Center for Life Sciences

CEBPA-induced trophectoderm-like cells from pluripotent stem cells enable modeling of trophoblast lineage specification

Abstract Trophoblast lineages are essential for placental development and play indispensable roles in mammalian development. However, the regulatory mechanisms governing trophoblast lineage specification, particularly trophectoderm formation, remain elusive. Here, we show that tr...

Regulation of target gene expression by chromatin-associated protein-coding transcripts in plants

Protein-coding transcripts are regarded as intermediates that mediate DNA-to-protein information flow, leaving their noncoding regulatory potential largely underappreciated. Genome-wide profiling of RNA–chromatin interactions in Arabidopsis has uncovered widespread associations b...

Evolutionary Genetics of Insect Mimicry and Masquerade

As classic examples of adaptive evolution, insect mimicry and masquerade have been studied extensively for more than a century. Both phenomena protect insects from predators and are widely observed in nature. Previous research on phenotypic, genetic, phylogenetic, and behavioral...

Orthogonal Fc engineering enables multiplexed delivery of mRNA-encoded bispecific antibodies that constrain viral escape

The continuous antigenic evolution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has repeatedly undermined the effectiveness of monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies, underscoring the need for innovative approaches that improve therapeutic mAb breadth and durabili...

Multi-Frame Reconstruction via Clutter Filtering for Computational Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Microflow Imaging

Objective: Existing computational reconstruction methods for plane-wave ultrasound imaging (PWI) often neglect the interference of strong tissue signals with weak flow-related scattering signals in microflow imaging. This study aims to develop a multi-frame computational ultrasou...

MIMAS: An open-source microlens-array miniature microscope for accessible large-field cortical imaging in freely behaving mice

Large-scale cortical dynamics during natural behavior are difficult to measure because head-mounted imaging systems must balance field of view, spatial resolution, weight, and optical complexity. Existing wide-field miniature microscopes often rely on compound or custom-corrected...

Ultrasensitive Electrochemiluminescence Aptasensor With DNA Nanotetrahedron Amplification for Multilevel Detection of cTnI From Cells to Patients

ABSTRACT Accurate detection of myocardial injury (MI) biomarkers for assessing anticancer drug‐induced cardiotoxicity has long been constrained by insufficient capture efficiency and limited assay sensitivity. To address this challenge, we developed an electrochemiluminescence (E...

Trade-off between flux efficiency and metabolic control shapes enzyme allocation

Efficient use of limited cellular resources is fundamental to metabolism. Although flux optimization is widely recognized as a central objective of metabolic networks, how flux efficiency influences the allocation of the metabolic proteome remains unclear and lacks direct validat...

Control of ice thickness in cryo-EM via confinement

Achieving thin ice with optimal thickness is a prerequisite for successful cryo-EM analysis of embedded macromolecules. Despite decades of effort, precise control of ice thickness in cryo-EM remains a major challenge. Here we reveal that the intrinsic instability of sub-100-nm li...

Composite Crystalline Aluminum Nitride Passivation for Near-Junction Thermal Management in Gallium Nitride High-Electron-Mobility Transistors

In this work, we demonstrate a composite crystalline aluminum nitride (AlN) passivation layer for near-junction thermal management in aluminum gallium nitride/gallium nitride (AlGaN/GaN) high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). The 120-nm-thick AlN film consists of an ordered...

MG53 suppresses IRF7 to reprogram macrophages and promote antitumor immunity in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

In pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the desmoplastic stroma and immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) present barriers to immunotherapy. Here, we show that MG53 (TRIM72) is a critical regulator of macrophage fate and anti-tumor immunity; its myeloid-specific depl...

Undernutrition enhances host attractiveness to mosquitoes and transmission of mosquito-borne diseases

Undernutrition is prevalent in regions affected by mosquito-borne diseases. Understanding how insufficient nutrition affects the transmission of mosquito-borne pathogens is critical for combating these diseases. In this study, we found that undernourished mice were more attractiv...

Convergent use of aminopeptidase N receptor by hedgehog merbecoviruses

Abstract Coronaviruses circulating in wildlife, such as European and Asian hedgehog merbecoviruses (EriCoVs), pose a potential transmission risk. Knowledge of viral receptors can inform risk assessment and development of countermeasures; however, the functional receptor for EriCo...

Increased receptor binding and spike glycosylation, remodeled immune escape of surging SARS-CoV-2 subvariant BA.3.2.2/RE.2.2/Cicada

SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve. The subvariant BA.3.2 (Cicada), a derivative of the Omicron BA.3 subtype first detected in late 2024, harbors multiple spike protein mutations, ORF7 and ORF8 deletions, and has recently evolved sublineages (BA.3.2.1 and BA.3.2.2), rendering it a cr...

Directed evolution of Lantern enables rapid RNA and protein proximity labeling

In eukaryotic cells, the precise spatial localization of RNAs and proteins is essential for proper cellular function. Genetically encoded photocatalytic proximity labeling techniques have expanded our ability to map subcellular proteomes and transcriptomes, but their temporal res...

Integration of proteomic aging clocks in a phase 2a clinical trial supports simultaneous geroprotective assessment

Abstract Drugs for aging-related diseases may modulate aging itself, but standard clinical trial designs cannot detect such effects. Aging clocks could close this gap, but epigenetic models often yield inconsistent, hard-to-interpret results. In contrast, proteomic clocks, by tra...

Discovery of CDK8/19 inhibitors as lead compounds for IL-6–dependent lymphoma enabled by the formal synthesis of cortistatin A

A formal synthesis of cortistatin A, a marine-derived steroidal alkaloid with potent anti-angiogenic and antileukemic activities, was achieved via a unique synthetic strategy that leveraged a late-stage SmI 2 -mediated oxa-bridge translocation. The de novo–synthesized simplified...

scProtoTransformer: Scalable reference mapping across molecules, cells, and donors

Abstract The rapid accumulation of single-cell data has made it possible to comprehensively characterize biological systems at molecular, cellular, and donor levels. However, scalable reference mapping across different resolutions remains a major challenge in current research. He...

Longitudinal alignments and syntheses of multimodal clinical data for personalized medicine with the PULSE framework

Multimodal models capable of imputing diverse data used in single-cell biology studies provide potential foundational opportunities in clinical practice. However, patient data uniquely comprise longitudinal mosaic measurements that reflect underlying physiological dynamics and ex...

NICE: A Two‐Step Non‐Invasive Framework for Embryo cfDNA Read Enrichment and Quality Assessment

Non-invasive preimplantation genetic testing (niPGT) using cell-free DNA (cfDNA) extracted from spent embryo culture medium (SECM) has shown great potential, providing economic and practical advantages for embryo ploidy testing and quality assessment, while minimizing the risk of...