Conservation strategies are turning back the doomsday clock in threatened Florida-Scrub Jays — but not without caveats, a new study published in Current Biology shows.

In the early 2000s, conservationists proposed a plan to move isolated jays to a region comprising thousands of acres of restored habitat, home to a small community of 13 jays.

Translocation, where an organism is moved from one area to another, offers a means to prop up declining populations. Across an eight-year stretch from 2003 to 2010, 51 jays were relocated from fragmented and degraded habitats to a partially restored, contiguous region of scrubland called the M4 Core Region.

This strategy was proposed to thwart the compounding factors putting the Scrub-Jay at risk of extinction: inbreeding, decline in population size and reduced genetic diversity.

A team of researchers led by MSU conservation geneticists Tyler Linderoth and Sarah Fitzpatrick analyzed decades’ worth of data, finding that translocations successfully bolstered population numbers but failed to overcome genetic erosion and inbreeding. The

Decades of systematic tagging, field observations and genetic sequencing provided a nearly complete pedigree of the jays.

Leveraging this rich dataset, the researchers analyzed the genetic consequences of this strategy, sequencing the entire genomes of 87 jays sampled before, and several generations after, the first translocated jays were introduced to the M4 core region.

This study shows, in unparalleled resolution, how demographic mechanisms, including births, deaths, emigrations and immigrations, influenced the genetic conditions of the M4 core region population.

“The only way to really have a pulse on population health is through both demographic and genetic monitoring, which can inform when and what conservation interventions are needed and how to adapt management accordingly,” said Linderoth, the paper’s lead author.

The researchers identified that although the population had rebounded, growing to ten-fold the original population size, genetic erosion persisted.

This population increase is critical for the continued survival of the species.

The dampened genetic diversity uncovered by the researchers is due to an uneven number of offspring produced per family line, a factor called reproductive skew.

Reproductive skew limits the effective population size: the members of a population who produce the next generation. A high effective population helps ensure robust genetic diversity, while low numbers indicate that genetic variation will decrease more rapidly.

A handful of genetic lines tracing back to mostly translocated jays now dominate the genetic make-up of the jay population, dampening genetic diversity. Importantly, however, the authors were able to show with simulations that translocation efforts effectively pumped the breaks on genetic erosion, despite failing to reverse it.

The authors note that translocations likely provided a net benefit to the population.

“Even though translocations did not completely prevent the loss of genetic diversity, they likely slowed the rate at which genetic diversity within the core population was lost and prevented inbreeding from being as high as it would have been otherwise,” Linderoth said.

The authors hope this study informs future conservation projects, highlighting the viability of translocations as a means for supporting at-risk populations.

“Even though translocations did not completely prevent the loss of genetic diversity, they likely slowed the rate at which genetic diversity within the core population was lost and prevented inbreeding from being as high as it would have been otherwise,” Linderoth said.

The authors encourage future projects to anticipate the negative impact of reproductive skew on translocation strategies and stress the importance of habitat management in supporting these efforts.

“Without sound habitat management and protection, translocations are likely doomed to fail. Even small areas of habitat can serve as important stepping-stones that facilitate migration and connectivity between populations,” Fitzpatrick said.

The MSU researchers partnered with ecologists & co-authors Raoul Boughton, from The Mosaic Company, and Lauren Deaner of Flatwoods Consulting.

For over 20 years, ecologists from The Mosaic Company have monitored groups of Florida Scrub-Jays located 25 miles from the state’s west coast, monitoring changes at the demographic and genetic levels.

The conservation project first began with a partnership between The Mosaic Company, Reed Bowman — bird biologist at Archbold Biological Station, and pioneer of a 54-year Scrub-Jay monitoring program — and The United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Raoul Boughton, lead ecologist at Mosaic and a collaborator on the study, explains the results detailed in this publication stem from a 30-year commitment to monitor and analyze the results of the mitigation translocation.

“This publication highlights the genetic outcomes of this extensive experiment to date and provides critical information on how we may further improve the success of this project,” Boughton said.

