Lysosomes were once viewed mainly as cellular waste disposers, but are now recognized as key hubs for nutrient sensing and metabolic signaling. Still, what lysosomes contribute metabolically inside high-demand neurons in the intact brain remains elusive.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers revealed that reduced levels of testosterone combined with fructose intake led to a synergistic accumulation of fat in the liver. Furthermore, they determined that this fat accumulation is caused by increased pyruvate levels resulting from the activity of gut bacteria.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have suggested that ultrasound-repellers could help reduce hedgehog deaths by cars. The proposal is based on new findings, published today (11 March) in Biology Letters, which demonstrate for the first time that hedgehogs can hear high-frequency ultrasound.

Harvard researchers report in Current Biology the first documented case in which a cell produced by an asymmetric, fate-specifying division retains full totipotency — the ability to generate an entire organism from scratch.

Most lethal mutations in wild fruit flies are driven by newly transferred jumping genes, not small DNA errors, according to a new study from Duke University.

The visual cortex is the part of the brain that enables visual perception. In this area millions of nerve cells, called neurons, process stimuli from the outside world. They only react when objects with certain characteristics come into our field of vision. According to textbooks, the first stage of the visual cortex has two main types of neurons that specialize in edges – sharp transitions between light and dark. An international team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Göttingen has now used machine learning techniques to find neurons in mice that use a previously unknown process in the brain to share this cognitive processing. These neurons respond to different “spatial frequencies”, meaning the change in patterns of different objects in the visual field. The research was published in Nature Neuroscience.