A new report led by researchers at Pennington Biomedical Research Center underscores the growing potential of precision medicine to transform how obesity is prevented, diagnosed and treated, while also illuminating key gaps and challenges that must be addressed.

Published in September in Obesity, the paper, “Precision Prevention, Diagnostics and Treatment of Obesity,” synthesizes the proceedings of a recent Pennington-Louisiana Nutrition Obesity Research Center, or NORC, scientific workshop that was convened to review current evidence on tailoring obesity interventions to individual biology, environment, behavior and social factors.

It’s a scene fit for a nature documentary: In the frigid ocean surrounding Antarctica, the water boils over as seabirds dive from above and marine animals like seals and whales rise from the depths to all feast on krill. But zoom out and this flurry of activity is just a tiny speck in a desolate seascape. Scientists have been puzzled by how these various species are all able to find the same food source at the same time. In research published October 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duke University and UC Davis scientists tease out how multiple species of Antarctic seabirds forage together – with takeaways for conservation and for crowd behavior — and shows that flocks find food better when they rely on each other’s senses.

Regression analysis is essential in biomedical research for exploring relationships between phenotypic or clinical outcomes and diverse predictors. However, constructing multiple univariate and multivariate models is often hindered by the lack of robust tools for batch regression in R, forcing researchers to rely on custom scripts. To address this gap, we developed bregr, an open-source R package built in the tidyverse style, leveraging the object-oriented programming strategy for enhanced extensibility. bregr streamlines batch processing of diverse regression models, including generalized linear, Cox proportional hazards, and mixed-effects, using native R pipes. It provides tidy outputs, integrated visualization, parallel computing capabilities, and a cohesive workflow, enabling efficient execution of hundreds of models with structured results for downstream analysis. Available on CRAN, bregr enhances efficiency, reproducibility, and scalability in biomedical research and beyond.

A new metal–organic framework (MOF), APF-80, enables the crystalline sponge method to capture and analyze nucleophilic compounds. Alkaloids, a diverse group of biologically active compounds, usually damage MOF crystals and resist study. By incorporating multiple structural motifs, these guests are encapsulated inside APF-80, which allows high-quality crystallographic data collection. This development opens new possibilities for structural analysis, advancing drug development and biochemistry.

When the nerves connected to taste buds are cut, the buds usually wither and later regrow. But Korean researchers found that not all taste cells fade equally. Sweet-sensing cells, supported by the protein c-Kit, are uniquely resilient. Using mouse and organoid experiments, the team showed that blocking c-Kit with the cancer drug imatinib eliminated these survivors, preventing regeneration. The discovery reveals how specific cell types drive taste recovery.

Every Rosh Hashanah, annual reports are released focused on birth rates, the average number of children per family, and other population growth data. However, there’s another side to these statistics: experiences of involuntary childlessness, in which people who wish to be parents are unable to for medical, social, or institutional reasons. A new study reveals that these experiences are far more widespread than commonly thought, especially among the LGBTQ+ community. The researchers note that an international comparison of this phenomenon is important, as countries vary widely in the degree of encouragement they offer for childbearing, the assistance they provide to prospective parents, and the barriers they place that can impede the path to parenthood. The current study compared responses from participants in the United States with those in Israel.

Researchers from Shandong University and South China University of Technology have developed E2E, an effective and comprehensive R package to simplify the construction of ensemble models for diagnosis and prognosis. The package integrates bagging, stacking, and voting strategies, offering flexible model selection and improved handling of imbalanced data. Validated on TCGA and CHARLS datasets, E2E demonstrates strong performance in both diagnosis and prognosis tasks.