The earliest known eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex life on Earth, lived in oxygenated, shallow marine environments nearly 1.7 billion years ago, according to a new study led by researchers at McGill University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The findings cast doubt on the long-held belief that early complex life emerged in oxygen-poor environments or floated freely in the open ocean.

The School of Medicine’s University of Maryland - Medicine Institute for Neuroscience Discovery (UM-MIND) has received $2.9 million in federal funding to build a leading-edge advanced microscopy facility designed to accelerate neuroscience discoveries and innovations.The funding will be used, in part, to purchase a new, $2 million state-of-the-art fluorescence microscope — called MINFLUX — only a handful of which are currently available in the U.S.

Osteosarcoma is an aggressive bone cancer characterized by high rate of recurrence and metastasis. In a new study, researchers show that restoring the RNA-editing enzyme adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 2 (ADAR2) slows tumor growth, reduces invasion, promotes bone-like differentiation, and improves chemotherapy sensitivity in cell and mouse models. The findings identify IGFBP7 RNA editing as a key mechanism underlying these effects, highlighting a potential differentiation-based treatment strategy for pediatric patients with bone cancer.

Promoters are key DNA regions that control gene transcription, but their activity varies greatly across different cell types. This heterogeneity makes it difficult for existing computational methods to identify promoters reliably. A team led by Professors Zhangyu Mei and Hao Wu from Shandong University, China, has developed MuSE‑Promoter, a deep ensemble learning framework that combines multi‑scale feature fusion, transformer attention, and a learnable weighted ensemble of neural network and random forest. The system outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on human cell lines from different tissues and on Arabidopsis thaliana datasets, and shows excellent generalization in cross‑cell‑line and promoter–enhancer discrimination tasks.

Mono-ubiquitination of histone H2A lysine 119 (H2AK119Ub): its multifaceted role in biology and implication in diseases

New study demonstrates that the direction of a magnetic field can influence how slightly different versions of the same biological molecule behave, revealing a previously unrecognized link between magnetism, electron spin, and isotope chemistry. By showing that these effects depend on both molecular structure and magnetic orientation, the research introduces a new factor that could help explain how chemical processes operate in biological systems and may offer new approaches for isotope separation and analysis.