This study presents an enhanced nuclease prime editor (uPEn) that significantly improves gene knock-in and knockout efficiency in mammalian zygotes. The researchers optimized prime editing by incorporating a ubiquitin variant regulator of double-strand break (DSB) repair, enhancing editing precision while maintaining high efficiency. The study validates the system by editing PPARG, a key regulator of fat metabolism, in Hu sheep and mice. Additionally, a multiplexed approach was applied to simultaneously knock out MSTN and knock in PPARG in sheep embryos, demonstrating uPEn's potential for agricultural and biomedical applications.

Women who exhibit more menopausal symptoms are more likely to later have poorer cognitive function and mild behavioral impairments – both markers of dementia. That is the conclusion of a study of 896 postmenopausal females published March 5, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Zahinoor Ismail of University of Calgary, Canada, and colleagues. 

The study in Global Change Biology shows caribou herds changed their migratory duration, distance or elevation over 35 years of radio tag tracking 

A new expert review in the peer-reviewed OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, explores how core-shell nanoparticles could revolutionize drug delivery systems and play a key role in advancing personalized and precision medicine.

A research team led by William O'Hearn from the German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research has found that female Guinea baboons court males more intensively when they show special foraging abilities. Two baboon groups in their natural habitat in Senegal and one group at Nuremberg Zoo were studied. The now published study furthers our understanding of what animals know about the skills and competences of group members and how they use that information to inform their social decisions.

Identifying therapeutic gene targets is essential for advancing personalized medicine and addressing the genetic basis of diseases. However, traditional experimental methods for discovering these targets are costly and time-consuming. While deep learning has shown promise in identifying biomarker genes, it has struggled to identify therapeutic genes. To address this challenge, researchers have developed an innovative method, the Hypergraph Interactive Transformer, which accurately and quickly identifies therapeutic gene targets using hypergraphs and attention-based learning.

A team of international researchers affiliated to the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), in South Africa indicates in new research that a group of fossils belong to a single, young adult Paranthropus robustus. The fossil not only demonstrates that the species was, like modern humans, a habitual upright walker, but also confirms it was also extremely small.