In a recent study published in Current Biology, a research team led by Professor Takashi Ueda of the National Institute for Basic Biology and Associate Professor Masaru Fujimoto of the University of Tokyo has revealed the molecular steps that led to the emergence of this plant-specific vacuolar transport system. Their work shows that the acquisition of this pathway was driven by the stepwise neofunctionalization of a membrane fusion protein called VAMP7.

An unprecedented international effort to decode how cells manage the transport of chemical substances has culminated in four groundbreaking studies published in Molecular Systems Biology. Led by Giulio Superti-Furga at CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and supported by an international consortium of academic and pharmaceutical partners under the European Union's Innovative Medicines Initiative, this decade-long project provides the first comprehensive functional blueprint of chemical transport pathways in human cells.

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) forms part of an international consortium that is preparing the Tree of Sex project, an ambitious initiative aimed at decoding the evolutionary complexity of reproductive strategies across eukaryotic Life.