Messenger RNA can travel between different types of stem cells through tunnel-like structures, as revealed by a new study. By studying interactions between mouse and human stem cells, they discovered that this RNA transfer can reprogram human cells to an earlier developmental state. This groundbreaking finding not only sheds light on an underexplored form of cellular communication but also suggests promising applications in regenerative medicine without using artificial genetic modifications or external chemicals.

The soil bacterium Cupriavidus necator has attracted the attention of researchers and industry for decades. This is partly because, through biochemical reactions, the bacterium converts the renewable raw materials formic acid and carbon dioxide (CO2) into valuable products such as bioplastics.

However, there is a drawback: the bacteria do not grow well on formic acid. The soil bacteria first burn the formic acid into more CO₂, which they then reprocess by pumping in extra energy. A rather inefficient detour, according to microbiologist Nico Claassens. “It is like taking an extra lap around the starting line at a race.”

This could be more efficient, thought researchers from Wageningen University & Research and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They designed a smarter, more direct biochemical pathway on paper—one that allows the bacterium to use formic acid directly, without unnecessary intermediate steps. This approach has now proven successful in practice. The results are published in Nature Microbiology.

Beau Dronsella (Max Planck) observed that in small culture vessels, the bacteria yield 15% to 20% more biomass with the same energy intake. “We have shown that we can do better than nature,” says Claassens. He adds, “Twenty percent extra product may seem small, but it can make the difference between an economically feasible and unfeasible sustainable process.”

A ‘metabolic heart transplant’

Improving the bacterium required precise genetic modifications, or as Claassens calls it, a “metabolic heart transplant.” The researchers deactivated the genes responsible for the original, inefficient metabolic pathway and instead provided the bacterium with genetic instructions for the shortened route.

Think of the process as a factory with a conveyor belt on which raw materials are placed and processed by robotic arms—cutting, assembling, and gluing components together. Claassens and his colleagues replaced these robotic arms with more efficient ones, allowing the same final product to be made with fewer steps and less energy.

Cupriavidus necator already naturally produces useful compounds. Under the right conditions, it accumulates bioplastics in its cells, sometimes making up more than half of its body weight. The newly enhanced bacteria in turbo mode are particularly interesting to researchers.

“By altering their genetics further, we can direct them to produce other valuable compounds as well,” Claassens explains. However, the research is not quite there yet. “We have now demonstrated that the principle works.”

The next step is to use these modified bacteria to actually produce specific products. A startup has already shown interest in using the bacteria to manufacture chemicals from formic acid.

Soilless growing systems inside greenhouses, known as controlled environment agriculture, promise to advance the year-round production of high-quality specialty crops, according to an interdisciplinary research team at Penn State. But to be competitive and sustainable, this advanced farming method will require the development and implementation of precision agriculture techniques. To meet that demand, the team developed an automated crop-monitoring system capable of providing continuous and frequent data about plant growth and needs, allowing for informed crop management.

Their research is published in the journal Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.

“Traditionally, crop monitoring in controlled environment agriculture soilless systems is a critical, time-consuming task requiring specialized personnel,” said team lead Long He, associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering. “And traditional crop-monitoring methods do not allow frequent data collection to capture plant growth dynamics throughout the crop cycle. Automated crop-monitoring systems allow continuous monitoring of the plants with frequent data collection and a more efficient and informed management of the crop.”

In their findings, the researchers reported that an integrated “internet of things,” artificial intelligence (AI) and a computer vision system tailored for controlled environment agriculture soilless growing systems, enabling continuous monitoring and analysis of plant growth throughout the crop cycle. An internet of things—often referred to as IoT—is a network of physical objects that can connect and exchange data over the internet, linking devices that are embedded with sensors, software and other technologies.

According to the team, the core innovation of their research is the implementation—for the first time—of a recursive image segmentation model that processes sequential images, captured in high resolution at predetermined time intervals, to accurately track changes in plant growth. In the study, the researchers tested their approach by monitoring baby bok choy, a leafy vegetable commonly called Chinese cabbage, but the researchers said it would work with many different crops.

