Table Of Contents Page, PNAS Volume 121, Number 30
This Week in PNAS
Opinion
Commentaries
Brief Report
As the primary cause for chronic pain and disability in elderly individuals, osteoarthritis
(OA) is one of the fastest-growing diseases due to the aging world population. To
date, the impact of microenvironmental changes on the pathogenesis of OA remains ...
Physical Sciences
Applied Physical Sciences
In this work, we have found that a prenotched double-network (DN) hydrogel, when subjected
to tensile loading in a pure-shear geometry, exhibits intriguing stick–slip crack
dynamics. These dynamics synchronize with the oscillation of the damage (yielding)
...
Ice is emerging as a promising sacrificial material in the rapidly expanding area
of advanced manufacturing for creating precise 3D internal geometries. Freeform 3D
printing of ice (3D-ICE) can produce microscale ice structures with smooth walls,
...
The recognizable shapes of landforms arise from processes such as erosion by wind
or water currents. However, explaining the physical origin of natural structures is
challenging due to the coupled evolution of complex flow fields and three-dimensional
(3D)...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Mitofusins (Mfn1 and Mfn2) are the mitochondrial outer-membrane fusion proteins in
mammals and belong to the dynamin superfamily of multidomain GTPases. Recent structural
studies of truncated variants lacking alpha helical transmembrane domains suggested
...
Theoretical models conventionally portray the consolidation of memories as a slow
process that unfolds during sleep. According to the classical Complementary Learning
Systems theory, the hippocampus (HPC) rapidly changes its connectivity during ...
Gliding motility proceeds with little changes in cell shape and often results from
actively driven surface flows of adhesins binding to the extracellular environment.
It allows for fast movement over surfaces or through tissue, especially for the ...
Large cells often rely on cytoplasmic flows for intracellular transport, maintaining
homeostasis, and positioning cellular components. Understanding the mechanisms of
these flows is essential for gaining insights into cell function, developmental ...
As cells age, they undergo a remarkable global change: In transcriptional drift, hundreds
of genes become overexpressed while hundreds of others become underexpressed. Using
archetype modeling and Gene Ontology analysis on data from aging Caenorhabditis ...
Chemistry
High-entropy compounds have been emerging as promising candidates for electrolysis,
yet their controllable electrosynthesis strategy remains a formidable challenge because
of the ambiguous ionic interaction and codeposition mechanism. Herein, we report a
...
Surface reconstruction determines the fate of catalytic sites on the near-surface
during the oxygen evolution reaction. However, deciphering the conversion mechanism
of various intermediate-states during surface reconstruction remains a challenge.
Herein, ...
A kinetic/mechanistic investigation of gaseous propane hydrogenolysis over the single-site
heterogeneous polyolefin depolymerization catalysts AlS/ZrNp2 and AlS/HfNp2 (AlS = sulfated alumina, Np = neopentyl), is use to probe intrinsic catalyst properties
...
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
The perfluorocarbons tetrafluoromethane (CF4, PFC-14) and hexafluoroethane (C2F6, PFC-116) are potent greenhouse gases with near-permanent atmospheric lifetimes relative
to human timescales and global warming potentials thousands of times that of CO2. ...
Due to the scarcity of rock samples, the Hadean Era predating 4 billion years ago
(Ga) poses challenges in understanding geological processes like subaerial weathering
and plate tectonics that are critical for the evolution of life. The Jack Hills zircon
...
The melting of ice sheets and global glaciers results in sea-level rise, a pole-to-equator
mass transport increasing Earth’s oblateness and resulting in an increase in the length
of day (LOD). Here, we use observations and reconstructions of mass ...
Engineering
The development of advanced neural modulation techniques is crucial to neuroscience
research and neuroengineering applications. Recently, optical-based, nongenetic modulation
approaches have been actively investigated to remotely interrogate the nervous ...
Nitrophenols present on the surface of particulates are ubiquitous in the atmosphere.
However, its atmospheric photochemical transformation pathway remains unknown, for
which the crucial effect of visible light is largely overlooked, resulting in an ...
Environmental Sciences
Rechargeable zinc–air batteries (ZABs) are regarded as a remarkably promising alternative
to current lithium-ion batteries, addressing the requirements for large-scale high-energy
storage. Nevertheless, the sluggish kinetics involving oxygen reduction ...
Physics
In topological magnetic materials, the topology of the electronic wave function is
strongly coupled to the structure of the magnetic order. In general, ferromagnetic
Weyl semimetals generate a strong anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) due to a large
Berry ...
Soft and biological matter come in a variety of shapes and geometries. When soft surfaces
that do not fit into each other due to a mismatch in Gaussian curvatures form an interface,
beautiful geometry-induced patterns are known to emerge. In this paper, ...
The properties of excitons, or correlated electron–hole pairs, are of paramount importance
to optoelectronic applications of materials. A central component of exciton physics
is the electron–hole interaction, which is commonly treated as screened solely ...
