Category: 7. Science

A team of scientists has found the recently discovered “interstellar invader” comet 3I/ATLAS is teeming with water ice. This water could have been sealed in the comet for 7 billion years, which would make it older than the solar system itself.

The team also found a mixture of organic molecules, silicates and carbon based minerals on the object, meaning 3I/ATLAS resembles asteroids found at the outskirts of the solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Neanderthals that interbred with our ancestors may have passed on DNA that causes some people to develop a potentially fatal condition where the brain bulges out of the skull, a new study finds.

The disorder, known as Chiari malformation type I, affects the lower part of the cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps control motions. In people with this condition, the cerebellum protrudes through the hole at the base of the skull and into the spine. Symptoms may include headaches, neck pain and dizziness, and if too much of the brain bulges out, it can be fatal.

Inspired by a hitchhiking fish that uses a specialized suction organ to latch onto sharks and other marine animals, researchers from MIT and other institutions have designed a mechanical adhesive device that can attach to soft surfaces underwater or in extreme conditions, and remain there for days or weeks.

This device, the researchers showed, can adhere to the lining of the GI tract, whose mucosal layer makes it very difficult to attach any kind of sensor or drug-delivery capsule. Using their new adhesive system, the researchers showed that they could achieve automatic self-adhesion, without motors, to deliver HIV antiviral drugs or RNA to the GI tract, and they could also deploy it as a sensor for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The device can also be attached to a swimming fish to monitor aquatic environments.

The design is based on the research team’s extensive studies of the remora’s sucker-like disc. These discs have several unique properties that allow them to adhere tightly to a variety of hosts, including sharks, marlins, and rays. However, how remoras maintain adhesion to soft, dynamically shifting surfaces remains largely unknown.

Understanding the fundamental physics and mechanics of how this part of the fish sticks to another organism helped us to establish the underpinnings of how to engineer a synthetic adhesive system,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the senior author of the study.

MIT research scientist Ziliang (Troy) Kang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature. The research team also includes authors from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, and Boston College.

Inspired by nature

Most protein and RNA drugs can’t be taken orally because they will be broken down before they can be absorbed into the GI tract. To overcome that, Traverso’s lab is working on ingestible devices that can be swallowed and then gradually release their payload over days, weeks, or even longer.

One major obstacle is that the digestive tract is lined with a slippery mucosal membrane that is constantly regenerating and is difficult for any device to stick to. Furthermore, any device that manages to attach to this lining is likely to be dislodged by food or liquids moving through the tract.

To find a solution to these challenges, the MIT team looked to the remora, also known as the sucker fish, which clings to its hosts for free transportation and access to food scraps. To explore how the remora attaches itself to dynamic, soft surfaces so strongly, Traverso’s teamed up with Christopher Kenaley, an associate professor of biology at Boston College who studies remoras and other fish.

Their studies revealed that the remora’s ability to stick to its host depends on a few different features. First, the large suction disc creates adhesion through pressure-based suction, just like a plunger. Additionally, each disc is divided into individual small adhesive compartments by rows of plates called lamellae wrapped in soft tissue. These compartments can independently create additional suction on nonhomogeneous soft surfaces.

There are nine species of remora, and in each one, these rows of lamellae are aligned a little bit differently — some are exclusively parallel, while others form patterns with rows tilted at different angles. These differences, the researchers found, could be the key to elucidating each species’ evolutionary adaptation to its host.

Remora albescens, a unique species that exhibits mucoadhesion in the oral cavity of rays, inspired the team to develop devices with enhanced adhesion to soft surfaces with its unparallel, highly tilted lamellae orientation. Other remora species, which attach to high-speed swimmers such as marlins and swordfish, tend to have highly parallel orientations, which help the hitchhikers slide without losing adhesion as they are rapidly dragged through the water. Still other species, which have a mix of parallel and angled rows, can attach to a variety of hosts.

Tiny spines that protrude from the lamellae help to achieve additional adhesion by interlocking with the host tissue. These spines, also called spinules, are several hundred microns long and grasp onto the tissue with minimal invasiveness.

