A recent review provides an overview of the purinergic receptor P2Y2 and its involvement in cancer-related processes. The article discusses how extracellular nucleotide signaling may influence tumor cell behavior and the tumor microenvironment, and evaluates the potential of P2Y2 as a biomarker and therapeutic target.

Prolonged nutrient deprivation drives motif-specific DNA methylation changes in Flavobacterium columnare, a major fish pathogen. Using advanced Nanopore sequencing, researchers found that specific methylation patterns—especially demethylation of a 6mA-modified motif—serve as epigenetic signatures of starvation adaptation. Temperature also influences these changes. The findings reveal a novel survival mechanism in bacteria and provide a valuable methodological reference for bacterial epigenetics.

As global climate change intensifies and agricultural environments become increasingly arid, understanding the adaptive mechanisms of terrestrial plants is critical for global food security. Plant cuticular wax forms a vital hydrophobic barrier that protects crops from severe water loss, UV radiation, and pathogen infection. Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench), a major drought-tolerant crop, is valued for its thick cuticular wax layer, which markedly enhances resilience to abiotic stresses. However, the key regulatory mechanisms governing cuticular wax accumulation and very-long-chain fatty acid (VLCFA) biosynthesis have remained largely uncharacterized.

A new study shows that fish embryo toxicity tests using the Chinese rare minnow may provide a promising alternative to conventional acute fish toxicity tests. By testing 26 fragrance ingredients, researchers found that malformation-based endpoints in rare minnow embryos were more closely aligned with juvenile fish toxicity than lethality-based endpoints, supporting the use of embryo tests to reduce animal use in chemical registration and ecotoxicological assessment.

Natural polysaccharides with different structural features and closely similar molecular sizes are often isolated together as a mixture using current purification methods and then are identified to be one complex structure. The current purity tests mainly focus on molecular size and ion-exchange property and therefore are weak to identify this impurity risk. Researchers have now developed the existing "enzyme diagnosis" method which usually indicates structure feature to an upgraded "enzyme diagnostic criteria" for purity test in order to expose these hidden mixtures. This new criterion may effectively solve the concern regarding the poor repeatability of polysaccharide structure identification by offering truly pure and much simpler polysaccharides.

Researchers developed DGMoE, a mixture-of-experts framework that better handles individual differences in EEG signals and improves emotion recognition across unseen users. Tested on three public datasets, it achieved state-of-the-art accuracies of 79.5%, 59.1%, and 57.9%, showing a more practical path toward robust affective brain-computer interfaces.

This study investigates how 6:2 chlorinated polyfluorinated ether sulfonic acid (6:2 Cl-PFESA)—a widely used alternative to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS)—exacerbates antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) proliferation during anaerobic digestion. The research demonstrates that PFESA exposure significantly increases both intracellular and extracellular ARGs, particularly tetracycline and sulfonamide resistance genes, through multiple mechanisms including enhanced mobile genetic element proliferation, extracellular polymeric substance restructuring that immobilizes DNA, oxidative stress-induced membrane damage, and selective enrichment of resistant microbial taxa. These findings reveal that emerging PFAS alternatives pose overlooked ecological and health risks by amplifying antimicrobial resistance spread in wastewater treatment systems, highlighting the need to incorporate resistance indicators into environmental risk assessment frameworks for persistent contaminants.

The article reframes dams as basin governance platforms through three interconnected pathways: engineering safety as the baseline, addressing sedimentation and structural risks; system operations as the core, shifting from single-purpose management to multiobjective coordination across safety, ecology, and public benefits; and digital-intelligent governance as the frontier, institutionalizing transparent and anticipatory decision-making. Drawing on China's experience with approximately 95,000 reservoirs, the authors demonstrate how this platform model can enhance resilience, ecological integrity, and public accountability. The framework offers transferable principles for global hydraulic infrastructure governance, contingent upon enabling institutional, financial, and data conditions.