Recent progress in out-of-equilibrium closed quantum systems has significantly advanced
the understanding of mechanisms behind their evolution toward thermalization. Notably,
the concept of nonthermal fixed points (NTFPs)—responsible for the emergence of ...
Social Sciences
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Our given name is a social tag associated with us early in life. This study investigates
the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy effect wherein individuals’ facial appearance
develops over time to resemble the social stereotypes associated with ...
There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is
structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents,
likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is ...
The neuroscientific examination of music processing in audio-visual contexts offers
a valuable framework to assess how auditory information influences the emotional encoding
of visual information. Using fMRI during naturalistic film viewing, we ...
Reinforcement learning inspires much theorizing in neuroscience, cognitive science,
machine learning, and AI. A central question concerns the conditions that produce
the perception of a contingency between an action and reinforcement—the assignment-of-...
Social Sciences
Low socioeconomic status (SES) is a risk factor for mortality and immune dysfunction
across a wide range of diseases, including cancer. However, cancer is distinct in
the use of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) as a treatment for
...
We provide the mathematical and empirical foundations of the friendship paradox in
networks, often stated as “Your friends have more friends than you.” We prove a set
of network properties on friends of friends and characterize the concepts of ego-based
...
In the centuries following Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Americas, transoceanic
travel opened unprecedented pathways in global pathogen circulation. Yet no biological
transfer is a single, discrete event. We use mathematical modeling to ...
Humans update their social behavior in response to past experiences and changing environments.
Behavioral decisions are further complicated by uncertainty in the outcome of social
interactions. Faced with uncertainty, some individuals exhibit risk ...
Sustainability Science
The global biodiversity that underpins wild food systems—including fisheries—is rapidly
declining. Yet, we often have only a limited understanding of how households use and
benefit from biodiversity in the ecosystems surrounding them. Explicating these ...
Biological Sciences
Agricultural Sciences
Sex pheromones play a crucial role in mate location and reproductive success. Insects
face challenges in finding mates in low-density environments. The population dynamics
of locusts vary greatly, ranging from solitary individuals to high-density swarms,
...
Applied Biological Sciences
Autonomous nanorobots represent an advanced tool for precision therapy to improve
therapeutic efficacy. However, current nanorobotic designs primarily rely on inorganic
materials with compromised biocompatibility and limited biological functions. Here,
we ...
Biochemistry
Mitofusins (Mfn1 and Mfn2) are the mitochondrial outer-membrane fusion proteins in
mammals and belong to the dynamin superfamily of multidomain GTPases. Recent structural
studies of truncated variants lacking alpha helical transmembrane domains suggested
...
Glutamyl-prolyl-tRNA synthetase (EPRS1) is a bifunctional aminoacyl-tRNA-synthetase
(aaRS) essential for decoding the genetic code. EPRS1 resides, with seven other aaRSs
and three noncatalytic proteins, in the cytoplasmic multi-tRNA synthetase complex
(...
Mutations in the tyrosine phosphatase Src homology-2 domain-containing protein tyrosine
phosphatase-2 (SHP2) are associated with a variety of human diseases. Most mutations
in SHP2 increase its basal catalytic activity by disrupting autoinhibitory ...
Biophysics and Computational Biology
Atypical Chemokine Receptor 3 (ACKR3) belongs to the G protein-coupled receptor family
but it does not signal through G proteins. The structural properties that govern the
functional selectivity and the conformational dynamics of ACKR3 activation are ...
Cell Biology
Migrasomes, vesicular organelles generated on the retraction fibers of migrating cells,
play a crucial role in migracytosis, mediating intercellular communication. The cargoes
determine the functional specificity of migrasomes. Migrasomes harbor numerous ...
Natural kinesin motors are tethered to their cargoes via short C-terminal or N-terminal
linkers, whose docking against the core motor domain generates directional force.
It remains unclear whether linker docking is the only process contributing ...
Regulated cell cycle progression ensures homeostasis and prevents cancer. In proliferating
cells, premature S phase entry is avoided by the E3 ubiquitin ligase anaphasepromoting
complex/cyclosome (APC/C), although the APC/C substrates whose degradation ...
The prevalence of “long COVID” is just one of the conundrums highlighting how little
we know about the lung’s response to viral infection, particularly to syndromecoronavirus-2
(SARS-CoV-2), for which the lung is the point of entry. We used an in vitro ...
Crosstalk between metabolism and circadian rhythms is a fundamental building block
of multicellular life, and disruption of this reciprocal communication could be relevant
to disease. Here, we investigated whether maintenance of circadian rhythms depends
...
Ecology
In the centuries following Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Americas, transoceanic
travel opened unprecedented pathways in global pathogen circulation. Yet no biological
transfer is a single, discrete event. We use mathematical modeling to ...
Social foraging is very common in the animal kingdom. Numerous studies have documented
collective foraging in various species and many reported the attraction of various
species to foraging conspecifics. It is nonetheless difficult to quantify the ...
Environmental Sciences
The global biodiversity that underpins wild food systems—including fisheries—is rapidly
declining. Yet, we often have only a limited understanding of how households use and
benefit from biodiversity in the ecosystems surrounding them. Explicating these ...
