An analytical pipeline called Iteratively Defined Lengths of Inaccessibility (IDLI) maps the genome-wide occupancy of a range of nucleosome types and shows that most nucleosomes exhibit programmed ‘di...

Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 04 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41576-026-00942-6Campbell and Goyal discuss a recent study by Rossine et al., which introduces a synthetic plasmid system that experimentally separates within-cell from between-cell selection, revealing multilevel evolutionary conflict and addressing questions first posed by Szathmáry and Smith in 1995.

Classical autoassociative memory models have been central to understanding emergent computations in recurrent neural circuits across diverse biological contexts. However, they typically neglect neurom...

Classification and regression are cornerstones of computational biology and science at large, from identifying cell types to stratifying patients by disease state. Current deep learning classifiers pr...

From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

During menstruation, an inner layer of the endometrium is selectively shed, while an outer, progenitor-containing layer is preserved to support repeated regeneration. Progress in understanding this co...

DNA replication is molecularly asymmetric, due to distinct mechanisms for lagging and leading strand DNA synthesis. Whether chromatin assembly on newly replicated strands is also asymmetric remains un...

Antibiotic resistance is frequently observed shortly after the clinical introduction of an antibiotic. Whether and how frequently that resistance occurred before the introduction is harder to determin...

The development of a zygote into a functional organism requires that this single progenitor cell gives rise to numerous distinct cell types. Attempts to exhaustively tabulate the interactions within d...

Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...

In the presence of cell division errors, mammalian cells can pause in mitosis for tens of hours with little to no transcription, while still requiring continued translation for viability. These unique...

How do vascular tissues grow with the rest of the developing organism postnatally? In this issue of Cell Systems, Pi et al. combine modeling with molecular biology to uncover how cell behaviors scale ...

Foundation models such as scGPT and Geneformer have not been rigorously evaluated in a setting where they are used without any further training (i.e., zero-shot). Understanding the performance of mode...