An international team of scientists has identified fossils of snow leopards for the first time, in a research published in Science Advances. The discovery has allowed them to trace the evolutionary history of the species during the Quaternary period and to propose how it dispersed from the Tibetan plateau to the Iberian Peninsula, far from the high and icy Himalayan mountains. The study suggests that snow leopards prefer rocky terrain and cold climates over high altitudes. These data may help to ensure the protection of this iconic animal.

Developing rice with tolerance to higher nighttime temperatures has become a focus for rice breeders because studies are showing nights are getting warmer in rice-growing regions. Vibha Srivastava, professor of plant biotechnology in the crop, soil and environmental sciences department for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, explores the topic of breeding rice and the potential for gene editing to tolerate night heat in the December issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology with an article titled “Beat the heat: Breeding, genomics, and gene editing for high nighttime temperature tolerance in rice.”

By reexamining 3D images used to map the connections between brain cells, researchers are uncovering new information about a small, elusive, and often overlooked cellular appendage.

Proteins play a crucial role in nearly all biological processes, yet predicting their complex interactions and designing proteins with new functions poses a significant challenge. In a new study published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08435-4), researchers at EPFL in Lausanne and AITHYRA of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna have successfully used AI techniques to computationally predict the newly formed “neo-surfaces” of proteins after small drug molecules bind to them and design artificial proteins that can bind to these new surfaces. The computational results were confirmed experimentally in vitro.  The new method has the potential to accelerate the development of future precision drugs.