Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 122, Number 35
This Week in PNAS
Editorial
Opinion
Profile
Soil scientist Johannes Lehmann has spent his career examining how to improve soil
quality to secure agricultural production, regulate climate, and keep water clean.
His work with dark earths in the Brazilian Amazon led to the discovery of the importance
...
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Commentaries
Letters
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Brief Reports
Using well-established microarchaeological sampling methods, we reached a precise
radiocarbon date of 800 BC for the Siloam Pool’s monumental water dam in Jerusalem.
This date is a critical link connecting several imposing waterworks constructed at
that ...
As climate change accelerates, effectively monitoring and managing the growing impacts
on biodiversity is an urgent priority. Here, we identify the exposure of species to
unprecedented heat to evaluate the potential impact of 2024—the hottest year on ...
Social media are often said to exacerbate polarization by platforming hostility between
groups. However, positive social emotions like ingroup solidarity may also drive social
media engagement, particularly after major threats such as military invasions ...
Cooperation often requires individuals to balance personal risk with mutual gain.
The Stag Hunt game provides a well-established paradigm for studying such decision-making.
Prior research suggested that verbal communication about the game correlated with
...
Physical Sciences
Applied Mathematics
Community structure is a key feature omnipresent in real-world network data. Plethora
of methods have been proposed to reveal subsets of densely interconnected nodes using
criteria such as the modularity index. These approaches have been successful for ...
Applied Physical Sciences
Living systems display complex behaviors driven by physical forces as well as decision-making.
Hydrodynamic theories hold promise for simplified universal descriptions of socially
generated collective behaviors. However, the construction of such theories ...
The investigation of biomolecular interactions at the single-molecule level has emerged
as a pivotal research area in life science, particularly through optical, mechanical,
and electrochemical approaches. Spins existing widely in biological systems offer
...
Aqueous foams are solid materials composed of gases and liquids, exhibiting a large
gas/liquid surface area and enabling dynamic exchanges between their fluid components.
The structure of binary-gas foams, whose bubbles consist of a mixture of two gases
...
Light scattering in biological tissue presents a significant challenge for deep in
vivo imaging. Our previous work demonstrated the ability to achieve optical transparency
in live mice using intensely absorbing dye molecules, which created transparency in
...
Life thrives due to its remarkable ability to create complex structures through the
self-assembly of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules. Achieving such complex
assemblies with the same level of fidelity, reproducibility, and advanced ...
The room temperature manipulation of solid-state spins provides an opportunity to
develop quantum applications under ambient conditions. Local electromagnetic fields,
that usually produced by current in micro/nanoscale metal wires, have been employed
for ...
Biological flyers periodically flap their appendages to generate aerodynamic forces.
Extensive studies have made significant progress in explaining the physics behind
their propulsion in cruising by developing scaling laws of their flight kinematics.
...
Heparan sulfates are found in all animal tissues and have essential roles in living
systems. This family of biomacromolecules modulates binding to calcium ions (Ca2+) in low free energy reactions that influence biochemical processes from cell signaling
...
Chemistry
Street art murals are increasingly recognized as valuable contemporary artworks, often
attaining significant artistic, historical, and social importance. As these murals
become integral parts of cultural heritage, finding efficient strategies for their
...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) to multicarbon (Cn) upgrading for commodity chemicals, fuel production, or artificial food synthesis
using renewable energy input is a golden target for researchers in sustainable carbon
emission reduction. Here, we explore and ...
Computer Sciences
With rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), there has been an increasing
application of LLMs in creative content ideation and generation. A critical question
emerges: can current LLMs provide ideas that are diverse enough to truly bolster ...
By varying prompts to a large language model, we can elicit the full range of human
behaviors in a variety of different scenarios in classic economic games. By analyzing
which prompts elicit which behaviors, we can categorize and compare different ...
Human learning embodies a striking duality: Sometimes, we can rapidly infer and compose
logical rules, benefiting from structured curricula (e.g., in formal education), while
other times, we rely on an incremental approach or trial-and-error, learning ...
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
The oxygenation history of Earth’s surface environments has had a profound influence
on the ecology and evolution of metazoan life. It was traditionally thought that the
Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event enabled the origin of animals in marine environments,...
