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Parsing autism spectrum heterogeneity through fMRI

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 15 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02269-1

Autism is remarkably heterogeneous, posing a long-standing challenge for linking genetics to brain dynamics. A cross-species study identifies two principal dysconnectivity signatures across 20 mouse models of autism risk, each associated with distinct molecular pathways, and shows analogous connectivity patterns in autistic humans. These results establish a translational framework for biologically grounded fMRI phenotyping.

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[Comment] Integrated proteomic and immune subtyping: a two-tier framework for biomarker-guided therapy in high-grade serous ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancer remains one of the deadliest gynaecological malignancies, with high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) accounting for the majority of deaths.1,2 Despite advances in surgery and chemotherapy, most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage, and the 5-year survival rate has stubbornly remained below 50% for decades.3 A major obstacle is that the traditional FIGO staging system, while useful for prognosis, does not explain why patients within the same stage often follow dramatically different clinical trajectories.

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DNA‑Guided CRISPR Suggests a New Direction for RNA Editing

CRISPR’s rise from obscure bacterial defense system to molecular scalpel has always hinged on one small component: the guide RNA. For years, that guide RNA—meticulously designed, modified, and optimized in countless labs—has been treated as an immutable feature of the system. CRISPR cuts where the RNA tells it to cut. That’s the central dogma of the system.

But a new approach suggests the system is more flexible than anyone expected. The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, is titled “DNA-guided CRISPR–Cas12 for cellular RNA targeting.”

Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have developed the first CRISPR system that uses DNA, rather than RNA, to direct Cas enzymes to RNA targets. The platform, called ΨDNA, reprograms Cas12 nucleases to recognize and act on RNA using a DNA-based guide scaffold. The result is a fundamentally different way of controlling RNA inside cells—one “that extends Cas12 systems beyond genome editing and diagnostics to enable precise, programmable control of cellular transcriptomes and their epitranscriptomic marks,” according to the authors.

The concept is rooted in a simple biological distinction. DNA stores the cell’s long-term instructions, but RNA carries the working copies. “Those RNA copies are like Xerox copies of the original manual, and sometimes those copies have errors,” said Piyush Jain, PhD, associate professor of chemical engineering at UF and lead author of the study. Errors in those working copies can drive disease, and targeting RNA offers a way to intervene without altering the underlying genome. But RNA‑guided CRISPR systems, such as Cas13, can suffer from instability and off‑target effects. “Existing RNA-targeting CRISPR systems rely on RNA guides to find their targets,” Jain said. “While effective, they can sometimes affect unintended molecules… They can also be costly and less stable.”

ΨDNA takes a different approach. The team engineered a DNA guide that mimics the crRNA scaffold in reverse orientation, enabling AsCas12a and Cas12i1 to bind RNA and trigger strong single‑stranded DNA trans‑cleavage. As the abstract describes, “ΨDNA… enables RNA targeting by Cas12 nucleases… including 100% accurate hepatitis C virus RNA detection in clinical samples.” In human cell lines, ΨDNA achieved 70–95% knockdown of endogenous RNA transcripts, driven by mechanisms such as ribosome stalling and RNase H1 recruitment.

Jain sees the work as a conceptual shift for CRISPR. “The most meaningful advance is that we show CRISPR‑Cas12 can be reprogrammed to target RNA using a DNA guide rather than an RNA guide,” he told GEN. “That is a real conceptual shift for the field.” Until now, RNA targeting has been dominated by RNA‑guided systems. ΨDNA demonstrates that Cas12 enzymes—traditionally DNA editors—can be redirected toward RNA “while preserving strong specificity and enabling multiple functions, including RNA detection for developing diagnostics, intracellular knockdown, multiplex targeting, dual DNA and RNA targeting, and effector fusion strategies for RNA modification and potential therapeutic strategies.”

