Mathematical models have become essential tools for exploring the complex interplay between cancer cells and their microenvironment, but require multidisciplinary expertise and abundant biological dat...

Recently, I exchanged views with a prominent Ivy League scientist who was complaining about the minority students and junior faculty applying to his program. He claimed that the university, through di...

Single-cell long-read RNA sequencing enables the high-fidelity mapping of single-cell expression data from highly sequence-similar transposable elements to unique genomic loci by correcting errors fro...

There is a long-standing consensus that the animal phyla closest to our own phylum of Chordata are the Echinodermata and Hemichordata. These three phy…

Author summary Certain segments of DNA are repeated hundreds to thousands of times within the same genome, posing an intriguing and understudied source of genetic variation between individuals. The ge...

Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...

by Han-Wen Chang, Hung-Che Lin, Ching-Ting Yang, Rebecca J. Tay, Dao-Ming Chang, Yi-Chung Tung, Yen-Ping Hsueh Adhesive interactions, mediated by specific molecular and structural mechanisms, are fundamental to host–pathogen and predator–prey relationships, driving evolutionary dynamics and ecological interactions. Here, we investigate the cellular and molecular basis of adhesion between the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and its natural predator the nematode-trapping fungus Arthrobotrys oligospora, which employs specialized adhesive nets to capture its prey. Using forward genetic screens, we identified C. elegans mutants that escape fungal traps and revealed the nuclear hormone receptor NHR-66 as a key regulator of fungal-nematode adhesion. Loss-of-function mutations in nhr-66 conferred resistance to fungal trapping through the downregulation of a large subset of cuticular collagen genes. Restoring collagen gene expression in nhr-66 mutants abolished the escape phenotype, highlighting the essential role of these structural proteins in fungal-nematode adhesion. Furthermore, sequence analysis of natural C. elegans populations revealed no obvious loss-of-function variants in nhr-66, suggesting selective pressures exist that balance adhesion-mediated predation risk with physiological robustness. We observed that loss of nhr-66 function resulted in a trade-off of increased hypersensitivity to hypoosmotic stress and cuticular fragility. These findings underscore the pivotal role of structural proteins in shaping ecological interactions and the evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

The genetic tractability, transparency and invariant development of the C. elegans embryo have led to its broad adoption as a model system for the study of cell and developmental biology. Its impermea...

Epigenetic inheritance can be influenced by environmental conditions and somatic inputs originating from different tissues. Such transgenerational inheritance is reversable as it does not lead to muta...