Meiotic drivers are selfish genetic elements that distort fair segregation. The <i>wtf</i> genes are poison-antidote meiotic drivers that are experiencing rapid diversification in fission yeasts. However, gene duplication alone is insufficient to drive the diversification of <i>wtf</i> genes, given the poison encoded by a newly duplicated <i>wtf</i> gene can be detoxified by the antidote encoded by the original <i>wtf</i> gene. Here, we analyze the evolution of <i>wtf</i> genes across 21 strains of <i>Schizosaccharomyces pombe</i>. Knocking out each of 25 <i>wtf</i> genes in <i>S. pombe</i> strain 972h- separately does not attenuate the yeast growth, indicating that the <i>wtf</i> genes might be largely neutral to their carriers in asexual life cycle. Interestingly, <i>wtf</i> genes underwent recurrent and intricate recombination. As proof of principle, we generate a novel meiotic driver through artificial recombination between <i>wtf</i> drivers, and its encoded poison cannot be detoxified by the antidotes encoded by their parental <i>wtf</i> genes but can be detoxified by its own antidote. Therefore, we propose that recombination can generate new meiotic drivers and thus shape the diversification of the <i>wtf</i> drivers.
Science Journals
The world constantly changes, with the underlying state of the world shifting from one regime to another. The ability to detect a regime shift, such as the onset of a pandemic or the end of a recession, significantly impacts individual decisions, as well as governmental policies. However, determining whether a regime has changed is usually not obvious, as signals are noisy and reflective of the volatility of the environment. We designed an fMRI paradigm that examines a stylized regime-shift detection task. Human participants showed systematic overreaction and underreaction: Overreaction was most commonly seen when signals were noisy, but when environments were stable and change is possible but unlikely. By contrast, underreaction was observed when signals were precise but when environments were unstable and hence change was more likely. These behavioral signatures are consistent with the <i>system-neglect</i> computational hypothesis, which posits that sensitivity or lack thereof to system parameters (noise and volatility) is central to these behavioral biases. Guided by this computational framework, we found that individual subjects’ sensitivity to system parameters was represented by two distinct brain networks. Whereas a frontoparietal network selectively represented individuals’ sensitivity to signal noise but not environment volatility, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) showed the opposite pattern. Further, these two networks were involved in different aspects of regime-shift computations: while vmPFC correlated with subjects’ beliefs about change, the frontoparietal network represented the strength of evidence in favor of regime shifts. Together, these results suggest that regime-shift detection recruits belief-updating and evidence-evaluation networks and that under- and overreactions arise from how sensitive these networks are to the system parameters.
New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 394, Issue 19, Page 1939-1939, May 14/21, 2026.
New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 394, Issue 19, Page 1880-1881, May 14/21, 2026.
New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 394, Issue 19, Page 1873-1875, May 14/21, 2026.
New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 394, Issue 19, Page 1878-1880, May 14/21, 2026.
New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 394, Issue 19, Page 1876-1877, May 14/21, 2026.
The Pasteur Institute of Iran sustained considerable damage from a series of airstrikes in late March, 2026.1 This historically important medical institution, founded 106 years ago, has played a key role in combating various human pathogens in the region and has responded to numerous epidemics and pandemics in its history. The Pasteur Institute of Iran houses reference laboratories, departments of vaccine research and production, pathogen surveillance, and outbreak response teams.2 WHO confirmed that, following the damage caused by the airstrikes, the institute was no longer functional and could no longer deliver health services.
Since early March, 2026, the US–Israel war with Iran has expanded to attacks on energy infrastructure, producing black plumes from burning fuel storage sites across the Arabian Gulf. Burning oil and fuel release complex mixtures of fine particulate matter, black carbon, sulphur oxides, volatile organic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and trace metals from incomplete combustion. These emissions are chemically complex and can carry greater toxicity per unit exposure than emissions from non-anthropogenic sources.
Clinical trials in stroke balance a few tensions including efficacy against safety, biology against clinical proof, and broad answers against a disease that is not really one disease. Antiplatelet therapy after intravenous thrombolysis is one such area. Platelet-mediated re-occlusion after lysis is biologically plausible, but haemorrhage risk has warranted caution against early antiplatelet use. In The Lancet, Anxin Wang and colleagues1 report results from the TAPIS trial, which reopens this question.
