Volume 43 Issue 1, January 2025

Bispecific T cell receptor molecules designed to wipe out HIV-infected T cells offer glimpses of a cure.

From corn to bananas, farmers stand to gain from cultivating edited crops that are resilient and sustainable, paired with precision insecticides and microbe engineering. But reaching those with the greatest need remains a challenge.

After two decades of experience with biosimilars, physicochemical and in vitro biological comparison with their reference products appear sufficient to guarantee clinical safety and efficacy. Hence, the regulation of biosimilars has become redundant, and biopharmaceuticals should now be regulated through the generic pathway available for small molecules.

To enhance the safety and security of the US bioeconomy, a new public–private partnership should be established to facilitate information sharing and threat analysis among industry, government and academia, and to develop and deploy safeguards.

An engineered retrotransposon achieves targeted gene transfer into the human genome.

The underrepresentation of functional glial cells is a major challenge in brain organoid models. We developed an astroglia-enriched cortical organoid model that allows efficient generation of functional astrocytes and enables the formation of astroglial morphological subclasses with layer-specific gene expression profiles upon transplantation into the mouse brain.

Borderlands Science is a casual mini-game released within a mass-market video game that crowdsources the alignment of one million RNA sequences from the human microbiome. In 3 years, 4 million participants generated over 135 million puzzle solutions that were used to build a reference alignment and improve microbial phylogeny.

We developed a deep learning-based method, EMRNA, to automatically model RNA structures from cryo-electron microscopy maps. Evaluation of EMRNA on diverse test sets of RNA maps shows that it builds RNA models with high accuracy and efficiency.

We developed the OMArk software package for evaluating protein-coding gene annotation quality. In addition to assessing the completeness of a proteome, OMArk estimates the overall quality of the gene set’s content, a feature that will help to improve public protein sequence data.