Scientists from Gladstone Institutes, UC San Francisco, and Stanford University, in collaboration with Biohub, have unveiled a massive, high-resolution functional map of human immune cells that promises to transform our understanding of how genetics control health and disease. Published in the journal Cell, the study represents a landmark achievement in immunology and genomics. By systematically stress-testing genes across the genome in 22 million human immune cells, scientists moved beyond mere DNA sequencing to decode the dynamic circuits that govern how these genes actually work in the context of health and disease.

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate. Scientists have asked if rock weathering could be accelerated to pull excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere. However, current efforts to achieve this are still too slow to affect the global carbon balance or to be economically viable at industrial scale.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS)’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, engineered a solution to this problem. They showed in customized bioreactors with a continuous flow of seawater that an engineered marine bacterium sped up the weathering of a silicate mineral, boosting the amount of CO₂that was removed from air. Their findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.