Volume 2 Issue 2, February 2024

In addition to systemic inequity, the lack of adequate parental leave conditions at many US institutions can negatively affect career trajectories for women in STEM. Support structures are needed at the institutional, departmental and funding agency level to promote the success of pregnant women and parents with childcare responsibilities in academia.

An article in Nature Communications reports an injectable hydrogel electrode to stimulate and restore the native pacing of the heart.

An article in Nature Medicine reports soft robotic apparel that improves walking and alleviates freezing of gait associated with Parkinson’s disease.

Regenerative tissue engineering aims to functionally restore damaged tissues. This Review discusses how advances in single-cell RNA sequencing techniques and analysis methods can expand our understanding of tissue injury responses to inform the design of new regenerative biomaterials and therapeutics.

Bacteria-based living drugs can treat a broad range of diseases. This Review discusses challenges to the clinical translation of engineered bacterial therapeutics and how advances in synthetic biology and nanomedicine can help overcome them.

Diffusion models are deep-learning-based generative models that can generate new data from input parameters. This Review discusses applications of diffusion models in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Microbial engineering can enable the development of cell factories that produce value-added chemicals from various feedstocks. This Review highlights recent efforts to engineer microorganisms for the utilization of various waste streams for sustainable bioproduction and presents state-of-the-art strategies that can accelerate the advancement towards a bio-based circular economy.

The human microbiome plays a central role in health and disease. This Review discusses the design of human organ-on-a-chip platforms to model host–microbiome interactions in vitro and investigate microbiome-associated diseases as well as microbiome-mediated interventions.