New discovery sheds light on evolutionary crossroads of vertebrates   

University of St. Andrews

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Juvenile Ciona Seasquirt

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Credit: Shunsuke Sogabe

New research from the University of St Andrews has discovered a crucial piece in the puzzle of how all animals with a spine - including all mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians - evolved.   

In a paper published today (2nd February) in BMC Biology, researchers found an intriguing pattern of gene evolution which appears to be significant for the evolutionary origin and diversification of vertebrates.   

All animals have major signalling pathways that their cells use to communicate with each other, which control things like how their embryos and organs develop. The signalling pathways are fundamental to animal development and are major targets in disease-causing mutations and for the development of pharmaceuticals.   

Proteins at the base of these signalling pathways are crucial as they control the final output from them, like a traffic system, directing cells into specific responses and gene expression.   

Researchers created new gene sequencing data in sea squirts, a lamprey and a type of frog. They found the genes that make these signalling output proteins have evolved in a distinctive way. The sea squirt is an invertebrate that helped to distinguish the change when moving from invertebrates to vertebrates. Lampreys are an early branch in the vertebrate group, which pinpoints that this change happened at the invertebrate-to-vertebrate transition.  

Researchers used long-molecule DNA sequencing, which allowed them to distinguish the different transcripts from each gene. Long-molecule sequencing had never been done on the genes expressed in these particular animals before. Therefore, researchers were able to characterise the real range of the transcripts and proteins produced from these genes in vertebrate development for the first time ever.  

Unlike the invertebrate sea squirt, the lamprey and frog made higher numbers of different forms of proteins from the individual signalling output genes, compared to all sorts of other types of genes.    

This significant change with the evolution of vertebrates is very striking. Given the importance of these pathways in how animals decide what types of cells, tissues and organs to make, it is highly likely these proteins have had a major role in making vertebrates (animals with backbones) different and more complex than invertebrates.   

Lead author of the study Professor David Ferrier from the School of Biology, said: “It was very surprising to us to see how this small selection of very particular genes stands out in the way that they are behaving compared to any other sort of gene we looked at.It will be exciting to determine how these various different protein forms work in distinct ways to generate the diversity of cell types we now see in vertebrates.”  

These diverse protein variations not only shed light on the origins of how we, and most other animals with backbones have evolved, but will also be important for future work on understanding how these proteins and pathways might be manipulated in disease management.  

 ENDS 

  

Adult Lamprey

Credit

Sebastian Shimeld

Xenopus Tadpole

Credit

Marika Salonna

Journal

BMC Biology

DOI

10.1186/s12915-026-02522-w 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Long‑read sequencing reveals increased isoform diversity in key transcription factor effectors of intercellular signalling at the invertebrate‑vertebrate transition

Article Publication Date

2-Feb-2026

 

Aging researchers find new puzzle piece in the game of longevity

The lab of Kris Burkewitz just made a key discovery: How cellular machineries are structured and organized within a cell has implications for healthy aging. “We didn't just add a piece to the puzzle—we found a whole section that hasn't even been touch

Vanderbilt University

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The discovery that ER-phagy is involved in aging highlights this process as a possible drug target for age-related chronic conditions such as neurodegenerative diseases and various metabolic disease contexts.

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Credit: Burkewitz et. al.

The idea

Improvements in public health have allowed humankind to survive to older ages than ever before, but, for many people, these added golden years are not spent in good health. Aging is a natural part of life, but it is associated with a greatly increased incidence of most chronic diseases, including various cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The laboratory of Kris Burkewitz, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, wants to figure out if there is a way to break the links between the aging process and disease so that we can stay healthy longer, allowing us to better enjoy our later years. To accomplish this goal, the Burkewitz lab focuses on how cells organize their internal compartments, or organelles, and how organelle structures can influence cellular function, metabolism, and disease risk.

In his most recent paper, published in Nature Cell Biology, Burkewitz describes a new way by which cells adapt to the aging process: by actively remodeling the endoplasmic reticulum, one of the cell’s largest and most complex organelles. His team found that aging cells remodel their ER through a process called ER-phagy, which selectively targets specific ER subdomains for breakdown. The discovery that ER-phagy is involved in aging highlights this process as a possible drug target for age-related chronic conditions such as neurodegenerative diseases and various metabolic disease contexts.

