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The increases are welcome news, but fall short of an advisory group’s recommendation

Veterinarians and researchers on the front lines say it has taken too long to share data on viral changes, spread, and milk safety

L1 elements are retrotransposons currently active in mammals. Although L1s are typically silenced in most normal tissues, elevated L1 expression is associated with a variety of conditions, including cancer, aging, infertility and neurological disease. These associations have raised interest in the mapping of human endogenous de novo L1 insertions, and a variety of methods have been developed for this purpose. Adapting these methods to mouse genomes would allow us to monitor endogenous in vivo L1...

Genome-wide association studies have revealed >270 loci associated with schizophrenia risk, yet these genetic factors do not seem to be sufficient to fully explain the molecular determinants behind this psychiatric condition. Epigenetic marks such as post-translational histone modifications remain largely plastic during development and adulthood, allowing a dynamic impact of environmental factors, including antipsychotic medications, on access to genes and regulatory elements. However, few...

Affective touch-a slow, gentle, and pleasant form of touch-activates a different neural network than which is activated during discriminative touch in humans. Affective touch perception is enabled by specialized low-threshold mechanoreceptors in the skin with unmyelinated fibers called C tactile (CT) afferents. These CT afferents are conserved across mammalian species, including macaque monkeys. However, it is unknown whether the neural representation of affective touch is the same across...

Older adults experienced major changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing restrictions, and it might be expected that those who were already socially isolated before the pandemic were particularly vulnerable. We apply an outcome-wide longitudinal design on 4,636 participants (mean age 66.8 y) from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, observed in 2018/19 and early (June/July 2020) and later (November/December 2020) in the pandemic. Social isolation is defined using an index including...

Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) is a rare disease caused by the expression of progerin, a mutant protein that accelerates aging and precipitates death. Given that atherosclerosis complications are the main cause of death in progeria, here, we investigated whether progerin-induced atherosclerosis is prevented in HGPSrev-Cdh5-CreERT2 and HGPSrev-SM22α-Cre mice with progerin suppression in endothelial cells (ECs) and vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs), respectively....

Muscle atrophy and functional decline (sarcopenia) are common manifestations of frailty and are critical contributors to morbidity and mortality in older people¹. Deciphering the molecular mechanisms underlying sarcopenia has major implications for understanding human ageing². Yet, progress has been slow, partly due to the difficulties of characterizing skeletal muscle niche heterogeneity (whereby myofibres are the most abundant) and obtaining well-characterized human samples^(3,4). Here we...

Age-related changes in testicular function can impact health and well-being. The mechanisms underlying age-related testicular dysfunction, such as late-onset hypogonadism (LOH), remain incompletely understood. Using single-cell RNA sequencing on human testes with LOH, we delineated Sertoli cells (SCs) as pivotal metabolic coordinators within the testicular microenvironment. In particular, lysosomal acidity probing revealed compromised degradative capacity in aged SCs, hindering autophagy and...

Synapses at dendritic branches exhibit specific properties for information processing. However, how the synapses are orchestrated to dynamically modify their properties, thus optimizing information processing, remains elusive. Here, we observed at hippocampal dendritic branches diverse configurations of synaptic connectivity, two extremes of which are characterized by low transmission efficiency, high plasticity and coding capacity, or inversely. The former favors information encoding, pertinent...

There is a long-standing debate about the magnitude of the contribution of gene-environment interactions to phenotypic variations of complex traits owing to the low statistical power and few reported interactions to date. To address this issue, the Gene-Lifestyle Interactions Working Group within the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genetic Epidemiology Consortium has been spearheading efforts to investigate G × E in large and diverse samples through meta-analysis. Here, we present a...