He’s research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences, located at Penn State’s Fruit Research and Extension Center at Biglerville, has focused on automated, precision agriculture for more than a decade, devising robotic solutions for agricultural applications such as crop picking, tree pruning, green fruit thinning, pollination, orchard heating, pesticide spraying and irrigation. The machine vision system employed in this research is an advancement of technology the group developed for other purposes in previous studies.

In this study, the integrated machine vision system successfully isolated individual baby bok choy plants growing in a soilless system, producing frequent images that tracked increased leaf coverage area throughout their growth cycle. The researchers said the recursive model maintained a “robust performance,” providing accurate information throughout the crop growth cycle.

He credited Chenchen Kang, a post-doctoral scholar in his lab and first author on the study, for supplying the innovation and hard work needed to “teach” the computer vision system to track plant growth.

“Chenchen installed the sensors, collected and processed the data, developed the methodology and did the coding and programming work with the AI models,” He said.

The research was an interdisciplinary project between agricultural engineers and plant scientists, and it is part of a larger federal project titled “Advancing the Sustainability of Indoor Urban Agricultural Systems.”

Francesco Di Gioia, associate professor of vegetable crop science and principal investigator on the overarching project, stressed the importance of integrating different expertise for the development of precision agriculture solutions. The interdisciplinary approach, he suggested, will be increasingly critical in advancing the efficiency and long-term sustainability of current controlled-environment agricultural systems.

“The ability to automatically monitor and collect data on the crop status, estimate plant growth and crop requirements along with the monitoring of the nutrient solution and of the environmental factors—radiation, temperature and relative humidity—combined with the use of IoT and AI technologies, is going to revolutionize the way we manage crops,” Di Gioia said. “Minimizing inefficiencies and improving the competitiveness of controlled environment agricultural systems will enhance our food and nutrition security.”

In the future, Di Gioia added, the integration of precision agriculture technologies in controlled environment agricultural systems may also offer the opportunity to enhance the quality of specialty crops and even tailor their nutritional profile.

Xinyang Mu, who graduated with a doctoral degree in agricultural and biological engineering from Penn State and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Michigan State University, and Aline Novaski Seffrin, doctoral candidate in plant science, contributed to the study.

Xolography is a novel light printing technique that has been explored for dental products and in-space manufacturing. At Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), this technique has now been adapted to 3D print living cells. This research can pave the way for 3D-printed kidneys and muscle tissue. The team pioneered the Xolography-based method to produce tiny structures with features as small as 20 µm—approximately the size of a human cell.

These results are published in Advanced Materials.

Is Xolography the technique that will enable a future of 3D-printed hearts and kidneys?

“Unfortunately, this is still entirely speculative for now, I’m afraid,” cautions researcher Miguel Dias Castilho. “For now, we still view technology as a hacker space.”

This pioneering spirit is perfectly reflected in the printer, an early tissue printing prototype, whose sheer orange acrylic casing reveals an inside of wires, projectors, copper coils, and tiny digital displays.

While it may seem speculative for now, the detailed and lightning-fast printing of living tissue in a suitcase-sized, orange 3D printer is completely real.

“Our research is a necessary first step for the future of tissue engineering. Right now, it can print more physiologically relevant 3D environments for cell culture, and in the long term, it could help make 3D-printed organs a reality,” says Dias Castilho.

Tissue printing with light

At the heart of the machine sits a tiny cuvette containing a fluid that transforms into a solid as if by magic. But instead of waving a magic wand, Lena Stoecker, who is a Ph.D. of Dias Castilho’s brand-new Biomaterials Engineering and Biofabrication group, projects beams of light onto liquids to conjure up viable cell-laden geometries.

Stoecker has successfully adapted a novel 3D printing technique called Xolography to print biomaterials. While demonstrating the printer by putting a cuvette with a liquid inside, Stoecker explains what drew her to 3D printing tissues: “I first encountered 3D printing as a student assistant during my studies of mechanical engineering and business administration. We employed 3D printing mainly for prototyping and tooling for small series production, and I was fascinated by the technology’s possibility to realize (almost) any idea.”

