Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Vol. 123, Issue 11 Issue 11 2026
102
Articles

Articles in this Issue

Reducing PTSD symptoms through unconscious intervention

Qing Yang, Yingying Wang, Chunyu Liu et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2521088123

Intrusive traumatic memories are a hallmark symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Conventional therapies typically require explicit and emotionally distressing reexposure to trauma cues, of...

SonoPIN enables precise, noninvasive, and efficient intracellular delivery of PROTACs

Yuqi Wu, Mingyuan Liu, Ke Li et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2534439123

Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have emerged as a promising molecular approach for degrading undruggable proteins and for overcoming drug resistance in cancer therapy. However, their clinical...

Stretch and flow at the gliovascular interface: High-fidelity modeling of astrocyte endfeet

Marius Causemann, Rune Enger, Marie E. Rognes Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2517059123

Astrocyte endfeet form a near-continuous sheath around the brain’s vasculature, defining the perivascular spaces (PVS) that are crucial for brain fluid flow and solute transport. Yet, their precise ph...

Nonreciprocal buckling makes active filaments polyfunctional

Sami C. Al-Izzi, Yao Du, Jonas Veenstra et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2531723123

Active filaments are a workhorse for propulsion and actuation across biology, soft robotics, and mechanical metamaterials. However, artificial active rods suffer from limited robustness and adaptivity...

Narrative “twist” shifts within-individual neural representations of dissociable story features

Clara Sava-Segal, Clare Grall, Emily S. Finn Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2512071123

Given the same input, understanding of that input can differ depending on context. How does the brain represent the latent mental frameworks that support different interpretations of the same sensory...

Reversibility and β-sheet formation are decoupled in tau condensate aging

Charlotte M. Fischer, Irina A. Edu, Tomas Sneideris et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2522993123

Neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) formed from the protein tau disrupt neuronal function in Alzheimer’s disease and are strongly associated with cognitive decline. Early events in tau aggregation are incr...

Methylation-associated mutagenesis underlies variation in the mutation spectrum across eukaryotes

Fabián Ramos-Almodóvar, Ziyue Gao, Benjamin F. Voight et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2516368123

Mutation spectra vary across genetic and environmental contexts, leading to differences between and within species. Most research on mutation spectrum has focused on trinucleotide (3-mer) mutation typ...

ODC1 restricts meningeal B cell age-associated-like phenotype and function in multiple sclerosis: A human and experimental study

Jonathan Zurawski, Alara Tuncer, Martin R. Profant et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2526147123

Meningeal inflammation, as a clinical feature of multiple sclerosis (MS), is associated with worse clinical disease outcomes. In both relapsing and secondary progressive MS and the experimental autoim...

Non-Fickian diffusion within assemblies of the intrinsically disordered protein β-casein

Laura M. Miñarro, Saikat Chakraborty, Christian Beck et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2532636123

The molecular mechanisms governing internal fluctuations in intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) assemblies are crucial to the stability and dynamics of both regulated and aberrant toxic cellular ag...

A global analysis of patterns of tuberculosis exposure and transmission

Peter J. Dodd, Katherine C. Horton Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2526321123

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health concern and the leading infectious cause of mortality globally. The disease exhibits strong prevalence patterns by age and sex, but the implications of these...

Anion-mediated solvation structures and intercalation chemistry of aqueous zinc-ion electrolytes

Shiqiang Wei, Quan Zhou, Shuangming Chen et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2524561123

Understanding solvent/solute-borne coordination structures and their impact on electrode intercalation chemistry is crucial for the rational design of high-performance electrolytes. Nevertheless, the...

DeepDegradome: A structure-aware deep learning framework for PROTAC and ligand generation against protein targets

Qiaoyu Hu, Yu Cao, PengXuan Ren et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2518248123

Targeted protein degradation is a promising strategy for drug discovery, but designing effective PROTACs remains challenging, especially for proteins without well-defined binding sites. Current method...

Host ESCRT machinery orchestrates the assembly of tomato spotted wilt virus ribonucleoproteins

Kikyo Watanabe, Chihiro Oda-Yamamizo, Kazuhiro Ishibashi Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2518109123

The genomic RNA of negative-strand RNA viruses is encapsidated by nucleocapsid proteins and associates with RNA polymerase to form a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex. Lacking both a 5’ cap and a 3’ pol...

