Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Articles in this Issue
Mining lysine post-translational modification sites by integrating protein language model representations with structural context
Lysine (Lys/K) residues serve as major hubs for post-translational modifications (PTMs) owing to the chemical versatility of their ε-amino groups, giving rise to diverse regulatory functions. Accurate...
Next-gen geothermal could bring clean power to much more of the planet
Conservation and environmental management reimagined: Toward anti-oppressive futures
Conservation and environmental management are under increased scrutiny as the embeddedness of oppressive practices has gained wider societal and scholarly attention. As conservation and environmental...
James D. Watson (1928–2025): Influencer of science and society
James Dewey Watson who died on November 7, 2025, at the age of 97, was a towering figure in 20th century life science. With Francis Crick, he determined the structure of DNA, laying the foundation of...
Coupled anatexis and extreme differentiation are the keys for producing giant lithium-rich pegmatites
Despite the economic importance of lithium, there is considerable disagreement over the processes that concentrate it and other rare metals in pegmatite-type lithium deposits. Two main processes have...
Sourcing the origins of carnelian in early Chinese civilizations
Carnelian beads in high-status burials of the Western Zhou period (ca. 1000–800 BCE) have long been seen as key evidence for long-distance exchange between East Asia and regions to the west, while the...
Acquired motility of <i>Babesia microti</i> –infected red blood cells
Babesia microti is an intraerythrocytic protozoan parasite and the main causative agent of human babesiosis in the United States. While extensive research has focused on the preval...
Noise-enabled goal attainment in crowded collectives
In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot sw...
Gradience as a cognitive principle for evaluating numerical notations
More than 100 historically, archaeologically and ethnographically attested numerical notations have been used over the past 5,000 y; however, because most of those systems are no longer used, experime...
A cell fate specification and transition mechanism for human foveolar cone subtype patterning
In the central region of the human retina, the high-acuity foveola is notable for its dense packing of green (M) and red (L) cones and absence of blue (S) cones. To identify mechanisms that pattern co...
The cultural evolution of pluralistic ignorance
Pluralistic ignorance—the systematic misperception of others’ attitudes—can entrench suboptimal norms, yet its dynamics remain poorly understood. We develop a mathematical model of the coevolution of...
The moving Born–Oppenheimer approximation
We develop a mixed quantum-classical framework, dubbed the moving Born–Oppenheimer approximation (MBOA), to describe the dynamics of slow degrees of freedom (DOFs) coupled to fast ones. As in the Born...
In vitro sex-specific function–structure relationship in neonatal rat cardiac monolayers
Even though in vivo rodent studies have been instrumental in investigating sex-specific differences in cardiac health, function, and pathology, they fall short in providing a fast and flexible platfor...
ARP2/3 complex mediates the neuropathology of PTEN-deficient human neural cells downstream of mTORC1 and mTORC2 hyperactivation
Mutations in the phosphatase and tensin homolog ( PTEN ) gene are linked to severe neurodevelopmental disorders. Loss of PTEN...
Diverse, distinct, and densely packed DNA nanostar droplets
The liquid–liquid phase separation of biomolecules is an important process for intracellular organization. Biomolecular sequence combinatorics leads to a large variety of proteins and nucleic acids wh...
Leveraging probabilistic forecasts for dengue preparedness and control: The 2024 Dengue Forecasting Sprint in Brazil
Forecast models are a key decision-support tool for public health authorities in managing epidemics, feeding into early warning systems, scenario evaluations, and an empirical basis for resource alloc...
Larval zebrafish minimize energy consumption during hunting via adaptive movement selection
Animals must balance behavioral goals with the energetic costs of movement. How such trade-offs are implemented algorithmically during natural behavior, and how they adapt to changing energetic constr...
Nonlinear diffusion and decay of a blob of turbulence spreading into a quiescent fluid
Turbulence, left unforced, evolves under its own dynamics, invading surrounding quiescent fluid as it decays. A ubiquitous and familiar phenomenon, this fundamental aspect of turbulence has resisted t...
Synaptogyrin-3 plays a critical role in addiction-related dopamine dysfunction and behavioral maladaptations
Cocaine use disorder is marked by deficits in dopamine signaling; however, the molecular mechanisms driving these deficits remain unclear. The synaptic vesicle protein Synaptogyrin-3 (Syngr3) has rece...
Genetic recording of pancreatic beta cell proliferation
Pancreatic beta cell generation and proliferation primarily rely on the self renewal of preexisting beta cells, making precise quantification of beta cell proliferation essential for understanding pan...
Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems
Function diversity, the range of tasks individuals perform, and specialization, the distribution of function abundances, are fundamental to complex adaptive systems. In the absence of overarching prin...
Charge acceleration without radiation
The existence of electromagnetic radiation—radio waves, microwaves, light, X-rays, and so on—is one of the most important physical phenomena, and our ability to manipulate them is one of the most sign...
High-speed atomic force microscopy reveals a surface-catalyzed elongation mechanism of the fungal functional amyloid hydrophobin RolA
Hydrophobins are functional amyloids conserved in filamentous fungi. They act as a protective coat in the fibrous form, called rodlet. Rodlets further assemble to form dense films where they are bundl...
Strategy evolution on temporal hypergraphs
Individuals interact and cooperate in structured systems. Many studies represent this structure using static networks, where each link represents a permanent connection between two nodes. However, rea...
No evidence that haplodiploidy favors the evolution of eusociality
The potential role of haplodiploid sex determination in promoting the evolution of altruism and eusociality has been the subject of intense debate for over 50 y. Different theoretical models have sugg...