and characterising micro- and nano-architected materials using 3D lithography, nanofabrication, and additive manufacturing (AM) techniques for a multitude of applications ranging from biological devices to damage-tolerant fabrics.

Climate science and climate economics are critical sources of expertise in our pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals. Effective use of this expertise requires a strengthening of its epistemic foundations and a renewed focus on more practical policy problems.

In the past decade, a new generation of radar satellites have revolutionised our ability to measure Earth’s surface deformation globally and with unprecedented resolution. InSAR is transforming our understanding of faults, volcanoes and ground stability and increasingly influencing hazard management.

Immunotherapy using immune-checkpoint modulators revolutionizes the oncology field far beyond their remarkable clinical efficacy in some patients. It creates radical changes in the evaluation of treatment efficacy and toxicity with a more holistic vision of the patient with cancer.

Organocatalysis has become a major pillar of (asymmetric) catalysis. Here, the authors discuss recent trends in organocatalytic activation modes for challenging stereoselective transformations and the emerging integration with other fields, such as photoredox catalysis and electrosynthesis.

As investment in urban conservation grows, researchers must balance the needs of residents and conservation targets. We discuss some of the challenges we have encountered and the importance of taking a transdisciplinary approach informed by design and social knowledge.

After two decades of steady growing, symbiotic merger of organocatalysis with emerging electrochemical and photochemical tools are envisioned as hot topics in the coming decade. Here, these trends are discussed in parallel to the implementation of artificial intelligence-based technologies, which anticipate a paradigm shift in catalyst design.

Niche hijack by malignant cells is considered to be a prominent cause of disease relapse. Barbier and colleagues uncover (E)-selectin as a novel mediator of malignant cell survival and regeneration which, upon blockade, has the potential to significantly improve therapeutic outcomes.

Nature Communications are pleased to announce that we are now considering Registered Reports for publication in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, human behaviour and psychology, as well as epidemiology.