This page is brought to you by Brian Golding (Golding@McMaster.CA) and is copied locally here to speed your access. To go to the original page (should you find something interesting or should you wish to follow links) click on

Current Issue of PNAS


Table of Contents — August 6, 2024, 121 (32) | PNAS

Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 121, Number 32

PNAS August 6, 2024
Special Feature

Climate Change and California Sustainability–Challenges and Solutions

One of California’s most pressing social and environmental challenges is the rapid expansion of the wildlands–urban interface (WUI). Multiple issues associated with WUI growth compared to more dense and compact urban form are of concern—including greatly ...
California agriculture will undergo significant transformations over the next few decades in response to climate extremes, environmental regulation and policy encouraging environmental justice, and economic pressures that have long driven agricultural ...
In this review and synthesis, we argue that California is an important test case for the nation and world because terrestrial biodiversity is very high, present and anticipated threats to biodiversity from climate change and other interacting stressors ...
As human-caused climate changes accelerate, California will experience hydrologic and temperature conditions different than any encountered in recorded history. How will these changes affect the state’s freshwater ecosystems? Rivers, lakes, and wetlands ...
In the realm of climate policy, issues of environmental justice (EJ) are often treated as second-order affairs compared to overarching sustainability goals. We argue that EJ is in fact critical to successfully addressing our national and global climate ...
The climate crisis has exacerbated many ecological and cultural problems including wildfire and drought vulnerability, biodiversity declines, and social justice and equity. While there are many concepts of social and ecological resilience, the exemplar ...
Climate change is an existential threat to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of the coastal zone and impacts will be complex and widespread. Evidence from California and across the United States shows that climate change is impacting ...
An increasing amount of California’s landscape has burned in wildfires in recent decades, in conjunction with increasing temperatures and vapor pressure deficit due to climate change. As the wildland–urban interface expands, more people are exposed to ...
California faces several serious direct and indirect climate exposures that can adversely affect public health, some of which are already occurring. The public health burden now and in the future will depend on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, ...

This Week in PNAS

Editorial

Core Concepts

Commentaries

Letters

Brief Report

Fragment correlation mass spectrometry correlates ion pairs generated from the same fragmentation pathway, achieved by covariance mapping of tandem mass spectra generated with an unmodified linear ion trap without preseparation. We enable the ...

Physical Sciences

Applied Mathematics

Most problems within and beyond the scientific domain can be framed into one of the following three levels of complexity of function approximation. Type 1: Approximate an unknown function given input/output data. Type 2: Consider a collection of variables ...
Exploring the complexity of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) unveils a diversity of potential cell fates; however, the exact timing and mechanisms by which early cell states diverge into distinct EMT trajectories remain unclear. Studying ...

Applied Physical Sciences

The duality between deformations of elastic bodies and noninertial flows in viscous liquids has been a guiding principle in decades of research. However, this duality is broken when a spheroidal or other doubly curved liquid film is suddenly forced out of ...
Drop–fiber interactions are fundamental to the operation of technologies such as atmospheric fog capture, oil filtration, refrigeration, and dehumidification. We demonstrate that by twisting together two fibers, a sliding drop’s flow path can be ...

Biophysics and Computational Biology

How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with trajectory ...
Two-pore channels are pathophysiologically important Na+- and Ca2+-permeable channels expressed in lysosomes and other acidic organelles. Unlike most other ion channels, their permeability is malleable and ligand-tuned such that when gated by the ...

Chemistry

Over the last decade, an increasing body of evidence has emerged, supporting the existence of a metastable liquid–liquid critical point in supercooled water whereby two distinct liquid phases of different densities coexist. Analyzing long molecular ...
Many bacteria secrete metallophores, low-molecular-weight organic compounds that bind ions with high selectivity and affinity, in order to access essential metals from the environment. Previous work has elucidated the structures and biosynthetic machinery ...

Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

Elevated temperatures persisted for an anomalously protracted interval following pulsed volcanic carbon release associated with the end-Permian mass extinction, deviating from the expected timescale of climate recovery following a carbon injection event. ...
The nitrogen isotopes of the organic matter preserved in fossil fish otoliths (ear stones) are a promising tool for reconstructing past environmental changes. We analyzed the 15N/14N ratio (δ15N) of fossil otolith-bound organic matter in Late Cretaceous ...
To test the hypothesis that an abiotic Earth and its inert atmosphere could form chemically reactive carbon- and nitrogen-containing compounds, we designed a plasma electrochemical setup to mimic lightning-induced electrochemistry under steady-state ...

