Life Sciences

This study used Mask R-CNN to segment goats from two-dimensional images and extract heart girth and body length, combined these with age and sex metadata, trained XGBoost, Random Forest and CatBoost and integrated them with weights of 0.5/0.3/0.2; on a validation set split by Animal ID (37 goats) XGBoost reached R²=0.8514 (RMSE=4.26 kg, MAE=3.47 kg, MAPE=16.27%), and on a completely unseen test set (37 goats) XGBoost performed best with R²=0.7955 (MSE=29.15 kg², RMSE=5.40 kg, MAE=4.01 kg, MAPE=16.38%) while the weighted ensemble recorded R²=0.7713 (MSE=32.60 kg², RMSE=5.71 kg, MAE=4.13 kg, MAPE=16.60%), indicating that combining visual and morphometric information under strict group-based evaluation provides reliable non-contact body weight estimation on unseen livestock.

The authors present RNASeek, a 1.6-billion-parameter generative foundation model built on a DeepSeek architecture and trained on a cross-phyla transcriptomic corpus, using natural-language tokens for conditional prediction and sequence design; it captures species-specific transcript features and intron–exon boundaries in a zero-shot setting, can be fine-tuned to predict ribozyme self-cleavage activity and viral mRNA stability while revealing interpretable features such as loop flexibility, stem stability, and AU-rich motifs, and these functional predictors then serve as reward models for GRPO updates to the generation policy, producing faster-cleaving ribozymes and stability-enhancing 3′ UTRs under user-specified IUPAC constraints, with experimentally validated generated ribozymes reaching

Using COPD-related datasets from a public database, this study applied differential expression analysis, machine learning, and gene expression analysis to identify APRT and S100A8 as lipotoxicity-related COPD biomarkers (APRT notably lower and S100A8 notably higher in COPD samples), supported by RT-qPCR, built and validated a nomogram for predicting COPD risk (P = 0.395 in the Hosmer-Lemeshow test), found both biomarkers co-enriched in the "focal adhesion" pathway and significantly correlated with neutrophils, predicted 27 drugs targeting APRT (such as alteplase and relaxin) and methotrexate targeting S100A8, and used scRNA-seq to identify macrophages as a key cell type in COPD with dynamic expression patterns of both biomarkers during macrophage differentiation.

Nature reports that 82% of the 140 in vivo CAR-T cell drugs being tested in animals and people are being developed by groups in China, which has become a fast mover to the clinic through investigator-initiated trials; a Nature study in the same evidence bundle shows that PHGDH-deficient pancreatic cancer cells reprogram neighbouring hepatocytes through a CXCL5–CXCR2–PI3K–AKT–FOXO3A axis, driving hepatocyte PHGDH expression and serine secretion that supports liver metastatic outgrowth.

Jesse Poganik's team at Harvard grafted hearts from young, middle-aged and old mice into mice of all three age groups and measured DNA methylation across roughly 320,000 genomic regions, finding that grafted hearts shifted their biological age toward the recipient; the same effect appeared in biopsy samples from 11 historical heart transplants at Brigham and Women's Hospital with large donor-recipient age gaps, while some functional measures such as heart rate, posterior wall thickness and exercise capacity tracked recipient age rather than donor age.

The study presents a single-nucleus multi-omic atlas comprising 459,856 transcriptomic and chromatin accessibility profiles from 21 adult human tissues and four donors, including paired measurements from 160,688 nuclei, resolving nine cell lineages, 61 broad cell types and 313 subclusters, identifying 1,085,062 candidate cis-regulatory elements (including 161,270 novel elements absent from ENCODE), and using the dataset to train sequence-to-function models that predict chromatin-accessibility effects for 548,656 fine-mapped variants, identifying 18,133 high-effect variants including 1,120 broadly active variants.