Vaccines rely on adjuvants to enhance immune protection, but these often cause reactogenicity, such as swelling or fever. Challenging the long-held assumption that these effects are inseparable, researchers from Japan have shown that vaccine efficacy and reactogenicity are driven by distinct immune pathways. Their findings reveal specific roles for IL-1α and IL-1β in controlling these responses, opening new possibilities for designing vaccines that maintain strong immunity while minimizing adverse effects.

With the rapid development of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), researchers can now examine gene activity in individual plant cells at unprecedented resolution, opening new opportunities to study cell differentiation, tissue development, and stress responses. However, scRNA-seq datasets compile data from thousands of cells and are characterized by high dimensionality, extreme sparsity, and substantial technical noise. Notably, most of the genes expressed in a given cell are expressed in every type of cell; only a relatively small number of genes, so-called marker genes, are specific to each cell type. Consequently, the task of assigning roles to individual cells relies heavily on prior knowledge of the biological context and which genes are highly expressed in each cell type — making it difficult to identify marker genes and assign cell types accurately.

The novel sh2isu1 sweet corn germplasm resource perfectly addresses the issues of insufficient flavor in super sweet maize and low sugar content in common sweet corn. Its excellent characteristics can directly serve the high-end specialty maize breeding system.

Scientists at the University of Groningen studied cells growing under different conditions and found that some conditions led to changes in molecular mobility inside the cells. This was caused by the clustering of proteins that produce amino acids. These findings could improve cell factories.

Few studies have investigated coastal marine plankton and aggregate abundance and diversity with high frequency over a long time period. Here, a group of researchers deployed a cabled marine Oshima Coastal Environmental data Acquisition Network System (OCEANS) observatory in 20 m of water off the coast of Oshima Island in Japan to establish plankton diversity and plankton and aggregate abundance as a function of ocean turbulence during two 4-month periods spanning 2014 to 2016.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) is working with China’s Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and Swedish biotechnology company Lipigon Pharmaceuticals AB to develop a new inhaled treatment aimed at helping patients recover faster from severe lung infections. The treatment is designed to reduce excessive inflammation in the lungs, which can continue even after viruses or bacteria have been cleared from the body. To tackle this, the new therapy targets a protein called Angiopoietin-like protein 4 (ANGPTL4), which increases during inflammatory stress in the lungs. High levels of ANGPTL4 are associated with increased vascular permeability and fibrosis in injured lung tissue. Instead of being taken as a pill or injection, the treatment is delivered directly into the lungs by inhalation, similar to how asthma medications are administered. This allows it to act where it is needed most while limiting effects on the rest of the body.

Light-induced accumulation of p-coumaric acid enhances adhesion between the outer and inner tissues, which contributes to regulation of growth.