Engineering

Proteins play a key role in biological electron transport, but the structure–function relationships governing the electronic properties of peptides are not fully understood. Despite recent progress, understanding the link between peptide conformational ...
Magnetic miniature robotic systems have attracted broad research interest because of their precise maneuverability in confined spaces and adaptability to diverse environments, holding significant promise for applications in both industrial infrastructures ...

Physics

The group of moiré graphene superconductors keeps growing, and by now it contains twisted graphene multilayers as well as untwisted stacks. We analyze here the contribution of long-range charge fluctuations in the superconductivity of twisted double ...

Social Sciences

Anthropology

This study aimed to reconstruct the environmental conditions and the crop management practices and plant characteristics when agriculture appeared in western Europe. We analyzed oak charcoal and a large number of cereal caryopsides recovered from La Draga ...

Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

Distracted driving is responsible for nearly 1 million crashes each year in the United States alone, and a major source of driver distraction is handheld phone use. We conducted a randomized, controlled trial to compare the effectiveness of interventions ...
Linguistic communication is an intrinsically social activity that enables us to share thoughts across minds. Many complex social uses of language can be captured by domain-general representations of other minds (i.e., mentalistic representations) that ...
The primary visual cortex (V1) in blindness is engaged in a wide spectrum of tasks and sensory modalities, including audition, touch, language, and memory. This widespread involvement raises questions regarding the constancy of its role and whether it ...

Social Sciences

Despite the long-standing calls for increased levels of interdisciplinary research as a way to address society’s grand challenges, most science is still disciplinary. To understand the slow rate of convergence to more interdisciplinary research, we ...
A typical empirical study involves choosing a sample, a research design, and an analysis path. Variation in such choices across studies leads to heterogeneity in results that introduce an additional layer of uncertainty, limiting the generalizability of ...

Sustainability Science

Indigenous communities in the North American Arctic are characterized by mixed economies that feature hunting, fishing, gathering, and trapping activities—and associated sharing practices—alongside the formal wage economy. The region is also undergoing ...

Biological Sciences

Agricultural Sciences

This study aimed to reconstruct the environmental conditions and the crop management practices and plant characteristics when agriculture appeared in western Europe. We analyzed oak charcoal and a large number of cereal caryopsides recovered from La Draga ...

Applied Biological Sciences

Cell–matrix interactions in 3D environments significantly differ from those in 2D cultures. As such, mechanisms of mechanotransduction in 2D cultures are not necessarily applicable to cell-encapsulating hydrogels that resemble features of tissue ...
Protein engineering often targets binding pockets or active sites which are enriched in epistasis—nonadditive interactions between amino acid substitutions—and where the combined effects of multiple single substitutions are difficult to predict. Few ...

Biochemistry

Dihydrouridine (D), a prevalent and evolutionarily conserved base in the transcriptome, primarily resides in tRNAs and, to a lesser extent, in mRNAs. Notably, this modification is found at position 2449 in the Escherichia coli 23S rRNA, strategically ...
Parkin is an E3 ubiquitin ligase implicated in early-onset forms of Parkinson’s disease. It catalyzes a transthiolation reaction by accepting ubiquitin (Ub) from an E2 conjugating enzyme, forming a short-lived thioester intermediate, and transfers Ub to ...
Since prion diseases result from infection and neurodegeneration of the central nervous system (CNS), experimental characterizations of prion strain properties customarily rely on the outcomes of intracerebral challenges. However, natural transmission of ...
Invasive fungal diseases are a major threat to human health, resulting in more than 1.5 million annual deaths worldwide. The arsenal of antifungal therapeutics remains limited and is in dire need of drugs that target additional biosynthetic pathways that ...

Biophysics and Computational Biology

Proteins play a key role in biological electron transport, but the structure–function relationships governing the electronic properties of peptides are not fully understood. Despite recent progress, understanding the link between peptide conformational ...
Exploring the complexity of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) unveils a diversity of potential cell fates; however, the exact timing and mechanisms by which early cell states diverge into distinct EMT trajectories remain unclear. Studying ...
Two-pore channels are pathophysiologically important Na+- and Ca2+-permeable channels expressed in lysosomes and other acidic organelles. Unlike most other ion channels, their permeability is malleable and ligand-tuned such that when gated by the ...

