Regular exercise promotes whole-body health and prevents disease, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are incompletely understood. Here, the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium – whose researchers include Regents' Professor and Vasser-Woolley Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry Facundo Fernández, profiled the temporal transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, lipidome, phosphoproteome, acetylproteome, ubiquitylproteome, epigenome and immunome in whole blood, plasma and 18 solid tissues in male and female Rattus norvegicusover eight weeks of endurance exercise training. The data and analyses presented in the study serve as valuable resources for understanding and exploring the multi-tissue molecular effects of endurance training.

In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Emma Bingham, a student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, put forward a brand new idea, which they tested in a computational model. Bingham and Ratcliff suggest that the way prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes respond to population size may make or break their chances of evolving multicellularity. It’s a fascinating hypothesis, and if further work bears it out, it could fundamentally change how scientists conceive of this transition and challenge a key assumption they make about evolutionary forces.

Estimating fire emissions prior to the satellite era is challenging because observations are limited, leading to large uncertainties in the calculated aerosol climate forcing following the preindustrial era. This challenge further limits the ability of climate models to accurately project future climate change. In this study, researchers reconstruct a gridded dataset of global biomass burning emissions from 1750 to 2010 using inverse analysis that leveraged a global array of 31 ice core records of black carbon deposition fluxes, two different historical emission inventories as a priori estimates, and emission-deposition sensitivities simulated by the atmospheric chemical transport model GEOS-Chem. The study’s researchers include Bingqing Zhang, Takamitsu Ito, and Pengfei Liu of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.