Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 121, Number 40
This Week in PNAS
Editorial
QnAs
Retrospective
Commentaries
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Perspectives
Modern molecular microbiology elucidates the organizational principles of bacterial
biofilms via detailed examination of the interplay between signaling and gene regulation.
A complementary biophysical approach studies the mesoscopic dependencies at the ...
Sounding rockets have played and continue to play a key role in the modeling of the
upper atmosphere and predicting weather. Goddard’s insight into the usefulness of
rockets for this application came at a time when measurements had not been made above
the ...
Letters
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The thermoneutral zone in women takes an “arctic” shift compared to men
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Applied Mathematics
The Katz centrality of a node in a complex network is a measure of the node’s importance
as far as the flow of information across the network is concerned. For ensembles of
locally tree-like undirected random graphs, this observable is a random variable.
...
Applied Physical Sciences
Thin-film devices that transduce the chemical activity of ions into electronic signals
are essential components in various applications, including healthcare diagnostics
and environmental monitoring. Combinations of organic semiconductors (OSCs) and ion-...
Semiconductor heterojunctions have gained significant attention for efficient optoelectronic
devices owing to their unique interfaces and synergistic effects. Interaction between
charge carriers with the heterojunction plays a crucial role in determining ...
Unlike human intestines, which are long, hollow tubes, the intestines of sharks and
rays contain interior helical structures surrounding a cylindrical hole. One function
of these structures may be to create asymmetric flow, favoring passage of fluid down
...
Replica symmetry breaking (RSB) for spin glasses predicts that the equilibrium configuration
at two different magnetic fields are maximally decorrelated. We show that this theory
presents quantitative predictions for this chaotic behavior under the ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Cellular processes are controlled by the thermodynamics of the underlying biomolecular
interactions. Frequently, structural investigations use one monomeric binding partner,
while ensemble measurements of binding affinities generally yield one affinity ...
We introduce a data-driven epistatic model of protein evolution, capable of generating
evolutionary trajectories spanning very different time scales reaching from individual
mutations to diverged homologs. Our in silico evolution encompasses random ...
Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue
dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase
field model to study numerically the behavior of a near-confluent monolayer ...
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis.
On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a
fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer under actively
...
Computer Sciences
Discrepancy is a well-known measure for the irregularity of the distribution of a
point set. Point sets with small discrepancy are called low discrepancy and are known
to efficiently fill the space in a uniform manner. Low-discrepancy points play a ...
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
As sand moves across Earth’s landscapes, the shapes of individual grains evolve, and
microscopic textures accumulate on their surfaces. Because transport processes vary
between environments, the shape and suite of microtextures etched on sand grains ...
Rock metamorphism releases substantial CO2 over geologic timescales (>1 My), potentially driving long-term planetary climate
trends. The nature of carbonate sediments and crustal thermal regimes exert a strong
control on the efficiency of metamorphic CO2 ...
Atmospheric methane concentrations rose rapidly over the past decade and surged in
2020–2022 but the causes have been unclear. We find from inverse analysis of GOSAT
satellite observations that emissions from the wet tropics drove the 2010–2019 increase
...
Engineering
With current plans for manned missions to Mars and beyond, the need to better understand,
prevent, and counteract the harmful effects of long-duration spaceflight on the body
is becoming increasingly important. In this study, an automated heart-on-a-chip ...
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As countries pursue decarbonization goals, the rapid expansion of transmission capacity
for renewable energy (RE) integration poses a significant challenge due to hurdles
such as permitting and cost allocation. However, we find that large-scale ...
Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a powerful imaging technique that
enables the visualization of biological samples at the molecular level by measuring
the fluorescence decay rate of fluorescent probes. This provides critical information
...
Pore structures provide extra freedoms for the design of porous media, leading to
desirable properties, such as high catalytic rate, energy storage efficiency, and
specific strength. This unfortunately makes the porous media susceptible to failure.
Deep ...
Deployable tubular structures, designed for functional expansion, serve a wide range
of applications, from flexible pipes to stiff structural elements. These structures,
which transform from compact states, are crucial for creating adaptive solutions ...
