Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 122, Number 26
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Zoos must embrace animal death for education and conservation
Brief Report
Gastrointestinal (GI) neuroimmune interactions are crucial sensors and regulators
of tissue homeostasis. Most enteric neurons reside within the myenteric plexus of
the enteric nervous system in the muscular region, forming a structure called the
...
Physical Sciences
Applied Mathematics
Antagonistic interactions are critical determinants of microbial community stability
and composition, offering host benefits such as pathogen protection and providing
avenues for antimicrobial control. While the ability to eliminate competitors confers
an ...
Collective cooperation maintains the function of many natural and social systems,
making understanding the evolution of cooperation a central question of modern science.
Although human interactions involve complex contact networks, current explorations
...
Darwinian evolution results from an interplay between stochastic diversification of
heritable phenotypes, impacting the chance of survival and reproduction, and fitness-based
selection. The ability of populations to evolve and adapt to environmental ...
Applied Physical Sciences
Liquid–liquid phase transitions (LLPTs) are typically characterized as two-state systems,
where transitions occur between two distinct liquid phases driven by local structural
rearrangements. In this study, we observed a continuous LLPT with an inversion ...
Roughness-dependent scaling of the contact area and separation gap with pressure for glassy polymers
The contact between two rough surfaces has been a topic of significant interest since
early studies on Coulombic friction and remains crucial for numerous technological
applications. However, theoretical progress has outpaced experiments due to the ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
The outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) produced by diderm bacteria have important roles
in cell envelope homeostasis, secretion, interbacterial communication, and pathogenesis.
The facultative intracellular pathogen Salmonella enterica Typhimurium (STm) ...
The aggregation of α-synuclein into amyloid fibrils is a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease. This process
has been shown to directly involve interactions between proteins and lipid surfaces
when the latter are present. Despite this importance, the molecular ...
Chemistry
The Hantzsch ester (HEH2) has found considerable utility as a photoreductant in synthesis, with photodriven
transfer hydrogenation reactions typically limited to activated substrates. We recently
established that the addition of an organic buffer of ...
Inspired by Nature, we present a polypeptide-based organic redox-active material constructed
from renewable feedstocks, L-glutamic acid (an amino acid) and riboflavin (vitamin
B2), to address challenges with start-to-end-of-life management in energy ...
Adhesive interfaces store significant energy due to interlocking molecular chain entanglement
and van der Waals forces. When two adhesive surfaces are separated, triboelectric
effects induce charge transfer, generating a strong electric field at the ...
Cancer therapy would benefit from suppressing cancer cell motility in the process
of metastasis. Such directed cell migration relies on the propulsive force established
by the filamentous actin network within lamellipodia. Proteins of the Ena/VASP family
...
Drimenol synthase from Aquimarina spongiae (AsDMS) is a highly unusual chimera that integrates two distinct, sequential isoprenoid
processing activities within a single polypeptide chain. AsDMS catalyzes the class
II cyclization of farnesyl diphosphate (...
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
The Late Paleozoic Ice Age (~340 to 260 Ma) occurred under peak atmospheric O2 (1.2 to 1.7 PIAL, pre-industrial atmospheric levels) for Earth history and CO2 concentrations comparable to those of the preindustrial to that anticipated for our
near future. ...
Engineering
Currently, catalytic recycling of polyethylene (PE) into high-value chemicals using
solar energy often faces poor product selectivity and low efficiency. This is mainly
due to the difficulty in effectively controlling the intermediates during PE ...
Hydrocephalus, a neurological condition characterized by an excessive buildup of cerebrospinal
fluid (CSF) in the brain, affects millions worldwide and leads to severe consequences.
Current treatments, such as ventriculoperitoneal shunts, divert excess ...
Physics
The response of an atom to external electric and magnetic fields can reveal fundamental
atomic properties. It has long been verified that, in a static magnetic field, those
atomic energy levels with hyperfine interactions shift according to the Breit–Rabi
...
Social Sciences
Economic Sciences
Generative AI is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated
promise in significantly improving human productivity. A key question is how generative
AI affects learning—namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks. ...
Indirect reciprocity is a compelling explanation for stable cooperation in a large
society: Those who cooperate appropriately earn a good standing, so that others are
more likely to cooperate with them. However, this mechanism requires a population
to ...
Social Sciences
In recent years, trust in US public health and science institutions has faced unprecedented
declines, particularly among Republicans/conservatives. To what extent might institutional
criticism on social media be responsible for such politically polarized ...
Sustainability Science
Scholars have long been concerned about gender representation in scientific research
but there has been little work on gender differences in participation and performance
in climate science, a field that engages with both male-majority disciplines (e.g.,
...
Freshwater resources are fundamental to supporting humanity, and measures of water
scarcity have been critical for identifying where water requirements and water availability
are imbalanced. Existing water scarcity metrics typically account for blue water ...
Biological Sciences
Biochemistry
Cancer therapy would benefit from suppressing cancer cell motility in the process
of metastasis. Such directed cell migration relies on the propulsive force established
by the filamentous actin network within lamellipodia. Proteins of the Ena/VASP family
...