Among patients treated with intravenous thrombolysis for moderate ischaemic stroke, initiation of oral DAPT within 6 h of onset improved the likelihood of excellent functional outcomes at 90 days. Although no significant between-group difference in symptomatic intracranial haemorrhage was detected, wide CIs precluded exclusion of a small increased risk.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceCytotoxic T cells [cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs)] play a critical role in antitumor immunity; however, cancer cells have evolved immune evasion strategies that impair CTL recognition and effector function. Epstein–Barr virus (EBV)-positive ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificancePhysical conditions at the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions are ideal for constructing an ultrastable optical resonator. This passively cooled optical cavity will stabilize a laser with unprecedentedly long phase coherence time, surpassing ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceThe basis for the selective activity of saponins across organisms, and for plant self-resistance during their biosynthesis and storage, is not fully understood. Here, we show that membrane sterol identity governs susceptibility to saponins and ...
Demonstrating real advantage of machine learning–enhanced Monte Carlo for combinatorial optimization
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceIn this work, we address a question that has attracted intense interest in recent years: whether machine learning-assisted algorithms can genuinely outperform classical approaches in challenging combinatorial optimization problems. While ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceHow has evolution shaped the diverse gene repertoires of extant genomes? We find that current methods seeking to reconcile a genome phylogeny with complex gene sequence histories quickly hit a crisis-point where the phylogenetic signal for ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceInflammasomes are supramolecular complexes that activate caspase-1 and other inflammatory caspases in response to pathogenic and damage stimuli. While inflammasomes play important roles in host defense, their excessive activation leads to ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceThere is growing attention and concern about racial biases in some of the decision tools that clinicians use to decide on medical interventions, but considerably less evidence on the downstream consequences of these biases for patient ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceWhy does inhibiting the endosomal lipid kinase PIKfyve, which generates PI(5)P and PI(3,5)P2, block entry of some enveloped viruses but spare vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV-G)? Using single-round infectivity and live-cell three-dimensional (...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceLarge language models (LLMs) enable the generation of data that could potentially be analyzed for social research. While the need for assessing the validity of such AI-generated data is widely recognized, we do not yet have a coherent ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceOur work reveals how the D614G mutation in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein reshapes its internal communication pathways and speeds up receptor binding domain (RBD) opening, providing mechanistic ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceUnderstanding the structure of biomolecules is key to explaining their function. Cryoelectron microscopy is a method for reconstructing the electrostatic potential distribution of a biological macromolecule, a quantity which contains ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. SignificanceIn a time of accelerating climate change, we need a predictive theory of species’ range shifts, adaptation, and resilience of populations. Currently, predictions rely on theory that fails to incorporate the effects of interactions between ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 19, May 2026. Global crop movement has traditionally been viewed as a major driver of emerging plant diseases through the introduction of pathogens into naïve environments. Here we show that the reverse process, introducing crops into regions containing endemic ...
Humans conceptualize time in terms of space, allowing flexible time construals from various perspectives. We can travel internally through a timeline to remember the past and imagine the future (i.e., mental time travel) or watch from an external standpoint to have a panoramic view of history (i.e., mental time watching). However, the neural mechanisms that support these flexible temporal construals remain unclear. To investigate this, we asked participants to learn a fictional religious ritual of 15 events. During fMRI scanning, they were guided to consider the event series from either an internal or external perspective in different tasks. Behavioral results confirmed the success of our manipulation, showing the expected symbolic distance effect in the internal-perspective task and the reverse effect in the external-perspective task. We found that the activation level in the posterior parietal cortex correlated positively with sequential distance in the external-perspective task but negatively in the internal-perspective task. In contrast, the activation level in the anterior hippocampus positively correlated with sequential distance regardless of the observer’s perspectives. These results suggest that the hippocampus stores the memory of the event sequences allocentrically in a perspective-agnostic manner. Conversely, the posterior parietal cortex retrieves event sequences egocentrically from the optimal perspective for the current task context. Such complementary allocentric and egocentric representations support both the stability of memory storage and the flexibility of time construals.