The discovery emerged from a structural puzzle. Simply swapping RNA bases for DNA bases does not work; Cas12 enzymes are thought to be tightly dependent on RNA scaffolds. “Several groups have tried to achieve DNA-guided CRISPR/Cas, but simply converting RNA bases to DNA bases doesn’t work,” Jain said. The breakthrough came from engineering a 3′ DNA handle that recreated the crRNA scaffold. Mutational screening revealed that a stem‑loop architecture was essential for activity, and recent cryo‑EM structures—solved in collaboration with David Taylor’s group at UT Austin—showed that AsCas12a has more structural flexibility than expected, allowing it to accommodate a DNA guide bound to an RNA target.

What surprised the team most was how robust the system proved to be. “It was especially exciting to see that this was not just an in vitro curiosity,” Jain said. ΨDNA worked in clinical RNA detection, achieving 100% accuracy on hepatitis C virus samples, and functioned inside cells with lower off‑target effects than Cas13d.

The platform’s modularity may be its most powerful feature. ΨDNA can be fused to RNase H1 for targeted RNA degradation or to METTL3 for epitranscriptomic editing. And because crRNA and ΨDNA can be codelivered, a single Cas12a enzyme can operate in two modes at once. “A single Cas12a effector can simultaneously edit DNA and regulate RNA,” Jain said. “This work starts to blur that boundary.”

Looking ahead, the team is expanding both the mechanistic and translational sides of the platform. They are refining guide design rules, dissecting how ΨDNA‑guided Cas12 triggers knockdown, and exploring applications in diagnostics, multiplex RNA regulation, and ex vivo therapeutic settings. One emerging direction involves using the technology to repair donor organs before transplantation.

More broadly, DNA guides offer practical advantages. They are easier to synthesize, more stable, and potentially more scalable than RNA guides. That combination could make ΨDNA a versatile platform for basic research, diagnostics, and future therapeutic engineering.

After decades of CRISPR research built around RNA‑guided systems, ΨDNA introduces a new way to direct one of biology’s most powerful tools. As Jain put it, “At its core, this is about giving us better control—not just rewriting the instruction manual but also precisely managing how those instructions are used.”

The post DNA‑Guided CRISPR Suggests a New Direction for RNA Editing appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest.

“Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or I will eat you.”

The scene is from Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby, one of the many hundreds of short dramas that appear on apps like DramaWave and ReelShort. There’s just something about this one that isn’t quite right. The lighting may be glossy and cinematic, but the show has an odd visual texture like something between a movie and a video game cutscene. 

That’s because Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby is part of a new trend for making these shows entirely with AI: no actors, camera operators, cinematographers, or CGI specialists required.

China’s short drama industry has boomed since its launch, in 2018. These ultrashort, melodramatic, and often smutty shows are designed for smartphone viewing, with episodes often running just one or two minutes long: Viewers can finish an entire series in as little as 30 minutes to an hour. The films are made for endless scrolling, packed with emotional confrontations and melodramatic plot twists. The trend’s growth is driven by apps that bombard TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook with cliffhanger-heavy ads designed to lure viewers into buying subscriptions. In 2024, China’s short drama market reached roughly $6.9 billion in revenue, surpassing the country’s annual box office earnings for the first time. 

Since 2022, Chinese short drama companies have aggressively expanded overseas, translating existing hits and producing localized series featuring local actors. Globally, short drama apps have approached a billion cumulative downloads. The United States is the biggest market outside of China, providing around 50% of the revenue, according to research firm DataEye.

Now the industry is reinventing itself. Chinese short drama companies—already masters of low-budget, algorithmically optimized entertainment—are embracing generative AI to produce content faster and cheaper than ever. An average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were released every day in January, according to DataEye. Short-drama companies like Kunlun Tech are ramping up AI productions, shrinking film crews, and reorganizing the labor pipeline from the ground up. For some studios, AI has moved from being a supporting tool to providing the backbone of production itself.