Black carbon (BC) aerosols exacerbate air pollution and climate warming, but their
climatic impacts and sources are poorly constrained by bottom–up emission inventories
(EIs). China’s Clean Air Action (CAA), which was launched in 2013, provides an ...
Ice often mediates unexpected reactions in the Cryosphere, acting as a fascinating
geochemical reactor. Mineral–organic interactions in frozen environments, such as
soils and permafrost, are crucial for explaining the flux of soluble iron during melting
...
Ferrous chloride–rich silicic fluid and melt infiltration led to the decarbonation
of dolomitic marble in the Chinese Sulu ultrahigh-pressure metamorphic terrain under
temperatures ranging from 670 to 800 °C, pressures from the aragonite + albite to
...
Engineering
Membranes that selectively enhance target solute permeation while rejecting competing
species are essential for precision separations. This study introduces charge-patterned
mosaic membranes (CMMs) that selectively transport divalent asymmetric salts by ...
Precise, noninvasive drug delivery to small but important brain regions is challenging
and highly desired given the brain’s inherent complexity and heterogeneous nature.
Here, we report an approach utilizing focused ultrasound (FUS) combined with ...
Environmental Sciences
Global demand for wood products is increasing forest harvest. One understudied consequence
of logging is that it accelerates mobilization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) from
soils to aquatic ecosystems where it is more easily rereleased to the ...
Physics
Emergence of quantum orders with nontrivial quantum geometric properties in metals
represent central issues in condensed matter physics. In this context, recently discovered
chiral loop-current order in kagome metals has garnered significant attention. ...
We discuss the dependence of the critical properties of the Anderson model on the
dimension d in the language of β-function and renormalization group recently introduced in Vanoni et al. [C. Vanoni
et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121, e2401955121 (...
Social Sciences
Demography
Living systems display complex behaviors driven by physical forces as well as decision-making.
Hydrodynamic theories hold promise for simplified universal descriptions of socially
generated collective behaviors. However, the construction of such theories ...
Exposure to infectious disease in early life may have long-term ramifications for
health and lifespan. However, reducing pathogen exposure may not be uniformly beneficial.
The rise of modern sanitation and reduction of infectious diseases has been ...
The fast-paced improvements in mortality in high-income countries since the early
1900s have led to a sustained increase in life expectancy. However, whether this linear
trend will continue or life expectancy gains will decelerate in the near future ...
Economic Sciences
By varying prompts to a large language model, we can elicit the full range of human
behaviors in a variety of different scenarios in classic economic games. By analyzing
which prompts elicit which behaviors, we can categorize and compare different ...
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
For over 5,000 y, chanting has been practiced across many Western and Eastern traditions.
However, there is hardly any empirical research on 1) whether chants from across the
globe share common acoustic properties, 2) whether these acoustic features make ...
The “eureka” insights that drive progress in science and mathematics remain shrouded
in mystery. Sudden, unexpected, appearing like “flashes of lightning”, these insights
have the hallmarks of critical transitions in complex systems. Here, zooming in on
...
How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed
38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how personal values are encoded
in individual and collective legacies. Using Schwartz’s theory of basic human values,
...
Sustainability Science
Rapid global expansion of protected areas is critical for safeguarding biodiversity
but depends on political action for successful implementation. Following widespread
ratification of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, an unprecedented
...
Biological Sciences
Applied Biological Sciences
Streptomyces are naturally endowed with the capacity to produce a wide array of natural products
with biomedical and biotechnological value. They have garnered great interest in synthetic
biology applications given the abundance of uncharacterized ...
Biochemistry
Immunoglobulin A proteases (IgAPs) are a diverse group of enzymes secreted from bacteria
that inhabit human mucosal tissues. These enzymes have convergently evolved to cleave
human immunoglobulin A as a means of modulating and evading host immunity. Only ...
Ligands in the transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) family [activins, Bone Morphogenetic
Proteins (BMPs), and TGF-βs] signal by bringing together two type I and two type II
receptors. Activin receptor-like kinase-2 (ALK2) is the only type I receptor among
...