What we knew

“Where many prior studies have documented how the levels of different cellular machineries change with age, we are focusing instead on how aging affects the way that cells house and organize these machineries within their complex inner architectures,” Burkewitz said.

The efficiency of a cell’s function and metabolism depends on how those collections of machineries are organized and distributed within a cell. A helpful way to envision how the inner architecture of a cell impacts its function is to imagine a factory that builds many complex products. According to Burkewitz, that factory needs a lot of specialized machineries, but even if all they are all present, the factory only runs smoothly if they are arranged in the right position and sequence. “When space is limited or production demands change, the factory has to reorganize its layout to make the right products,” Burkewitz said. “If organization breaks down, production becomes very inefficient.”

One of the largest and most important structures in a cell is the ER, a labyrinth of interconnected sheets and tubules that not only acts as a major production hub for proteins and lipids but serves as a scaffold for organizing other parts of the cell. Despite these critical roles, scientists knew surprisingly little about how the structure of the ER might change in aging animals.

What we found out

“We didn’t just add a piece to the aging puzzle—we found a whole section that hasn’t even been touched,” said Eric Donahue, PhD’25, the first author of the paper. Donahue is a medical student in the Medical Scientist Training Program who recently completed the Ph.D. portion of his training in the Burkewitz lab, where he focused on ER-phagy, ER remodeling, and aging.

Donahue, Burkewitz, and their team used new genetic tools and advanced light and electron microscopy to visualize how the ER is shaped and organized inside cells of living Caenorhabditis elegans worms, a widely used model for aging research. C. elegans worms possess a unique combination of characteristics that make them the ideal model to study aging: They are transparent and age rapidly, a combination that allows researchers to observe what happens inside the cells of intact, aging animals.

Burkewitz and his team found that, as animals age, they dramatically reduce the amount of “rough” ER in their cells, which is involved in creating more protein; the amount of tubular ER, which is more closely associated with lipid or fat production, is only slightly impacted. This change fits with broader themes of aging, including declines in our ability to maintain functional proteins and shifts in metabolism that lead us to accumulate fat in new places; more research is needed to establish these links causally.

The researchers also found that cells use the process of ER-phagy to remodel their ER during aging and that ER-phagy is linked to lifespan, actively contributing to healthy aging.

What’s next?

The Burkewitz lab will continue to probe the different structures of the ER and how they can promote different metabolic outputs at the cell and whole-animal scales. As the ER is one of the master controllers for organizing all other compartments within the cell, it will be important to ask how its remodeling during aging impacts the organization of other cellular components. “Changes in the ER occur relatively early in the aging process,” Burkewitz said. “One of the most exciting implications of this is that it may be one of the triggers for what comes later: dysfunction and disease.”

If scientists can figure out what, exactly, is the trigger, they may be able to stop it from firing.

Here’s to a long, healthy life for us all! Thank you, science.

Go deeper

The paper “ER remodeling is a feature of aging and depends on ER-phagy” was published in Nature Cell Biology in February 2026.

This work was performed in collaboration with the Vanderbilt University labs of Jason MacGurn, associate professor of cell and developmental biology, Andrew Folkmann, assistant professor of biochemistry, Rafael Arrojo e Drigo, assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, and Lauren Jackson, associate professor of biological sciences, plus collaborators from the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego.

Funding

This research was supported by funds from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research/American Federation for Aging Research.

School of Medicine Basic Sciences shared resources

This research made use of the Cell Imaging Shared Resource.

ER Phagy 

Vanderbilt University

Burkewitz et. al

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Journal

Nature Cell Biology

Article Title

ER remodeling is a feature of aging and depends on ER-phagy

Article Publication Date

2-Feb-2026

 

Using generative AI to help scientists synthesize complex materials

MIT researchers’ new model offers recipes for synthesizing new materials, enabling faster experimentation and a shorter journey from theory to use.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Generative AI models have been used to create enormous libraries of theoretical materials that could help solve all kinds of problems. Now, scientists just have to figure out how to make them.

In many cases, materials synthes is not as simple as following a recipe in the kitchen. Factors like the temperature and length of processing can yield huge changes in a material’s properties that make or break its performance. That has limited researchers’ ability to test millions of promising model-generated materials.

Now, MIT researchers have created an AI model that guides scientists through the process of making materials by suggesting promising synthesis routes. In a new paper, they showed the model delivers state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting effective synthesis pathways for a class of materials called zeolites, which could be used to improve catalysis, absorption, and ion exchange processes. Following its suggestions, the team synthesized a new zeolite material that showed improved thermal stability. 

