Uniform and intensive forest management approaches threaten European forest biodiversity. There are many different ways to manage forests, but the effects of different combinations of approaches are not well understood. An international research team led by the universities of Göttingen, Germany, and Jyväskylä, Finland, investigated how the Triad forest management framework can support biodiversity conservation in European beech forests. This framework proposes to balance economic and ecological objectives by dividing forest landscapes into three distinct zones: intensively managed forest for timber production, unmanaged areas for biodiversity conservation, and extensively managed forest for supporting biodiversity while producing timber. The researchers collected data from these three management categories and developed “virtual forest landscapes” for analysis. The results were published in the journal PNAS.

Collaborative research by the University of Tokyo and RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research has led to the development of a new method for simultaneously synthesizing all transfer RNA (tRNA) required for protein synthesis in a reconstituted translation system in vitro.

Researchers led by Prof. GAO Caixia from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with their collaborators, uncovered the molecular innovation that led to the origin of Type V CRISPR-Cas immune systems.

Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) represents a paradigm of targeted therapy in hematologic malignancies. Once regarded as the most fatal form of leukemia due to its rapid onset and severe hemorrhagic risk, APL was fundamentally transformed in the 20th century when Dr. Tingdong Zhang from Harbin Medical University, China discovered that arsenic trioxide (ATO) could effectively treat patients, achieving remission rates of up to 90% and converting it into the most curable acute leukemia. Extensive mechanistic studies have demonstrated that ATO exerts therapeutic effects by inducing apoptosis and promoting differentiation of APL cells. More recently, a study published in Science Bulletin using single-cell sequencing further revealed that ATO not only directly eliminates leukemic cells but also reshapes the tumor microenvironment through modulation of lymphocyte activity, underscoring its multifaceted role in APL treatment.

For the first time, researchers at Umeå University have observed the same type of programmed cell death in microalgae as in humans. The discovery, published in Nature Communications, shows that this central biological process is older than previously thought.