Cell Biology

Macroautophagy is a conserved cellular degradation pathway that, upon upregulation, confers resilience toward various stress conditions, including protection against proteotoxicity associated with neurodegenerative diseases, leading to cell survival. ...

Evolution

How emerging adaptive variants interact is an important factor in the evolution of wild populations, but the opportunity to empirically study this interaction is rare. We recently documented the emergence of an adaptive phenotype “curly-wing” in Hawaiian ...

Genetics

Repression of facultative heterochromatin is essential for developmental processes in numerous organisms. Methylation of histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27) by Polycomb repressive complex 2 is a prominent feature of facultative heterochromatin in both fungi and ...
Time-restricted feeding (RF) is known to shift the phasing of gene expression in most primary metabolic tissues, whereas a time misalignment between the suprachiasmatic nucleus circadian clock (SCNCC) and its peripheral CCs (PCC’s) is known to induce ...

Immunology and Inflammation

Although many cytokine pathways are important for dendritic cell (DC) development, it is less clear what cytokine signals promote the function of mature dendritic cells. The signal transducer and activator of transcription 4 (STAT4) promotes protective ...

Medical Sciences

Activating leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) mutations cause Parkinson’s and phosphorylation of Rab10 by pathogenic LRRK2 blocks primary ciliogenesis in cultured cells. In the mouse brain, LRRK2 blockade of primary cilia is highly cell type specific: ...
Understanding the normal function of the Huntingtin (HTT) protein is of significance in the design and implementation of therapeutic strategies for Huntington’s disease (HD). Expansion of the CAG repeat in the HTT gene, encoding an expanded polyglutamine (...

Microbiology

Many bacteria secrete metallophores, low-molecular-weight organic compounds that bind ions with high selectivity and affinity, in order to access essential metals from the environment. Previous work has elucidated the structures and biosynthetic machinery ...
Microbes rarely exist in isolation and instead form complex polymicrobial communities. As a result, microbes have developed intricate offensive and defensive strategies that enhance their fitness in these complex communities. Thus, identifying and ...
The animal origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains elusive, lacking a plausible evolutionary narrative that may account for its emergence. Its spike protein resembles certain segments of BANAL-236 and RaTG13, two bat coronaviruses considered possible progenitors of ...
Plants release a wealth of metabolites into the rhizosphere that can shape the composition and activity of microbial communities in response to environmental stress. The connection between rhizodeposition and rhizosphere microbiome succession has been ...

Neuroscience

How do we capture the breadth of behavior in animal movement, from rapid body twitches to aging? Using high-resolution videos of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, we show that a single dynamics connects posture-scale fluctuations with trajectory ...
The primary visual cortex (V1) in blindness is engaged in a wide spectrum of tasks and sensory modalities, including audition, touch, language, and memory. This widespread involvement raises questions regarding the constancy of its role and whether it ...
High-throughput volumetric fluorescent microscopy pipelines can spatially integrate whole-brain structure and function at the foundational level of single cells. However, conventional fluorescent protein (FP) modifications used to discriminate single ...
Understanding how neural circuits generate sequential activity is a longstanding challenge. While foundational theoretical models have shown how sequences can be stored as memories in neural networks with Hebbian plasticity rules, these models considered ...
Human standing balance relies on the continuous monitoring and integration of sensory signals to infer our body’s motion and orientation within the environment. However, when sensory information is no longer contextually relevant to balancing the body (...
For the human brain to operate, populations of neurons across anatomical structures must coordinate their activity within milliseconds. To date, our understanding of such interactions has remained limited. We recorded directly from the hippocampus (HPC), ...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic and debilitating neurological disease that results in inflammatory demyelination. While endogenous remyelination helps to recover function, this restorative process tends to become less efficient over time. Currently, ...
Leucine-rich glioma-inactivated protein 1 (LGI1), a secretory protein in the brain, plays a critical role in myelination; dysfunction of this protein leads to hypomyelination and white matter abnormalities (WMAs). Here, we hypothesized that LGI1 may ...

Corrections

View the cover image for PNAS Vol.121; No.32

Advertisement

Submit to PNAS

Submit to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and have your research discovered by millions of researchers in the Biological, Physical, and Social Sciences.

Submit your manuscript