Find how Circularization for High-throughput Analysis of Nuclease Genome-wide Effects by Sequencing Base Editors (CHANGE-seq-BE) improves finding off-targets.

Why does cancer sometimes recur after chemotherapy? Why do some bacteria survive antibiotic treatment? In many cases, the answer appears to lie not in genetic differences, but in biological noise — random fluctuations in molecular activity that occur even among genetically identical cells.

Biological systems are inherently noisy, as molecules inside living cells are produced, degraded, and interact through fundamentally random processes. Understanding how biological systems cope with such fluctuations — and how they might be controlled — has been a long-standing challenge in systems and synthetic biology.

Although modern biology can regulate the average behavior of a cell population, controlling the unpredictable fluctuations of individual cells has remained a major challenge. These rare “outlier” cells, driven by stochastic variation, can behave differently from the majority and influence system-level outcomes.

Lithium-rich layered oxides (LRLOs) offer exceptionally high capacities but suffer rapid energy loss because of irreversible migration of transition-metal (TM) ions during cycling, triggering oxygen release and voltage decay. This study presents a breakthrough strategy: using trace dopants (only 0.75 at.% W⁶⁺) placed precisely at tetrahedral sites in the lithium layer. These isolated single dopants exert long-range Coulomb repulsion, suppressing both in-plane and out-of-plane TM migration across a ~2-nm region. As a result, cation ordering is preserved over 250 cycles, oxygen release is significantly reduced, and voltage decay drops to just 0.75 mV per cycle. This work provides a new atom-efficient pathway for stabilizing high-energy LRLO cathodes.