Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 121, Number 35
This Week in PNAS
News Feature
Retrospective
Commentaries
Letters
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Brief Reports
Large volumes of liquid water transiently existed on the surface of Mars more than
3 billion years ago. Much of this water is hypothesized to have been sequestered in
the subsurface or lost to space. We use rock physics models and Bayesian inversion
to ...
Coevolution between predator and prey plays a central role in shaping the pelagic
realm and may have significant implications for marine ecosystems and nutrient cycling
dynamics. The siliceous diatom frustule is often assumed to have coevolved with the
...
Physical Sciences
Astronomy
Firmly anchored on observational data, giant radio lobes from massive galaxies hosting
supermassive black holes can exert a major negative feedback effect, by endowing the
intergalactic gas with significant magnetic pressure hence retarding or preventing
...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
B cell receptors (BCRs) play a crucial role in recognizing and fighting foreign antigens.
High-throughput sequencing enables in-depth sampling of the BCRs repertoire after
immunization. However, only a minor fraction of BCRs actively participate in any ...
Biomolecules can be sequestered into membrane-less compartments, referred to as biomolecular
condensates. Experimental and computational methods have helped define the physical-chemical
properties of condensates. Less is known about how the high ...
Proteins perform their biological functions through motion. Although high throughput
prediction of the three-dimensional static structures of proteins has proved feasible
using deep-learning-based methods, predicting the conformational motions remains a
...
2’-deoxy-ATP (dATP) improves cardiac function by increasing the rate of crossbridge
cycling and Ca transient decay. However, the mechanisms of these effects and how therapeutic responses
to dATP are achieved when dATP is only a small fraction of the total ...
Chemistry
Size-dependent phagocytosis is a well-characterized phenomenon in monocytes and macrophages.
However, this size effect for preferential gene delivery to these important cell targets
has not been fully exploited because commonly adopted stabilization ...
Coded ribosomal peptide synthesis could not have evolved unless its sequence and amino
acid–specific aminoacylated tRNA substrates already existed. We therefore wondered
whether aminoacylated RNAs might have served some primordial function prior to their
...
The abundance of CaV2 voltage-gated calcium channels is linked to presynaptic homeostatic
plasticity (PHP), a process that recalibrates synaptic strength to maintain the stability
of neural circuits. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms ...
Computer Sciences
How good a research scientist is ChatGPT? We systematically probed the capabilities
of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 across four central components of the scientific process: as
a Research Librarian, Research Ethicist, Data Generator, and Novel Data Predictor,
using ...
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Estuaries, as connectors between land and ocean, have complex interactions of river
and tidal flows that affect the transport of buoyant materials like floating plastics,
oil spills, organic matter, and larvae. This study investigates surface-trapped ...
Seismological studies have exposed numerous ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs) exhibiting
extraordinary physical attributes at Earth’s core–mantle boundary, yet their compositions
and origins remain controversial. Water–iron reaction can generate unique ...
Engineering
Muscle stem cells (MuSCs) are specialized cells that reside in adult skeletal muscle
poised to repair muscle tissue. The ability of MuSCs to regenerate damaged tissues
declines markedly with aging and in diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy,
but ...
Matter entanglement is a common chaotic structure found in both quantum and classical
systems. For classical turbulence, viscous vortices are like sinews in fluid flows,
storing and dissipating energy and accommodating strain and stress throughout a ...
The conversion of CO2 into liquid fuels, using only sunlight and water, offers a promising path to carbon
neutrality. An outstanding challenge is to achieve high efficiency and product selectivity.
Here, we introduce a wireless photocatalytic architecture ...
Physics
Excitons are the neutral quasiparticles that form when Coulomb interactions create
bound states between electrons and holes. Due to their bosonic nature, excitons are
expected to condense and exhibit superfluidity at sufficiently low temperatures. In
...
The topological physics has sparked intensive investigations into topological lattices
in photonic, acoustic, and mechanical systems, powering counterintuitive effects otherwise
inaccessible with usual settings. Following the success of these endeavors in ...
In many physical situations in which many-body assemblies exist at temperature T, a characteristic quantum-mechanical time scale of approximately can be identified in both theory and experiment, leading to speculation that it may
be the shortest ...
In recent years, self-assembly has emerged as a powerful tool for fabricating functional
materials. Since self-assembly is fundamentally determined by the particle interactions
in the system, if we can gain full control over these interactions, it would ...
Social Sciences
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
How good a research scientist is ChatGPT? We systematically probed the capabilities
of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 across four central components of the scientific process: as
a Research Librarian, Research Ethicist, Data Generator, and Novel Data Predictor,
using ...
Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws
be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents
are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis
(n =...
Emerging evidence suggests that gender is a defining feature of personhood. Studies
show that gender is the primary social category individuals use to perceive humanness
and the social category most strongly related to seeing someone—or something—as ...