Infinite stories, infinite tropes

Short dramas are already famously low-budget. But AI has made them dramatically cheaper to mass-produce, helping to accelerate the entire process—and save money. Production timelines have collapsed. Conceptualization, script writing, casting, shooting, and editing used to take three to four months. With AI, the process can now take less than a month, says Tang Tang, vice president at short-drama platform FlexTV. Producing a short drama in North America once cost roughly $200,000, but AI can cut that cost by 80% to 90%, according to Tang.

After expanding into the US market, Chinese short drama companies largely followed the same playbook they used in China: Buy traffic aggressively on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube; offer a handful of free episodes; then charge viewers to unlock the rest inside the companies’ apps. Decisions about what to produce next are often driven less by creative instinct than by performance data. “We look at what themes, plotlines, and writers resonate with audiences, then quickly adjust,” says Tang.

The industry operates at a relentless pace. “Everyone expects quick returns,” Tang says. “In China, if a series doesn’t break even within a month, the industry considers it a failure.” 

As a result, screenwriters who spoke with MIT Technology Review said platforms often categorize projects using highly specific keywords that encompass everything from genre and setting to plot structure, such as “campus romance,” “gang rivalry,” “enemies to lovers,” or “rags to riches.” Recently, one of the most popular genres has been “reborn revenge,” a fantasy trope in which a wronged protagonist is miraculously reborn and given a chance to change their fate.

“You kind of have to keep the emotional intensity extremely high throughout the show, using the same plot devices over and over again: sudden deaths, betrayals, physical violence, huge confrontations,” says Phoenix Zhu, a freelance short drama screenwriter based in Suzhou. “It’s common to sacrifice narrative logic for shock value, because otherwise people are more likely to scroll away.”

Those simple tropes have made the format particularly compatible with AI-generated production. Earlier this year, FlexTV halted all traditionally shot productions and shifted entirely to AI-generated dramas. Kunlun Tech, the parent company of drama apps DramaWave and FreeReels, began producing AI-generated short dramas in 2025 and now offers more than 1,000 AI titles on its platforms. StoReels, another popular short drama company targeting a global audience, has said it aims to produce 100 AI-generated dramas per month.

“People’s attention spans are getting shorter, and serialized drama naturally has to get shorter,” says Han “Daniel” Fang, the CEO of Kunlun Tech. Fang told MIT Technology Review that the company is not going to stop investing in traditionally shot short dramas with real actors. But the company is expanding AI-generated productions and gradually increasing their share on its platforms as a low-cost way to experiment with new genres, themes, and ideas. “We want to bring the amount of AI work to 20% of the platform,” Fang says.

The format is also rapidly growing overseas. Research firm Omdia estimates that the global microdrama market reached $11 billion in 2025 and will grow to $14 billion by the end of 2026. The United States is expected to generate $1.5 billion in revenue in that market this year.

“No one comes to short dramas expecting high art,” says investor Shangguan Hong, former partner of Legend Capital. “The short-drama industry already stands out from traditional TV and filmmaking by being real-time and data-driven. AI only furthers that logic. In a sense, short drama is perfectly compatible with AI.”

Inside the content machine

The industry’s AI revolution is already changing the type of roles required to make short dramas. 

Phoenix Zhu graduated from college in 2024 with a degree in philosophy. After months of rejections from traditional media and film studios, she eventually found work writing scripts for short dramas. “It was a very difficult job market for young people,” Zhu says. “I couldn’t afford to be picky about what I wrote.”

To support herself, Zhu worked a string of part-time jobs, including as a barista, a flower seller, and an event coordinator, while taking freelance writing gigs online for advertising and education companies. In April 2025, she sold her first short-drama script for around 20,000 yuan (approximately $2,945). More commissions followed, and she thought her career was finally beginning to pick up.

Then AI arrived. Two projects already in the contract stage were abruptly canceled, Zhu says. Rates across the industry began falling. The raises she expected as she gained more experience never materialized. 

Still, writers like Zhu have been among the less disrupted workers in the industry. Many production roles on traditional filming sets have disappeared almost entirely from AI-generated productions.