The researchers believe their new model could break the biggest bottleneck in the materials discovery process.

“To use an analogy, we know what kind of cake we want to make, but right now we don’t know how to bake the cake,” says lead author Elton Pan, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “Materials synthesis is currently done through domain expertise and trial and error.”

The paper describing the work will appear in Nature Computational Science. Joining Pan on the paper are Soonhyoung Kwon ’20, PhD ’24; DMSE postdoc Sulin Liu; chemical engineering PhD student Mingrou Xie; DMSE postdoc Alexander J. Hoffman; research assistant Yifei Duan SM ’25; DMSE visiting student Thorben Prein; DMSE PhD candidate Killian Sheriff; MIT Robert T. Haslam Professor in Chemical Engineering Yuriy Roman-Leshkov; Valencia Polytechnic University Professor Manuel Moliner; MIT Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli; and MIT Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering Elsa Olivetti.

Learning to bake

Massive investments in generative AI have led companies like Google and Meta to create huge databases filled with material recipes that, at least theoretically, have properties like high thermal stability and selective absorption of gases. But making those materials can require weeks or months of careful experiments that test specific reaction temperatures, times, precursor ratios, and other factors.

“People rely on their chemical intuition to guide the process,” Pan says. “Humans are linear. If there are five parameters, we might keep four of them constant and vary one of them linearly. But machines are much better at reasoning in a high-dimensional space.”

The synthesis process of materials discovery now often takes the most time in a material’s journey from theory to use.

To help scientists navigate that process, the MIT researchers trained a generative AI model on over 23,000 material synthesis recipes described over 50 years of scientific papers. The researchers iteratively added random “noise” to the recipes during training, and the model learned to de-noise and sample from the random noise to find promising synthesis routes.

The result is DiffSyn, which uses an approach in AI known as diffusion.

“Diffusion models are basically a generative AI model like ChatGPT, but more like the DALL-E image generation model,” Pan says. “During inference, it converts noise into meaningful structure by subtracting a little bit of noise at each step. In this case, the ‘structure’ is the synthesis route for a desired material.”

When a scientist using DiffSyn enters a desired material structure, the model offers some promising combinations of reaction temperatures, reaction times, precursor ratios, and more.

“It basically tells you howto bake your cake,” Pan says. “You have a cake in mind, you feed it into the model, the model spits out the synthesis recipes. The scientist can pick whichever synthesis path they want, and there are simple ways to quantify the most promising synthesis path from what we provide, which we show in our paper.”

To test their system, the researchers used DiffSyn to suggest novel synthesis paths for a zeolite, a material class that is complex and takes time to form into a testable material.

“Zeolites have a very high-dimensional synthesis space,” Pan says. “Zeolites also tend to take days or weeks to crystallize, so the impact [of finding the best synthesis pathway faster] is much higher than other materials that crystallize in hours.”

The researchers were able to make the new zeolite material using synthesis pathways suggested by DiffSyn. Subsequent testing revealed the material had a promising morphology for catalytic applications. 

“Scientists have been trying out different synthesis recipes one by one,” Pan says. “That makes them very time-consuming. This model can sample 1,000 of them in under a minute. It gives you a very good initial guess on synthesis recipes for completely new materials.”

Accounting for complexity

Previously, researchers have built machine-learning models that mapped a material to a single recipe. Those approaches do not take into account that there are different ways to make the same material.

DiffSyn is trained to map material structures to many different possible synthesis paths. Pan says that is better aligned with experimental reality.

“This is a paradigm shift away from one-to-one mapping between structure and synthesis to one-to-many mapping,” Pan says. “That’s a big reason why we achieved strong gains on the benchmarks.”

Moving forward, the researchers believe the approach should work to train other models that guide the synthesis of materials outside of zeolites, including metal-organic frameworks, inorganic solids, and other materials that have more than one possible synthesis pathway.

“This approach could be extended to other materials,” Pan says. “Now, the bottleneck is finding high-quality data for different material classes. But zeolites are complicated, so I can imagine they are close to the upper-bound of difficulty. Eventually, the goal would be interfacing these intelligent systems with autonomous real-world experiments, and agentic reasoning on experimental feedback to dramatically accelerate the process of materials design.”

