The neurohormone oxytocin is well-known for promoting social bonds including trust, empathy, positive memories, processing of bonding cues, and positive communication and generating pleasurable feelings, for example from art, exercise, or intimacy. Now, researchers from Michigan State University show that in zebrafish and human cell cultures, oxytocin has yet another, unsuspected, function: it stimulates stem cells derived from the heart’s ...

BGI Genomics, in collaboration with Southwest University, the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology, and other partners, has constructed a high-resolution pangenome dataset representing almost the entire genomic content in a silkworm. Previously, due to the scarcity of wild silkworms and technical limitations of former studies, many trait-associated sites were missing. This is the first research ever to digitize ...

“I’m a professional pin-in-a-haystack seeker,” geneticist Thijn Brummelkamp responds when asked why he excels at tracking down proteins and genes that other people did not find, despite the fact that some have managed to remain elusive for as long as forty years. His research group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute has once again managed to track down one of these “mystery ...

Left untreated, malaria can progress from being mild to severe — and potentially fatal — in 24 hours. So researchers at the University of British Columbia developed a method to quickly and sensitively assess the progression of the mosquito-borne infectious disease, which remains a leading killer in low-income countries. One way malaria wreaks havoc on the body is by causing ...