Arsenite (AsIII) is toxic to all organisms due to its ability to tightly bind exposed thiols within
cells. An important AsIII resistance mechanism in prokaryotes involves proteins encoded by the ars operon. A central component of the ars operon in many ...
In vivo genome editing has the potential to address many inherited and environmental
disorders. However, a major hurdle for the clinical translation of genome editing
is safe, efficient delivery to disease-relevant tissues. A modality-agnostic reporter
...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Stromal interaction molecule 1 (STIM1) is a Ca2+-sensing protein in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane. The depletion of ER Ca2+ stores induces a large conformational transition of the cytosolic STIM1 C-terminus,
initiated by the dimerization of the ...
Membrane active peptides (MAPs) represent a diverse group of agents that disrupt the
integrity of lipid membranes. One class of MAPs, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), destroy
bacteria by transiently porating the bacterial membrane causing leakage of ...
Cell Biology
The glycerol-3-phosphate (G-3-P) pathway is central to the synthesis of triacylglycerols
(TAGs) and glycerophospholipids, essential for membrane biogenesis and lipid storage.
The first and rate-limiting step in this pathway is catalyzed by glycerol-3-...
Biallelic pathogenic variants in the essential DNA repair gene BRCA2 cause Fanconi anemia complementation group D1. Patients in this group are highly
prone to develop embryonal tumors, most commonly medulloblastoma arising from the
cerebellar granule cell ...
With No lysine (K) 1 (WNK1) is essential for ion and volume homeostasis, sensing osmotic
stress and activating pathways that regulate ion transport. Its response to osmotic
stress shares similarities with the function of the mechanosensitive ion channel ...
Developmental Biology
Progenitor cell dedifferentiation is important for stem cell maintenance during tissue
repair and age-related stem cell decline. Here, we use the Drosophila ovary as a model to study the role of cytonemes in bone morphogenic protein (BMP)
signaling–...
Ecology
The oxygenation history of Earth’s surface environments has had a profound influence
on the ecology and evolution of metazoan life. It was traditionally thought that the
Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event enabled the origin of animals in marine environments,...
Soil microbial diversity is crucial to sustaining ecosystem productivity and improving
carbon sequestration. Global temperature continues to rise, but how climate warming
affects microbial diversity and its capacity to sequester soil organic carbon (SOC)
...
The niche is a key concept that unifies ecology and evolutionary biology. However,
empirical and theoretical treatments of the niche are mostly performed at the species
level, neglecting individuals as important units of ecological and evolutionary ...
Environmental Sciences
Global demand for wood products is increasing forest harvest. One understudied consequence
of logging is that it accelerates mobilization of dissolved organic matter (DOM) from
soils to aquatic ecosystems where it is more easily rereleased to the ...
Evolution
Mutation rates have long been measured as averages across many genomic positions.
Recently, a method to measure the rates of individual mutations was applied to a narrow
region in the human hemoglobin subunit beta (HBB) gene containing the site of the ...
A remarkable example of symbiosis involves the pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti). It lives obligatorily on gorgonian corals, mimicking their polyps with pink coloration
and skin protuberances. Unique for seahorses, pygmy seahorses retain juvenile ...
Denisovans are an extinct group of humans whose morphology is mostly unknown. The
scarcity of verified Denisovan fossils makes it challenging to study their anatomy,
and how well they were adapted to their environment. We previously developed a genetic
...
Despite sharing fewer than 10 core genes, the hyperdiverse Nucleocytoviricota phylum (ranging from poxviruses to giant viruses) universally assembles viral factories
(VFs) resembling biomolecular condensates. Regardless, it is unclear how these viruses
...
Genetics
The fungal species Candida albicans and the bacterium Enterococcus faecalis are members of the human gut microbiome. To explore the range of interactions between
these two species, we utilized dual RNA-sequencing to transcriptionally profile both
C. ...
Transcription of interferons upon viral infection is critical for cell-intrinsic innate
immunity. This process is influenced by many host and viral factors. To identify host
factors that modulate interferon induction within cells infected by influenza A ...
Immunology and Inflammation
The Foxp3+CD4+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) generated around birth are phenotypically and functionally
distinct from those engendered during adulthood. That perinatally produced Tregs persist
for a protracted period in peripheral lymphoid organs has been ...