Charge-reversal proteolysis polymers enable tissue-specific STING degradation in rheumatoid arthritis

Xu He, Lidong Gong, Juqi Zhang et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2525897123

Inhibiting stimulator of interferon genes (STING) is critical for treating rheumatoid arthritis (RA), yet achieving precise suppression with high tissue specificity across protein variants remains cha...

A <i>KCNC1</i> variant linked to Rett syndrome disrupts ER to Golgi trafficking of Kv3.1 channel

Diego Maureira, Carla Rubilar, Joaquín López et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2424514123

Intrinsic neuronal excitability, defined by the balance between input and output signals, is crucial to neural function, and its disruption underlies various neurological diseases. Kv3.1 channels, enc...

Atomistic simulations reveal the photoactivation mechanism of a carotenoid-binding photoreceptor

Amanda Arcidiacono, Mattia Bondanza, Lorenzo Cupellini et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2515214123

The orange carotenoid protein (OCP) is a key photoreceptor in the photoprotection of cyanobacterial antenna complexes. Its peculiar activity is governed by a bound keto-carotenoid that functions both...

Online supervised learning of temporal patterns in biological neural networks under feedback control

Yuki Sono, Hideaki Yamamoto, Yusei Nishi et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2521560123

In vitro biological neural networks (BNNs) provide well-defined model systems for constructively investigating how living cells interact with their environments to shape high-dimensional dynamics that...

Structural innovation in the evolution of plant chemical defense

Paola Rubiano-Buitrago, Amy P. Hastings, Masaaki Uematsu et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2535853123

Chemical defenses are fundamental in organismal biology and widely used in medicine and agriculture. Plant defense chemistry evolves in response to various selective pressures, particularly herbivory,...

Switching of the c-Myc protein degradation pathway depending on the PP2A-B55α complex levels

Sana Ando, Shunta Ikeda, Keiko Tanaka et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2509374123

The transcription factor c-Myc is a master oncoprotein that regulates over 15% of all genes. Protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A), a crucial tumor suppressor, destabilizes c-Myc protein. Classically, PP2A-me...

Generating a stratocumulus-like cloud top in a convection-cloud chamber

Aaron Wang, Fan Yang, Mikhail Ovchinnikov et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2519791123

Stratocumulus-topped boundary layers play a crucial role in influencing daily weather and earth energy balance. Entrainment at the stratocumulus cloud top affects the cloud’s lifetime, precipitation,...

Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude

Charles Perreault Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2523038123

Humans occupy a geographic and ecological range wider than that of any other extant vertebrates, having rapidly expanded into nearly every habitat on the planet. This expansion was driven not only by...

Hypothalamic endoplasmic reticulum stress drives pubertal precocity due to early-onset obesity in female rodents

Elvira Rodríguez-Vázquez, Álvaro Aranda-Torrecillas, Manuel Jiménez-Puyer et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2510886123

Early-onset obesity, especially in girls, is frequently associated with advanced puberty; a phenomenon bound to increased risk of long-term complications. Hypothalamic endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stres...

Acoustic Pancharatnam–Berry geometric phase for structured sound manipulation

Wanyue Xiao, Wenjian Kuang, Sibo Huang et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2527851123

Phase control is fundamental to acoustic wave manipulation. The propagation and resonant phases have been widely used to modulate acoustic waves. However, the real-space geometric phase, also known as...

Integrated framework to study genomic surveillance of selective sweeps in multivariants dynamics

Baltazar Espinoza, Srinivasan Venkatramanan, Andrew Scott Warren et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2521031123

Pandemics often involve complex transmission dynamics in which epidemiological surveillance is essential but not sufficient for containment, as resurgence may be driven by emerging or imported variant...

Control of microglial dynamics by the Arp2/3 complex and the autism- and schizophrenia-associated protein CYFIP1

James Scott-Solache, Jiaxin Pei, James Drew et al. Mar 17, 2026 10.1073/pnas.2532488123

Microglia use a highly complex and dynamic network of branched processes to sense and respond to their surroundings. Despite emerging evidence that microglial motility plays important roles in brain d...

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Journal Info

Publisher National Academy of Sciences
ISSN 0027-8424
E-ISSN 1091-6490
Subject Life Sciences
Language English
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