Peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Cell Press covering original research across molecular, cellular, and systems biology.
Researchers using the FIRE machine-learning tool report that about 40% of maternal-paternal regulatory differences occur where the DNA is identical. It also flagged tens of thousands of overlooked regions enriched for disease-linked DNA changes.
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Engineered granulocyte-monocyte progenitors from a USC team slowed blood cancers and solid tumors in mice, according to a study in Cell. A self-renewing source of such cells could ease manufacturing, but every result described so far comes from mice.
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NIH's SMaHT Network has published its first benchmarking study in Cell, calibrating sequencing methods for rare somatic mutations. The researchers say the methods are more sensitive and specific than before, and call the work foundational for disease studies beyond cancer.
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Jonathan Weissman's lab at the Whitehead Institute traced the lineage of over a million cells in developing mouse embryos using a DNA recorder. The lineage is read after the fact from embryos collected at several stages, so the movie is stitched together from many animals.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers built a 3D atlas of rice gene activity spanning 10 organs and 61 developmental stages, they report in Cell. Its seed-signaling results are predictions, offered as candidates for further experiments.
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Weizmann and Regensburg researchers report in Cell that heat-loving archaea carry natural RNA phosphorothioates, the backbone chemistry used in RNA drugs. Developers get a natural counterpart to study, and the paper's title also points to the enzymes that install the marks.
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Joel Blanchard's Mount Sinai team reports in Cell that APOE4 pushes brain vessel cells toward a scar-producing state in lab-grown tissue. In people the evidence is a comparison of cell counts, so the link to amyloid rests on models.
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In Cell, a Syracuse University team describes an amoeba from a hot-spring stream in Lassen Volcanic National Park that feeds and divides at 63 C, three degrees above the temperature ceiling long assumed for cells with a nucleus.
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Max Planck-led researchers report in Cell that the coumarins Arabidopsis roots release to free soil iron work fully only with help from root bacteria. All of the work was in Arabidopsis under lab co-culture, so whether crops in field soil would benefit has not been tested.
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Teams led by HHMI's Jonathan Weissman and Jay Shendure reconstructed family trees spanning millions of cells in developing mice, reported in Science. Each lab had the cells record their own divisions in DNA, a first step toward mapping a mammal the way the roundworm was mapped.
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Stanford Medicine built a two-part molecule that turns a lymphoma-driving protein against the cancer cells it drives, clearing tumors in mice within 11 days. It switches on the cells' built-in death genes, and has not yet been tested in people.
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Broad and MIT researchers watched single receptors on live cells for over 16 minutes and found that normal HER3 forms stable pairs. Cancer-linked HER3 mutations loosened those pairs, and the idea that this frees HER3 to drive signaling is still the team's working model.
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Mayo Clinic researchers tie colorectal and breast cancers diagnosed at 50 or younger to distinct gut microbes, using stool from 1,364 patients. The signals give researchers named bacteria to test next, though the data cannot yet say whether those microbes drive early disease or follow from it.
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Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research scientists built Metax, a profiler that judges a microbial DNA match by how widely its reads spread across the genome. It targets the false positives current profilers can report, a problem sharpest in low-biomass samples, where host and contaminant DNA swamp the microbial signal.
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The wiring of a male fruit fly's brain and nerve cord is now public, and the payload for anyone planning a bigger map is a claimed thousandfold gain in connectome efficiency whose denominator nobody has stated.
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EMBL researchers report in two Cell papers that 3D imaging of frozen bacteria catches protein production coupled to transcription and membrane transport. Lead author Joe Dobbs calls both proofs of concept built on still images of flash-frozen cells.
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Mount Sinai researchers report that APOE4 turns vessel-support cells into scar-forming ones, and that blocking TGF-beta reversed it in aged mice. Both reversals so far are in aged mice and in stem-cell-derived human tissue.
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Guidance published by GEN draws the line between presentation and manipulation at consistency and disclosure. The case for archiving unprocessed files is prudential, since the article reports no rate of irregularities.
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Incendiamoeba cascadensis, from Lassen Volcanic National Park, divides at 63 degrees Celsius and still hunts for food at 64, one degree past a membrane-stability limit its lead author says may have narrowed the search.
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UC San Diego researchers treated cancer cells with 25 mitochondria-perturbing compounds, collected 40,000 single-cell 4D movies, and trained a model that sorted the drugs by mechanism with the labels withheld.
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