“We could shrink the production team down to around 10 people,” says Tang, vice president at FlexTV. Like many companies in the industry, FlexTV relies primarily on Chinese writers and production teams, even for shows featuring non-Chinese characters and targeting overseas audiences. The reason is not just lower costs, Tang says, but also that Chinese writers better understand the pacing and narrative rhythm of short dramas.

Instead of camera crews, lighting technicians, makeup artists, and visual effects teams, AI productions now rely on smaller groups consisting largely of producers, writers, AI directors, and “AI asset curators.”

An AI asset curator translates scripts into prompts and generates reference images of characters, costumes, and scenes for AI video models to follow. MIT Technology Review found hundreds of job listings for the role on Chinese job sites, many requiring little prior industry experience beyond familiarity with AI tools.

“The technology has improved enormously just in the past few months,” says Hanzhong Bai, an AI short-drama producer based in Beijing. Bai says it is common for AI asset curators to use prompts like “combine the faces of these celebrities I like” when generating characters. Studios typically use a mix of tools, including Google’s image-generation model Nano Banana, ByteDance’s Seedance, and Kuaishou’s Kling.

For producers like Bai, AI also makes it economically viable to produce genres that were previously too expensive for short dramas, especially fantasy series requiring elaborate visual effects, costumes, or makeup. “We’ll see many more dragon and mermaid shows for exactly this reason,” Bai says.

The compressed production cycle has also changed the writing process itself. Writers once had two to three months to finish a script. Now, Zhu says, platforms often expect delivery within a month. Scripts can also be rougher and more flexible, since scenes, visuals, and even plot details can be changed later through prompts.

As a result, writers increasingly have to write for AI models as much as for human audiences. Zhu says she now has to describe scenes with far greater visual specificity, effectively taking on responsibilities once handled by cinematographers or visual effects teams.

“Before AI, writing ‘He gave her a cold stare’ might have been enough,” Zhu says. “Now I might need to write, ‘Cold beams of light shot out from his eyes.’”

Fang of Kunlun Tech believes the future quality of AI-generated short dramas is ultimately a numbers game. “Good ideas and good writing still stand out,” Fang says. “The quality [of AI short drama] will improve simply because more people with strong ideas will be able to make their shows.”

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The world is on track to miss its health targets

Every year the World Health Organization publishes a global health statistics report. It features the numbers behind world health trends and, importantly, assesses whether we’re on track to reach ambitious goals set in 2015. It’s a bit like a health grade.

The 2026 report was published on Wednesday. And the results aren’t looking brilliant. While we are seeing some improvements, they are uneven, and they’re far too slow.

The targets themselves are part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, a sprawling and ambitious plan focused on improving life around the world. The 17 goals were set to tackle poverty and climate change and to boost education, gender equality, health, and well-being, among many other quality of life issues. Those targets were meant to be met by 2030.

Perhaps they were a little too ambitious. Here are the numbers and statistics that stood out to me on this year’s world health report card.

1.3 million new cases of HIV in 2024

Before the SDGs, there were the Millennium Development Goals. One MDG target was to halt and reverse the spread of HIV—and that target was exceeded by 2015. Back then, we were considered on track to “end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.”

How depressing, then, to see that in 2024 there were an estimated 1.3 million new cases of HIV. That’s 40% lower than the figure from 2010. But it’s still 1.3 million additional people with HIV. The SDG target is to reduce HIV incidence by 90% by 2030—we’re not likely to meet it.

10.7 million new cases of TB

The picture is even bleaker for tuberculosis, which ranks 10th on the WHO’s list of top global causes of death. The goal was to reduce cases by 80% between 2015 and 2030. So far, cases have only fallen by a measly 12%. And when you break the change down by region, the Americas saw an increase of 13%

An 8.5% rise in malaria cases

And then there’s malaria, the mosquito-borne disease with a 7% fatality rate. The European region has been free of malaria since 2015, but the disease is a significant concern in many countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa. The goal was to lower rates by 90% between 2015 and 2030. In 2024, there were an estimated 282 million cases of malaria globally—representing an 8.5% increase in incidence rates.

