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Table of Contents — September 24, 2024, 121 (39) | PNAS

Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 121, Number 39

PNAS September 24, 2024

Lasker Awards 2024

The 2024 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award was attributed to Zhijian (James) Chen for “the discovery of the cGAS enzyme that senses foreign and self DNA, solving the mystery of how DNA stimulates immune and inflammatory responses.” Bringing to ...
The 2024 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award has been given to Joel Habener and Svetlana Mojsov for their discovery of a new hormone GLP-1(7-37) and to Lotte Knudsen for her role in developing sustained acting versions of this hormone as a ...

This Week in PNAS

Opinion

Retrospective

Profile

Commentaries

Perspective

PerspectiveSeptember 12, 2024

N-degron pathways

An N-degron is a degradation signal whose main determinant is a “destabilizing” N-terminal residue of a protein. Specific N-degrons, discovered in 1986, were the first identified degradation signals in short-lived intracellular proteins. These N-degrons ...

Letters

Brief Reports

The “Returning Farmland to Lakes” (RFTL) project began in China following the catastrophic 1998 floods. It aims to recover flood storage capacity and mitigate flood risk to agriculture and people. This flood adaptation strategy divides the floodplain into ...
New data sources and AI methods for extracting information are increasingly abundant and relevant to decision-making across societal applications. A notable example is street view imagery, available in over 100 countries, and purported to inform built ...

Physical Sciences

Applied Physical Sciences

Liquid–liquid phase separation, whereby two liquids spontaneously demix, is ubiquitous in industrial, environmental, and biological processes. While isotropic fluids are known to condense into spherical droplets in the binodal region, these dynamics are ...
Metamaterial has been captivated a popular notion, offering photonic functionalities beyond the capabilities of natural materials. Its desirable functionality primarily relies on well-controlled conditions such as structural resonance, dispersion, ...
We report a neutron spin echo (NSE) study of the nanoscale dynamics of the cell–cell adhesion cadherin–catenin complex bound to vinculin. Our measurements and theoretical physics analyses of the NSE data reveal that the dynamics of full-length α-catenin, ...

Astronomy

We consider the refractive lensing effects of ionized cool ( T 10 4 K ) gas cloudlets in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of galaxies. In particular, we discuss the combined effects of lensing from these cloudlets and scintillation from plasma screens in the Milky ...

Biophysics and Computational Biology

Antibody-derived T-cell receptor (TCR) agonists are commonly used to activate T cells. While antibodies can trigger TCRs regardless of clonotype, they bypass native T cell signal integration mechanisms that rely on monovalent, membrane-associated, and ...
To respond and adapt, cells use surface receptors to sense environmental cues. While biochemical signal processing inside the cell is studied in depth, less is known about how physical processes during cell–cell contact impact signal acquisition. New ...

Chemistry

Despite its ubiquitous nature, the atomic structure of water in its liquid state is still controversially debated. We use a combination of X-ray Raman scattering spectroscopy in conjunction with ab initio and path integral molecular dynamics simulations ...
Knots containing metal atoms as part of their continuous strand backbone are termed as metallaknots. While several metallaknots have been synthesized through one-pot self-assembly, the designed synthesis of metallaknots by controlling the arrangement of ...

Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

Future climate change may bring local benefits or penalties to surface air pollution, resulting from changing temperature, precipitation, and transport patterns, as well as changes in climate-sensitive natural precursor emissions. Here, we estimate the ...
Determining the mechanisms by which the earliest continental crust was generated and reworked is important for constraining the evolution of Earth’s geodynamic, surface, and atmospheric conditions. However, the details of early plate tectonic settings ...
Enhanced warming of the Arctic region relative to the rest of the globe, known as Arctic amplification, is caused by a variety of diverse factors, many of which are influenced by the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Here, we quantify ...
While the dominant role of halogens in Arctic ozone loss during spring has been widely studied in the last decades, the impact of sea-ice halogens on surface ozone abundance over the northern hemisphere (NH) mid-latitudes remains unquantified. Here, we ...

Engineering

Developmental biology-inspired strategies for tissue-building have extraordinary promise for regenerative medicine, spurring interest in the relationship between cell biophysical properties and morphological transitions. However, mapping gene or protein ...
Hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant element in the universe, plays essential roles in a variety of clean energy technologies and industrial processes. For over a century, it has been known that hydrogen can significantly degrade the mechanical ...
The progression of many solid tumors is accompanied by temporal and spatial changes in the stiffness of the extracellular matrix (ECM). Cancer cells adapt to soft and stiff ECM through mechanisms that are not fully understood. It is well known that there ...
Multispecies microbial communities drive most ecosystems on Earth. Chemical and biological interactions within these communities can affect the survival of individual members and the entire community. However, the prohibitively high number of possible ...

Mathematics

We show that integer partitions, the fundamental building blocks in additive number theory, detect prime numbers in an unexpected way. Answering a question of Schneider, we show that the primes are the solutions to special equations in partition ...

