How does a tiny cluster of cells become an embryo with a head, trunk, and tail? And how do thousands of genes coordinate this development? A new imaging method makes it possible to visualize the activity of thousands of genes simultaneously throughout the entire zebrafish embryo. Using this technology, a research team at the University of Basel, Switzerland, has created an atlas of all genes and cells involved in turning a cluster of cells into an embryo.

A deep genetic mystery has baffled plant scientists for decades. Although leaves, stems, and flowers develop in strikingly similar ways across many plant species, scientists have struggled to identify the shared DNA instructions that guide their formation. A new study now uncovers this hidden regulatory code and shows that its core has been conserved for 300 million years of plant evolution. Remarkably, these ancient DNA sequences were hidden in plain sight but were obscured by the constant reshuffling and duplication of plant genomes. By uncovering this deep-time blueprint, the research reshapes our understanding of plant evolution, showing how core regulatory logic is preserved and modified to guide the diversity of plant shapes and forms. The findings also carry important implications for agriculture, where fine-tuning gene regulation, rather than altering genes themselves, opens new paths to developing more resilient and productive crops.

A new AI-driven system generates plans for long-term, complex tasks about twice as well as some existing methods. The technique, developed at MIT, uses two vision-language models that work together to simulate actions and produce files for formal planning software.