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Researchers have uncovered a surprising hidden function of a protein that may hold the key to repairing damaged muscles and treating muscular dystrophy. Known for protecting chromosomes, TRF2 also helps muscle stem cells maintain their identity and regenerate injured tissue. When scientists removed the protein in mice, muscles struggled to repair themselves, and muscular dystrophy progressed dramatically faster.

A surprising new study suggests that where men get their protein may be linked to their testosterone levels. Researchers studying more than 2,500 men found that higher animal protein intake, particularly from dairy, was associated with lower testosterone, while plant protein was linked to higher levels. The findings raise intriguing questions about how everyday food choices might relate to male hormone levels.

Stanford researchers have discovered that children who struggle persistently with math may have underlying differences in how their brains manage problem-solving strategies. Children with developmental dyscalculia were slower to switch strategies, less responsive to changes in difficulty, and less able to improve their approach over time. Distinct patterns of brain activity were linked to these difficulties and could even predict certain math-related abilities.

Crows may be even smarter than we thought, and their brains are astonishingly fast. Researchers at the University of Tübingen discovered that crows can make visual decisions twice as quickly as humans and monkeys, taking just 235 milliseconds on average to identify the direction of moving dots while maintaining remarkable accuracy.

Colorectal cancer is making an alarming comeback in the United States after more than 20 years of declining rates, and the increase is no longer limited to younger adults. A major new study found rising rates across nearly every age group under 70, including older Americans who have historically benefited most from cancer screening.

Scientists have developed an AI-powered approach that makes experimental bionic vision technology more precise, helping predict the flashes and shapes of light perceived by a blind man with a brain implant. By learning how an individual's brain responds to electrical stimulation, the technology could bring researchers closer to restoring some degree of sight to people with blindness.

Aging is the major risk factor for neurodegenerative disease, yet how it affects different cells in the primate brain remains unclear. In this issue of Cell, Yang et al. present a single-nucleus atlas of the aging macaque brain that, together with recent work by Zhang et al., reveals context-dependent aging programs, sex-biased transcriptional aging, and molecular links to Alzheimer's disease.

The basal ganglia (BG) underlie motor control, reward processing, and many neurological and psychiatric disorders, yet cell-type-resolved epigenomic and 3D genome maps of the human BG remain limited. Here, we present a multimodal single-cell atlas of DNA methylation (261,331 nuclei) and 3D chromatin conformation (229,286 nuclei) from eight subregions, harmonized under the BG consensus taxonomy and integrated with matched data across multiple regulatory layers. We identify millions of...

Brain aging is a complex process with profound health and societal consequences. However, the molecular and cellular pathways that govern its progression, and inter- and intra-individual variation, remain poorly defined. We present a transcriptomic atlas of 5.3 million cells from 582 samples spanning 11 brain regions of 55 rhesus macaques (aged 0.5-21 years). We identify age-depleted and vulnerable neuronal populations and subtle, age-associated compositional differences in glia-detectable only...

The anterior caudate shows a pattern of Alzheimer's disease pathology that differs from the more extensively studied cortex. Across 41 donors, we found mostly diffuse amyloid beta plaques in gray matter and phosphorylated tau threads associated with white matter. Combining digital pathology with single-nucleus and spatial gene expression data, we detected no significant loss or gain in neuronal cell-type abundance with increasing pathology. However, we did observe increases in an FLT1+/IL1B+...

Spatial omics enables the integration of high-dimensional molecular organization with clinical outcomes, yet incorporating spatial single-cell information into predictive models at the population scale remains challenging. We introduce SPIN (spatial predictive integration network), which integrates subject-specific, cell-type level, spatially informed co-expression or co-abundance networks for population-scale clinical prediction. Current implementation of SPIN includes three key modules:...

Degeneration of dopamine (DA) neurons and reduced DA levels in the brain is recognized as an underlying cause of Parkinson's Disease (PD). Levodopa (L-DOPA) is the standard treatment, but its effectiveness wanes over time and prolonged use can cause L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia (LID). AAV-mediated aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) expression in the striatum combined with L-DOPA shows promise for symptomatic improvement but requires invasive delivery. Here, we generate enhancer-driven AAVs...

Single-cell reference mapping is increasingly central to translating heterogeneous datasets into consistent representations of cell identity. As cell-type atlases expand in scale and complexity, mapping new data to shared references enables reproducible annotation, cross-study integration, and accumulation of biological knowledge. We present MapMyCells, an open-source, high-performance framework for mapping diverse single-cell omics datasets to hierarchical reference taxonomies with minimal...

Single-cell RNA technologies enable the routine acquisition of transcriptomic atlases. However, these molecular profiles are influenced by overlapping sources of variation. Since these covariates confound comparisons, data integration is the first step in most analyses. Three challenges remain: correcting strong batch effects, scaling to millions of cells, and modeling how covariates influence gene expression. To address these challenges, we developed PIANO, probabilistic inference autoencoder...

Aging is the major risk factor for neurodegenerative disease, yet how it affects different cells in the primate brain remains unclear. In this issue of Cell, Yang et al. present a single-nucleus atlas of the aging macaque brain that, together with recent work by Zhang et al., reveals context-dependent aging programs, sex-biased transcriptional aging, and molecular links to Alzheimer's disease.

The human striatum governs diverse motor, cognitive, and affective behaviors yet lacks the obvious cytoarchitectural boundaries defining functional territories elsewhere in the brain. Using Slide-tags single-nucleus spatial transcriptomics, we profiled 1.1 million cells across 19 postmortem donors to uncover the striatum's spatial organization. These data revealed a consistent subdivision of the striatum into six zones, each defined by molecularly distinct populations of spiny projection neurons...

The cellular and molecular bases of inter-individual variation in the human brain are not yet understood, particularly beyond the neocortex. Here, we describe cellular and gene-expression variation in the striatum and prefrontal cortex from single-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) analysis of 3.9 million nuclei from 178 adult brain donors. People with more astrocytes, microglia, or oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) in any one brain region tended to have this property in all gray-matter...

Brain aging is a complex process with profound health and societal consequences. However, the molecular and cellular pathways that govern its progression, and inter- and intra-individual variation, remain poorly defined. We present a transcriptomic atlas of 5.3 million cells from 582 samples spanning 11 brain regions of 55 rhesus macaques (aged 0.5-21 years). We identify age-depleted and vulnerable neuronal populations and subtle, age-associated compositional differences in glia-detectable only...

Single-cell reference mapping is increasingly central to translating heterogeneous datasets into consistent representations of cell identity. As cell-type atlases expand in scale and complexity, mapping new data to shared references enables reproducible annotation, cross-study integration, and accumulation of biological knowledge. We present MapMyCells, an open-source, high-performance framework for mapping diverse single-cell omics datasets to hierarchical reference taxonomies with minimal...

High-quality neurotypical postmortem human brain tissue is essential for constructing comprehensive human brain cell atlases, but it is difficult to obtain. Here, we describe the establishment of UC Irvine's Brain Procurement Program, a coordinated multi-institutional pipeline to collect and process neurotypical donor brains for multiomic mapping studies within the National Institute of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) consortium. Through partnerships with the Orange...