Medical Sciences
Exposure to infectious disease in early life may have long-term ramifications for
health and lifespan. However, reducing pathogen exposure may not be uniformly beneficial.
The rise of modern sanitation and reduction of infectious diseases has been ...
Noonan syndrome with multiple lentigines (NSML) is a rare autosomal dominant disorder
caused by mutations in PTPN11 (protein tyrosine phosphatase nonreceptor type 11) which encodes for the protein
tyrosine phosphatase, SHP2. Approximately 85% of NSML ...
Human papillomavirus (HPV)–related lesions contain types with benign outcomes and
those with a risk of progression to cancer. We addressed the role of immune surveillance
in 76 cervical biopsies (normal = 23, HPV+ benign = 16, HPV+ precancer = 37) by ...
Inadequate response to androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) frequently arises in prostate
cancer, driven by cellular mechanisms that remain poorly understood. Here, we integrated
single-cell RNA sequencing, single-cell multiomics, and spatial ...
Microbiology
Studies from the 1980s and 1990s conducted in Italy, where malaria was once endemic,
hypothesized that individuals with erythrocytes deficient in flavin mononucleotide
and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD)—collectively known as flavins—are partially
...
severeacute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) bivalent vaccines show
potential against variants but lack a full understanding of the immunological mechanisms
that drive broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs). This study explored the ...
Schistosomes are parasitic flatworms that infect more than 200 million people globally.
However, there is a shortage of molecular tools that enable the discovery of potential
drug targets within schistosomes. Thus, praziquantel has remained the frontline ...
The human gut is rich in metabolites and harbors a complex microbial community, yet
surprisingly little is known about the spectrum of chemical signals detected by the
large variety of sensory receptors present in the gut microbiome. Here, we ...
Bacteria have several nucleotide second messengers, most of which act as global regulators
to control a wide range of bacterial physiological processes. Studies usually focus
on a single second messenger, and the mechanisms and physiological significance ...
Glucose metabolism impacts the innate immune response against viral infection. However,
the key enzymes or the natural products and mechanisms involved are not well elucidated.
Here, we found that arrestin domain containing 4 (ARRDC4), a critical ...
The efficacy of VIR-7831, a class 3 anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibody (mAb), was
demonstrated repeatedly in clinical trials; yet, reduced neutralization against Omicron
variants in cell-line-based neutralization assays led to its withdrawal from ...
Neuroscience
Precise, noninvasive drug delivery to small but important brain regions is challenging
and highly desired given the brain’s inherent complexity and heterogeneous nature.
Here, we report an approach utilizing focused ultrasound (FUS) combined with ...
Amyloid β (Aβ)-dependent circuit dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is determined
by a puzzling mix of hyperactive and inactive (“silent”) brain neurons. Recent studies
identified excessive glutamate accumulation as a key Aβ-dependent determinant of ...
Plant Biology
The plant immune system utilizes nucleotide-binding/leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins
to detect pathogen virulence factors (effectors) inside host cells and transduce recognition
to rapid defense. In dicotyledenous plants, pathogen activated Toll-like/...
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Human learning embodies a striking duality: Sometimes, we can rapidly infer and compose
logical rules, benefiting from structured curricula (e.g., in formal education), while
other times, we rely on an incremental approach or trial-and-error, learning ...
Systems Biology
Epidemiological evidence shows that some diseases tend to co-occur; more exactly,
certain groups of patients with a given disease are at a higher risk of developing
a specific secondary condition. Here, we develop an approach to generate a disease
network ...
Corrections
Cover image: Pictured are two pygmy seahorses (Hippocampus bargibanti) clinging to gorgonian coral (Muricella sp.). Meng Qu, Yingyi Zhang et al. analyzed the genome of H. bargibanti, which mimic the coloration and bulbous polyps of the gorgonian corals on which they live. The authors identified molecular mechanisms associated with the seahorse’s miniaturization, camouflage, and tolerance of coral venom and extensive losses of immune-related genes—likely facilitated by antimicrobial metabolites produced by the corals. The results provide insight into the evolution of the obligatory symbiotic relationship between H. bargibanti and gorgonian corals. See the article by Qu, Zhang et al. e2423818122. Image credit: South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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