Showing papers in "Current Biology in 2020"

TL;DR: Genomic and evolutionary evidence of the occurrence of a SARS-CoV-2-like CoV (named Pangolin-Cov) in dead Malayan pangolins is found and suggests that pangolin species are a natural reservoir of SARS

TL;DR: Early in tumor growth, a dynamic and reciprocal relationship develops between cancer cells and components of the tumor microenvironment that supports cancer cell survival, local invasion and metastatic dissemination.

TL;DR: Critically, and in a similar manner to SARS-CoV-2, RmYN02 was characterized by the insertion of multiple amino acids at the junction site of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike (S) protein, providing strong evidence that such insertion events can occur naturally in animal betacoronaviruses.

TL;DR: It was found that, on one hand, the restrictions reduced the mismatch between external (social) and internal (biological) sleep–wake timing, as indexed by significant reductions in social jetlag and social sleep restriction, with a concomitant increase in sleep duration.

TL;DR: Investigation of sleep behaviors prior to and during Stay-at-Home orders in 139 university students finds individual differences in the change of TIB devoted to sleep such that students with shorter TIB at baseline before the first COVID-19 cases emerged locally had larger increases in weekday and weekend TIB during stay- at-Home.

TL;DR: It is shown that participants slept longer and later during lockdown weekdays, and exhibited lower levels of social jetlag, which may seem to be an overall improvement of sleep conditions.

TL;DR: What little is currently known about the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is reviewed and existing evolutionary theory is extended to consider how selection might be acting upon the virus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

TL;DR: Survival threats to turtles and tortoises are examined and the interventions that will be needed to prevent widespread extinction in this group in coming decades are discussed.

TL;DR: It is concluded that, in early plants, H3K27me3 played an essential role in heterochromatin function, suggesting an ancestral role of this mark in transposon silencing.

TL;DR: This work resolves the position of bryophytes in the land plant tree and investigates the evolutionary origins of genes that specify stomatal development and function and shows that a range of core guard cell genes map back to the common ancestor of embryophytes or even earlier.

TL;DR: A retrospective-cue WM paradigm is used to manipulate prioritization and suppression task demands designed to drive theta oscillations in prefrontal cortex and parietal alphascillations in the control of internally maintained WM representations to causally establish dissociable roles for prefrontal thetascillations andParietal alpha oscillations.

TL;DR: The findings suggest that human-biting in this important disease vector originally evolved as a by-product of breeding in human-stored water in areas where doing so provided the only means to survive the long, hot dry season.

TL;DR: It is argued that networks of trophic interactions, in which the metabolic excretions of one species are the primary resource for another, constitute the central drivers of microbial community assembly.

TL;DR: This work reconstructs the first complete inventory of olfactory projections connecting the antennal lobe of the Drosophila melanogaster brain to higher-order brain regions in an adult animal brain, and finds new connectivity motifs, including axo-axonic connectivity between projection neurons, feedback, and lateral inhibition of these axons by a large population of neurons.

TL;DR: The results of conservation efforts for mangrove forests in recent years are discussed, with a focus on coastal mangroves in Southeast Asia.

TL;DR: It is revealed that mice combine head and eye movements to sample their environment and highlight similarities and differences between eye movements in mice and humans.

TL;DR: Cassetta and Pollard introduce tumor-associated macrophages and discuss their origin, diversity, function and plasticity.

TL;DR: High spatial resolution video of single zebrafish larvae swimming in a naturalistic environment is collected and models of their action selection across exploration and hunting are developed to evaluate how bout types and interbout intervals are selected by the fish as a function of its internal hunger state, behavioral history, and the locations and properties of nearby prey.

TL;DR: It is shown that short-term integration of binocular visual cues shapes the behavioral dynamics of hunting, thus uncovering the temporal organization of a goal-directed behavior in a vertebrate.

TL;DR: The results suggest that ALA-dependent drowsiness, rather than RIS-dependent sleep bouts, appears to be important for increasing survival after cellular stress, suggesting that different types of behavioral inhibition play different roles in restoring health.

TL;DR: A global analysis of abundance trends of 304 widely distributed marine species over the last century suggests that projected sea temperature increases of up to 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels by 2050 will continue to drive latitudinal abundance shifts in marine species, including those of importance for coastal livelihoods.

TL;DR: The data support the proposal that objective sleep markers could be part of a set of biomarkers that statistically forecast the longitudinal trajectory of cortical Aβ deposition in the human brain, and sleep may represent a potentially affordable, scalable, repeatable, and non-invasive tool for quantifying of Aβ pathological progression, prior to cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

TL;DR: It is found that sea snakes underwent rapid adaptive diversification of their visual pigments when compared with their terrestrial and amphibious relatives, and appear to share parallel mechanisms of color vision diversification with fruit-eating primates.

TL;DR: Direct evidence of seabird exposure to plastic additives is provided and the role of marine debris ingestion as a source of chemical pollution in marine organisms is emphasized.

TL;DR: By focusing on the components of REM sleep and discouraging continued reliance on a restricted template, this work aims to promote a richer and more biologically grounded developmental-comparative approach that spans behavioral, physiological, neural, and ecological domains.

TL;DR: The findings highlight the biological processes that evolved with the origin of land plants and emphasize the importance of conserved gene novelties in plant diversification.

TL;DR: It is proposed that scaling of gene expression with cell size is the consequence of competition between genes for limiting RNAPII, and that, in multinucleated cells, scaling is set at the level of single nuclei and not the entire cell, making the nucleus a determinant of scaling.

TL;DR: Evidence is provided that antiviral piRNAs are produced in the presence of a naturally occurring EVE and its cognate virus, demonstrating a functional link between non-retroviral EVEs and antiviral immunity in a natural insect-virus interaction.

TL;DR: It is shown that sleep and wakefulness are accompanied by state-dependent changes in astroglial activity, which is proportional to sleep need, and is a component of the sleep homeostat.