Flexible intracortical probes offer important opportunities for stable neural interfaces
by reducing chronic immune responses, but their advances usually come with challenges
of difficult implantation and limited recording span. Here, we reported a ...
Palladium (Pd) catalysts have been extensively studied for the direct synthesis of
H2O through the hydrogen oxidation reaction at ambient conditions. This heterogeneous
catalytic reaction not only holds considerable practical significance but also serves
...
The 2023 smooth Lagrangian Crack-Band Model (slCBM), inspired by the 2020 invention
of the gap test, prevented spurious damage localization during fracture growth by
introducing the second gradient of the displacement field vector, named the “sprain,”
as ...
The CD4 T cell, when engineered with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) containing
specific intracellular domains, has been transformed into a zero-order drug-delivery
platform. This introduces the capability of prolonged, disease-specific engineered
...
Environmental Sciences
As countries pursue decarbonization goals, the rapid expansion of transmission capacity
for renewable energy (RE) integration poses a significant challenge due to hurdles
such as permitting and cost allocation. However, we find that large-scale ...
Global pollution has exacerbated accumulation of toxicants like methylmercury (MeHg)
in seafood. Human exposure to MeHg has been associated with long-term neurodevelopmental
delays and impaired cardiovascular health, while many micronutrients in seafood ...
Physics
The Majorana fermion offers fascinating possibilities such as non-Abelian statistics
and nonlocal robust qubits, and hunting it is one of the most important topics in
current condensed matter physics. Most of the efforts have been focused on the Majorana
...
The electronic properties of moiré heterostructures depend sensitively on the relative
orientation between layers of the stack. For example, near-magic-angle twisted bilayer
graphene (TBG) commonly shows superconductivity, yet a TBG sample with one of the
...
Statistics
Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation of decisions
or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network interference. This
occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its outcome but also ...
Interactions among the underlying agents of a complex system are not only limited
to dyads but can also occur in larger groups. Currently, no generic model has been
developed to capture high-order interactions (HOI), which, along with pairwise ...
Monitoring nociception, the flow of information associated with harmful stimuli through
the nervous system even during unconsciousness, is critical for proper anesthesia
care during surgery. Currently, this is done by tracking heart rate and blood ...
Sustainability Science
Global pollution has exacerbated accumulation of toxicants like methylmercury (MeHg)
in seafood. Human exposure to MeHg has been associated with long-term neurodevelopmental
delays and impaired cardiovascular health, while many micronutrients in seafood ...
Social Sciences
Anthropology
It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative Nazca geoglyphs, which
offer significant insights into the ancient cultures at the Nazca Pampa. Here, we
report the deployment of an AI system to the entire Nazca region, a UNESCO World ...
Economic Sciences
Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation of decisions
or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network interference. This
occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its outcome but also ...
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Shortly after birth, both naïve animals and newborn babies exhibit a spontaneous attraction
to faces and face-like stimuli. While neurons selectively responding to faces have
been found in the inferotemporal cortex of adult primates, face-selective ...
Biological Sciences
Agricultural Sciences
Effective colonization by microbe in the rhizosphere is critical for establishing
a beneficial symbiotic relationship with the host plant. Bacillus subtilis, a soil-dwelling bacterium that is commonly found in association with plants and
their rhizosphere,...
Applied Biological Sciences
With current plans for manned missions to Mars and beyond, the need to better understand,
prevent, and counteract the harmful effects of long-duration spaceflight on the body
is becoming increasingly important. In this study, an automated heart-on-a-chip ...
View related content:
The CD4 T cell, when engineered with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) containing
specific intracellular domains, has been transformed into a zero-order drug-delivery
platform. This introduces the capability of prolonged, disease-specific engineered
...
Biochemistry
Cancers develop resistance to inhibitors of oncogenes mainly due to target-centric
mechanisms such as mutations and splicing. While inhibitors or antagonists force targets
to unnatural conformation contributing to protein instability and resistance, ...
Huntington disease (HD) is a genetic neurodegenerative disease caused by cytosine,
adenine, guanine (CAG) expansion in the Huntingtin (HTT) gene, translating to an expanded polyglutamine tract in the HTT protein. Age at
disease onset correlates to CAG ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Cellular processes are controlled by the thermodynamics of the underlying biomolecular
interactions. Frequently, structural investigations use one monomeric binding partner,
while ensemble measurements of binding affinities generally yield one affinity ...
