In order for vertebrate embryos to develop their body axes, they require what is known as an embryonic signalling centre. This group of cells provides the instructions that determine where »up« and »down«, »left« and »right«, and »front« and »back« are. Biologists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena have now discovered that even cnidarians—which , according to current understanding, form the sister group to all other multicellular animals—possess this fundamental coordinate system. The Jena-based scientists report on their research in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

New Oxford University-led research reveals that bees can regulate their feeding to avoid over-consuming certain essential nutrients - and that honeybees make a specialist “baby food” that gives their larvae a better-balanced diet.

Some fish swim in synchrony. Others, it turns out, breathe in synchrony. This is true for Arapaimas, an obligate air-breathing species living in the Amazon. A new study in Communications Biology, led by the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in collaboration with the Cluster of Excellence “Science of Intelligence”, has demonstrated for the first time that arapaima juveniles gather by the hundreds to synchronize their trips to the water surface with split-second precision, most likely to avoid predators and maximize survival and efficiency. The principle behind this behavior could also help inform mathematical models for synchronizing heterogeneous groups of robots or drone swarms.

Cells have surface receptors that couple to proteins and other molecules to initiate or inhibit certain behaviors. Typically, the number of these receptors increases as the cell matures, but researchers have now identified that one receptor influences cell behavior much earlier than previously thought and appears to help trigger the cell differentiation process to form neurons. 

Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University and collaborating institutions have discovered a new species of bumblebee goby on Hengqin Island in Guangdong Province, marking the first recorded presence of this fish genus in China. The species has been named Brachygobius jennie, commonly known as Jennie’s Bumblebee Goby, in honour of the South Korean singer Jennie Ruby Jane.

The GCAT team at IGTP has developed PolyGenie, a new open tool that enables researchers to explore and reuse genomic data more easily. Designed to support large-scale genetic association studies, the platform advances GCAT's commitment to FAIR data and Open Science. Its development and application to the GCAT cohort are described in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics.

MD4SB will establish an infrastructure for the dynamic description of biological macromolecules, connecting three major European Research Infrastructures (Instruct-ERIC, ELIXIR, and EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC) with three of Europe's largest supercomputing centres (BSC-CNS, CINECA, and JSC).

The project will facilitate the use of molecular simulations to understand how biomacromolecules function, advance the molecular description of diseases, and accelerate drug discovery.

Coordinated by IRB Barcelona, the project brings together 25 partners across 8 countries and incorporates Almirall, Sanofi, and other pharmaceutical companies to provide feedback and evaluate the practical usefulness of the platform in industrial settings. The IRB Barcelona spin-off company Nostrum Biodiscovery will bridge the gap between academic groups and pharmaceutical companies.

Conventional methods generally analyze many proteins simultaneously. The specific traits of individual protein molecules are thus often unclear. A research team led by Dr. Sarina Veit and Professor Thomas Günther-Pomorski at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in collaboration with researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and the University of Toronto, Canada, has developed a new microscopy platform that overcomes this limitation. The method allows the simultaneous examination of hundreds of tiny membrane spheres each with a diameter of only about 200 nanometers. Each of these synthetic membrane spheres contains just one lipid transport protein. Using this method, the researchers can conduct measurements at the level of individual protein molecules. At the same time, the platform is flexible enough to be used to examine other proteins as well. The researchers report their results in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology from June 15, 2026.

Researchers studied the microbes associated with historical middens conserved in Greenland’s permafrost, left behind by Paleo-Inuit, ancient Norse, and early modern Inuit. These middens harbored biodiverse bacterial communities – including many unknown taxa – that were especially rich in human- and animal-associated groups. The authors concluded that microbial traces of human activities such as defecation, livestock farming, and seal hunting can linger for centuries in Arctic middens. They also found a wide range of antimicrobial resistance genes in the bacterial genomes. However, the limited outward spread of potential pathogens away from the frozen core of the middens means that they currently pose little risk to public health.