To efficiently yet reliably represent and process information, our brains need to
produce information-rich signals that differentiate between moments or cognitive states,
while also being robust to noise or corruption. For many, though not all, natural
...
Biological Sciences
Applied Biological Sciences
The enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS) functions in the shikimate
pathway which is responsible for the production of aromatic amino acids and precursors
of other essential secondary metabolites in all plant species. EPSPS is also ...
The advent of drones has revolutionized various aspects of our lives, and in the realm
of biological systems, molecular drones hold immense promise as “magic bullets” for
major diseases. Herein, we introduce a unique class of fluorinated macromolecular
...
The growing world population and increasing life expectancy are driving the need to
improve the quality of blood transfusion, organ transplantation, and preservation.
Here, to improve the ability of red blood cells (RBCs) for normothermic machine ...
Biochemistry
Coded ribosomal peptide synthesis could not have evolved unless its sequence and amino
acid–specific aminoacylated tRNA substrates already existed. We therefore wondered
whether aminoacylated RNAs might have served some primordial function prior to their
...
While the centrality of posttranscriptional modifications to RNA biology has long
been acknowledged, the function of the vast majority of modified sites remains to
be discovered. Illustrative of this, there is not yet a discrete biological role assigned
...
Breast Cancer Type 1 Susceptibility Protein (BRCA1) is a tumor-suppressor protein
that regulates various cellular pathways, including those that are essential for preserving
genome stability. One essential mechanism involves a BRCA1-A complex that is ...
Upon DNA damage, numerous proteins are targeted for ubiquitin-dependent proteasomal
degradation, which is an integral part of the DNA repair program. Although details
of the ubiquitination processes have been intensively studied, little is known about
...
Protein kinase Gcn2 attenuates protein synthesis in response to amino acid starvation
while stimulating translation of a transcriptional activator of amino acid biosynthesis.
Gcn2 activation requires a domain related to histidyl-tRNA synthetase (HisRS), ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Proteins perform their biological functions through motion. Although high throughput
prediction of the three-dimensional static structures of proteins has proved feasible
using deep-learning-based methods, predicting the conformational motions remains a
...
2’-deoxy-ATP (dATP) improves cardiac function by increasing the rate of crossbridge
cycling and Ca transient decay. However, the mechanisms of these effects and how therapeutic responses
to dATP are achieved when dATP is only a small fraction of the total ...
α-synuclein (α-syn) assembles into structurally distinct fibril polymorphs seen in
different synucleinopathies, such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy.
Targeting these unique fibril structures using chemical ligands holds diagnostic ...
Activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc/Arg3.1) is an immediate early
gene that plays a vital role in learning and memory. Arc protein has structural and
functional properties similar to viral Group-specific antigen (Gag) protein and ...
Cell Biology
Muscle stem cells (MuSCs) are specialized cells that reside in adult skeletal muscle
poised to repair muscle tissue. The ability of MuSCs to regenerate damaged tissues
declines markedly with aging and in diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy,
but ...
The mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) pathway regulates cell growth
and metabolism in response to many environmental cues, including nutrients. Amino
acids signal to mTORC1 by modulating the guanine nucleotide loading states of the
...
Developmental Biology
Insect developmental transitions are precisely coordinated by ecdysone and juvenile
hormone (JH). We previously revealed that accumulated H3K27 trimethylation (H3K27me3)
at the locus encoding JH signal transducer Hairy is involved in the larval–pupal ...
Intercellular signaling mediated by evolutionarily conserved planar cell polarity
(PCP) proteins aligns cell polarity along the tissue plane and drives polarized cell
behaviors during tissue morphogenesis. Accumulating evidence indicates that the ...
Ecology
Studying the mechanisms shaping age-related changes in behavior (“behavioral aging”)
is important for understanding population dynamics in our changing world. Yet, studies
that capture within-individual behavioral changes in wild populations of long-lived
...
The southeastward extrusion of Indochina along the Ailao Shan–Red River shear zone
(ARSZ) is one of two of the most prominent consequences of the India–Asia collision.
This plate-scale extrusion has greatly changed Southeast Asian topography and drainage
...
Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest carbon pool in terrestrial ecosystems and
plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change and enhancing soil productivity.
Microbial-derived carbon (MDC) is the main component of the persistent SOC pool. However,
...
Evolution
From microbes to humans, organisms perform numerous tasks for their survival, including
food acquisition, migration, and reproduction. A complex biological task can be performed
by either an autonomous organism or by cooperation among several specialized ...
Genetics
Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB) is a rare and most often severe
genetic disease characterized by recurrent blistering and erosions of the skin and
mucous membranes after minor trauma, leading to major local and systemic complications.
...
Immunology and Inflammation
Platelet-activating factor (PAF) promotes immunosuppressive neutrophil differentiation within tumors
Chronic inflammatory milieu in the tumor microenvironment (TME) leads to the recruitment
and differentiation of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs). Polymorphonuclear
(PMN)-MDSCs, which are phenotypically and morphologically defined as a subset of ...
Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the arterial wall characterized
by the accumulation of cholesterol-rich lipoproteins in macrophages. How macrophages
commit to proinflammatory polarization under atherosclerosis conditions is not clear.
...
Medical Sciences
WD40 Repeat Domain 5 (WDR5) is a highly conserved nuclear protein that recruits MYC
oncoprotein transcription factors to chromatin to stimulate ribosomal protein gene
expression. WDR5 is tethered to chromatin via an arginine-binding cavity known as
the “...
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) exert clinical efficacy against various types
of cancers by reinvigorating exhausted CD8+ T cells that can expand and directly attack cancer cells (cancer-specific T cells)
among tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). ...
Lipid-associated macrophages’ promotion of fibrosis resolution during MASH regression requires TREM2
While macrophage heterogeneity during metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis
(MASH) has been described, the fate of these macrophages during MASH regression is
poorly understood. Comparing macrophage heterogeneity during MASH progression vs ...
Microbiology
The emergence of carbapenem-resistant hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (CR-hvKp) is a growing concern due to its high mortality and limited treatment options.
Although hypermucoviscosity is crucial for CR-hvKp infection, the role of changes
in ...
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is potentially linked to disordered tryptophan metabolism that
attributes to the intricate interplay among diet, gut microbiota, and host physiology.
However, underlying mechanisms are substantially unknown. Comparing the gut ...
Viral infection is frequently assayed by ongoing expression of viral genes. These
assays fail to identify cells that have been exposed to the virus but limit or inhibit
viral replication. To address this limitation, we used a dual-labeling vesicular ...
Neuroscience
The abundance of CaV2 voltage-gated calcium channels is linked to presynaptic homeostatic
plasticity (PHP), a process that recalibrates synaptic strength to maintain the stability
of neural circuits. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms ...
To efficiently yet reliably represent and process information, our brains need to
produce information-rich signals that differentiate between moments or cognitive states,
while also being robust to noise or corruption. For many, though not all, natural
...
The numerical sense of animals includes identifying the numerosity of a sequence of
events that occur with specific intervals, e.g., notes in a call or bar of music.
Across nervous systems, the temporal patterning of spikes can code these events, but
how ...
Emerging evidence suggests that altered myelination is an important pathophysiologic
correlate of several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer and Parkinson’s
diseases. Thus, improving myelin integrity may be an effective intervention to ...
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are major vectors of dengue, chikungunya, and other arboviral diseases.
Ae. aegypti’s capacity to reproduce and to spread disease depends on the female mosquitoes’ ability
to obtain blood meals and find water-filled containers in ...
Visual cortical neurons show variability in their responses to repeated presentations
of a stimulus and a portion of this variability is shared across neurons. Attention
may enhance visual perception by reducing shared spiking variability. However, shared
...
Learning and memory require coordinated structural and functional plasticity at neuronal
glutamatergic synapses located on dendritic spines. Here, we investigated how the
endoplasmic reticulum (ER) controls postsynaptic Ca2+ signaling and long-term ...
Dynamic brain immune function in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder is
rarely studied, despite evidence of peripheral immune dysfunction. Positron emission
tomography brain imaging using the radiotracer [11C]PBR28 was used to measure the 18-...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be caused by environmental factors. These factors
act early in the development of the nervous system and induce stereotyped repetitive
behaviors and diminished social interactions, among other outcomes. Little is known
...
Physiology
Activating Ca2+-sensitive enzymes of oxidative metabolism while preventing calcium overload that
leads to mitochondrial and cellular injury requires dynamic control of mitochondrial
Ca2+ uptake. This is ensured by the mitochondrial calcium uptake (MICU)1/...
Plant Biology
The circadian clock is an endogenous oscillator, and its importance lies in its ability
to impart rhythmicity on downstream biological processes, or outputs. Our knowledge
of output regulation, however, is often limited to an understanding of ...
Many virus genomes encode proteases that facilitate infection. The molecular mechanism
of plant recognition of viral proteases is largely unexplored. Using the system of
Vigna unguiculata and cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV), we identified a cowpea lipid ...
Plants sense and respond to environmental cues during 24 h fluctuations in their environment.
This requires the integration of internal cues such as circadian timing with environmental
cues such as light and temperature to elicit cellular responses ...
Retraction
Cover image: Pictured is a cross-section of a developing mouse cochlea stained with fluorescent dyes. Nicholas Xie et al. report that a pair of signaling ligands, Wnt7b and Wnt5a, work together to control the coiling and elongation of the cochlear duct in mice. The ligands also help orient the cytoskeleton of resident hair cells by localizing cell polarity proteins along a tissue plane. According to the authors, mutations to the WNT7B gene may underlie birth defects, including Robinow syndrome, cleft palate, and congenital hearing loss. See the article by Xie et al. e2405217121. Image credit: Natalie Rodeman.
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