“If the compartment suction is subjected to a shear force, the friction enabled by the mechanical interlocking of the spinules can help to maintain the suction,” Kang says.

Watery environments

By mimicking these anatomical features, the MIT team was able to create a device with similarly strong adhesion for a variety of applications in underwater environments.

The researchers used silicone rubber and temperature-responsive smart materials to create their adhesive device, which they call MUSAS (for “mechanical underwater soft adhesion system”). The fully passive, disc-shaped device contains rows of lamellae similar to those of the remora, and can self-adhere to the mucosal lining, leveraging GI contractions. The researchers found that for their purposes, a pattern of tilted rows was the most effective.

Within the lamellae are tiny microneedle-like structures that mimic the spinules seen in the remora. These tiny spines are made of a shape memory alloy that is activated when exposed to body temperatures, allowing the spines to interlock with each other and grasp onto the tissue surface.

The researchers showed that this device could attach to a variety of soft surfaces, even in wet or highly acidic conditions, including pig stomach tissue, nitrile gloves, and a tilapia swimming in a fish tank. Then, they tested the device for several different applications, including aquatic environmental monitoring. After adding a temperature sensor to the device, the researchers showed that they could attach the device to a fish and accurately measure water temperature as the fish swam at high speed.

To demonstrate medical applications, the researchers incorporated an impedance sensor into the device and showed that it could adhere to the esophagus in an animal model, which allowed them to monitor reflux of gastric fluid. This could offer an alternative to current sensors for GERD, which are delivered by a tube placed through the nose or mouth and pinned to the lower part of the esophagus.

They also showed that the device could be used for sustained release of two different types of therapeutics, in animal tests. First, they showed that they could integrate an HIV drug called cabotegravir into the materials that make up the device (polycaprolactone and silicone). Once adhered to the lining of the stomach, the drug gradually diffused out of the device, over a period of one week.

Cabotegravir is one of the drugs used for HIV PrEP — pre-exposure prophylaxis — as well as treatment of HIV. These treatments are usually given either as a daily pill or an injection administered every one to two months.

The researchers also created a version of the device that could be used for delivery of larger molecules such as RNA. For this kind of delivery, the researchers incorporated RNA into the microneedles of the lamellae, which could then inject them into the lining of the stomach. Using RNA encoding the gene for luciferase, a protein that emits light, the researchers showed that they could successfully deliver the gene to cells of the cheek or the esophagus.

The researchers now plan to adapt the device for delivering other types of drugs, as well as vaccines. Another possible application is using the devices for electrical stimulation, which Traverso’s lab has previously shown can activate hormones that regulate appetite.

The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

Reference: Kang, Z., Gomez, J.A., Ross, A.M. et al. Mechanical underwater adhesive devices for soft substrates. Nat. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09304-4

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Leuven, Belgium, 23 July 2025 – Researchers have identified a key neural switch that controls whether animals instinctively flee from a threat or freeze in place. By comparing two closely related deer-mouse species, they found that this switch is calibrated by evolution to match the animal’s habitat. This neural circuit is hypersensitive in mice living in densely vegetated environments, causing instant escape, but less responsive in their open-field cousins, who are more likely to freeze. In doing so, the research team uncovered an important way in which evolution fine-tunes the brain for survival.

Flee or freeze?

In nature, survival hinges on making the right split-second choice when danger strikes, and the brain’s defensive circuits are built for exactly that task. Yet what counts as the “right” response depends on the landscape: in cluttered woods, swift flight into the underbrush can save your life; on exposed grassland, motionless hiding buys time. How does evolution solve this puzzle?

In a new study published in Nature, an international research team from Belgium and the USA has uncovered an elegant mechanism that, by tweaking the sensitivity of a danger-response hub in the brain, tailors behavior to each environment without redesigning the whole system.

Forest mice vs open-field mice

When a shadow of a potential predator looms overhead, forest mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) dash for cover, while their open-field cousins (Peromyscus polionotus) freeze in place. The researchers set out to pinpoint the brain switch that sets those opposite instincts.

