YouTube video by Dioscorid

Franch et al. show that human hippocampal neurons encode the meanings of the words we hear through distributed, context-sensitive population activity that mirrors some features of large language model...

YouTube video by diproton

This declaration calls for action to address the challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligence within mathematics research. Technological developments have repeatedly transformed the practi...

Multiomic profiling provides a comprehensive physiological overview at the molecular level, but understanding of its spatiotemporal dynamics remains limited in human populations. We profiled longitudi...

No description available

Complex traits that span multiple tissues and systems often integrate large numbers of genes across development, physiology, and behavior, making it challenging to identify their essential components. Blood feeding in mosquitoes is one such trait. It is ancestral to the mosquito family, maintained in most species for ~200 million years, and was independently lost in three lineages. These convergent losses offer a natural experiment to discover the genetic, physiological, and neural features required for blood feeding. We assembled high-quality, chromosome-level genomes for seven mosquito species, along with whole-brain tomographic reconstructions. Our study spanned the three known non-blood-feeding lineages (Toxorhynchites rutilus, Topomyia yanbarensis, and Malaya genurostris), blood-feeding relatives, and the variable blood feeder Wyeomyia smithii. Comparing orthologous gene clades, we detected convergent gene loss specific to the three lineages that had lost blood feeding. The losses include the salivary platelet-aggregation inhibitor Aegyptin, blood-activated serine proteases such as Chymotrypsin-1 and 2, and a carboxylesterase expressed in the female fat body and brain glia. The loss of blood feeding also extended to chemosensation. Non-blood feeders lack two odorant-binding protein clades, two ionotropic receptor clades associated with blood-component taste detection, and odorant receptor clades expressed in a discrete, strongly female-biased population of antennal neurons. Female-biased head gene expression was reduced in non-blood feeders. Finally, examination of whole-brain tomographic reconstructions across the species revealed smaller antennal lobes in non-blood-feeding females, consistent with reduced olfactory input. Together, these findings identify a compact set of genes, expression patterns, and brain regions associated with blood feeding, offering an evolutionary entry point for functional dissection of how this complex and dangerous trait is built and dismantled.

Defense-inducing Ca2+ waves in leaf epidermis are stimulus specific.

According to classic population genetics theory, recombination shapes the efficacy of natural selection. However, whether variation in recombination rate itself translates into meaningful differences ...

Summary: The placenta is the only mammalian organ that harbors a cancer-like genome while remaining functional and healthy. This Review highlights its high mutational load, structural variants, aneupl...

This is a Perspective covering a Python toolbox for neuroscience research that enables users to fetch datasets, construct networks and null models, estimate graph metrics, fit statistical models and v...

We provide a clearer presentation of the Chair44 monotile, a new strongly aperiodic monotile in three-dimensional Euclidean space $E^3$.

Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

Cohesin-mediated loop extrusion limits sister-fork coupling and tethers nearby replication forks under replication stress, promoting fork reversal and slowing fork progression to safeguard genome stability.