We introduce a data-driven epistatic model of protein evolution, capable of generating
evolutionary trajectories spanning very different time scales reaching from individual
mutations to diverged homologs. Our in silico evolution encompasses random ...
Interactions among the underlying agents of a complex system are not only limited
to dyads but can also occur in larger groups. Currently, no generic model has been
developed to capture high-order interactions (HOI), which, along with pairwise ...
Neurotransmitter:sodium symporters (NSSs) play critical roles in neural signaling
by regulating neurotransmitter uptake into cells powered by sodium electrochemical
gradients. Bacterial NSSs orthologs, including MhsT from Bacillus halodurans, have emerged ...
Cell Biology
One of the most critical axes for cell fate determination is how cells respond to
excessive reactive oxygen species (ROS)—oxidative stress. Extensive lipid peroxidation
commits cells to death via a distinct cell death paradigm termed ferroptosis. However,
...
N6-methyladenosine (m6A) RNA methylation is a prevalent RNA modification that significantly impacts RNA
metabolism and cancer development. Maintaining the global m6A levels in cancer cells relies on RNA accessibility to methyltransferases and the
...
The hair bundle, or stereocilia bundle, is the mechanosensory compartment of hair
cells (HCs) in the inner ear. To date, most mechanistic studies have focused on stereocilia
bundle morphogenesis, and it remains unclear how this organelle critical for ...
Bactofilins are rigid, nonpolar bacterial cytoskeletal filaments that link cellular
processes to specific curvatures of the cytoplasmic membrane. Although homologs of
bactofilins have been identified in archaea and eukaryotes, functional studies have
...
Gprotein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) regulate several physiological and pathological
processes and represent the target of approximately 30% of Food and Drug Administration-approved
drugs. GPCR-mediated signaling was thought to occur exclusively at the ...
Senescence is a cell fate driven by different types of stress that results in exit
from the cell cycle and expression of an inflammatory senescence-associated secretory
phenotype (SASP). Here, we demonstrate that stable overexpression of miR-96-5p was
...
Loss-of-function germline von Hippel–Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor mutations cause VHL disease, which predisposes individuals to kidney
cancer, hemangioblastomas, and paragangliomas. The risk that a given VHL disease family
will manifest some or all these ...
Developmental Biology
The prothoracic gland (PG) is a major insect endocrine organ. It is the principal
source of insect steroid hormones, and critical for key developmental events such
as the molts, the establishment of critical weight (CW), pupation, and sexual maturation.
...
Organ architecture is established during development through intricate cell–cell communication
mechanisms, yet the specific signals mediating these communications often remain elusive.
Here, we used the anterior pituitary gland that harbors different ...
Trophoblast stem (TS) cells have the unique capacity to differentiate into specialized
cell types, including extravillous trophoblast (EVT) cells. EVT cells invade into
and transform the uterus where they act to remodel the vasculature facilitating the
...
Ecology
Despite decades of research documenting the consequences of naturalized and invasive
plant species on ecosystem functions, our understanding of the functional underpinnings
of these changes remains rudimentary. This is partially due to ineffective scaling
...
Environmental Sciences
In 2015, the largest recorded harmful algal bloom (HAB) occurred in the Northeast
Pacific, causing nearly 100 million dollars in damages to fisheries and killing many
protected marine mammals. Dominated by the toxic diatom Pseudo-nitzschia australis, this ...
Despite the substantial evidence on the health effects of short-term exposure to ambient
fine particles (PM2.5), including increasing studies focusing on those from wildland fire smoke, the impacts
of long-term wildland fire smoke PM2.5 exposure remain ...
Evolution
The many independent transitions from hermaphroditism to separate sexes (dioecy) in
flowering plants and some animal clades must often have involved the emergence of
a heterogametic sex-determining locus, the basis of XY and ZW sex determination (i.e.,
...
Same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is widespread among animals and is often treated as
an evolutionary anomaly or mistake. An alternative view is that SSB occurs because
individuals have broader or more permissive “mating filters.” A broader filter means
...