Biomedical challenges

It is no surprise that Stoecker gravitated towards tissue engineering, as it is by nature a multidisciplinary field combining the expertise of molecular biologists, engineers and designers.

The biggest trifold challenge facing tissue engineers everywhere is to create viable 3D tissues that closely resemble the natural environment of cells, to create them fast, and to do it precisely. This is the holy grail.

“There was a big hype around 3D printing for biomedical engineering, but technologies failed to meet the high expectations,” Stoecker explains. “My dream for Xolography would be to develop into a technology that is actually able to create tissue and organ models to study disease and develop cures.”

A technique from the field of design

Xolography is a groundbreaking fusion of engineering, physics and chemistry, where light is used to 3D print liquid polymers. It harnesses the power of intersecting light beams of distinct wavelengths within a light-reactive fluid. As light rays converge, they turn the fluid into a detailed, solid 3D object the size of a gummi bear in under a minute.

The technology was developed by German chemist Stefan Hecht and physicist Martin Regehly, who further adapted it for diverse applications in their spin-off business Xolo. Four years ago, Hecht mused about Xolography potentially being used for generating complex biological structures.

Dias Castilho explains, “Four years ago, Xolo was looking to advance its technology into biomedical applications, while my team was searching for a disruptive technology that could potentially offer high resolution, fast manufacturing speeds, and scalability—so it’s a perfect marriage.”

Today, the TU/e-researchers at the Biomaterials Engineering and Biofabrication group made printing tissue with light a reality. Hecht and Regehly follow the findings of the research group with interest, as they are the first scientists to use this technology to print living materials in the world.

That did not happen overnight, as the researchers had to overcome some additional challenges to adapt Xolography to printing living tissue.

“The materials used must be biocompatible, for one. Besides the hydrogels we were developing for the process, we found that the photoinitiator system itself was not very cell-friendly and had to be replaced. In close collaboration with the company, we developed and optimized the material formulations to ensure they are safe for biomedical applications,” says Dias Castilho.

A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with the potential to expand the genome-editing toolbox. These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific sites on DNA.

TIGR systems can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, and they have distinct functional modules that can act on the targeted DNA. In addition to its modularity, TIGR is very compact compared to other RNA-guided systems, like CRISPR, which is a major advantage for delivering it in a therapeutic context.

These findings appear in the journal Science.

“This is a very versatile RNA-guided system with a lot of diverse functionalities,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT who led the research. The TIGR-associated (Tas) proteins that Zhang’s team found share a characteristic RNA-binding component that interacts with an RNA guide that directs it to a specific site in the genome. Some cut the DNA at that site, using an adjacent DNA-cutting segment of the protein. That modularity could facilitate tool development, allowing researchers to swap useful new features into natural Tas proteins.

“Nature is pretty incredible,” remarks Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a core member of the Broad Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT.

“It’s got a tremendous amount of diversity, and we have been exploring that natural diversity to find new biological mechanisms and harnessing them for different applications to manipulate biological processes,” he says.

Previously, Zhang’s team had adapted bacterial CRISPR systems into gene-editing tools that have transformed modern biology. His team has also found a variety of programmable proteins, both from CRISPR systems and beyond.

In their new work, to find novel programmable systems, the team began by zeroing in on a structural feature of the CRISPR Cas9 protein that binds to the enzyme’s RNA guide. That is a key feature that has made Cas9 such a powerful tool.

“Being RNA-guided makes it relatively easy to reprogram, because we know how RNA binds to other DNA or other RNA,” Zhang explains. His team searched hundreds of millions of biological proteins with known or predicted structures, looking for any that shared a similar domain. To find more distantly related proteins, they used an iterative process: from Cas9, they identified a protein called IS110, which had previously been shown by others to bind RNA. They then zeroed in on the structural features of IS110 that enable RNA binding and repeated their search.

At this point, the search had turned up so many distantly related proteins that the team turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of the list.

“When you are doing iterative, deep mining, the resulting hits can be so diverse that they are difficult to analyze using standard phylogenetic methods, which rely on conserved sequences,” explains Guilhem Faure, a computational biologist in Zhang’s lab.

