A new metal–organic framework (MOF), APF-80, enables the crystalline sponge method to capture and analyze nucleophilic compounds. Alkaloids, a diverse group of biologically active compounds, usually damage MOF crystals and resist study. By incorporating multiple structural motifs, these guests are encapsulated inside APF-80, which allows high-quality crystallographic data collection. This development opens new possibilities for structural analysis, advancing drug development and biochemistry.

When the nerves connected to taste buds are cut, the buds usually wither and later regrow. But Korean researchers found that not all taste cells fade equally. Sweet-sensing cells, supported by the protein c-Kit, are uniquely resilient. Using mouse and organoid experiments, the team showed that blocking c-Kit with the cancer drug imatinib eliminated these survivors, preventing regeneration. The discovery reveals how specific cell types drive taste recovery.

Every Rosh Hashanah, annual reports are released focused on birth rates, the average number of children per family, and other population growth data. However, there’s another side to these statistics: experiences of involuntary childlessness, in which people who wish to be parents are unable to for medical, social, or institutional reasons. A new study reveals that these experiences are far more widespread than commonly thought, especially among the LGBTQ+ community. The researchers note that an international comparison of this phenomenon is important, as countries vary widely in the degree of encouragement they offer for childbearing, the assistance they provide to prospective parents, and the barriers they place that can impede the path to parenthood. The current study compared responses from participants in the United States with those in Israel.

Researchers from Shandong University and South China University of Technology have developed E2E, an effective and comprehensive R package to simplify the construction of ensemble models for diagnosis and prognosis. The package integrates bagging, stacking, and voting strategies, offering flexible model selection and improved handling of imbalanced data. Validated on TCGA and CHARLS datasets, E2E demonstrates strong performance in both diagnosis and prognosis tasks.

A research team led by C. Justin LEE and LEE Boyoung at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has identified a new molecular pathway in the brain that directly links abnormal sugar modifications on proteins to depressive behaviors. Specifically, chronic stress disrupts sugar chains (O-glycans) attached to proteins in the prefrontal cortex, thereby triggering depression. The findings, published in Science Advances, open new possibilities for targeted therapies for treatment-resistant depression.

In a study now published in Nature Plants, Dr. Yihong Feng (Specially Appointed Assistant Professor) and Professor Takashi Ueda at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Japan, together with their collaborators, demonstrated in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana the existence of a retrograde trafficking pathway that retrieves the membrane protein VAMP727 from the vacuolar membrane back to endosomes. The team further identified the molecular machinery responsible for this pathway.