What began as an effort to prevent tigresses in captivity from killing their own cubs has turned into an unexpected boon for Indian farmers. Scientists at the CSIR–Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad have developed a simple, non‑invasive test — based on animal dung analysis — that can detect pregnancy in cows and buffaloes as early as six to eight weeks after conception.

The test is based on a novel biomarker identified in animal faeces, which researchers translated into a lateral‑flow device capable of early pregnancy detection, said CCMB’s Chief Scientist and in-charge of the Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) G. Umapathy.

How early pregnancy detection helps farmers

Conventional pregnancy detection in cattle relies on methods such as rectal palpation, ultrasonography, or hormone estimation in blood or milk—procedures that become reliable only three to four months after conception. Early detection is crucial for farmers as it helps reduce inter‑calving intervals, minimise economic losses and plan timely artificial insemination, pointed out Dr. Umapathy.

CCMB’s Chief Scientist and in-charge of the Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) G. Umapathy
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What prompted scientists to work on it?

LaCONES scientists were initially working on early pregnancy detection in captive tigers, following observations that tigresses sometimes kill their cubs due to stress and behavioural disturbances caused by human proximity. Several such incidents were reported at the Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, prompting zoo authorities to seek a method to identify pregnancy early so that expectant females could be shifted to quieter enclosures.

Existing pregnancy markers were largely blood‑based, but tranquillising wild animals for blood sampling posed serious risks to both the animal and the foetus. “We therefore shifted our focus to a non‑invasive approach,” said Dr. Umapathy. Using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC‑MS), the team screened urine and dung samples for pregnancy‑related molecules.

Two pregnancy markers identified

After analysing thousands of faecal and urinary samples from multiple species — ranging from primates and deer to lions and tigers — the researchers identified two promising pregnancy markers in faeces. One of these molecules, although known to exist in mammals, had never been reported earlier as a pregnancy indicator.

The team developed an Enzyme‑Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) using antibodies raised against the marker. The test proved accurate across several species and was subsequently adopted by many zoos. The leap to livestock came after a veterinarian raised a query at a scientific symposium. Subsequent trials at a military dairy farm confirmed the test’s effectiveness in detecting pregnancy in cattle and buffaloes.

With the collaboration of former CCMB colleagues Ch. Mohan Rao and Amit Asthana, the researchers went on to develop a field‑deployable, paper‑based kit suitable for non‑technical users. The technology has since received patents in the United States and Russia and is now being readied for transfer to industry, added Dr. Umapathy.

Researchers have found 58 genetic variants linked to an increased risk of anxiety, suggesting that the disorder is not driven by a “single anxiety gene”.

The researchers, led by those from Texas A&M University in the U.S., said that anxiety disorders are influenced by genetic variants from across the human genome, with each variant inherited subtly changing an individual’s genetic risk for developing anxiety-related conditions.

The findings are consistent with the genetic architecture for common medical conditions like hypertension and clinical depression, they said.

The 58 genetic variants analysed in the study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, pointed to 66 genes that the researchers said appear to influence how the brain responds to stress and threat.

The team also found a strong genetic overlap between anxiety disorders and related traits including depression, neuroticism, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide attempts — the results reinforced decades of clinical observations, they said.

“Anxiety disorders and their underlying sources of genetic risk have been understudied compared to other psychiatric conditions, so this study substantially advances this critical knowledge,” senior author Jack Hettema, professor from the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Texas A&M University, said.

“Anxiety disorders have long been recognised as heritable, but until now we lacked a solid link between anxiety and the specific genetic factors involved,” Hettema said.

The researchers analysed genetic data from 122,341 people diagnosed with major anxiety disorders and 729,881 without.

The authors “identified 58 independent genome-wide significant risk variants and 66 genes with robust biological support.” They also found a “substantial genetic correlation between (anxiety) and depression, neuroticism and other internalising phenotypes.” The analysis highlighted genes involved in the regulation of the ‘GABA’ brain chemical as a potential mechanism critical in one’s genetic risk of anxiety — GABA helps calm down activity in the nervous system.

GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric acid, is already targeted by several existing anti-anxiety medications, and thus, the study provides converging evidence for brain circuits and biochemical systems long suspected to be involved in anxiety, the researchers said.

They added that genes alone do not seal a person’s fate.

“Our discoveries highlight underlying biological vulnerability for anxiety, but they don’t diminish the profound influence of lived experience,” co-author Brad Verhulst, research assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Texas A&M University, said.

“Clarifying the influence of genetic factors that increase the risk of experiencing clinical anxiety may, in the future, help us to identify people who are particularly vulnerable. Our findings provide a starting point for developing early intervention strategies and more effective, personalised treatments,” Verhulst said.

The authors said the newly identified variants and implicated pathways provide a roadmap for future research.

Fungal infections are among the most underestimated health threats worldwide, contributing to rising hospitalizations and deaths. Beyond human health, fungi also devastate crops, reduce yields, and worsen food insecurity — creating a dual crisis for both public health and agriculture.

Now, researchers at the CSIR–Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad have uncovered a significant insight into how fungi become dangerous in the first place. Their findings point to a promising new pathway for developing antifungal therapies by targeting fungal metabolism rather than only gene networks.

Fungi can exist in two forms

Led by scientist Sriram Varahan, the study reveals that a fungus’s ability to switch shapes — a key factor in its infectiousness — is driven not only by genetic signals but also by its internal energy‑generating processes. Fungi can exist in two major forms: a small, oval yeast form and a larger filamentous form.

(From left) Siddhi Gupta, Dhrumi Shah, Sriram Varahan and Sudharsan M
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How yeast travels to transform into filamentous form

The yeast form travels through the host environment searching for a niche to anchor. Once it finds one, it transforms into filaments, allowing it to invade tissues aggressively. Inside the human body, fungi encounter nutrient scarcity, temperature shifts, and competing microbes. These stresses typically trigger their transformation into the filamentous form, which is much harder for both immune cells and medicines to eliminate.

A key link needed for fungal invasion

While earlier studies have focused heavily on genes that control these shape changes, the CCMB research highlights metabolism as a critical, previously overlooked driver. “We uncovered what can be described as a hidden biological short circuit,” said Mr. Varahan. “We found a direct link between glycolysis — the process of breaking down sugars — and the production of sulfur‑containing amino acids needed for fungal invasion.”

Why fungi need sugars?

When fungi rapidly consume sugars, they generate the sulfur‑based amino acids required to initiate invasive filament formation. The team tested what happens when sugar breakdown is slowed. In these conditions, the fungi remained trapped in their harmless yeast form and could not transition into the disease‑causing state. However, when sulfur‑containing amino acids were added externally, the fungi quickly regained their invasive ability.

The researchers studied a Candida albicans strain lacking a key enzyme for sugar breakdown and found it to be “metabolically crippled.” It struggled to change shape, was easily destroyed by immune cells, and caused only mild disease in mouse models.

‘Achilles’ heel’ of fungal pathogens

These findings suggest that interfering with fungal metabolism may be the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of fungal pathogens. Mr. Varahan notes that with drug‑resistant fungal infections on the rise, targeting metabolism could lead to safer, more effective antifungal therapies— benefiting both human health and agricultural security.

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Biologists and designers have long been fascinated by repeating patterns in nature, from spirals in shells to honeycombs in bees’ nests. However, they have paid the most attention to patterns called ‘cellular foams’ seen in bone or wood, where thin walls enclose many small chambers. These structures are strong and light and usually quite rigid.

This said, many organisms build their bodies from solid pieces separated by softer joints, like a natural suit of tiles, such that these tilings can shift and often repair themselves piece by piece — yet researchers have studied them in only a few well-known cases, including fish scales and reptile armor.

If a new study, published in PNAS Nexus by researchers in Germany, is to be believed, the prevalence of tilings in nature is surprisingly more widespread.