New research published in the journal Nature on February 26, 2025, uses advanced robotics to track the hyper-efficient supply chains formed between plants and mycorrhizal fungi as they trade carbon and nutrients across the complex, living networks that help regulate the Earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems.

Understanding the plant-fungal trade is urgent because these fungal networks draw down around 13 billion tons of CO2 per year into the soil—equivalent to ~1/3 of global energy-related emissions.

More than 80% of plant species on Earth form partnerships with mycorrhizal fungi, in which phosphorus and nitrogen collected by fungi are exchanged for plant carbon. Despite their global importance, scientists did not understand how these brainless organisms construct expansive and efficient supply chains across their underground networks.

Using a custom-built imaging robot, the international research team of 28 scientists discovered that the fungi construct a lace-like mycelial network that moves carbon outward from plant roots in a wave-like formation. To support this growth, fungi move resources to-and-from plant roots using a system of two-way traffic, controlling flow speed and width of these fungal highways as needed.

To seek further resources, the fungi deployed special growing branches as microscopic “pathfinders” to explore new territory, appearing to favor trade opportunities with future plant partners over short-term growth within immediate surroundings. The researchers describe how these behaviors appear to be coordinated by simple, local “rules” that prevent the fungus from “over-building” and define a unique ‘traveling wave strategy’ for growth, resource exploration, and trade.

“We’ve been mapping the decentralized decision-making processes of mycorrhizal fungal networks, exposing a hyper-efficient blueprint for an underground supply chain,” said Evolutionary Biologist and co-author Dr. Toby Kiers of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit.

“Humans increasingly rely on AI algorithms to build supply chains that are efficient and resilient. Yet mycorrhizal fungi have been solving these problems for more than 450 million years. This is the kind of research that keeps you up at night because these fungi are such important underground circulatory systems for nutrients and carbon.”

In a breakthrough that could transform bioelectronic sensing, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Rice University has developed a new method to dramatically enhance the sensitivity of enzymatic and microbial fuel cells using organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs). The research was recently published in the journal Device.

The innovative approach amplifies electrical signals by three orders of magnitude and improves signal-to-noise ratios, potentially enabling the next generation of highly sensitive, low-power biosensors for health and environmental monitoring.

“We have demonstrated a simple yet powerful technique to amplify weak bioelectronic signals using OECTs, overcoming previous challenges in integrating fuel cells with electrochemical sensors,” said corresponding author Rafael Verduzco, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and materials science and nanoengineering. “This method opens the door to more versatile and efficient biosensors that could be applied in medicine, environmental monitoring and even wearable technology.”

Traditional biosensors rely on direct interactions between target biomolecules and the sensor device, which can pose limitations when the electrolyte environment is incompatible. This research circumvents that challenge by electronically coupling fuel cells with OECTs instead of introducing biomolecules directly into the sensor.

“One of the biggest hurdles in bioelectronic sensing has been designing systems that work in different chemical environments without compromising performance,” said corresponding author Caroline Ajo-Franklin, professor of biosciences, director of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute and Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar. “By keeping the OECT and fuel cell separate, we ensured optimal conditions for both components while still achieving powerful signal amplification.”

OECTs are thin-film transistors that operate in aqueous environments and have gained attention for their high sensitivity and low-voltage operation. For the study, the team integrated OECTs with two types of biofuel cells to enhance their performance.

The first type, enzymatic fuel cells, utilize glucose dehydrogenase to catalyze glucose oxidation, generating electricity in the process. The second type, microbial fuel cells, rely on electroactive bacteria to metabolize organic substrates and produce current. The OECTs were then coupled with the fuel cells in two different configurations: a cathode-gate configuration and an anode-gate configuration.

The researchers found that OECTs can amplify signals from enzymatic and microbial fuel cells by factors ranging from 1,000 to 7,000 depending on the configuration and fuel cell type. This amplification is significantly higher than traditional electrochemical amplification techniques, which typically achieve signal enhancements in the range of 10 to 100 times stronger.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) say they have made an important leap forward with a novel methodology that adds an important microscopy capability to life scientists’ toolbox.

