Nature Biotechnology, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03121-4
A comprehensive ‘digital twin’ of a human organ has been built.
An international and independent scientific foundation for AI governance
Nature Medicine, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04375-w
An international and independent scientific foundation for AI governance
Depressive Symptoms Are Associated with Altered Development of Amygdala-Ventrolateral Prefrontal Connectivity During Implicit Emotion Regulation Across Adolescence
Adolescence is characterized by extensive development in neural circuits that support emotion processing and regulation, and by increased risk for depression. While altered frontolimbic functioning during emotion processing has been implicated in youth with depression relative to healthy controls, the directions of the associations have been inconsistent.
Phasing out animal research prematurely will maintain gender inequities in medicine
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02309-w
Decades of male bias in animal research have left female biology critically understudied. Prematurely phasing out animal research would lock this inequity into future biomedicine, disproportionately harming women.
Microglia-dependent regulation of fear memory extinction
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02286-0
Liu et al. show in mice that microglia are recruited to the soma and dendritic processes of fear engram neurons during extinction learning and that they weaken fear memories by temporarily silencing and remodeling the engram neurons.
Stochastic growth and ligand–receptor interaction-mediated stabilization generate stereotyped dendritic arbors
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02278-0
Stereotyped dendritic arbors arise from stochastic growth and selective stabilization of dendritic branches. Two pools of guidance receptor are required. Ligand-free receptors drive stochastic growth while ligand-bound receptors stabilize branches.
<![CDATA[Round on the latest news in psychiatry from the last week.]]>
STAT+: Biotech raises $42 million to run Huntington’s disease trial
Gene therapy startup Latus Bio has raised another $42 million to start its first clinical trials, where it will try to sidestep issues that have set back a more advanced competitor.
Latus is moving two treatments through clinical trials this year. The first is for a form of Batten disease called CLN2 disease, a fatal genetic condition that causes seizures, vision loss, and cognitive problems. The company anticipates having initial clinical data by the end of the year.
Now, Latus — founded by Beverly Davidson, chief scientific strategy officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — is turning its attention to a second drug candidate, a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease.
Immigration changes are driving foreign researchers to leave the U.S. — or not come to begin with
The budding scientist had left India for the U.S. for her Ph.D., because as she saw it, no other country offered the same opportunities for researchers. Set to finish her doctorate this summer, she also had a postdoctoral fellowship lined up in America.
Now those plans have changed. New and intrusive burdens for renewing a component of her visa — which required her to make public her social media profiles for U.S. review while she was back in India — caused her to be away from the lab for two months during the crunch time of wrapping up her degree.
Opinion: Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder than ever
When French geneticist Jean-Francois Deleuze first launched the AGENOMICS study in 2022, he hoped to identify genetic patterns among 1,200 French citizens who’d lived more than 100 years and to compare those to centenarians hailing from one of the world-famous “blue zones.”
Then he started having doubts.