Kyoto, Japan -- "It takes a village to raise a child" doesn't apply merely to humans. Many species of mammals, birds, fish, and various invertebrates have evolved complex social care systems known as cooperative breeding. In these animal societies, offspring receive attention not only from their parents but also from other group members called helpers.

Such social systems have evolved independently multiple times across various taxa, yet most studies have focused on birds and mammals. After studying fish in Lake Tanganyika, one of Africa's great lakes bordering four countries, a team of researchers at Kyoto University was inspired to investigate the forces behind cooperative breeding in lamprologine cichlid, a fish variety endemic to the lake. Specifically, they aimed to elucidate the evolutionary history of cooperative breeding and its correlation with the life history traits of several of these species.

"I have long been interested in how animals cooperate with other individuals," says first author Shun Satoh. "Even when social systems appear superficially similar, the environmental factors that promoted increasing social complexity may have differed among mammals, birds, and fish, and I find that especially fascinating."

Researchers at Hiroshima University have developed a new tool to quickly and accurately map fungal gene functions, even for species that have never been studied before.

Researchers identified the tegmentum in the midbrain as an ‘integration center’ of fish. The area receives visual information from the eyes that is combined with color information detected by the pineal organ—the ‘third eye.’ These inputs are integrated to control how fish orient themselves in the water.

Understanding how representative currently known proteins are of the overall potential diversity can help inform strategies for a wide range of applications, including therapeutic, biocatalysis, or biomaterials development. Published in PNAS, an OIST-led international team investigated the relationship between protein evolution and sequence space, identifying the limiting factors behind protein diversification. Their findings reinforce theories of DNA recombination as a driving force of ancestral protein formation and highlight the limitations of many cutting-edge AI protein design methods.

In a study led by researchers from the NRF-DSTI research chair in African Microbiome Innovation at Stellenbosch University (SU), scientists investigated how antimicrobial resistance genes behave in WWTPs and rivers in a large urban city in South Africa. Because of the lack of such studies in Africa, and the potential implications for water reuse, Dr Makumbi and his co-authors conducted a microbiome study to get a sense of what is happening at WWTWs and connected river systems in South Africa.