How the body creates reliable antibodies out of biological chaos
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 14-Jun-2026 22:15 ET (15-Jun-2026 02:15 GMT/UTC)
Researchers found that, although antibody evolution is highly chaotic at the level of individual cells, germinal centers reliably produce stronger antibodies through repeated rounds of mutation and selection that are only slightly biased toward success. The findings provide a new quantitative framework for understanding immune evolution, with potential implications for vaccine design. This work also lays the groundwork for how germinal centers could serve as an experimentally tractable system for studying evolution more broadly and in real time.
Researchers at Yokohama City University, Japan, have uncovered evidence that the Y chromosome gene UTY still retains regulatory activity in human embryonic stem cells, offering a rare glimpse into what may represent an evolutionary transitional state of the human Y chromosome.
A major new review led by Swansea University has highlighted growing evidence that diet in the early years of life may shape how well the brain develops, with effects that can still be seen in adolescence.
Decomposers are crucial for keeping Earth habitable through nutrient recycling. Most decomposers survive through osmotrophy — a means of feeding by absorbing dissolved nutrients rather than engulfing prey. But how this method of feeding repeatedly arose across the eukaryotic tree of life remains unclear. Now, researchers have discovered that four groups of eukaryotes which have specialized in osmotrophy first arose between 720 million and 1 billion years ago and that they share a toolkit of genes involved in osmotrophic functions. Their results also indicate that horizontal gene transfer played an important role in the evolution of these functions.