The work was supported by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), the National Science Foundation, Generalitat Vaslenciana, the Office of Naval Research, ExxonMobil, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.

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Written by Zach Winn, MIT News

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Journal

Nature Computational Science

Article Title

“DiffSyn: A Generative Diffusion Approach to Materials Synthesis Planning”

 

One-third of young people are violent toward their parents

University of Zurich

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Physical aggression by young people toward their parents occurs quite frequently – yet the subject remains taboo. Victims often struggle with shame and avoid seeking help, hoping to shield their children from repercussions. Now, in a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study, researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) have tracked the development of this behavior from early adolescence to young adulthood, identifying which factors increase or reduce the risk.

 

The research draws on the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood (z-proso), directed by Manuel Eisner, Denis Ribeaud and Lilly Shanahan at UZH’s Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development. The study tracked more than 1,500 participants from early adolescence into young adulthood.

 

32.5% have at least one episode of physical aggression

Nearly one-third of participants (32.5 percent) acknowledge at least one episode of physical aggression toward their parents between the ages of 11 and 24, for instance involving hitting, kicking or throwing objects. This behavior peaks at age 13, when roughly 15% of respondents reported aggressive incidents. From there, the frequency of these episodes declined and plateaued at around 5% by early adulthood.

 

“At first glance, it may seem surprising that one-third of adolescents become physically aggressive toward their parents at some point,” says Lilly Shanahan. “But these are mostly isolated incidents, likely in the midst of heated parent-child conflicts that occur during puberty.  We’re not talking about systematic violence here, and it’s also not about individual failure.” Even so, Shanahan finds it troubling that two of the five in this subset acknowledged having these episodes on multiple occasions.

 

Parental conflict and ADD among risk factors

What drives young people to lash out at their parents? Educational attainment and socioeconomic status appear not to play a significant role. “This problem spans all social classes,” says lead author and postdoctoral researcher Laura Bechtiger. “It’s not limited to any particular social background or gender."

 

That said, researchers did identify multiple risk factors unrelated to whether the child generally has aggressive tendencies. Physical punishment and verbal aggression by parents increase the likelihood of creating a familial cycle of violence in which aggressive behavioral patterns are modeled to their children. Additionally, when parents frequently clash with one another, their children adopt similar patterns of conflict. Young people with attention-deficit and hyperactivity symptoms are also at greater risk, both because they often struggle with impulse control and may provoke impatience from their parents.

 

Conflict resolution and positive environments are protective factors

Fortunately, the research also offers hope: Certain factors can dramatically lower the risk of child-on-parent aggression. Children who have learned how to constructively deal with negative emotions and conflicts are far less prone to physical aggression. A supportive upbringing, where parents are actively involved in their children’s lives, show interest and offer emotional support, also reduces the risk considerably. Furthermore, the researchers believe that early prevention measures can lower the likelihood of aggression later on.

 

“Conflicts between parents and adolescents are normal and even important for development,” explains Denis Ribeaud, co-director of z-proso. “Isolated outbursts during puberty should trigger reflection but are not necessarily cause for alarm. If a pattern emerges, however, this is a red flag. Repeated physical aggression with increasing intensity is a warning sign, as are a lack of remorse and aggressive behavior extending outside of the family.”

 

Early prevention is key

At five percent, the share of 24-year-olds displaying physical aggression is comparatively small, but nonetheless significant. If physical attacks are still being carried out in early adulthood, there is an increased risk of this becoming a lasting pattern, with the attendant psychosocial consequences.

 

Sociologist Manuel Eisner emphasizes the importance of early intervention: “Prevention needs to be aimed at both parents and children. Parents should learn to rely less on corporal punishment and to create a supportive, constructive environment within the family. Children should also receive help to learn emotional regulation and constructive conflict resolution, even before they start school.”

Box
Methodology

The z-proso longitudinal study in Zurich has tracked the social development of children and young people since 2005. Researchers gathered information on physical aggression against parents from 1,522 participants at six intervals: ages 11, 13, 15, 17, 20 and 24. Risk factors and protective factors were recorded from ages 7 to 11. The data was analyzed using logistic regression.

 

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Journal

European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

DOI

10.1007/s00787-025-02953-w 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Physical aggression toward parents from ages 11 to 24: prevalence trajectory and risk and protective factors

Article Publication Date

29-Jan-2026