Launched in 2022, the SynBio Challenges is an annual initiative that empowers young innovators to tackle global challenges through synthetic biology. By promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, it drives creative and sustainable solutions for a better future.

Plants produce all amino acids essential for human life. This commonly occurs in specialised cell organelles, so-called plastids. A research team headed by Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now decoded the mechanism by which the plants distribute these amino acids within their organisms. In the scientific journal Nature Plants, the researchers describe the mechanism and the class of transport proteins used for this process. The findings could potentially contribute to breeding crop plants with a higher content of essential amino acids and thus improved nutritional quality.

Text mining has emerged as a powerful strategy for extracting domain knowledge structure from large amounts of text data. To date, most text mining methods are restricted to specific literature information, resulting in incomplete knowledge graphs. Here, we report a method that combines citation analysis with topic modeling to describe the hidden development patterns in the history of science. Leveraging this method, we construct a knowledge graph in the field of Raman spectroscopy. The traditional Latent DirichletAllocation model is chosen as the baseline model for comparison to validate the performance of our model. Our method improves the topic coherence with a minimum growth rate of 100% compared to the traditional text mining method. It outperforms the traditional text mining method on the diversity, and its growth rate ranges from 0 to 126%. The results show the effectiveness of rule-based tokenizer we designed in solving the word tokenizer problem caused by entity naming rules in the field of chemistry. It is versatile in revealing the distribution of topics, establishing the similarity and inheritance relationships, and identifying the important moments in the history of Raman spectroscopy. Our work provides a comprehensive tool for the science of science research and promises to offer new insights into the historical survey and development forecast of a research field.

Endangered Pacific pocket mice, native to Southern California, were once thought to be extinct until a tiny remnant population was rediscovered in the mid-1990s. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance established a conservation breeding and reintroduction program to save the species from extinction. Though there has been significant success with breeding and reintroduction, the species is still at risk of losing genetic diversity, which reduces its survival and reproduction. In a new study published in the prestigious scientific journal Science on August 21, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance researchers demonstrate how genetic rescue can be used as an effective strategy for the conservation of this species. This strategy includes introducing Pacific pocket mice from genetically distinct populations for breeding purposes to boost genetic diversity and, in turn, the health of the population.  

New research, published today in the journal Science, shows how lysosomes — organelles that act like cells’ waste disposal system — respond to stress by becoming abnormally bloated, a process called lysosomal vacuolation that is associated with numerous diseases.