Drimenol synthase from Aquimarina spongiae (AsDMS) is a highly unusual chimera that integrates two distinct, sequential isoprenoid
processing activities within a single polypeptide chain. AsDMS catalyzes the class
II cyclization of farnesyl diphosphate (...
Cyclin F, a noncanonical member of the cyclin protein family, plays a critical role
in regulating transitions in the cell division cycle. Unlike canonical cyclins, which
bind and activate cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs), Cyclin F functions as a substrate
...
Motivated by recent data pointing to the existence of homo-oligomeric assemblies of
membrane proteins called higher-order transient structures, and their apparent role
in connecting components of membrane signal pathways, we examine here by cryoelectron
...
A hallmark of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection
is the delayed interferon response. Interferons are typically produced upon host recognition
of pathogen- or damage-associated molecular patterns, such as nucleic acids. ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Hydrocephalus, a neurological condition characterized by an excessive buildup of cerebrospinal
fluid (CSF) in the brain, affects millions worldwide and leads to severe consequences.
Current treatments, such as ventriculoperitoneal shunts, divert excess ...
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an immune-mediated disease with no current cure. Drug discovery
and repurposing are essential to enhance treatment efficacy and safety. We utilized
summary statistics for protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) of 2,004 plasma ...
D-peptides hold great promise as therapeutics by alleviating the challenges of metabolic
stability and immunogenicity in L-peptides. However, current D-peptide discovery methods
are severely limited by specific size, structure, and the chemical ...
Developmental Biology
Retinoic acid (RA) is a morphogen that contributes to inner ear development. Gain
and loss of function experiments have indicated retinoic acid’s critical role in cochlear
hair cell development. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms are unclear. ...
The formation of bilateral testes in animals is critical for puberty, reproductive
capacity, and testosterone production across the life course. In humans, testis development
begins in embryonic life in the first trimester, with considerable effort ...
Ecology
Antagonistic interactions are critical determinants of microbial community stability
and composition, offering host benefits such as pathogen protection and providing
avenues for antimicrobial control. While the ability to eliminate competitors confers
an ...
Salt marshes provide valuable ecosystem services but are vulnerable to drowning with
accelerated sea-level rise (SLR). Marsh belowground biomass (BGB) production helps
avoid drowning by building marsh surface elevation. Reductions in BGB can serve as
an ...
The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) harbors extraordinarily high levels of biodiversity
and endemism. The region is warming at a rate twice the global average, yet the evolutionary
dynamics of its unique biota are poorly understood. Here, we used the endemic ...
Tree species worldwide face increasing exposure to unprecedented macroclimatic conditions
due to anthropogenic climate change, which may trigger biome shifts and ecosystem
disruptions. We quantified climate change exposure–shifts to species’ currently ...
Climate change pushes species toward higher latitudes and altitudes, but the proximate
drivers of range expansions vary, and it is unclear whether evolution facilitates
climate change–induced range changes. In a temporally replicated field experiment,
we ...
Environmental Sciences
Freshwater resources are fundamental to supporting humanity, and measures of water
scarcity have been critical for identifying where water requirements and water availability
are imbalanced. Existing water scarcity metrics typically account for blue water ...
Methane seeps harbor uncharacterized animal–microbe symbioses with unique nutritional
strategies. Three undescribed sea spider species (family Ammotheidae; genus Sericosura) endemic to methane seeps were found along the eastern Pacific margin, from ...
Thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency in marine systems is a globally significant threat to marine life. In
2020, newly hatched Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) fry in California’s Central Valley (CCV) hatcheries swam in corkscrew patterns and
died at ...
Evolution
Collective cooperation maintains the function of many natural and social systems,
making understanding the evolution of cooperation a central question of modern science.
Although human interactions involve complex contact networks, current explorations
...
Darwinian evolution results from an interplay between stochastic diversification of
heritable phenotypes, impacting the chance of survival and reproduction, and fitness-based
selection. The ability of populations to evolve and adapt to environmental ...
Indirect reciprocity is a compelling explanation for stable cooperation in a large
society: Those who cooperate appropriately earn a good standing, so that others are
more likely to cooperate with them. However, this mechanism requires a population
to ...
Island populations of large vertebrates have experienced higher extinction rates than
mainland populations over long timescales due to demographic stochasticity, genetic
drift, and inbreeding. While being more susceptible to extinction and as such ...
Polyploid organisms evolve from their initial doubled genomic condition through a
number of processes collectively termed diploidization, whose tempo and mode remain
poorly understood mainly due to the difficulty of discriminating de novo evolution
...
The rapid evolution of RNA viruses implies that their evolutionary and ecological
processes occur on the same time scale. Genome sequences of these pathogens therefore
can contain information about the processes that govern their transmission and ...
Insects frequently form associations with maternally transmitted symbiotic bacteria.
This transmission mode ensures that symbiont-conferred effects, both beneficial and
negative, are passed onto offspring. Here, we report an extreme example of symbiont-...
