Researchers have identified a novel molecular module, the PEP2-PEPR2 signalling pathway, that regulates iron-deficiency responses in plants. This discovery reveals how plants integrate growth and iron acquisition, offering insights into nutrient homeostasis and potential strategies for improving crop yield and nutritional quality in iron-deficient soils globally.
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Delhi’s air pollution is a chronic issue, exacerbated by weak governance, fragmented institutions, and insufficient enforcement of environmental standards. Despite some temporary improvements due to weather during certain years, the underlying sources of pollution remain unaddressed. Without significant changes in funding, authority, and coordinated action, long-term air quality improvements will remain elusive
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A fully light-driven catalytic system was able to reuse greenhouse gas rather than produce it by converting CO2 to CO while upgrading propane to propene in a single tandem process without relying on external heating or external supply of hydrogen. Instead, hydrogen released when propane is converted into propene was used to transform carbon dioxide
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Prevention and cure of Type 1 diabetes in mice was achieved by a team of Stanford researchers by using a a preconditioning regimen together with a unique combination of blood stem cell and islet cell transplantation. This led to prevention and cure with improved immune tolerance, and without chronic immunosuppression or graft-versus-host disease
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When the TB drug moxifloxacin was masked as a prodrug form, the prodrug’s permeability into the bacteria improved significantly. Once inside the bacteria, the prodrug is activated by an enzyme leading to the generation of the active drug moxifloxacin within the bacteria. This strategy significantly enhanced the lethality against TB persisters, thus effectively reducing the population of persisters
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India’s AMR surveillance network is primarily built on a few dozen tertiary-care hospitals. The problem is not the quality of data from these tertiary centres; it is the narrowness of the sample. A surveillance system built only on a few dozen largest hospitals cannot speak for the entire country
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The recognition by Nature has come just three years after Dr. Achal Agrawal began raising awareness about and reporting on research-integrity violations by Indian researchers through the Indian Research Watch (IRW), a volunteer-run non-profit organisation he founded in November 2022
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An AI tool developed by IIT Madras has made discovery of highly safe, effective drug analogues easily possible. In the case of the FDA-approved cancer drug Sorafenib, starting from its original structure, PURE produced hundreds of thousands of possible analogues, and then narrowed them down using basic drug-likeness filters. A manageable group of candidates that were selected exhibited docking scores comparable to, and in some cases, superior to those of Sorafenib
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Unlike many current leukaemia drugs that target only one pathway, a molecule designed by IACS researchers attacks two essential oncogenes at the same time, leaving cancer cells with no fallback options. As the molecule acts at the DNA-regulation level, it may also bypass some of the resistance mechanisms seen with protein-targeting inhibitors
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The IHCI study found that individuals aged 45-54 years had a higher risk of uncontrolled BP compared with those aged over 55 years. And compared with females, males had a higher risk of uncontrolled BP, and those with diabetes exhibited a higher risk. Also, individuals who were already on treatment at the time of registration had a higher risk of having uncontrolled BP
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The RAD52 protein is a coveted drug target for precision oncology because while it is largely dispensable in healthy human cells, the protein is essential for survival of cancer cells that are deficient in DNA repair function, such as those with defective BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes
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In a detailed interview to the Science Chronicle, Dr. Sundaram Acharya formerly with CSIR-IGIB and currently a JSPS postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo, and co-inventor of enFnCas9, explains how and why the indigenously developed CRISPR genome editing system using the enhanced FnCas9 (enFnCas9) variants fare better than the existing Cas9 tool — about twice the DNA cleavage speed, a nearly 3.5-fold broader target range in the human genome, and much stronger editing activity with excellent genome-wide specificity
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The study of over 4,800 Indian adolescents found 16.1% had subclinical hypothyroidism and 1.1% had clinical hypothyroidism. Subclinical and clinical hypothyroidism in adolescents were not linked to obesity but to dyslipidemia and altered levels of adiponectin, suggesting early metabolic disruptions even before visible changes in body weight
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