At the outset, the researchers developed a biological definition of tiling that differed from the strict mathematical concept. This was needed because, in nature, the tiles are almost never perfectly edge to edge: there’s usually a thin, softer joint in between. The team thus defined biological tiling as a repeated arrangement of solid tiles separated by a joint material — then built a database around this idea.

They collected information of more than 120 examples from across the tree of life from published research papers, images, and expert inputs, then shortlisted 100 clear cases that fit their definition. For each example, they noted down about 70 parameters — including what the tiles and joints were made of (mineral, protein, sugar, etc.), the shape of the tiles, how the tiles touched or overlapped, their size and packing density, and the overall pattern. Finally, they used multivariate analysis to look for patterns among these traits.

To their pleasant surprise, the researchers found that architectures were far more common and diverse than expected. The examples spanned viruses, plants, arthropods, molluscs, and deuterostomes (such as echinoderms and vertebrates). Their tiles spanned a wide range in size — from nanometre-scale virus capsids to turtle shell plates tens of centimetres across.

Across this range, some motifs also recurred. Many tilings used mineral-protein or sugar-protein combinations in tiles and joints and were built from simple tile shapes arranged in a regular grid-like pattern. Many fine tilings with medium-sized tiles provided shielding and structural support at the same time.

The analyses also revealed strong preferences for certain materials. While the protostomes often combined sugar and protein, deuterostomes used minerals and protein, and plants went for sugars plus other polymers such as lignin. The overlapping tiles of the sort familiar from fish and reptile scales turned out to be especially characteristic of deuterostomes.

Next, plant tilings were found to cluster tightly because they shared sugar-based tiles and lignin joints whereas arthropod tilings were more spread out, reflecting their wide variety of forms and functions. At the same time, the researchers also found that some seemingly unrelated structures were actually quite similar on a deeper level. In particular the overlapping plates of bony fish, brittle stars, and shark teeth appeared to be similar solutions that these disparate life forms had evolved to solve similar mechanical problems, including protection and flexibility.

The researchers’ catalogue thus exposed likely evolutionary constraints but also new open questions. For instance, why do tiles in such different organisms tend to share a similar upper size limit? How do material choices control which patterns are possible? And under what ecological pressures did the common regular tiling patterns arise? According to the team’s paper, there are also other gaps that prior research hasn’t covered fully: joint materials are often poorly described and there could be many undiscovered nanoscale tilings once imaging tools catch up.

The researchers also said their database and a website they set up together form a “morphospace” that designers, engineers, and architects could browse as a library of natural design ideas. The website is accessible here: https://tessellated-materials.mpikg.mpg.de/

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Glow-in-the-dark plants are not new. In fact, scientists created the first bioluminescent plant way back in 1986, when they combined genes from firefly, Photinus pyralis, with a type of tobacco plant. Fast forward to 2024, the first genetically engineered bioluminescent plant, a petunia variety, was made commercially available for sale in the United States for the first time. Now, scientists have published a new research paper that exhibits multicoloured luminescence in plants, and for the first time, this does not involve altering the genetics of the plant.

On August 27, 2025, scientists working in China published their findings in Matter journal and said that they used glowing particles in a succulent called Echeveria ‘Mebina’, instead of genetically engineering the plant. According to them, material engineering often involves the use of tiny glowing particles, but these produce weak results. To improve the glowing performance, this new research uses afterglow particles greater than 5 μm.

These plants can recharge their luminescence with sunlight, and the process takes only ten minutes. In their experiment, the scientists also observed that the leaves of E. ‘Mebina’ have a dense but evenly structured interior with enough space between its cells, which creates pathways for larger glowing particles to spread quickly and evenly.

The afterglow particles were inserted into the plant through injections into the leaves. The size of the particles was a crucial factor for the luminescence – medium-sized ones, around 7 μm, achieved the brightest glow, 3.6 times stronger than smaller particles and 2.3 times stronger than larger ones also used in the experiment. This was attributed to how well the particles diffused within the succulent.

