Research lab
A major nonprofit biomedical research organization that funds scientists nationwide and operates its own Janelia Research Campus in Virginia.
Vamsi Mootha's team mapped mitochondrial proteins in six organisms and found 33 families conserved in eukaryotic pathogens but absent in humans. The families are candidate drug targets, and the same data have stirred a debate over the origin of the mitochondrion.
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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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IRB Barcelona, Cambridge and UT Southwestern scientists built OpenCGChromatin, software that simulates chromatin over ten times larger than comparable models. The code is open source, so other labs can now test their own DNA-packaging hypotheses with it.
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Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann won the 2026 medicine Nobel for optogenetics, the control of cells with light and genetics. It goes to a laboratory method, unlike the discoveries and treatments Scientific American cites from the prize's 125-year record.
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UMBC and Oklahoma State chemists showed that two linked proteins let Pseudomonas aeruginosa sense iron inside and outside the cell and rewire its metabolism. Because the same system also governs the biofilms that shield the microbe from drugs, they propose it as a drug target.
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Two decades after Janelia proposed the project, the adult fly connectome is finished. The 1,000-fold efficiency gain credited with making it possible is measured against the institute's own 2008 forecast.
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Stephen Harrison's Harvard lab imaged a rotavirus breaking into a cell and found that VP7, not the protein he expected, forms the pore that releases its genome. The team reported the mechanism Sept. 10 in Science, and Harrison sees it as a lead on delivering large gene therapies into cells.
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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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Memorial Sloan Kettering researchers used nanoparticles to kill a scar-driving macrophage subset, restoring immunotherapy in mice with liver and lung cancer. The Science paper points to the tumor's fibrotic barrier as a route past immunotherapy resistance.
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Salk researchers recorded and then manipulated the amygdalostriatal transition zone in freely moving mice, and report in Neuron that dopamine-expressing neurons there are needed to mount a fear response.
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The company's head of life sciences told Reuters that real lab work is still the final test in biology. Anthropic has not said which experiments the lab is running, and it has yet to run a clinical trial.
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Coverage is the achievement in this Nature paper: cardiovascular, digestive and nervous activity recorded on one clock, in an animal chosen because you can see through it, which is also why the result is about a fish larva.
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Salk's mouse model left the Tbr1 protein abundant and put methyl tags on the DNA it has to land on. Deep-layer neurons developed poorly, and the electrophysiological consequences were still there in adulthood.
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Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard swaps each instrument's own API for one command set. The early integrator list, not the microscope demo, is what turns an agent driving lab hardware into something a buyer can specify.
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An immunologist argues the directive sets direction without holding authority. That leaves clinicians and state programs reconciling two sources of guidance, with nobody appointed to do it.
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MIT's Horvitz lab reports that worms with broken cohesin build extra adrenergic neurons in place of GABA ones. The chromosome-structure complex is also a fate switch.
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