A team that includes Rutgers University-New Brunswick scientists has unlocked some of the secrets of corn DNA, revealing how specific sections of genetic material control vital traits such as plant architecture and pest resistance.

The discovery could enable scientists to use new technologies to improve corn, making it more resilient and productive, the scientists said.

In a report in the science journal Nature Plants, researchers described finding where certain proteins called transcription factors attach to the DNA in corn plants and how this sticking changes how genes are turned on or off in a particular tissue.

Artificial intelligence (AI) models such as ChatGPT are designed to rapidly process data. Using the AI ChatGPT-4 platform to extract and analyze specific data points from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans of patients with pancreatic cysts, researchers found near-perfect accuracy when compared directly against the manual approach of chart review performed by radiologists, according to a study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons (JACS).

Emeli Chatterjee, PhD, of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the lead author and Saumya Das, MD, PhD, of the Division of Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the senior author of a paper published in Cell Genomics, “The extracellular vesicle transcriptome provides tissue-specific functional genomic annotation relevant to disease susceptibility in obesity.”

The Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA (TLI) announced today that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a new grant (P01AI186818) to Dr. Ashraf S. Ibrahim, PhD, a TLI Investigator, a Professor of Medicine at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and a leading authority on mucormycosis pathogenesis. The grant provides $2.2 million in first-year funding and $11,269,858 million in total projected support over the next five years to launch MUCOR-ADVANCE, an ambitious effort to revolutionize risk stratification, early diagnosis, and treatment of mucormycosis, one of the world’s most lethal fungal infections.