“To precisely measure escape behavior, we presented both types of mice with stimuli that resembled an aerial predator in a controlled environment,” explains Felix Baier, co-first author and part of the research team at Harvard. “We found that open-field mice required roughly twice the stimulus intensity to trigger escape compared with their forest relatives, indicating a substantial difference in how they processed the threat stimulus.”

A switch in the brain

Using cutting-edge neural recordings with Neuropixels probes and manipulation techniques, the researchers traced these behavioral differences to a central command hub for escape actions: the dorsal periaqueductal gray (dPAG), a group of neurons deep in the brain. “We were surprised to find that evolution acted in a central brain region, downstream of peripheral sensory perception, because for evolution to change a behavior, it has often been thought that the easiest and most efficient way would be to just change the sensory inputs,” says Baier.

Both species perceive the looming threat identically as evidenced by comparable responses along the circuit from the eye to the dPAG when the animals saw the stimulus without reacting to it. However, the activation of the dPAG differed significantly in the case where the mice escaped from the threat.

“Our monitoring of neural activity revealed a stark contrast: in forest deer mice, escaping from a potential threat in the sky is enabled by an instant ‘run’ command in the dPAG, whereas the dPAG of its open field cousin does not send any such commands. This divergence can be understood as an evolutionary repurposing of neural circuits to finetune survival response,” says Katja Reinhard, who is the other co-first author and a former postdoc at NERF (part of imec, KU Leuven and VIB), now leading her own group at SISSA, Italy.

Further, by using advanced methods that let scientists activate or silence specific brain regions, the team demonstrated a causal connection. Artificially stimulating dPAG neurons in forest mice made them escape even in the absence of a threat. Conversely, using chemical methods to dampen dPAG activity raised their escape threshold, making their behavior more like that of their cousins.

Built-in flexibility

The study not only sheds light on how instinctive behaviors like freezing or fleeing are controlled but also underscores the flexibility of the brain’s internal architecture, explain lead authors Prof. Karl Farrow (imec, KU Leuven, VIB) and Prof. Hopi Hoekstra (Harvard).

Farrow: “By comparing these two related species we uncovered a switch that balances freeze versus flight, showing how natural selection fine-tunes behavior without rewiring the senses.”

Hoekstra: “Our new discovery illustrates a fundamental evolutionary principle: natural selection often tweaks existing neural circuits rather than constructing entirely new pathways.”

Publication

Baier F. Reinhard K. et al. “Publication The neural basis of species-specific defensive behaviour in Peromyscus mice” Nature, 2025

Funding

The research team at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research was financially supported by the HHMI International Student Research Fellowship, the Grant-in-Aid of the American Society of Mammalogy, the Herchel Smith Graduate Fellowship, the Robert A. Chapman Memorial Scholarship, the Joan Brockman Williamson Fellowship, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fund, FWO, ERC, the Harvard PRISE fellowship, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology grant for undergraduate research, the NIH, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Neurobiologists at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found the brain’s internal GPS changes each time mice navigate a familiar, static environment.

Even when a mouse walks the same path every day — and the path and surrounding conditions remain identical — each journey activates different “map-making” neurons in the brain.

This finding illuminates the fundamental mystery of how the brain processes and stores spatial memories, with implications for scientists’ understanding of memory, learning and even aging.

The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.

“Our study confirms that spatial memories in the brain aren’t stable and fixed,” said Northwestern neurobiology professor Daniel Dombeck, the study’s senior author. “You can’t point to one group of neurons in the brain and say, ‘That memory is stored right there.’ Instead, we’re finding that memories are passed among neurons. The exact same experience will involve different neurons every time. It’s not a sudden change, but it slowly evolves.”

Located deep within the brain’s temporal lobe, the hippocampus stores memories related to spatial navigation. For decades, neurobiologists thought the same hippocampal neurons encoded memories of the same places, Dombeck said. Thus, the path someone might take from their bedroom to their kitchen should activate the exact same sequence of neurons during each midnight walk for a glass of water.

About 10 years ago, however, scientists imaged mouse brains as the animals ran through a maze. Even as the mice ran through the same maze day after day, different neurons fired during each run. Scientists wondered if the results were a fluke — maybe the rodents’ experience of the maze changed, with differences in speed, smell or something subtle in the environment.

