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The rapid behavioral transformation of wolves into dogs, unfolding within an emerging human niche, entailed swift neural adaptation without widespread pleiotropic disruption. To recover adaptive signals embedded in mosaic genomes shaped by complex demographic histories, we developed GAMA, an ancestry-aware framework, and applied it to 1,929 canids. GAMA identified GPR52 as the top genome-wide selection outlier, enriched for Fertile Crescent–related ancestry. A Canis-specific full-length L1-Cf insertion ~39 kb upstream of GPR52 emerged as the focal candidate cis-regulatory element, associated with ~3.3-fold caudate GPR52 upregulation, enhancer-like 5′ UTR activity and local chromatin contact. Ancient DNA modeling indicated that L1-Cf persisted as standing variation in wolves, was detected in dogs by ~6.5 ka and rose early in Fertile Crescent–associated populations. Pharmacological GPR52 activation in mice attenuated threat-evoked freezing without broad behavioral impairment. Genome-wide, full-length L1s were enriched near neurodevelopmental genes and contributed to CNS-biased transcription. Together, these findings support standing TE insertions as modular substrates for regulatory exaptation, revealing how mobile elements can reshape neural regulatory programs during rapid behavioral evolution.
Identifying biomarkers of cancers presents a persistent challenge due to insufficient interpretability in model decision. Current approaches only provide explainability that quantifies the contribution of input features or local substructures to predictions at the data level, yet they fail to uncover the inherent reasoning logic of the model and cannot deliver genuine interpretability, which severely restricts their ability to capture comprehensive biological mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, we introduce NSINR, Neuro-Symbolic Interpretability Noise-Robust Framework for Disease ceRNA Biomarker Prediction. Our framework supports dual-channel collaborative learning for disease-ceRNA biomarker prediction. The neural explainability channel constructs interpretable mask matrices to filter structural and feature noise, yielding compact graph topology and clear data-driven explanations. The symbolic interpretability channel models ceRNA regulation as a logical knowledge hypergraph and performs differentiable logical reasoning to provide transparent biological logic. An Attention fusion mechanism unifies neural learning outputs and symbolic reasoning results, ensuring coherent fusion of performance and interpretability. Comprehensive experiments on three tasks demonstrate that NSINR achieves superior performance, yielding mean AUCs of 0.808, 0.820, and 0.856, and mean AUPRs of 0.796, 0.812, and 0.842 for the MCA, CCA, and LCA tasks, respectively. Compared to the current state-of-the-art methods, NSINR achieves the expected predictive performance. Case studies on cancer biomarkers verify its capacity to discover credible and biologically meaningful candidates.
The CRISPR/Cas7-11 system is a recently characterized RNA targeting tool that exhibits low toxicity, minimal off-target effects, and reduced collateral RNA cleavage. While Cas7-11 has been recently tested in zebrafish embryos as ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complexes, its use as mRNA–single guide RNA (sgRNA) formulations and its application in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have not been explored. In this study, we evaluated the efficiency and specificity of Cas7-11 in zebrafish embryos and hESCs. In zebrafish,injection ofCas7-11and sgRNA resulted in evident reductions of target transcripts, accompanied by clear phenotypic outcomes. ExogenousEGFPmRNA levels were reduced to 31.90
Maternal aging impairs embryo development. However, little is known regarding the molecular defects in aged human embryos. Combining single-cell RNA sequencing and ATAC-seq, we investigated aging-associated changes in the transcriptome and chromatin accessibility in fully grown GV oocytes, mature eggs, 4C, 8C, and morula embryos from young, middle-aged and old rhesus monkeys. We reveal that impaired maternal mRNA stability is a major RNA metabolism defect in aged oocytes. Unlike mice, aged monkey embryos display precocious expression of stage-specific genes including zygotic genome activation (ZGA) and morula-stage genes. Consistently, promoters and distal regulatory regions that show stage-specific accessibility changes in young embryos lose this dynamic regulation and become constitutively accessible in old embryos. Mechanistically, aged monkey embryos have reduced maternal transcripts of SETDB1 . Knockdown of SETDB1 in young monkey zygotes recapitulates aging-associated phenotypes. Thus, maternal SETDB1 insufficiency is a major factor contributing to developmental and molecular defects in aged embryos.
A new species of the genus Brachytarsophrys is described from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. The new species can be distinguished from its congeners by a combination of morphological characters: body size relatively small, dorsal skin smooth with a few large tubercles on dorsum and crotch, snout relatively long, eye relatively small, foot relatively short, pectoral glands orange, upper iris blood red and lower iris reddish brown, nuptial pad present on first finger in adult male. Phylogenetically, the new species differs from other species of the genus by a genetic divergence of 4.2–15.7% and 3.3–15.2% in COI and cytb genes, respectively. This study brings the total number of the species of Brachytarsophrys to 12, with ten occur in China and three in Guangxi.