Evolution
Humans update their social behavior in response to past experiences and changing environments.
Behavioral decisions are further complicated by uncertainty in the outcome of social
interactions. Faced with uncertainty, some individuals exhibit risk ...
Heterotrophic protists are vital in Earth’s ecosystems, influencing carbon and nutrient
cycles and occupying key positions in food webs as microbial predators. Fossils and
molecular data suggest the emergence of predatory microeukaryotes and the ...
It is commonly held that there is a fundamental relationship between genome size and
error rate, manifest as a notional “error threshold” that sets an upper limit on genome
sizes. The genome sizes of RNA viruses, which have intrinsically high mutation ...
Dingoes are culturally and ecologically important free-living canids whose ancestors
arrived in Australia over 3,000 B.P., likely transported by seafaring people. However,
the early history of dingoes in Australia—including the number of founding ...
Genetics
American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a deciduous tree species of eastern North America that was decimated by the introduction
of the chestnut blight fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica) in the early 20th century. Although millions of American chestnuts ...
Immunology and Inflammation
Antibody responses require the proliferative expansion of B cells controlled by affinity-dependent
signals. Yet, proliferative bursts are heterogeneous, varying between 0 and 8 divisions
in response to the same stimulus. NFκB cRel is activated in response ...
Medical Sciences
Low socioeconomic status (SES) is a risk factor for mortality and immune dysfunction
across a wide range of diseases, including cancer. However, cancer is distinct in
the use of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) as a treatment for
...
Tumor blood vessels are highly leaky in structure and have poor blood perfusion, which
hampers infiltration and function of CD8T cells within tumor. Normalizing tumor vessels
is thus thought to be important in promoting the flux of immune T cells and ...
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection inhibits mitochondrial
oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) and elevates mitochondrial reactive oxygen species
(ROS, mROS) which activates hypoxia-inducible factor-1alpha (HIF-1α), ...
Microbiology
Microbes face many physical, chemical, and biological insults from their environments.
In response, cells adapt, but whether they do so cooperatively is poorly understood.
Here, we use a model social bacterium, Myxococcus xanthus, to ask whether adapted ...
Neuroscience
The neuroscientific examination of music processing in audio-visual contexts offers
a valuable framework to assess how auditory information influences the emotional encoding
of visual information. Using fMRI during naturalistic film viewing, we ...
Reinforcement learning inspires much theorizing in neuroscience, cognitive science,
machine learning, and AI. A central question concerns the conditions that produce
the perception of a contingency between an action and reinforcement—the assignment-of-...
Neuropeptides (NPs) and their cognate receptors are critical effectors of diverse
physiological processes and behaviors. We recently reported of a noncanonical function
of the Drosophila Glucose-6-Phosphatase (G6P) gene in a subset of neurosecretory cells ...
The key role of a thyroid hormone receptor in determining the maturation and diversity
of cone photoreceptors reflects a profound influence of endocrine signaling on the
cells that mediate color vision. However, the route by which hormone reaches cones
...
Pharmacology
Achieving ligand subtype selectivity within highly homologous subtypes of G-protein-coupled
receptor (GPCR) is critical yet challenging for GPCR drug discovery, primarily due
to the unclear mechanism underlying ligand subtype selectivity, which hampers ...
Physiology
The Shaker family of voltage-gated K+ channels has been thought of as an animal-specific ion channel family that diversified
in concert with nervous systems. It comprises four functionally independent gene subfamilies
(Kv1-4) that encode diverse neuronal ...
Plant Biology
The mutualistic arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis arose in land plants more than
450 million years ago and is still widely found in all major land plant lineages.
Despite its broad taxonomic distribution, little is known about the molecular components
...
For plants adapted to bright light, a decrease in the amount of light received can
be detrimental to their growth and survival. Consequently, in response to shade from
surrounding vegetation, they initiate a suite of molecular and morphological changes
...
Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Insects rely on path integration (vector-based navigation) and landmark guidance to
perform sophisticated navigational feats, rivaling those seen in mammals. Bees in
particular exhibit complex navigation behaviors including creating optimal routes
and ...
Systems Biology
As cells age, they undergo a remarkable global change: In transcriptional drift, hundreds
of genes become overexpressed while hundreds of others become underexpressed. Using
archetype modeling and Gene Ontology analysis on data from aging Caenorhabditis ...
Correction
Cover image: Pictured is a clay structure being eroded by flowing water. Samuel Boury et al. examined the mechanism of formation of landforms called yardangs. Lab experiments and flow simulations revealed that mounds of soft material with hard inclusions can erode into sphinx-shaped yardangs. Wake turbulence and flow funneling effects underlie the unique erosional features of the simulated yardangs. According to the authors, material heterogeneity and flow conditions can together produce complex erosional shapes from simple starting conditions. See the article by Boury et al. e2322411121. Image credit: Applied Math Lab at New York University's Courant Institute.
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