Using synthetic biology, we engineered a cellulose-producing bacterium that can produce eumelanin and respond to light, so that it is possible to grow a microbial leather material that is colored black or contains projected black patterns.

Cells interact with their local environment to enact global tissue function. By harnessing gene–gene covariation in cellular neighborhoods from spatial transcriptomics data, the covariance environment (COVET) niche representation and the environmental variational inference (ENVI) data integration method model phenotype–microenvironment interplay and reconstruct the spatial context of dissociated single-cell RNA sequencing datasets.

An engineered retrotransposon achieves targeted gene transfer into the human genome.

The underrepresentation of functional glial cells is a major challenge in brain organoid models. We developed an astroglia-enriched cortical organoid model that allows efficient generation of functional astrocytes and enables the formation of astroglial morphological subclasses with layer-specific gene expression profiles upon transplantation into the mouse brain.