Scientists also tried using different compounds as afterglow material to induce multicoloured luminescence in the plant. This was successful for a variety of colours in the visible spectrum, but it was observed that particle size, and not chemical composition, was the dominant factor that controlled how well they diffused within the plant.

This experiment is important because it creates the possibility of low-carbon, plant-based light emission which can have future practical uses.

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Wherever humans go, they need oxygen to breathe — and soon enough humans are going to go to new parts of space and stay there for longer. On long-term space missions like the International Space Station (ISS), the gas is stored in tanks carried from the earth or made by passing a large current through water, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen.

In a study in Nature Chemistry on August 18, scientists from Germany, the UK, and the US have reported a way to use a certain kind of magnet to make this process, called electrolysis, a lot more efficient.

The electrolyser device has electrodes at two ends, one positively charged (anode) and the other negatively charged (cathode). Water is a poor conductor of electricity, so it’s mixed with a small amount of a substance that helps electrons pass through it. This substance is called the electrolyte and is usually some salt, acid or base.

The scientists wanted to check how magnetic fields influence water electrolysis in microgravity. To this end they conducted an experiment at the Centre of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity in Bremen, where there are facilities to simulate these conditions.

They studied two reactions: one that produced hydrogen using platinum electrodes and another that produced oxygen using iridium oxide electrodes, both in a liquid electrolyte solution. They compared how the reactions worked with and without microgravity and with and without a powerful neodymium magnet placed beneath the electrode. Neodymium magnets are strong, permanent magnets made of the rare earth metal along with iron and boron. The magnet was oriented to maximise its effect on the setup.

The main problem with electrolysis in microgravity is that a ‘lack’ of gravity causes gas bubbles to stick to electrodes instead of rising to the water’s surface and away from the electric apparatus. Thus operators resort to complicated, energy-intensive processes to remove these gases.

During their tests, the scientists found that for hydrogen production, the magnet’s presence increased the density of current through the electrolyte by 25% with microgravity conditions and 26% without. When they used platinum mesh electrodes in the electrolyser, the current density increased by around 240% in microgravity conditions. This meant the bubbles could detach and move away much faster.

The team reported similar results for the oxygen-producing reaction, although they were less pronounced. With the magnetic field, the current density in microgravity conditions increased by about 23%. Using a magnetic field during electrolysis also significantly slowed the rate at which electrical current passing through the electrolyte decreased over time.

“The demonstrators provide a proof-of-concept for the utilisation of magnetically induced flow control as a lightweight, energy-efficient and reliable phase-separation approach in electrolytic cells that pave the way for the development of next-generation electrolytic water-splitting devices for application in space environments,” the scientists wrote in their paper.

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Embryo implantation is a decisive step in mammalian reproduction. When a fertilised egg reaches the uterus, it must successfully attach to and invade the maternal tissue for pregnancy to continue. However, implantation often fails: an estimated 60% of miscarriages are due to problems at this stage. Traditionally, scientists have investigated implantation by looking at genes and chemical signals that control how embryonic cells behave. While valuable, this focus has had a gap: implantation is also at its core a physical act. An embryo must push, pull, and burrow into the tissue that surrounds it.

Human embryos also invade deeply into the uterine wall, embedding themselves almost entirely. In contrast, mouse embryos attach more superficially, settling into crypt-like spaces rather than tunneling all the way in. These differences affect placental development and pregnancy outcomes. Understanding why they exist and how mechanical forces shape them can illuminate human fertility challenges.

Studying these forces directly in living embryos has been nearly impossible, however. Implantation occurs inside the uterus, hidden from view, and the tools to measure feeble forces in such delicate systems have been lacking. A team of scientists from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Spain recently reported in Science Advances a solution to this problem.

The researchers designed an artificial environment outside the body that mimics the uterine lining. They built a flat, 2D collagen gel and a 3D collagen matrix, both resembling the fibrous extracellular tissue embryos naturally encounter. Human and mouse embryos were placed on or within these gels. Then, advanced imaging tools captured how the embryos pulled, pushed, and deformed the surrounding material.