To probe these questions, the researchers designed an experiment that gave them unprecedented control over the mice’s sensory input. The mice ran through the virtual maze on treadmills, ensuring precise measurement of speed. The maze was presented on a multisensory virtual reality system previously developed in Dombeck’s laboratory. This not only controlled what the animals saw, but a cone on the nose of the mice provided identical smells for every session, controlling for every possible environmental variable.

After running the experiment several times, the results were clear: Even in a highly reproducible virtual world, a different group of neurons activated each time. The finding confirmed that the brain’s spatial maps are inherently dynamic, constantly updating regardless of how static a space might be.

“This evidence suggests that memories are fluid. This could be related to deeper questions of why the brain can do things modern artificial intelligence struggles with, things like learning new things continuously,” said U. of I. molecular and integrative biology professor Jason Climer, the co-first author of the study. Climer performed the study while a postdoctoral researcher in Dombeck’s group. “It also may play a role in natural forgetting — an active process, often overlooked, but essential for healthy memory function.” 

Although few patterns arose throughout the course of the experiment, the researchers did notice one consistent factor: The most excitable neurons, which were more easily activated, maintained more stable spatial memories throughout multiple runs through the virtual maze. Since neuron excitability decreases with age, the finding could help scientists understand the role of aging and disease as it relates to the brain’s ability to encode new memories.

“The small core of neurons that are stable are special, and better understanding what makes them special could lead to new treatments for memory dysfunction,” Climer said. “Memory deficits are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease and are also a major barrier for patients suffering from a range of neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. By better understanding fundamental aspects of memory like the changes over time we report in our paper, we are providing new targets for understanding differences in these patients’ brains and novel strategies for treatments. Understanding how the brain handles the problem of memory also has a lot to teach us about how computers and AI might be improved.”

The National Institutes of Health supported this work. Dombeck lab members Heydar Davoudi and Jun Young Oh are also co-first authors of the paper, along with Climer.

This news release is adapted from content provided by Northwestern University. 

“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” says Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence, Italy, and lead author of this study, published on July 21 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The potential planet-in-the-making was detected around the star HD 135344B, within a disc of gas and dust around it called a protoplanetary disc. The budding planet is estimated to be twice the size of Jupiter and as far from its host star as Neptune is from the Sun. It has been observed shaping its surroundings within the protoplanetary disc as it grows into a fully formed planet.

Protoplanetary discs have been observed around other young stars, and they often display intricate patterns, such as rings, gaps or spirals. Astronomers have long predicted that these structures are caused by baby planets, which sweep up material as they orbit around their parent star. But, until now, they had not caught one of these planetary sculptors in the act.

In the case of HD 135344B’s disc, swirling spiral arms had previously been detected by another team of astronomers using SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), an instrument on ESO’s VLT. However, none of the previous observations of this system found proof of a planet forming within the disc.

Now, with observations from the new VLT’s Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument, the researchers say they may have found their prime suspect. The team spotted the planet candidate right at the base of one of the disc’s spiral arms, exactly where theory had predicted they might find the planet responsible for carving such a pattern.

“What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc,” says Maio, who is based at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, a center of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). “This gives us a much higher level of confidence in the planet’s existence, as we’re observing the planet’s own light.”

A star’s companion is born

A different team of astronomers have also recently used the ERIS instrument to observe another star, V960 Mon, one that is still in the very early stages of its life. In a study published on 18 July in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team report that they have found a companion object to this young star. The exact nature of this object remains a mystery.

The new study, led by Anuroop Dasgupta, a doctoral researcher at ESO and at the Diego Portales University in Chile, follows up observations of V960 Mon made a couple of years ago. Those observations, made with both SPHERE and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), revealed that the material orbiting V960 Mon is shaped into a series of intricate spiral arms. They also showed that the material is fragmenting, in a process known as ‘gravitational instability’, when large clumps of the material around a star contract and collapse, each with the potential to form a planet or a larger object.

