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Received — 4 April 2026 ⏭

Genetically encoded fluorescent reporters to visualize α-synuclein pathology in live brain

✇Cell
By: Li Zhang · Minhui Yu · Guoqing Chen · Siyuan Ge · Mengdi Wang · Xianying Zhang · Miao Zhao · Huating Gu · Meizhu Huang · Aixue Liu · Gengxin Ran · Zeyuan Liu · Tiepeng Liao · Qi Chen · Chenjian Miao · Yao Lu · Yibing Wang · Fengchao Wang · Zhihui Liu · Hongying Zhu · Qian Wu · Zhuan Zhou · Wei Xiong · Xiaoqun Wang · Peng Cao
4 March 2026 at 08:00
The development of genetically encoded fluorescent reporters, along with their corresponding knock-in mouse lines for labeling α-Syn inclusions, enables diverse applications in studying the propagation and pathological effects of α-Syn inclusions in the live brain.
Received — 2 April 2026 ⏭

DNA damage burden causes selective CUX2 neuron loss in neuroinflammation

✇Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds
By: Laura Morcom · Wenlong Xia · Zhaoyang Xu · Yashika Awasthi · Celine Geywitz · Matthew O. Ellis · Tomas Noli · Amel Zulji · Daniel Yamamoto · Gemma C. Girdler · Li Kai · Keying Zhu · Mingming Wei · Xiao-Yan Tang · Kimberly K. Hoi · Julio Gonzalez-Maya · Greg J. Duncan · Adrien M. Vaquie · Diana Gold Diaz · Riki Kawaguchi · Erdong Liu · Yu Sun · Denny Yang · Gregory D. Jordan · I-Ling Lu · Staffan Holmqvist · Theresa Bartels · Katherine Ridley · Jennifer Ja-Yoon Choi · Santos J. Franco · Eric J. Huang · Ben Emery · Daniel Geschwind · Lucas Schirmer · Gabriel Balmus · Brian Popko · Stephen P. J. Fancy · David H. Rowitch
1 April 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10310-3

DNA damage burden and inadequate repair in CUX2+ cortical layer 2/3 excitatory neurons contributes to selective vulnerability in neuroinflammatory injury.

Expansion of outer cortical CUX2 neurons requires adaptations for DNA repair

✇Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds
By: Wenlong Xia · Laura Morcom · Zhaoyang Xu · I-Ling Lu · Qing Wang · Kimberly K. Hoi · Mingming Wei · Keying Zhu · Gregory Jordan · Xiao-Yan Tang · Julio Gonzalez-Maya · Vanesa S. Mattera · Sophia M. Panigrahi · Riki Kawaguchi · Ben Emery · Santos J. Franco · Daniel H. Geschwind · Brian Popko · David H. Rowitch · Stephen P. J. Fancy
1 April 2026 at 08:00

Nature, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10290-4

The transcription factor ATF4 is shown to regulate double-stranded DNA repair within vulnerable CUX2+ upper-layer 2/3 cortical neurons, enabling their survival during development.

Integrating Untargeted Metabolomics and Transcriptomics in Mice with Pulmonary Tuberculosis to Reveal Changes in Linoleic Acid and Its Metabolism in Lung Monocyte-Derived Macrophages

✇Omics In Lung
By: Yuxia Sha · Xiaoman Zhao · Hongying Zhu · Ye Li · Meilin Shao · Shenggang Ding · Haoquan Zhou
28 March 2026 at 18:00

Pathogens. 2026 Feb 27;15(3):254. doi: 10.3390/pathogens15030254.

ABSTRACT

Pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) remains a major global health challenge. The molecular and metabolic responses of monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs), which are critical for host defense against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), are not fully characterized. A murine pulmonary TB model was established by intravenous injection of BALB/c mice with the attenuated Mtb strain H37Ra; controls received saline. After 8 weeks, lung MDMs were isolated for integrated transcriptomic and untargeted metabolomic profiling. Transcriptomic analysis identified 3970 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in infected MDMs, including upregulated Ptpn1, Dgat2, and Alox5ap and downregulated Cyld, Zfp61, and Mapk11. Metabolomic profiling revealed 113 differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs). Taurocholic acid and linoleic acid were identified as potential diagnostic biomarkers, both achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 1.0 in ROC analysis. Integrated omics analysis showed a positive correlation between linoleic acid levels and the expression of Tbxas1, Acaa1b, and Acox1, implicating lipid metabolic pathways in the host response to TB. This multi-omics study delineates key molecular and metabolic alterations in lung MDMs during TB infection. The identified metabolites, taurocholic acid and linoleic acid, show promise as biomarkers, while dysregulated linoleic acid metabolism represents a potential target for novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies against TB.

PMID:41901707 | PMC:PMC13029415 | DOI:10.3390/pathogens15030254

Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

Evaluating Prompting Strategies for Chart Question Answering with Large Language Models

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Ruthuparna Naikar · Ying Zhu
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.22288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompting strategies affect LLM reasoning performance, but their role in chart-based QA remains underexplored. We present a systematic evaluation of four widely used prompting paradigms (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought, and Few-Shot Chain-of-Thought) across GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o on the ChartQA dataset. Our framework operates exclusively on structured chart data, isolating prompt structure as the only experimental variable, and evaluates performance using two metrics: Accuracy and Exact Match. Results from 1,200 diverse ChartQA samples show that Few-Shot Chain-of-Thought prompting consistently yields the highest accuracy (up to 78.2\%), particularly on reasoning-intensive questions, while Few-Shot prompting improves format adherence. Zero-Shot performs well only with high-capacity models on simpler tasks. These findings provide actionable guidance for selecting prompting strategies in structured data reasoning tasks, with implications for both efficiency and accuracy in real-world applications.

Children's Intelligence Tests Pose Challenges for MLLMs? KidGym: A 2D Grid-Based Reasoning Benchmark for MLLMs

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Hengwei Ye · Yuanting Guan · Yuxuan Ge · Tianying Zhu · Zhenhan Guan · Yijia Zhong · Yijing Zhang · Han Zhang · Yingna Wu · Zheng Tian
25 March 2026 at 12:00
arXiv:2603.20209v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) combine the linguistic strengths of LLMs with the ability to process multimodal data, enbaling them to address a broader range of visual tasks. Because MLLMs aim at more general, human-like competence than language-only models, we take inspiration from the Wechsler Intelligence Scales - an established battery for evaluating children by decomposing intelligence into interpretable, testable abilities. We introduce KidGym, a comprehensive 2D grid-based benchmark for assessing five essential capabilities of MLLMs: Execution, Perception Reasoning, Learning, Memory and Planning. The benchmark comprises 12 unique tasks, each targeting at least one core capability, specifically designed to guage MLLMs' adaptability and developmental potential, mirroring the stages of children's cognitive growth. Additionally, our tasks encompass diverse scenarios and objects with randomly generated layouts, ensuring a more accurate and robust evluation of MLLM capabilities. KidGym is designed to be fully user-customizable and extensible, allowing researchers to create new evaluation scenarios and adjust difficuly levels to accommodate the rapidly growing MLLM community. Through the evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs using KidGym, we identified significant insights into model capabilities and revealed several limitations of current models. We release our benchmark at: https://bobo-ye.github.io/KidGym/.
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