Antimalarial drug resistance is a major challenge here—forms of the malaria virus that are resistant to drugs have been confirmed or suspected in eight countries in Africa, according to a separate WHO report. Mosquitoes that are resistant to commonly used insecticides are present in nine African countries. And climate change, which can alter mosquito habitats, may be making things worse.

42.8 million children are wasting

We’re not meeting child health targets, either. Take malnutrition, for example. As of 2024, the global prevalence of wasting in children was 6.6%—that’s a staggering 42.8 million children who are literally wasting away because of a lack of adequate food. On the other end of the spectrum, 5.5% of children are now considered overweight. Both figures were meant to be below 5% by 2030, which now seems unlikely.

Vaccination rates are dropping in the Americas

Progress in improving childhood vaccination coverage has stalled. Globally, an estimated 76% of children are getting their second dose of a measles vaccine—a figure far below the the approximately 95% needed to prevent outbreaks. The Americas currently has lower rates of vaccine coverage for three of the four “core” vaccines than it did in 2015.

This is partly due to a lack of investment, says Goodarz Danaei, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But now we have a misinformation campaign going around vaccines that makes it worse,” he adds.

The covid-19 pandemic didn’t exactly help, either. The impact on health services led to millions of children missing out on routine vaccinations.

22.1 million pandemic-related deaths

And of course the pandemic affected progress toward health goals in more direct ways: 7 million people died of covid-19. The WHO report estimates that, for each of these, there were an additional two “excess” deaths related to the pandemic, due to disruptions in health care, for example. That puts the total figure at 22.1 million pandemic-related deaths.

A woman dies every two minutes from “maternal causes”

Maternal mortality rates fell by about 40% between 2020 and 2023. But today’s rate equates to 712 maternal deaths every single day. That’s one every two minutes. The WHO report notes that we’d have to reduce the mortality rate by almost 15% per year in order to meet the 2030 target. This seems incredibly unlikely, particularly given the recent decimation of US funding for global aid programs, which is expected to result in thousands of additional maternal deaths.

Progress has also slowed in reducing the risk of death from noninfectious diseases like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. “Overall, neither the world nor any WHO region is currently on track to meet the 2030 SDG target,” the report states.

2.1 billion people struggle to afford health care

Despite plans to make health care more affordable, a significant chunk of the population is being pushed into poverty by health-care costs. In 2022, 2.1 billion people faced financial hardship due to health spending—and 1.6 billion of them were living in or had been pushed into poverty.

Across the board, there have been some important improvements in global health. But the achievements have not gone far enough. “The good news is that there is progress,” says Danaei. “But as always, the glass is half empty.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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Opinion: Tributes to Craig Venter and the genomics race are missing something important

Two weeks ago, one of the most important scientists of the 20th century died. Craig Venter was a legend in genomics — a self-styled maverick who made a career of challenging institutional science and its methods and assumptions.

His most famous challenge to the scientific status quo came in the late 1990s, when his private company Celera announced it would beat the publicly funded Human Genome Project in the race to generate the first sequence of the human genome. It was one of the top science stories of the 20th century.

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STAT+: Top U.S. officials pressured Germany to pay more for prescription drugs

WASHINGTON — Over a recent breakfast, U.S. officials had a message for the German ambassador: pay more for pharmaceuticals.

The meeting, between U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, chief health department adviser Chris Klomp, and German Ambassador Jens Hanefeld, was part of a larger push from the Trump administration to get other countries to pay more for medications as the U.S. pays less, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

The U.S. officials discussed the possible use of tariffs under Section 301 — which grants the government authority to combat trade practices considered “unfair.” The move would be similar to the tactic of threatening new tariffs to get other countries to pay more for drugs. The ambassador agreed to review the matter with officials in Germany, but no deal was made, the person said. 

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…