“That work revealed unstable material but left open the question of what happens next. With ERIS, we set out to find any compact, luminous fragments signalling the presence of a companion in the disc — and we did,” says Dasgupta. The team found a potential companion object very near to one of the spiral arms observed with SPHERE and ALMA. The team say that this object could either be a planet in formation, or a ‘brown dwarf’ — an object bigger than a planet that didn’t gain enough mass to shine as a star.

If confirmed, this companion object may be the first clear detection of a planet or brown dwarf forming by gravitational instability.

More information

This research highlighted in the first part of this release was presented in the paper “Unveiling a protoplanet candidate embedded in the HD 135344B disk with VLT/ERIS” to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The second part of the release highlights the study “VLT/ERIS observations of the V960 Mon system: a dust-embedded substellar object formed by gravitational instability?” published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team who conducted the first study (on HD 135344B) is composed of F. Maio (University of Firenze, Italy, and INAF-Osservatorio Astrofisico Arcetri, Firenze, Italy [OAA]), D. Fedele (OAA), V. Roccatagliata (University of Bologna, Italy [UBologna] and OAA), S. Facchini (University of Milan, Italy [UNIMI]), G. Lodato (UNIMI), S. Desidera (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Italy [OAP]), A. Garufi (INAF — Istituto di Radioastronomia, Bologna, Italy [INAP-Bologna], and Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany [MPA]), D. Mesa (OAP), A. Ruzza (UNIMI), C. Toci (European Southern Observatory [ESO], Garching bei Munchen, Germany, and OAA), L. Testi (OAA, and UBologna), A. Zurlo (Diego Portales University [UDP], Santiago, Chile, and Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons [YEMS], Santiago, Chile), and G. Rosotti (UNIMI).

The team behind the second study (on V960 Mon) is primarily composed of members of the Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS), a collaborative research initiative based in Chile. Core YEMS contributors include A. Dasgupta (ESO, Santiago, Chile, UDP, and YEMS), A. Zurlo (UDP and YEMS), P. Weber (University of Santiago [Usach], Chile, and YEMS, and Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Astrophysics and Space Exploration [CIRAS], Santiago, Chile), F. Maio (OAA, and University of Firenze, Italy), Lucas A. Cieza (UDP and YEMS), D. Fedele (OAA), A. Garufi (INAF Bologna and MPA), J. Miley (Usach, YEMS, and CIRAS), P. Pathak (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India), S. Pérez (Usach and YEMS, and CIRAS), and V. Roccatagliata (UBologna and OAA).

As the Sun approaches the most active part of its eleven-year magnetic cycle this summer, NASA volunteers have been watching it closely. Now they’ve spotted a new trend in solar behavior that will have you reaching for your suntan lotion. It’s all about something called a “Type II” solar radio burst:

“Type II solar radio bursts are not commonly detected in the frequency range between 15 to 30 megahertz,” said Prof. Chuck Higgins, Co-founder of Radio JOVE. “Recently, we’re seeing many of them in that range.”

Let’s unpack that. Our Sun often sprays powerful blasts of radio waves into space. Heliophysicists classify these radio bursts into five different types depending on how the frequency of the radio waves drifts over time. “Type II” solar radio bursts seem to come from solar flares and enormous squirts of hot plasma called coronal mass ejections.

Now, Thomas Freeman, an undergraduate student at Middle Tennessee State University, and other volunteers working on NASA’s Radio JOVE project have observed something interesting about these Type II bursts: they are now showing up at lower frequencies—somewhere in between FM and AM radio. 

What does it mean? It means our star is full of surprises! These Radio JOVE observations of the Sun’s radio emissions during solar maximum can be used to extend our knowledge of solar emissions to lower frequencies and, therefore, to distances farther from the Sun. 

Radio JOVE is a NASA partner citizen science project in which participants assemble and operate radio astronomy telescopes to gather and contribute data to support scientific studies.  Radio JOVE collaborated with SunRISE Ground Radio Lab,  organized teams of high school students to observe the Sun, and recently published a paper on these Type II solar radio bursts. Learn more and get involved!  

Complex regions of the human genome remained uncharted, even after researchers sequenced the genome in its entirety. That is, until today.

