Radically different
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02231-1
Related memories are sometimes encoded in overlapping neurons. The authors show that the prefrontal cortex controls this type of memory organization in the hippocampus through direct projections to the medial entorhinal cortex.
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 28 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02253-9
The authors investigate the transcriptomic and connectivity organization of the basal ganglia and parafascicular nucleus. The analyses suggest that combinatorial gene expression underlies the modular and cell-type-specific basal ganglia input–output networks.
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Good morning. The other night I watched a shocking episode of “The Vampire Diaries.” A series of cursed, ghost-like hallucinations attempt to convince a teen vampire to end her own life using some disturbingly coercive, cogent arguments. Ultimately, the character is saved. And while this episode aired more than a decade ago, I was surprised by how many parallels there were to current debates about the risks of AI chatbots and people in mental health crises.
Eli Lilly struck a deal Tuesday to develop new forms of gene editors potentially capable of inserting entire genes into patients.
The collaboration, with artificial intelligence-focused biotech Profluent, is sparse on details, including the number of programs the two companies would work on, the types of diseases they’ll pursue, or how much Lilly was paying upfront. But if every one of its efforts works out, Lilly would pay Profluent $2.25 billion in milestones payments.
The deal is part of a larger push by Lilly into gene editing. The big pharma, flush with record revenues from its obesity and diabetes drugs, has opened a new genetic medicine center in Boston and bought up a series of gene editing or gene therapy companies over the last few years.
Governments, industry, and philanthropies are investing in neuroscience at an unprecedented scale, and the ambition behind this impetus is a noble one: to reduce the growing burden of brain diseases and extend healthy cognitive life. We fully support this movement’s push for “brain health” to mirror successful frameworks established for cancer and heart health that prioritize early screening and aggressive preventive treatments, making it possible to act before irreversible damage sets in.
Even as this agenda gains momentum, however, a critical blind spot is emerging. As governments refocus their policies to tackle conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, mental illness is often being sidelined as a secondary concern rather than as a primary component of brain health. This artificial divide is a scientific and a strategic error.
WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans are at odds over a consequential health care policy embedded in last year’s tax cut law.
Democrats say the law’s Medicaid work requirements will create red tape that leads to people losing their coverage. Republicans say the measure encourages work.
But because the law doesn’t require states to report on the implementation of this massive change to Medicaid, we may never get a detailed account of how the policy is working.
As Google faces pressure to take greater accountability for the mental health impacts of its artificial intelligence products, the company’s clinical director Megan Jones Bell welcomed the challenge of making artificial intelligence helpful to people who come to its Gemini chatbot with a mental health crisis.
“It can seem sometimes like shutting something down is a way of preventing harm,” Jones Bell told STAT. “We believe that making our product experience safer and more helpful and strengthening that bridge to support it is the more effective path to support mental health for the most people.”
Google recently made updates to its Gemini app so that it more prominently features connections to crisis hotlines when it detects a person may be at risk of self harm. In conversations about mental health, the AI will frequently point people to outside resources — but the bot doesn’t disengage, reminding a user, for example, that “I’m here to listen.”
Mental Health Europe reacts to the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework, which lacks consideration of mental health in the discussions about priorities, structures and processes.
The post Multiannual Financial Framework 28-34: Time to prioritise Mental Health appeared first on Mental Health Europe.
For decades, the ability to precisely rewrite bacterial genomes has been largely confined to a single workhorse organism: Escherichia coli. That limitation has slowed efforts to study pathogens, engineer sustainable biomanufacturing strains, and probe how microbes influence human health. While genome editing tools have transformed eukaryotic biology, most high‑efficiency bacterial editors simply haven’t worked outside E. coli.
A new study from the Gladstone Institutes aims to change that. In a large, nine‑lab collaboration, researchers have translated a retron‑based DNA editing system from E. coli into 14 additional bacterial species spanning three major phyla. The work, published in Nature Biotechnology and titled “Genome editing of phylogenetically distinct bacteria using cross-species retron-mediated recombineering,” demonstrates that retrons, bacterial immune elements that continuously produce short DNA strands, can be engineered into portable genome editing modules the authors call recombitrons. “Recombitrons—a genome editing tool created by pairing modified, donor-producing bacterial retrons with single-stranded binding and annealing proteins—have increased the efficiency of recombineering to install flexible, precise edits in the prokaryotic chromosome,” the authors wrote.
Retrons normally function as part of a viral defense system, generating DNA fragments that help bacteria detect and respond to infection. Seth Shipman, PhD, a Gladstone Investigator and senior author of the study, has spent years repurposing this machinery. “We’ve been easily editing E. coli genomes using retrons for years now, which has substantially increased the pace of our fundamental biology and our molecular technology development,” he said. “But we kept hearing from the broader field, asking when there would be a version of this technology that could be put to work in other bacterial species that matter for the environment, industrial processes, or human health.”
Shipman’s lab previously showed that retrons can act as cellular DNA-making factories, generating the donor strands needed for genome editing. In bacteria, the resulting editing tool built by pairing modified retrons with single‑stranded DNA–binding and annealing proteins is known as a recombitron. Until now, however, functional recombitrons existed only in E. coli.
To test whether the architecture could travel, the team designed a panel of 10 retron-based editing systems and partnered with other labs specializing in diverse bacterial species. “We designed all the molecular parts at Gladstone, then sent them to the collaborators, where they ran the experiment in their labs,” said first author Alejandro González‑Delgado, PhD. Samples were then returned to Gladstone for centralized analysis.
The results show broad functionality. The recombitrons worked in all 15 species tested, including clinically relevant pathogens such as Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, as well as fast‑growing biotechnology strains like Vibrio natriegens and Pseudomonas putida. Editing efficiencies varied widely—from fractions of a percent to more than 90%—but the team demonstrated that modifying retron structure or other system components could boost performance in lower‑efficiency hosts.
“Each retron worked differently in different bacteria,” González‑Delgado noted. “This reinforces why it’s important to have lots of different retrons, so scientists can choose the ones best suited to their favorite bacterial species.”
The study provides a roadmap for expanding genome editing into species that have historically been difficult to engineer. Researchers studying microbial pathogenesis, gut ecology, or industrial bioproduction can now match retron systems to their organism of interest.
“My lab builds molecular technology, and we want these technologies to be used as broadly as possible to uncover new biology and intervene in disease,” Shipman said. “We hope it will continue to spread from here.”
The post Retron-Powered Approach Enables Genome Editing Across Diverse Bacterial Species appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.