Hearing loss is the main limitation of radiation therapy for vestibular schwannoma (VS), and identifying treatment options that minimize hearing loss are urgently needed. Treatment with bevacizumab is associated with tumor control and hearing improvement in neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) patients; however, its effect is not durable and its mechanism...

Phosphatidylserine (PS) receptors contribute to two crucial biological processes: apoptotic clearance and entry of many enveloped viruses. In both cases, they recognize PS exposed on the plasma membrane. Here we demonstrate that phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) is also a ligand for PS receptors and that this phospholipid mediates phagocytosis and viral entry....

Three-quarters of the estimated 390 million dengue virus (DENV) infections each year are clinically inapparent. People with inapparent dengue virus infections are generally considered dead-end hosts for transmission because they do not reach sufficiently high viremia levels to infect mosquitoes. Here, we show that, despite their lower average level of...

The NMDA receptor (R) plays important roles in brain physiology and pathology as an ion channel. Here we examine the ion flow-independent coupling of agonist to the NMDAR cytoplasmic domain (cd). We measure FRET between fluorescently tagged cytoplasmic domains of GluN1 subunits of NMDARs expressed in neurons. Different neuronal compartments...

The NMDA receptor (NMDAR) is known to transmit important information by conducting calcium ions. However, some recent studies suggest that activation of NMDARs can trigger synaptic plasticity in the absence of ion flow. Does ligand binding transmit information to signaling molecules that mediate synaptic plasticity? Using Förster resonance energy transfer...

The primate brain contains a set of face-selective areas, which are thought to extract the rich social information that faces provide, such as emotional state and personal identity. The nature of this information raises a fundamental question about these face-selective areas: Do they respond to a face purely because of...

In the mammalian cochlea, acoustic information is carried to the brain by the predominant (95%) large-diameter, myelinated type I afferents, each of which is postsynaptic to a single inner hair cell. The remaining thin, unmyelinated type II afferents extend hundreds of microns along the cochlear duct to contact many outer...

We report an analytical study of the vibrational spectrum of the simplest model of jamming, the soft perceptron. We identify two distinct classes of soft modes. The first kind of modes are related to isostaticity and appear only in the close vicinity of the jamming transition. The second kind of...

Designing and controlling particle self-assembly into robust and reliable high-performance smart materials often involves crystalline ordering in curved spaces. Examples include carbon allotropes like graphene, synthetic materials such as colloidosomes, or biological systems like lipid membranes, solid domains on vesicles, or viral capsids. Despite the relevance of these structures, the...

We determine conditions on the filling of electrons in a crystalline lattice to obtain the equivalent of a band insulator—a gapped insulator with neither symmetry breaking nor fractionalized excitations. We allow for strong interactions, which precludes a free particle description. Previous approaches that extend the Lieb–Schultz–Mattis argument invoked spin conservation...

The maize genome is relatively large (∼2.3 Gb) and has a complex organization of interspersed genes and transposable elements, which necessitates frequent boundaries between different types of chromatin. The examination of maize genes and conserved noncoding sequences revealed that many of these are flanked by regions of elevated asymmetric CHH...

The allocation of carbon and nitrogen resources to the synthesis of plant proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids is complex and under the control of many genes; much remains to be understood about this process. QQS (Qua-Quine Starch; At3g30720), an orphan gene unique to Arabidopsis thaliana, regulates metabolic processes affecting carbon and...

Emotional responses to biologically significant events are essential for human survival. Do human emotions lawfully track changes in the acoustic environment? Here we report that changes in acoustic attributes that are well known to interact with human emotions in speech and music also trigger systematic emotional responses when they occur...

Birth of babies through round spermatid injection Baby born through ROSI. Men incapable of producing mature spermatozoa are often pronounced sterile and advised to consider donor sperm. Though round spermatids, which are 6–8 μm spheres that appear early in sperm development and give rise to mature sperm, have been used...

Developing effective governance structures for the fair and sustainable use of benefits that flow from shared natural resources is arguably one of the defining challenges of our time. Addressing this challenge has been extremely difficult because the associated governance problem is multifaceted and multilayered. Governance structures must address at least...

The extraordinary compaction of DNA in vivo, 2 m of DNA packed into a nucleus that is six orders of magnitude smaller, presents a conundrum: How can the cell maintain this highly dense chromatin structure while also carrying out exquisitely regulated processes like gene expression, DNA replication, and DNA repair?...

Metastatic prostate cancer (PCa) requires immediate attention in order to identify driving molecular mechanisms and therapeutic targets that will achieve sustainable regression of disease. Despite advances with novel therapies, patients either do not respond or develop rapid resistance to these agents (1). An emerging resistant phenotype is small-cell neuroendocrine prostate...

The first disparity between the sexes occurs upon fertilization: the sex chromosome complement is asymmetric in mammals, with females bearing two Xs and males bearing one X and one Y. Because of this, evolutionary forces have selected for one of the most fascinating epigenetic events in chromosome biology—the process of...

Some truly remarkable graphite is described by Bell et al. in PNAS (1). Graphite is, of course, the same material as found in pencil tips or in the anode of lithium ion batteries. Graphite is, however, also a very common material in Earth Science, and is often the form of...

In celebration of the 100th Anniversary of PNAS, this Special Feature summarizes the enormous progress that has been made in the engineering of biology and medicine. In 1915, PNAS published articles, such as “A comparison of methods for determining the respiratory exchange of man,” by T. M. Carpenter (1), “The...