Researchers used cryo-electron microscopy to reveal that two classes of antibiotics shut down RNA polymerase in bacteria by locking a key structural component in place. This discovery gives new insight into the basic biology of the enzyme, revealing a previously unknown moving part that may be essential across domains of life. The work provides a blueprint for developing the next generation of antibiotics.

An international team of researchers from Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, and the USA has reconstructed the evolution of body mass in carnivorous mammals during the Paleogene – a crucial window in the diversification of mammals, that follows the extinction of dinosaurs. This work, published in Biology Letters, challenges the long-standing hypothesis that competition decided the fate of ancient top predators.

Boston University researchers have now developed an antibody-specific AI framework. Rather than building a larger AI model, the team redesigned how AI learns, focusing it on the small regions of antibodies that recognize disease targets. 

For many years, cynodonts – animals that were a transitional link between early synapsids, a group of animals among which true mammals evolved, and the first true mammals – were believed to have laid eggs. Now, for the first time, a new study has found evidence to the contrary. Using a neonatal line, which is only rarely conserved in the fossil record, and comparisons of newborn-adult body weight ratios, a team in Argentina concluded that Chiniquodon theotonicus gave birth to live young. This pushes the timeline of this evolutionary adaptation back by up to 95 million years, said the team, and offers new avenues to reconstruct ecological aspects of the Triassic world.

Most individuals encounter their health primarily through an annual health screening, which provides a limited snapshot of one’s health status. A new study by the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), is challenging the way we think about health and longevity, by seeking to understand what occurs between those assessments, focusing on function rather than static markers, tracking how physiology changes moment to moment.

Led by Professor Dean Ho, Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) at NUS Medicine, the study took an unusual and highly personalised approach: Prof Ho became the sole subject of the study.