Computational methods tracked small shifts in the fibers, producing colour-coded maps of how the forces spread. The setup allowed researchers to see embryos developing and measure the traction they exerted on their environment in real time.

The experiments revealed that embryos don’t passively sit in the uterus: they actively reshape it. Both mouse and human embryos generated pulling forces that reorganised collagen fibers around them. While mouse embryos produced strong, directional pulls along two or three main axes, human embryos embedded deeply into the matrix, creating multiple small focal points of traction that spread radially. In other words, mice pulled outward and humans pulled inward.

Low-quality human embryos (those that were smaller or contained dead cells) produced weaker forces and failed to invade properly, suggesting force generation is a marker of healthy development. Additional tests showed that disrupting the proteins that connect embryonic cells to the matrix reduced force transmission, confirming that these attachments are critical. When scientists pressed on the gel with a needle, human embryos also sent protrusions towards the pressure point.

The findings indicate that mechanical forces are not side effects but drivers of early development. Clinically, the findings open new directions for fertility research. If healthy implantation depends on embryos generating certain patterns of force, doctors could one day use mechanical signatures to assess embryo quality during in-vitro fertilisation. Such tools could also improve success rates while reducing the emotional and financial toll of repeated treatments.

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Conflicts lurk inside every flower with multiple seeds. The embryos jostle for food, the maternal and paternal genomes bargain over control, and pollen grains compete to be fertilised. Scientists have therefore wondered whether natural selection encourages one-parent broods that keep such quarrels to a minimum and, in so doing, make plant flowers unexpectedly monogamous, much like many animal families.

Scientists have also long believed that most large fruits mix the genes of several parents, a view already under fire from smaller case-studies that hinted at widespread single paternity.

In challenging that orthodoxy, a new study — including scientists from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru and the Nature Conservancy and the Swaniti Initiative in New Delhi — provides a unifying picture of how kin conflict, pollinator behaviour, and flower design shape reproduction across the plant kingdom.

The scientists searched the research literature, focusing on papers published between 1984 and 2024 and selected 102 candidate studies. They finally shortlisted 63 species representing many flowering-plant families. For each of these species, they tracked down genetic studies that compared the DNA fingerprints of sibling seeds and converted the resulting “correlated paternity” values into a number of pollen donors per fruit.

Upon analysis, the scientists found that the headline numbers overturned the textbook story. Among the 63 species, 15 (or 24%) had strictly single paternity and another 18 (28%) averaged fewer than 1.5 fathers per fruit. Taken together, 52% of the sample displayed de facto monogamy at the flower level. The remaining 48% did allow multiple fathers yet even here most fruits harboured only two or three donors, a far cry from the genetic free-for-all that scientists once assumed was the case.

The patterns became clearer when the scientists split the species by mating system. In plants that couldn’t be mated with others of the same species, i.e. which must receive pollen from other individuals, 59% of fruits were sired by a single donor. In self-compatible plants on the other hand fruits had a single donor in only 41% of instances. Statistical tests also confirmed that the self-incompatible group consistently hosted fewer fathers per fruit.

The seed number also mattered less than expected. Although very large fruits sometimes had several donors, no overall rise in pollen parents accompanied an increase from tens to hundreds of seeds. Indeed, across all species, the link between seed count and paternity vanished after the scientists controlled for evolutionary relatedness.

The team also found that the breeding system, not the ancestry, best predicted paternity patterns, implying that kin conflict and pollinator precision evolve quickly when selection demands it. As a result, the plant world may resemble animals more closely than once thought: single fathers dominate, with true genetic polyandry the exception rather than the rule.

In their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 5, the scientists have urged more fieldwork, especially measurements of how many individual pollinators contribute to a single pollen load, to reveal exactly when and how plants shift from monogamy to polyandry. But for now their message is clear: most flowers, even crowded ones, usually pick one father and stick with him.

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