Genetics
While considerable knowledge exists about the enzymes pivotal for C4 photosynthesis, much less is known about the cis-regulation important for specifying their expression in distinct cell types. Here,
we use single-cell-indexed ATAC-seq to identify cell-...
Immunology and Inflammation
In the lower respiratory tract, the alveolar spaces are divided from the bloodstream
and the external environment by only a few microns of interstitial tissue. Alveolar
macrophages (AMs) defend this delicate mucosal surface from invading infections by
...
Medical Sciences
Building upon our previous investigation of genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic
profiles of prostate cancer in China, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of proteomic
and phosphoproteomic profiles of 82 tumor tissues and matched adjacent normal ...
Human inborn errors of the type I IFN response pathway and auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-α,
-β, and/or -ω can underlie severe viral illnesses. We report a simple assay for the
detection of both types of condition. We stimulate whole blood from healthy ...
Microbiology
We explored how a simple retrovirus, Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) to facilitate
its replication process, utilizes DHX15, a cellular RNA helicase, typically engaged
in RNA processing. Through advanced genetic engineering techniques, we showed that
M-...
Gram-negative bacteria produce chaperone–usher pathway pili, which are extracellular
protein fibers tipped with an adhesive protein that binds to a receptor with stereochemical
specificity to determine host and tissue tropism. The outer-membrane usher ...
Neuroscience
Shortly after birth, both naïve animals and newborn babies exhibit a spontaneous attraction
to faces and face-like stimuli. While neurons selectively responding to faces have
been found in the inferotemporal cortex of adult primates, face-selective ...
Monitoring nociception, the flow of information associated with harmful stimuli through
the nervous system even during unconsciousness, is critical for proper anesthesia
care during surgery. Currently, this is done by tracking heart rate and blood ...
Cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain play a crucial role in regulating adult
hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN). However, the circuit and molecular mechanisms underlying
cholinergic modulation of AHN, especially the initial stages of this process ...
There is evidence that transcription factor (TF) encoding genes, which temporally
control development in multiple cell types, can have tens of enhancers that regulate
their expression. The NR2F1 TF developmentally promotes caudal and ventral cortical
...
Stimulus-specific adaptation is a hallmark of sensory processing in which a repeated
stimulus results in diminished successive neuronal responses, but a deviant stimulus
will still elicit robust responses from the same neurons. Recent work has established
...
Decisions made over long time scales, such as life cycle decisions, require coordinated
interplay between sensory perception and sustained gene expression. The Caenorhabditis elegans dauer (or diapause) exit developmental decision requires sensory ...
No sooner is an experience over than its neural representation begins to be transformed
through memory reactivation during offline periods. The lion’s share of prior research
has focused on understanding offline reactivation within the hippocampus. ...
Mechanical force controls the opening and closing of mechanosensitive ion channels
atop the hair bundles of the inner ear. The filamentous tip link connecting transduction
channels to the tallest neighboring stereocilium modulates the force transmitted to
...
Plant Biology
Seed dormancy corresponds to a reversible blockage of germination. Primary dormancy
is established during seed maturation, while secondary dormancy is set up on the dispersed
seed, following an exposure to unfavorable factors. Both dormancies are relieved ...
It is normally supposed that populations of the same species should evolve shared
mechanisms of adaptation to common stressors due to evolutionary constraint. Here,
we describe a system of within-species local adaptation to coastal habitats, Brassica ...
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Evidence on cash transfers as a population-level intervention to support healthy cognitive
aging in low-income settings is sparse. We assessed the effect of a cash transfer
intervention on cognitive aging outcomes in older South African adults. We ...
Correction
SI Correction
Cover image: Pictured is green foxtail (Setaria viridis), an annual grass. Magda Garbowski et al. combined data from more than 75,000 vegetation plots across the United States with functional trait data for more than 5,500 plant species to uncover how naturalized species affect plant community traits. Compared with communities dominated by native species, communities dominated by naturalized species were shorter, more shallowly rooted, and exhibited traits supporting rapid resource acquisition and low reliance on mycorrhizal symbionts. According to the authors, community-level trait shifts likely underpin the functional changes observed in invaded ecosystems. See the article by Garbowski et al. e2403120121. Image credit: Magda Garbowski.
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