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Germany's oldest university, founded in 1386, with research spanning medicine, physics, biology, and public health.
Heidelberg researchers report that mutating the DNA template at a rate of about 3% turns simple RNA droplets into cell-like structures with large vacuoles. The experiments used synthetic droplets. Medical use is the group's stated aim.
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SpaCEy, a graph neural network in Nature Communications, sorted breast cancer patients by survival from spatial protein maps without cell-type labels. Its split held within established subtypes, the one place it could add prognostic information clinics lack.
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Heidelberg and Freiburg researchers report that the enzyme ICP55 trims one amino acid from 107 imported mitochondrial proteins and keeps large complexes intact. The evidence comes from engineered human cells and a test tube, so the disease link the authors suggest is still untested.
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Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, a Heidelberg group argues that health inequity is produced outside health systems, and asks climate planners to state in advance which groups each measure helps and which it leaves worse off.
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Heidelberg chemists report that iron and reactive oxygen species cleave lignin's methoxy groups into methanol and then formaldehyde at room temperature in water. In living soil, microbes eat the methanol before it can reach the air.
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A Physical Review Letters paper says bosons and fermions can bind into a self-holding droplet, and that today's ultracold-atom rigs are enough to check it.
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