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.
Rausu, Rishiri, hosome, ma-kombu: four kelps sold under four names and four price tiers. A Hokkaido University team read the DNA of 475 plants and found no genetic line between them.
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.
Fish have no eyelids, yet pufferfish close their eyes. Shimonoseki's Kaikyokan aquarium dissected 51 species and traced the eye-closing muscle to the one that deflates a puffed-up puffer.
Warming seas pushed a pufferfish north across the Tsugaru Strait, and the hybrids do not fit Japan's 1983 table of edible species and parts. How the rulebook caught up, and why the Mediterranean has the same gap.
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.
That blank, open-mouthed face your cat makes after a sniff may finally have an explanation: 13 branched-chain fatty acids in urine, blended to a ratio unique to each cat and stockpiled in the kidney.
Researchers landing on Nishinoshima must first wade into the sea, gear and all, so no seed comes ashore. Two 2026 studies show why: seabirds, not people, brought the plants.
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.
A team at the Institute of Science Tokyo found resistance genes running harder inside hospital drain biofilm than in the wastewater itself. Why new pipes can backfire.
Why does osteosarcoma cluster in the knees of growing teenagers? A University of Tokyo team, working from an accidental clue in aging research, has pieced together how the cancer starts: an accelerator gene (c-Myc), a brake gene (p53), and a signal from the bone's growth plate. It could reshape drug discovery for a rare cancer.
Toho University stroked infants on the head, back and belly. Only the back calmed them, at about 10.5 cm/s. In mouse pups raised without a mother, the response never appeared at all.
Modern wild boars still carry traces of domestic pigs brought from the Asian mainland over 2,000 years ago. Nagoya University read that story off 93 jawbones from Shimane's Nishikawazu site: escaped pigs going feral and breeding with native boars. The same thing is happening today from Texas to Brazil.
Two schoolkids on Tanegashima found a stag beetle with a female-type jaw on one side and a male-type jaw on the other. An expert says it's likely a mandible mutation, not a true gynandromorph. Here's the biology, and Japan's deep love of beetles.
Some upright-eared Scottish Folds secretly carry the fold gene, a Japanese study finds. What this means for a painful cartilage disease and the global push to restrict fold-cat breeding.
Japanese startup PorMedTec will run the country's first pig-to-human kidney transplant trial at Hokkaido University Hospital and Shonan Kamakura General Hospital in early 2028. Against a backdrop of 340,000 dialysis patients and 15-year transplant waits, we look at the plan, the gene-edited eGenesis pigs, and how it compares with US clinical cases.
Two nearly identical proteins, one sees red and one sees green, separated by just 30 nanometers. A Japan-led international team determined the dark-state atomic structures of the red and green cone pigments for the first time, revealing that three amino acids decide how we tell red from green. The story behind a long-standing mystery in color vision.
A Kyushu University team showed for the first time that RPS19, long known as an anemia gene, also suppresses cancer by keeping p53 working. The finding hints at repurposing existing MDM2-inhibitor drugs.
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.