Helmholtz Munich

Symbiont effectors modulate plant signalling to increase host stress resilience

Abstract Plant colonizing mutualistic symbionts confer beneficial effects to their hosts, which often includes increased growth, and biotic and abiotic stress resilience. How these benefits are activated on a molecular level is mostly unknown. Here, we describe effector candidate...

Linking microbial community composition of three rootstock genotypes to apple replant disease susceptibility

Abstract Background Apple replant disease (ARD) is a worldwide issue of complex biotic origin. The exact aetiology has yet to be fully elucidated and environmentally friendly and economically feasible countermeasures are sparse. The breeding of tolerant apple rootstock genotypes...

MeTime: An R package for reproducible longitudinal metabolomics data analysis

Abstract MeTime is an opensource R package for reproducible analysis of longitudinal metabolomics data. It builds upon a central S4 container, metime_analyser, that stores multiple datasets, associated metadata and analysis outputs, enabling unified handling of complex longitudin...

Mechanosensitive phosphorylation of NFATC4 at S213/S217 drives fibroblast-to-myofibroblast transition and fibrosis

Mechanosensitive feedback between tissue stiffness and cellular contractile forces instructs cell identity. To characterize phosphorylation-mediated mechanosensing, we charted the global phosphoproteome dynamics of primary human lung fibroblasts on fibronectin-coated polydimethyl...

Charting Endocrine Progenitors Across Species and Organs

ABSTRACT Hormone‐producing cells in the pancreas and intestine regulate whole‐body metabolism and are dysregulated in obesity and diabetes. A deeper understanding of endocrine lineage formation (endocrinogenesis) in these organs is essential to elucidate the healthy state and dis...

A novel SUR1‐TMD0 interaction region contributes to glucose‐dependent inhibition of pancreatic K ATP channels by bupropion

Background and Purpose Pancreatic β‐cell ATP‐sensitive potassium (K ATP ) channels play a central role in glucose homeostasis by coupling cellular metabolism to insulin secretion. Although conventional K ATP channel inhibitors are effective insulin secretagogues, their clinical u...

Community: Component based differential cell communication analysis in large multi-sample case-control scRNAseq datasets

Abstract Cell-cell communication is essential for physiological tissue function. In disease, communication often gets disbalanced by changes in the tissue cell type composition, fraction of cells engaged in communication, and changes in expression levels of ligands, receptors and...

Beyond benchmarking: an expert-guided consensus approach to spatially aware clustering

Spatial omics technologies have revolutionized the study of tissue architecture and cellular heterogeneity by integrating molecular profiles with spatial localization. In spatially resolved transcriptomics, delineating higher-order anatomical structures is critical for understand...

Unveiling centromeric retrotransposon dynamics through a high-quality rye genome assembly

Abstract Rye ( Secale cereale L.) is an important cereal crop known for its high yield potential and tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, its large, repeat-rich, and heterozygous genome has posed challenges for assembly compared to related species such as wheat and...

Histological aging signatures for monitoring tissue-specific aging and disease

Aging is the primary risk factor for chronic disease and is characterized by profound structural and architectural remodeling of human tissues. Here, we present a comprehensive assessment of these changes using 25,712 whole-slide histopathological images from 40 tissue types acro...

In vitro metabolic signaling in two intestinal bacterial isolates: glutamate-driven transcriptional and functional reprogramming in Clostridium butyricum and Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron

ABSTRACT Monosodium glutamate (MSG; L-glutamate monosodium salt) is among the most widely used flavor enhancers, yet its molecular effects on gut microbial physiology remain poorly understood. Here, we examined the strain-specific transcriptomic and metabolic responses of Clostri...

Range of dose enhancement factor for gold nanoparticles in radiotherapy using Monte Carlo simulations

Abstract Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) have been widely investigated as radiosensitizers in preclinical radiotherapy studies and are now advancing into clinical trials. To enhance tumour targeting, various molecular vectors are conjugated with GNPs. The localized radiation energy dep...

Drone-measured canopy spectra can be a complementary predictor of belowground arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi variations in urban community gardens

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) form essential symbioses with plant roots, improving nutrient uptake, plant health, and soil function. However, assessing AMF abundance in urban ecosystems remains challenging. Drone-based multispectral imaging can estimate canopy functional tra...