Perspectives

Long-duration human space travel creates challenges for maintaining healthy diets. Here the authors discuss using synthetic biology approaches to modify yeast into an optimal, and enjoyable, food production platform.

The collection of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) may capture patients’ assessments of their health status. Here authors highlight PRO-specific issues that should be considered to minimise respondent burden in clinical trials and routine care.

In this review, the authors define protein condensation diseases as conditions caused by aberrant liquid-like or solid-like states of proteins, and describe opportunities for therapeutic interventions to restore the normal phase behaviour of proteins. The review accompanies the related collection of articles published in Nature Communications focusing on possible therapeutic approaches involving liquid-liquid phase separation.

Key to life, water is an often overlooked or over-simplified factor in materials and biology. In this perspective the importance of water in biomaterials is discussed as well as the need to more carefully consider water’s role in every aspect of a biomaterial’s function.

Acoustic techniques are moving towards the clinic. Here the authors highlight recent developments in the areas of acoustic mechanobiology, point-of-care diagnostics, in vivo manipulation and tissues engineering, and provide their thoughts on the current challenges and directions for future work.

Building small-scale tools for biology research eliminates the need for time-consuming methods and enables novel experimental paradigms. Here, the authors discuss microfluidics' potential for manipulating or stimulating model organisms and identify barriers to making these tools accessible.

Precision oncology is important for patient treatment. Here the authors review the current applications of microfluidic systems to cancer precision medicine, and discuss the issues that must be addressed prior to getting these technologies into the clinic.

Both alternative splicing and autophagy are core cell biological processes, but where they intersect has received little attention. Here, the authors reflect on recent connections identified between these pathways and consider their impact on human disease.

A grand challenge in robotics is realising intelligent agents capable of autonomous interaction with the environment. In this Perspective, the authors discuss the potential, challenges and future direction of research aimed at demonstrating embodied intelligent robotics via neuromorphic technology.

Animal ecologists are increasingly limited by constraints in data processing. Here, Tuia and colleagues discuss how collaboration between ecologists and data scientists can harness machine learning to capitalize on the data generated from technological advances and lead to novel modeling approaches.

Many biological processes require changes in the physical properties of cells and their surroundings. Here, Lenne and Trivedi discuss recent findings in biological systems in terms of phase transitions in inert physical systems from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.

The reasons for concern framework are an effective visualisation of climate change related risks. Here, the authors propose a new framework by which different levels of uncertainty can be included into this aggregated assessment in order to ensure a transparent communication of risks.

Cooperation is vulnerable to cheating, and both cooperation and cheating may be especially common in viruses. Here, Leeks et al. place diverse examples of viral cooperation and cheating within an evolutionary framework, highlighting opportunities emerging from greater synthesis of virology and evolutionary theory.

The number of publicly available proteomics datasets is growing rapidly, but a standardized approach for describing the associated metadata is lacking. Here, the authors propose a format and a software pipeline to present and validate metadata, and integrate them into ProteomeXchange repositories.

The microbiome is becoming recognized as a key determinant of host phenotype. Here, Henry et al. present a framework for building our understanding of how the microbiome also influences host evolution, review empirical examples and research approaches, and highlight emerging questions.

Vast, ancient impact basins scattered mantle materials across the lunar surface. We review lunar evolution models to identify candidate mantle lithologies, then assess orbital observations to evalutae the current distribution of these materials and implications for fundamental planetary processes.

A key feature of living cells is the cell cycle. In this Perspective, the authors explore attempts to recreate this process and what is still required for an integrated synthetic cell cycle.

Many different methods have been developed to forecast climate phenomena like the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which makes a fair comparison of their capabilities crucial. In this perspective, the authors discuss how choices in the evaluation method can lead to an overestimated perceived skill of ENSO forecasts.

Racism thrives in geoscience. We present an antiracism plan to support the recruitment, retention and success of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in geoscience. Our action plan can be adapted by any organization to remove barriers to participation for all marginalized geoscientists.