Professor Timo Betz at Göttingen University’s Faculty of Physics has been awarded Momentum funding by the Volkswagen Foundation for his project “From Cells to Smart Gels: Momentum in Motion”. The award is worth just under 950,000 Euros over 4 years with a possible extension of 2 years. It will enable the translation of biological processes to synthetic materials that mimic key behaviours of living cells. At last, researchers will be able to make use of our current understanding of life to copy key features, like self-organization and physical adaptation, which have developed through evolution over billions of years. The hope is to generate smart materials that can react and adapt to external stimuli just like living entities.

FIU researchers are studying how great hammerhead sharks engage in a “thermal hustle,” maintaining peak hunting performance across a wide range of ocean temperatures.

There is a closing 20-year window in which decisions on climate and land use will determine the fate of dozens of native birds, butterflies and plants across Great Britain, which is already one of the most nature-depleted countries globally.

That is the warning in a new study led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), which, for the first time, predicts how different combined environmental changes would affect the survival of species within 1km square areas across the country.

Why are some people unable to hear from birth, even though their inner ear appears intact? One possible cause lies in the so-called OTOF gene. It plays a central role in transmitting sound signals from the hair cells to the auditory nerve. Without this function, acoustic information does not reach the brain. Researchers from the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, the University Medical Center Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences have now, for the first time, generated marmosets in which this gene has been knocked out precisely. The animals are healthy and develop normally, but are deaf from birth. This provides the first primate model that realistically replicates key characteristics of human deafness.

Researchers at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute have demonstrated that combining data from different origins enables a more precise characterisation of cell type’s diversity into tissues and organs. The team also introduced scOMM, a new machine learning tool for classifying and compare cell types across the distinct data modalities. The tool is openly available to researchers worldwide and has been successfully tested in kidney tissue, one of the most cellularly diverse organs in the human body and validated in blood and heart tissue. As the results demonstrate, when it comes to understanding complex tissues, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Microbial metabolites influence health far beyond the intestinal tract. Yet, a systematic understanding of how these molecules precisely control specific immune cell functions and regulate disease has remained elusive. A comprehensive review by the team of Professor Changtao Jiang and Dr. Kai Wang at Peking University addresses this gap. The article provides a critical theoretical foundation for understanding the gut microbiota-metabolite-immune axis in disease pathogenesis and for developing targeted intervention strategies.

A collaborative research study co-led by scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Liber Institute for Brain Development has for the first time identified a biological process that may help explain how the brain develops differently in people with Down syndrome.

Researchers at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), have engineered a high-fidelity adenine base editor variant, ABE8eY149V, to overcome the severe genome-wide off-target risks associated with the hyperactive ABE8e. Through comprehensive genome-wide off-target analysis by two-cell embryo injection (GOTI), the team first revealed that ABE8e induces massive sgRNA-independent single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), nearly 30-fold higher than spontaneous background levels.