Researchers decoded DNA segments involved in the development of diseases like diabetes and spinal muscular atrophy that had previously been considered too complicated to sequence. Their work, published in Nature on Wednesday, could expand the future of precision medicine.

“This is a landmark paper,” said Barbara Mellone, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. “It opens the door to potentially solving cases that have been inaccessible to diagnosis for a long time.”

The first truly complete human genome was sequenced in 2022. A year later, scientists unveiled the first human “pangenome,” an effort to represent the genetic variability of populations worldwide. But still, gaps remained — gaps that Wednesday’s study has helped fill. The research solved for 92% of missing data in the human genome. And it mapped genomic variation across ancestries to a degree not reached before.

The international team of researchers co-led by the Jackson Laboratory used data from 65 human samples, which spanned five continental groups and 28 population groups. They started by sequencing the data using a combination of two technologies. The first, Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ ultra-long sequencing tools, allowed the researchers to scaffold regions that are difficult to sequence due to their density. The second, Pacific Biosciences’ high-fidelity sequencing tool, allowed the researchers to achieve high base-level accuracy when sequencing.

Christine Beck, a senior study author and geneticist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, said that this “one-two hit” is what allowed her team to overcome previous technological hurdles and surmount the missing genome regions.

The researchers then partitioned the individual sequences into haplotypes, groups of genes that are typically inherited together from a single parent. These were subsequently compiled into contiguous stretches to form haplotype-resolved assemblies, which separate and individually represent the haplotypes inherited from each parent. In the final step, researchers compared each haplotype to that of a reference genome to identify the structural variants that could lead to diseases, as well as understand the degree of genetic variation across different populations, Beck said.

The group fully sequenced several of the most complex regions that have previously been associated with genetic diseases. One such region is the major histocompatibility complex, which encodes the machinery for antigen presentation, a crucial process in the body’s immune response. This part of the genome has been linked to conditions like cancer and type 2 diabetes, as well as differences among individuals in their viral susceptibility, according to Beck.

The study resolved the sequences for the SMN1 and SMN2 genes, which are associated with spinal muscular atrophy and have previously been the target for therapies for the disease. The amylase gene cluster, which aids in the digestion of starchy foods, was also decoded.

And the researchers sequenced over 1,200 centromeres, which are specialized regions of the chromosome that are essential to cell division. They found that the alpha satellite array, which forms the foundation of human centromeres, can vary up to 30-fold in length. Centromere variation can cause chromosomal abnormalities like trisomies, when an individual has three copies of a chromosome — leading to conditions like Down syndrome, Edwards syndrome, and Patau syndrome, Beck said.

Discerning the sequences and their population variation, Beck added, is a step toward understanding the development of associated diseases. This has significant implications for precision medicine, according to Charleston Chiang, a medical population geneticist at Keck School of Medicine of USC, who was not involved in the paper.

“It’s ultimately rooted in being able to more clearly define a person’s risk,” Chiang said.

The vast majority of studies related to genetic disease diagnosis have focused on single nucleotide polymorphisms, a gene variation that occurs when one base pair is changed, according to Chiang. This means that risk assessment for genetic disorders has largely ignored structural variants across different population groups. But the new study, which lays the foundation for understanding these variants’ associations with diseases, could ultimately enable physicians to deliver much more tailored genetic diagnoses — and in turn, treatments.

The diversity of the study’s sampled individuals is also key to its significance, according to Mellone. The research revealed that African ancestry samples had the most structural variance, which supports the idea that this population harbors the deepest reservoir of human genetic diversity. Considering this finding is essential when thinking about reference genomes, which have traditionally been biased towards European ancestry, Mellone added.

Though the paper has a more diverse sample compared to previous studies, a limitation is its sample size, according to Chiang. An analysis of many more global populations is necessary to fully represent the human genetic world and possible structural variations that could lead to diseases, he added.

Still, Chiang said the paper has important implications.

“It’s clearly the direction that our field, in terms of generating genetic variation data, is moving towards,” Chiang added. “The idea has been talked about for a while, and you’re seeing them, one by one, becoming realized.”