As a deadly fungal disease ravages wild frog populations around the globe, scientists have identified potential locations in Panama where amphibians might persist despite the presence of disease, according to new research from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) published today in the Journal for Nature Conservation.

A U.S. federal agency is investing $38 million in a provocative and potentially transformative project: AI-powered medical "digital twins" to help doctors personalize treatments for critical ill patients in hospitals. The project, led by a U. of Vermont surgeon and researcher, will help doctors treat the most challenging illnesses in the ICU—sepsis, burns, severe trauma, and disordered immune responses. The funding is from ARPA-H in the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services and is the largest research award in UVM's history.

Volume 42 of SLAS Discovery includes one review, eight original research articles and 1 short communication for oncology, infectious disease, immunology and computational biology research through innovative screening platforms for accelerating the discovery of targeted therapies, diagnostic biomarkers, and mechanistic insights across diverse disease areas.

UC San Diego researchers have received a $12.6 million award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to establish the Polysubstance Addiction Research Center, a multidisciplinary center designed to uncover the biological factors that contribute to addiction across multiple substances.

Dentin formation, a crucial process during tooth development, results from the secretion of organic matrix from specialized cells called odontoblasts. However, the roles of the mechanosensitive channels Piezo1 and Piezo2 in odontoblast differentiation are unclear. Now, researchers from the University of Maryland addressed this knowledge gap using Piezo1/Piezo2 conditional knockout mice. Piezo1/Piezo2 double knockout impaired odontoblast differentiation and Wnt signaling. This study indicated that Piezo1 and Piezo2 contribute to odontoblast terminal differentiation, at least in part, by modulating Wnt signaling.

From North America to Patagonia: Researchers at the University of Würzburg have reconstructed how New World blackbirds spread across the Americas over millions of years.

An international team of researchers led by Dr. Meng Li at Shenzhen University has conducted a comprehensive survey of fungal communities across seven representative Chinese mangrove wetlands. Using high-throughput sequencing of 300 sediment samples, the team discovered that over one-third of fungal diversity remains unclassified at the phylum level, making mangrove sediments a major reservoir of uncharacterized fungal life. The study reveals that fungal community assembly is governed by a hierarchical framework operating across three scales: macro-climatic filtering by temperature and dispersal limitation, local edaphic filtering by salinity and nutrient stoichiometry, and micro-scale biotic interactions through cross-kingdom co-occurrence networks. These findings, published in Mycology, provide a theoretical foundation for understanding microbial community stability in coastal ecosystems under global change.