Most people have right-dominant hearts—which to a doctor or a researcher means they have an artery that extends from the right side of their hearts to supply oxygenated blood to the back side. For some people, this artery, called the posterior descending artery, comes from the left side or from both directions. A study has found that the gene CXCL12 is connected to this artery’s formation and that its directional pattern is set very early in human development.

The findings, reported in the journal Cell, represent a step toward developing “medical revascularization,” a long-term goal of Stanford researchers to create a treatment for blocked or limited-flow arteries by growing new ones to compensate.

“For the first time, we have evidence of a gene that regulates the development of one of the most important types of arteries in the human body,” said Kristy Red-Horse, co-senior author of the study and biology professor in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. “And if we know the development pathways of these important arteries, then we can perhaps regrow them by reintroducing these pathways in a diseased heart.”

Grace Davidson gave birth to a baby girl two years after her sister’s womb was transplanted into her body.

Xueli Bai & team report on the high level of lactate in pancreatic cancer metabolism, which changes tumor immune features by protein lactylation and results in immunotherapy resistance:

The figure shows lactylation labeling of metabolic proteins from paracancerous and tumor tissues.

¹Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine and.

²Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Pancreatic Disease, The First Affiliated Hospital, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.

³MOE Joint International Research Laboratory of Pancreatic Diseases, Hangzhou, China.

A group of diatom species belonging to the Nitzschia genus gave up on photosynthesis and now get their carbon straight from their environment, thanks to a bacterial gene picked up by an ancestor. Gregory Jedd of Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, Singapore, and colleagues report these findings in a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

Unlike most diatoms, which perform photosynthesis to generate carbon compounds, some members of the genus Nitzschia have no chlorophyll and instead consume carbohydrates from seaweed and decaying plant matter. Previously, it was unclear how exactly they made this major lifestyle transition, so researchers sequenced the genome of one species, Nitzschia sing1, to look for clues.

N. sing1’s genome sequence showed that the diatom carries a gene for an enzyme that breaks down alginate, a carbon polymer in the cell walls of brown algae—a group that includes kelp and other common seaweeds. The gene originally came from a marine bacterium, and an ancestor of N. sing1 took up the gene and incorporated it into its genome.