The advance represents a 1,000-fold improvement in speed and throughput in Brillouin microscopy and provides a way to view light-sensitive organisms more efficiently, according to Carlo Bevilacqua, an optical engineer in EMBL’s Prevedel Team and lead author of the study, “Full-field Brillouin microscopy based on an imaging Fourier-transform spectrometer” published in Nature Photonics.

“We were on a quest to speed up image acquisition,” said Bevilacqua. “Over the years, we have progressed from being able to see just a pixel at a time to a line of 100 pixels, to now a full plane that offers a view of approximately 10,000 pixels.”

The technology is based on a phenomenon first predicted in 1922 by French physicist Léon Brillouin. He showed that when light is shone on a material, it interacts with naturally occurring thermal vibrations within, exchanging energy and thereby slightly shifting the frequency (or color) of the light. Measuring the spectrum (colors) of the scattered light reveals information about a material’s physical characteristics.

In 2022, Bevilacqua and others in the Prevedel group were able to first expand the field of view to a line, and now with this latest development, to a full 2D field of view, which also helps speed up 3D imaging.

“Just as the development of light-sheet microscopy here at EMBL marked a revolution in light microscopy because it allowed for faster, high-resolution, and minimally phototoxic imaging of biological samples, so too does this advance in the area of mechanical or Brillouin imaging,” pointed out Robert Prevedel, PhD, group leader and senior author on the paper. “We hope this new technology—with minimal light intensity—opens one more ‘window’ for life scientists’ exploration.”

New research from scientists at Cleveland Clinic’s Genome Center and their collaborators at other institutions describes a pathway that human herpes simplex-1 (HSV-1) can use to contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. They have also identified two FDA-approved drugs that successfully reversed the pathway in the lab. Full details are published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association in a paper titled, “Human herpesvirus-associated transposable element activation in human aging brains with Alzheimer’s disease.”

Feixiong Cheng, PhD, Genome Center director and senior author on the study, claims that their findings provide concrete evidence of a possible link between human herpesviruses and Alzheimer’s disease. Many people around the world are either currently infected or will contract herpesviruses by adulthood. Some infections are asymptomatic while others cause minor illnesses. However, even after the illnesses subside, infected individuals carry the virus for the rest of their lives.

While herpesviruses are generally harmless when they are suppressed, there is evidence that shows that immune systems can lose the ability to suppress them under certain conditions including as people age. Circumstantial evidence from other studies has linked HSV-1 to Alzheimer’s disease, but the exact mechanism was not known.

Cheng and his team hypothesized that latent HPV-1 infections could trigger Alzheimer’s disease by directly activating the transposable elements that they had previously connected to disease progression in aging brains. Transposable elements are small pieces of DNA that can physically “jump” out of chromosomes and randomly move to far-away regions of our DNA.

They identified several transposable elements that were more highly activated in Alzheimer’s-affected brains containing HSV RNA, compared to uninfected or healthy brains. They then tested HSV-1 infected brain cells to see whether the identified transposable elements were activated. They also assessed any effects on neuroinflammation and protein accumulation, which are associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

What they found was that when people either contract HSV-1 or when latent infections become active with age, the infection is linked with the activation of transposable elements like LINE-1. Once these are activated, they disrupt important genetic processes in the brain that are associated with the accumulation of Tau and other Alzheimer’s-linked proteins which contribute to inflammation and neurodegeneration in the brain.

Next, the scientists analyzed publicly available health records to see if people who were prescribed antiviral herpes medications were less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s later in life. They found evidence suggesting that two herpes medications, valacyclovir and acyclovir, were associated with significantly reduced instances of Alzheimer’s disease. When they tested the drugs in virus-infected human brain organoid models, they seemed to successfully reverse the activation of transposable elements that impact the Alzheimer’s disease pathway.

Commenting on the study, Cheng noted that their findings could open a door to “new strategies for treating other neurological diseases associated with herpesviruses or other viruses.”