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PhoBITs Enable Unprecedented Control of Cellular Pathways with Blue Light

Imagine being able to flip a light switch to control disease pathways inside a living cell. A team of visionary researchers at the Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health) is making this dream a reality with their groundbreaking genetic tools known as photo-inducible binary interaction tools, or PhoBITs.

10 Sep 2025

Predicting Protein Metal Binding with New Artificial Intelligence Model

Biologists and computational scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently refined two artificial intelligence (AI) programs originally built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to predict protein shapes.

10 Sep 2025

Unraveling How Fly Embryos Solve the Fundamental Problem of "Tissue Tectonic Collision"

Combining classic comparative approaches, including collecting species from the wild, and cutting-edge light-induced gene manipulation technology, researchers from Japan and Germany have discovered how developing fly embryos solve the fundamental problem of "tissue tectonic collision" when the rapidly expanding head and torso tissues crash into each other.

10 Sep 2025

Scientists Engineer E. Coli To Produce Plastic-Building Chemical

This study reveals a novel pathway in E. coli for synthesizing 2,5-pyridinedicarboxylate from glucose, offering a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.

10 Sep 2025

CRISPRi Screening Reveals Genetic Insights into Cyanobacteria Acclimation

Cyanobacteria are the most abundant photosynthetic microorganisms on Earth. They live in nearly every habitat throughout the world, from permafrost to hot springs and from soils to oceans.

5 Sep 2025

Intestinal Cells Pull Rather Than Push to Remove Weaker Neighbors

Cells on the inner surface of the intestine are replaced every few days. But, how does this work? It was always assumed that cells leave the intestinal surface because excess cells are pushed out. In a recent publication in the journal Science, researchers of the Hubrecht Institute and AMOLF show that this is not correct.

4 Sep 2025

Scientists Uncover Hidden Role of Cas9 in Building Bacterial Immune Memory

When scientists discovered how bacteria protect themselves against viral invaders, called phages, in the early 2000s, little did they know they'd stumbled upon a revolutionary tool researchers could use to edit the DNA of living cells.

4 Sep 2025

Automated 3D Imaging Uncovers Genetic Markers for Sorghum Leaf Arrangement

By reconstructing 366 sorghum plants from calibrated images, the team showed that automated measurements achieved near-human repeatability and enabled genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to uncover genetic markers linked to leaf orientation.

3 Sep 2025

Genetic Discovery Reveals How Plants Respond to Blue Light and Cold

Plants may be stuck in one place, but the world around them is constantly changing. In order to grow and flower at the right time, plants must constantly collect information about their surroundings, measuring things like temperature, brightness, and length of day.

3 Sep 2025

Genetic Evidence Links Human Migration to Linguistic Exchange

Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact – especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of conquests, colonialization, and, more recently, globalization.

2 Sep 2025

Plants Activate Immunity Instead of Growth During Drought Recovery

A plant's number one priority is to grow-a feat that demands sunlight, nutrients, and water. If just one of these three inputs is missing, like water in a drought, growth halts.

2 Sep 2025

Discovery of CHP1 Protein Reveals New Insights Into Fat Metabolism

UNSW research has shed light on how cells in the body manage and store fat, potentially offering new insights into health.

29 Aug 2025

Genetic Study Reveals Independent Origins of Eye Loss in Cavefish

Small, colorless, and blind, amblyopsid cavefishes inhabit subterranean waters throughout the eastern United States.

28 Aug 2025

Breakthrough Research Reveals Pathway to Early Protein Synthesis

Chemists at UCL have shown how two of biology's most fundamental ingredients, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and amino acids, could have spontaneously joined together at the origin of life four billion years ago.

28 Aug 2025

How Newly Discovered Teeth In Ethiopia Are Changing The Human Origin Story

Discoveries in Ethiopia's Ledi-Geraru region highlight the coexistence of early Homo and Australopithecus, refining the narrative of human evolutionary history.

28 Aug 2025

RNA Binding Proteins and EVs Offer Clues to Cancer's Evasion of Immune Response

Certain types of biochemical processes can impair the immune system's ability to recognize and kill cancer cells. Purdue University's W. Andy Tao and his associates have developed a new way to study these processes.

27 Aug 2025

Cryo-Optical Microscopy Captures Instantaneous Snapshots of Cellular Waves

Optical microscopy is a key technique for understanding dynamic biological processes in cells, but observing these high-speed cellular dynamics accurately, at high spatial resolution, has long been a formidable task.

25 Aug 2025

Genetic Signatures of Neural Progenitor Cells Uncovered in the Adult Brain

For much of the 20th century it was thought that the adult brain was incapable of regeneration. This view has since shifted dramatically and neurogenesis – the birth of new neurons – is now a widely accepted phenomenon in the adult brain, offering promising avenues for treating many neurological conditions.

22 Aug 2025