Physics

Despite its ubiquitous nature, the atomic structure of water in its liquid state is still controversially debated. We use a combination of X-ray Raman scattering spectroscopy in conjunction with ab initio and path integral molecular dynamics simulations ...
The discovery of the quantum Hall effect has established the foundation of the field of topological condensed matter physics. An amazingly accurate quantization of the Hall conductance, now enshrined in quantum metrology, is stable against any reasonable ...
The heavy fermion (HF) state of d-electron systems is of great current interest since it exhibits various exotic phases and phenomena that are reminiscent of the Kondo effect in f-electron HF systems. Here, we present a combined infrared spectroscopy and ...

Statistics

A standard practice in statistical hypothesis testing is to mention the P-value alongside the accept/reject decision. We show the advantages of mentioning an e-value instead. With P-values, it is not clear how to use an extreme observation (e.g. P α ) for ...

Social Sciences

Demography

The racial gap in infant mortality is a pressing public-health concern, and [B. N. Greenwood et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 21194–21200 (2020), 10.1073/pnas.1913405117] suggest that Black newborns are more likely to survive if cared for by ...

Economic Sciences

Can we use data on the biographies of historical figures to estimate the GDP per capita of countries and regions? Here, we introduce a machine learning method to estimate the GDP per capita of dozens of countries and hundreds of regions in Europe and ...
Rising inequality has brought redistribution back on the political agenda. In theory, inequality aversion drives people’s support for redistribution. People can dislike both advantageous inequality (comparison relative to those worse off) and ...

Political Sciences

Whether and when to censor hate speech are long-standing points of contention in the US. The latest iteration of these debates entails grappling with content regulation on social media in an age of intense partisan polarization. But do partisans disagree ...

Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

The prevalence of depression is a major societal health concern, and there is an ongoing need to develop tools that predict who will become depressed. Past research suggests that depression changes the language we use, but it is unclear whether language ...

Sustainability Science

Future climate change may bring local benefits or penalties to surface air pollution, resulting from changing temperature, precipitation, and transport patterns, as well as changes in climate-sensitive natural precursor emissions. Here, we estimate the ...

Biological Sciences

Agricultural Sciences

Realizing the full potential of genome editing for crop improvement has been slow due to inefficient methods for reagent delivery and the reliance on tissue culture for creating gene-edited plants. RNA viral vectors offer an alternative approach for ...

Biochemistry

Huntington’s disease (HD) and spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) are the two most prevalent polyglutamine (polyQ) neurodegenerative diseases, caused by CAG (encoding glutamine) repeat expansion in the coding region of the huntingtin (HTT) and ataxin-3 (...

Biophysics and Computational Biology

Small-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channels (SK, KCa2) are gated solely by intracellular microdomain Ca2+. The channel has emerged as a therapeutic target for cardiac arrhythmias. Calmodulin (CaM) interacts with the CaM binding domain (CaMBD) of the SK ...
The adenosine di-phosphate (ADP) ribosylation factor (Arf) small guanosine tri-phosphate (GTP)ases function as molecular switches to activate signaling cascades that control membrane organization in eukaryotic cells. In Arf1, the GDP/GTP switch does not ...
Liquid-like protein condensates have recently attracted much attention due to their critical roles in biological phenomena. They typically show high fluidity and reversibility for exhibiting biological functions, while occasionally serving as sites for ...

Cell Biology

Neutrophils utilize a variety of metabolic sources to support their crucial functions as the first responders in innate immunity. Here, through in vivo and ex vivo isotopic tracing, we examined the contributions of different nutrients to neutrophil ...
It is well established that DNA Damage Regulated Autophagy Modulator 1 (DRAM1), a lysosomal protein and a target of p53, participates in autophagy. The cellular functions of DRAM1 beyond autophagy remain elusive. Here, we show p53-dependent upregulation ...
Mammalian Yes-associated protein (YAP) and transcriptional coactivator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ) and Drosophila Yorkie (Yki) are transcription cofactors of the highly conserved Hippo signaling pathway. It has been long assumed that the YAP/TAZ/Yki ...
Ovulation is critical for sexual reproduction and consists of the process of liberating fertilizable oocytes from their somatic follicle capsules, also known as follicle rupture. The mechanical force for oocyte expulsion is largely unknown in many ...

Developmental Biology

Developmental biology-inspired strategies for tissue-building have extraordinary promise for regenerative medicine, spurring interest in the relationship between cell biophysical properties and morphological transitions. However, mapping gene or protein ...
Pathogenic variants in SF3B4, a component of the U2 snRNP complex important for branchpoint sequence recognition and splicing, are responsible for the acrofacial disorders Nager and Rodriguez Syndrome, also known as SF3B4-related syndromes. Patients ...
A number of studies have demonstrated that it is possible to directly convert one cell type to another by factor-mediated transdifferentiation, but in the vast majority of cases, the resulting reprogrammed cells are unable to maintain their new cell ...

Ecology

The increasing duration of drought induced by global climate change has reduced forest productivity. Biodiversity is believed to mitigate the effects of drought, thereby enhancing the stability of tree growth. However, the effects of species richness on ...

