Neeraj Lal, PhD, Assistant Member of the Monell Center, has been awarded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award, which recognizes exceptionally creative early-career investigators pursuing bold research with the potential to make a major impact on biomedical and behavioral science. Dr. Lal's research with Arctic ground squirrels offers new insights for developing novel treatments for multiple chronic diseases.

A UMBC-led team has revealed how the common hospital pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa senses iron with a sophisticated two-protein switch that dramatically rewires its metabolism and biofilm defenses. Published in Nature Communications, the discovery led by chemist Aaron Smith and collaborators at Oklahome State University points to a promising new target for combating stubborn, antibiotic-resistant infections—and shows how student-driven research can bridge chemistry and biology to tackle real-world health threats.

Critical Path Institute today announced a research collaboration with the University of Arizona to investigate the cellular mechanisms that drive Parkinson’s disease in women. The two-year project, led by Lalitha Madhavan, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Neurology, at the University of Arizona, will compare brain cells grown from women and men living with Parkinson’s to look for biological differences that may help explain why the disease presents and progresses differently between the sexes.

A new study seeks to challenge the conventional view of a honey bee colony. By viewing colonies as superorganisms, the fundamental biology of the honey bee colony is redefined. These insights may have implications for modern beekeeping.

Accurate chromosome segregation is essential for cell division and plant reproduction. Researchers found that rice has three CDC20 proteins that work redundantly to control the transition from metaphase to anaphase during both mitosis and meiosis. Different CDC20 mutations caused defects at distinct stages of cell division, revealing stage-specific requirements for this key cell-cycle regulator.

Why do the gut microbiomes of people from industrialized and non-industrialized regions differ? A study by the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the University of Trento (Italy), and the University of Tübingen shows that diet alone does not explain these differences. In artificially assembled gut communities, the team examined numerous dietary components and demonstrated that plant-based dietary fiber shifted the balance in favor of the bacterium Segatella copri, which is particularly common in non-industrialized regions. However, the effect also depended on which other bacteria were present. The results were published in the journal Nature Microbiology.