Cotton breeders have long faced a trade-off: better fiber quality often comes at the cost of poor seed quality including oil and vigor, and vice versa. Researchers in China identified an antagonistic GhRCD1-GhMYC3 protein module that governs this developmental balance. The module fine tunes reactive oxygen species homeostasis and fatty acid partitioning between developing fibers and ovule derived seeds. The findings offer gene targets for designing new cotton varieties with both premium fiber and high quality seeds for field production.

Brand loyal yet flexible: Small marine worms that live in close symbiosis with various bacteria are always open to new partnerships – and are therefore extremely successful.

Solid tumors resist CAR cell therapy through antigen heterogeneity, poor infiltration, and an immunosuppressive microenvironment. A new review argues that oncolytic viruses and CAR cells should be co-designed as an integrated, self-amplifying therapeutic system rather than simply combined. The authors describe how oncolytic viruses can install new targets, remodel the tumor microenvironment, and deliver local immune support, outlining engineering strategies, translational challenges, and future directions for next-generation solid tumor immunotherapy.

Kyoto, Japan -- Fertility treatments are becoming more and more advanced, including with cryopreservation, or the freezing of eggs and sperm. However, studies involving animal sperm often use a lactose solution containing chicken egg yolk and OEP, a detergent containing sodium lauryl sulfate: the former carrying the risk of microbial contamination and high batch variability, while the latter has the potential to damage oocytes during in vitro fertilization.

These issues with current sperm cryopreservation solutions motivated a team of researchers at Kyoto University and RIKEN to see if they could find a better alternative. They set out to develop a more reliable, chemically defined cryopreservation solution for rat sperm that does not contain egg yolk or OEP, which they then evaluated for its IVF efficacy.

"We were particularly interested in whether rat sperm could be cryopreserved without egg yolk, which has been used for many years in conventional sperm preservation solutions," says first author Kohtaro Morita.