Evolution

Sex-differential selection (SDS), which occurs when the fitness effects of alleles differ between males and females, can have profound impacts on the maintenance of genetic variation, disease risk, and other key aspects of natural populations. Because the ...
Mammals as a rule have seven cervical vertebrae, a number which remains remarkably conserved. Occasional deviations of this number are usually due to the presence of cervical ribs on the seventh vertebra, indicating a homeotic transformation from a ...
Fluctuating environments that consist of regular cycles of co-occurring stress are a common challenge faced by cellular populations. For a population to thrive in constantly changing conditions, an ability to coordinate a rapid cellular response is ...
Insects represent the most diverse animal group, yet previous phylogenetic analyses based on morphological and molecular data have failed to agree on the evolutionary relationships of early insects and their six-legged relatives (together constituting the ...
Algae mostly occur either as unicellular (microalgae) or multicellular (macroalgae) species, both being uninucleate. There are important exceptions, however, as some unicellular algae are multinucleate and macroscopic, some of which inhabit tropical seas ...

Genetics

Most eukaryotes have one nucleus and nuclear genome per cell. Ciliates have instead evolved distinct nuclei that coexist in each cell: a silent germline vs. transcriptionally active somatic nuclei. In the best-studied model species, both nuclei can divide ...

Immunology and Inflammation

Antibody-derived T-cell receptor (TCR) agonists are commonly used to activate T cells. While antibodies can trigger TCRs regardless of clonotype, they bypass native T cell signal integration mechanisms that rely on monovalent, membrane-associated, and ...
Systemic inflammation elicits sickness behaviors and fever by engaging a complex neuronal circuitry that begins in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. Ectotherms such as teleost fish display sickness behaviors in response to infection or inflammation, ...
Uveitis is a vision-threatening disease primarily driven by a dysregulated immune response, with retinal microglia playing a pivotal role in its progression. Although the transcription factor EGR2 is known to be closely associated with uveitis, including ...

Medical Sciences

The assessment of social determinants of health (SDoH) within healthcare systems is crucial for comprehensive patient care and addressing health disparities. Current challenges arise from the limited inclusion of structured SDoH information within ...
Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a chronic and severe disease of the skeletal neuromuscular junction (NMJ) in which the effects of neurotransmitters are attenuated, leading to muscle weakness. In the most common forms of autoimmune MG, antibodies attack ...
Androgens exert their effects primarily by binding to the androgen receptor (AR), a ligand-dependent nuclear receptor. While androgens have anabolic effects on skeletal muscle, previous studies reported that AR functions in myofibers to regulate skeletal ...
Immune evasion is not only critical for tumor initiation and progression, but also determines the efficacy of immunotherapies. Through iterative in vivo CRISPR screens with seven syngeneic tumor models, we identified core and context-dependent immune ...

Microbiology

Multispecies microbial communities drive most ecosystems on Earth. Chemical and biological interactions within these communities can affect the survival of individual members and the entire community. However, the prohibitively high number of possible ...
Bacterial biofilms have been implicated in several chronic infections. After initial attachment, a critical first step in biofilm formation is a cell inducing a surface-sensing response. In the Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, ...
Klebsiella pneumoniae is an important pathogen causing difficult-to-treat urinary tract infections (UTIs). Over 1.5 million women per year suffer from recurrent UTI, reducing quality of life and causing substantial morbidity and mortality, especially in ...
The opportunistic pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii, carries variants of A. baumannii resistance islands (AbaR)-type genomic islands conferring multidrug resistance. Their pervasiveness in the species has remained enigmatic. The dissemination of AbaRs is ...
The Pentamer complex of Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV) consists of the viral glycoproteins gH, gL, UL128, UL130, and UL131 and is incorporated into infectious virions. HCMV strains propagated extensively in vitro in fibroblasts carry UL128, UL130, or UL131 ...

Neuroscience

Cuprous copper [Cu(I)] is an essential cofactor for enzymes that support many fundamental cellular functions including mitochondrial respiration and suppression of oxidative stress. Neurons are particularly reliant on mitochondrial production of ATP, with ...
Adult central nervous system (CNS) neurons down-regulate growth programs after injury, leading to persistent regeneration failure. Coordinated lipids metabolism is required to synthesize membrane components during axon regeneration. However, lipids also ...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is typically a sporadic late-onset disorder, which has made it difficult to model in mice. Several transgenic mouse models bearing mutations in SNCA, which encodes alpha-Synuclein (α-Syn), have been made, but these lines do not ...
Connectomics research is making rapid advances, although models revealing general principles of connectional architecture are far from complete. Our analysis of 106 published connection reports indicates that the adult rat brain interregional connectome ...

Plant Biology

A fundamental assumption in plant science posits that leaf air spaces remain vapor saturated, leading to the predominant view that stomata alone control leaf water loss. This concept has been pivotal in photosynthesis and water-use efficiency research. ...

Population Biology

Genomic studies of endangered species have primarily focused on describing diversity patterns and resolving phylogenetic relationships, with the overarching goal of informing conservation efforts. However, few studies have investigated genomic diversity ...

Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

There has been much progress in understanding human social learning, including recent studies integrating social information into the reinforcement learning framework. Yet previous studies often assume identical payoffs between observer and demonstrator, ...

Correction

SI Correction

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