Japan's NIES has made iPS cells from four endangered birds. The flightless Okinawa rail has lost one of the two genes birds use to spot a virus. Inside the minus-160°C cell bank and the brain organoids grown from it.
A University of Tokyo and Arc Institute team has shown how the IS621 jumping gene cuts itself out of an E. coli genome, resolving a chicken-and-egg puzzle that had stood since 2024.
Japan has begun selling Telomelysin, a rewired cold virus that multiplies only inside cancer cells and goes into esophageal tumors by endoscope. Three doses list at 9.3 million yen; the trial behind it had 37 patients.
A kawakawa hybrid made bluefin tuna sperm at eight months, and rainbow trout now spawn Chinook salmon yearly. Inside Japan's 20-year surrogate broodstock effort and Kindai's 32-year tuna project.
Kobe University isolated seven bacterial strains from PFAS-polluted river sediment in Osaka. Three cut PFOS by up to 17.8%; one removed up to 97% of PFHxS in real landfill leachate. Degradation or adsorption? Unsettled.
In 200 colorectal cancer patients from Tokyo and Osaka, 44.8 percent of tumours carried a gut bacterium's mutational signature, rising to about 70 percent under 40. The damage may predate the age of ten.
The first commercial transplant of AMCHEPRY, the world's first approved iPS cell-derived medicine, is set for October in Kyoto. Why proving it takes 35 patients and six years, and why the US and EU have no equivalent product.
Tohoku University and Air Water went after the two bottlenecks that have kept photothermal cancer therapy in the lab for twenty years. IDP1, an artificial protein designed with AlphaFold, kept nanoparticles circulating for 150.5 minutes against 17.8 for PEG, and a 0.5 mm endoscope that fits inside a 16-gauge needle fired an 808 nm laser from inside the tumor at 28 percent less power. In mice, the tumors were gone within 14 days. How that compares with US trials already running in humans.
A Tohoku University team grew rice to the heading stage in soil mimicking the Moon's surface, using fertilizer made from nothing but air and electricity via plasma. The unlikely inspiration? Gundam's beam saber. As NASA pushes toward a lunar base, it could become foundational tech for growing food in space.
The pygmy sweeper glows blue from its belly, yet a full read of its 625-million-letter genome turns up no gene for the light-making enzyme. A Japanese team has now confirmed, at the genome level, that the fish runs entirely on a protein stolen from its prey, the only known case of its kind, with possible payoffs for oral protein drugs.
Over 100 researchers across six Asian countries, led by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and including Japanese institutions such as RIKEN and Waseda, have published a 10-year roadmap to build a synthetic cell from scratch. Their two-stage ProtoCell-to-AutoCell plan and AI-driven central biofoundry mark a new approach to a question Europe and the US have chased for 20 years.