A new species of bacteria has been discovered off the coast of Oʻahu, shedding light on how unseen microbial life connects Hawaiʻi’s land and sea ecosystems.

In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology developed LassoESM, a new large language model for predicting lasso peptide properties.

Sleep-like slow-wave patterns persist for years in surgically disconnected neural tissue of awake epilepsy patients, according to a study published October 16^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Marcello Massimini from Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and colleagues. The presence of slow waves in the isolated hemisphere impairs consciousness, however, whether they serve any functional or plastic role, remains unclear.