Genetics
There is overwhelming evidence that forest trees are locally adapted to climate. Thus,
genecological models based on population phenotypes have been used to measure local
adaptation, infer genetic maladaptation to climate, and guide assisted migration.
...
Regulation of proteome homeostasis is crucial for the survival and adaptation to changing
environments for all species. In eukaryotes, this process is finely tuned through
regulation at the level of transcription, translation, protein modification, and ...
Immunology and Inflammation
Tissue fibrosis is commonly associated with organ malfunction and is strongly associated
with the development of chronic rejection, cardiovascular diseases, and other chronic
diseases. Fibrosis also contributes to immune exclusion in tumor tissues. ...
Medical Sciences
Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT)
are two distinct vascular diseases linked to impaired signaling through bone morphogenetic
protein (BMP) receptor complexes in endothelial cells. Although BMP-9 plays a ...
Cribriform prostate cancer (crPCa) is associated with poor clinical outcomes, yet
its accurate detection remains challenging due to the poor sensitivity of standard-of-care
diagnostic tools. Here, we use untargeted spatial metabolomics to identify fatty ...
PIK3CA-related disorders are rare genetic disorders due to somatic gain-of-function mutations
in PIK3CA during embryonic development, a pathway involved in cell growth, proliferation, and
metabolism. Accumulating evidence from patients with PIK3CA-related ...
Estrogen receptor β (ERβ) plays an important role in both the mouse and human prostate.
The endogenous ligand for ERβ is the dihydrotestosterone metabolite, 5β-androstane-3β,
17β-diol (3β-Adiol). Thus, treatment with 5-α reductase inhibitor (5-ARI) should ...
Microbiology
The outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) produced by diderm bacteria have important roles
in cell envelope homeostasis, secretion, interbacterial communication, and pathogenesis.
The facultative intracellular pathogen Salmonella enterica Typhimurium (STm) ...
RNA recognition motif (RRM) domain proteins are crucial RNA-binding proteins across
all domains of life. In cyanobacteria, single RRM domain proteins are involved in
mRNA targeting to the thylakoid membrane and acclimation to certain stress conditions,
...
Equine infectious anemia virus (EIAV) is an important model for the study of pathogenesis
in lentiviruses. Studies of viral genome organization and replication mechanisms are
fundamental to the understanding of virus pathogenicity. In this study, we ...
The HTLV-1 bZIP factor (HBZ) gene, which is the only viral gene conserved and consistently expressed in all adult
T-cell leukemia–lymphoma (ATL) cases, is critical for ATL oncogenesis. Although HBZ
protein is found in both the nucleus and the cytoplasm, ...
Light controls important biological processes in fungi by regulating transcriptional
gene activation. Here, we found that beyond the regulation of mRNA transcript abundance,
light regulates alternative splicing (AS) in the filamentous fungi Aspergillus ...
Trichomonas vaginalis is a common, extracellular, sexually transmitted parasite which is often found in
symbiosis with the intracellular bacterium Mycoplasma hominis (Mh), an opportunistic pathogen of the female reproductive tract. How this symbiosis
...
Neuroscience
Perception is fallible. Humans know this, and so do some nonhuman animals like macaque
monkeys. When monkeys report more confidence in a perceptual decision, that decision
is more likely to be correct. It is not known how neural circuits in the primate ...
Recently, extensive evidence has demonstrated that the brain operates close to a critical
state, characterized by dynamic patterns known as neuronal avalanches. The critical
state, reflecting the delicate balance between neural excitation and inhibition, ...
Chronic pain arises from maladaptive changes in both peripheral and central nervous
systems, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a key region implicated in
descending pain modulation. Chronic pain increases the excitability of pyramidal neurons
...
The basal ganglia play a crucial role in action selection by facilitating desired
movements and suppressing unwanted ones. The substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr),
a key output nucleus, facilitates movement through disinhibition of the superior ...
Pharmacology
Prostate cancer is a global health challenge, particularly for patients resistant
to the second-generation anti-androgen receptor pathway inhibitors. The steroidogenic
enzyme 3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 (3βHSD1) has emerged as a promising
...
Physiology
Metabolic homeostasis is essential for survival; however, many studies have focused
on the fluctuations of these factors. Furthermore, while metabolic homeostasis depends
on the balance between the production and consumption of metabolites, there have ...
Plant Biology
The mutual antagonistic signaling of abscisic acid (ABA) and ROP GTPases highlights
an intersection between stress responses and pattern formation. Previously, we have
shown that signaling of ABA in the endodermis leads to protoxylem (PX) differentiation.
...
Chloroplast division, a process tightly linked to the energy demands of plants, is
initiated by the formation of the stromal filamenting temperature-sensitive Z (FtsZ)
ring. The Z ring is highly dynamic, and its constriction provides the essential force
...
Systems Biology
Anticancer chemotherapy is an essential part of cancer treatment, but the emergence
of resistance remains a major hurdle. Metabolic reprogramming is a notable phenotype
associated with the acquisition of drug resistance. Here, we develop a computational
...
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