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The latest issue of《Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics Academia Sinica New Series》has been published.

Exosomes are responsible for intercellular communication and are widely valued in medicine and bioindustry. The team led by Dr. Ruey-Hwa Chen, a distinguished research fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, has recently made a major breakthrough in the mechanism of exosome biogenesis. They discovered that cells contain two types of multivesicular bodies (MVBs), MVBs with PTPN23 are directed to lysosomes for degradation, while MVBs with ALIX are delivered to the cell membrane via actin cytoskeleton regulation for exosome secretion. The released exosomes are loaded with tumor-promoting proteins to enhance metastasis and tumor immune evasion. This study has broad impacts on boosting exosome production in bioindustry and devising cancer therapeutic strategy. This study was published in Developmental Cell (IF: 10.7) on April 3, 2025. The first author is Nai Yang Yeat, a Ph.D. student in the Taiwan International Graduate Program in Chemical Biology and Molecular Biophysics. The research was supported by Academia Sinica Investigator Award.

This issue has a total of three research articles. The authors and titles of these articles are as follow

This study analyzed sea turtle sightings from a citizen science project, TurtleSpot Taiwan, to identify Taiwan’s coastal foraging grounds, site fidelity, and threats. Results showed three main green turtle foraging grounds (Liuqiu Island, Kenting, and Green Island), and 43.4% of individuals stayed in the same area for one or more years, with adult-sized turtle residency greater than immature turtles. Moreover, 10% of the sightings involved turtles with fishing line entanglement, ingested debris, missing flippers, or injuries, indicating a significant level of human-turtle disturbance. The project also revealed transboundary movements of flipper-tagged individuals and demonstrated the value of citizen science in long-term ecological monitoring and marine biodiversity conservation. This research was published on March 24, 2025, in the BMC Ecology and Evolution, with Dr. Jia-Ling Feng, a PhD candidate from the TIGP Biodiversity Program at Academia Sinica, as the first author. The research team also included Dr. Yo-Ko Nozawa and Dr. Chih-Wei Ho, postdoctoral researchers. The citizen science project collaborators included several members of the Turtle Spot Taiwan. The study was jointly supported by Academia Sinica, the Turtle Spot Taiwan, and the Ocean Conservation Administration, Ocean Affairs council.

Cancer, a major global killer, claimed 9.7 million lives among 20 million new cases in 2022, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Led by Dr. Chi-Huey Wong and Dr. Che Ma at Academia Sinica’s Genomics Research Center, the researchersexplore β-1,3-galactosyltransferase 5 (β3GalT5). This enzyme drives production of cancer-linked glycans (e.g., Globo-H), fueling tumor growth and metastasis—making it a prime therapeutic target. Using X-ray crystallography, the team mapped β3GalT5’s structure and mechanism, revealing its broad substrate specificity. They engineered an S66A variant, boosting glycan synthesis efficiency tenfold, aiding vaccine production for cancers like triple-negative breast cancer. Two studies were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (March 2025) and were funded by Academia Sinica.

Neutrinos only have weak couplings with matter – it requires on average hundreds of light years of water to interact once. Detection and studies of neutrinos are therefore formidable experimental challenges. Nuclear reactors provide an intense source of low energy neutrinos, allowing the studies of neutrino elastic scattering with the atomic nucleus at full quantum-mechanical coherency. The TEXONO experiment led by Dr. Henry Tsz King Wong at the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, has proposed in 2005 and since been pursuing this research program with the Kuo-Sheng Reactor Neutrino Laboratory at the Second Nuclear Power Station in Taiwan, pioneering advances in several generations of novel germanium ionization detectors with increasing sensitivities at lower energy. No excesses of neutrino events were observed from data taken prior to the Reactor decommissioning in 2023. New upper limit of 4.7 times the Standard Model predicted cross-sections was placed. The research was published on March 27, 2025 in Physical Review Letters, sets the stage of imminent positive observation with the next-generation detectors, and opens the windows of sensitive searches of new physics.

The newest issue of Academia Economic Papers has been published

The newest issue of Taiwan Economic Forecast and Policy has been published.

Bacteria in polymicrobial environments face threats from phages, competing bacteria, and predatory eukaryotes. While bacterial defenses protect against these threats, their tradeoffs remain underexplored. Here, we investigated the fitness costs of phage resistance in Salmonella enterica, showing that phage-resistant variants suffer competitive disadvantages when co-cultured with rival bacteria. These strains exhibit lipopolysaccharide (LPS) deficiencies, increasing their susceptibility to type VI secretion system (T6SS)-mediated attacks. Mutational analysis and atomic force microscopy revealed that the long O-antigen of LPS acts as a protective shield against T6SS intoxication. Additionally, phages with LPS-targeting endoglycosidases can cleave the O-antigen, independently weakening bacterial competitiveness. Our findings highlight two distinct mechanisms by which phage-driven LPS modifications influence bacterial interactions, revealing tradeoffs that shape microbial competition in polymicrobial communities. This study was published in The EMBO Journal on March 10, 2025. The first authors are Chia-En Tsai, a Ph.D. candidate in the TIGP-MCB program, and Feng-Qi Wang, a master-level research assistant in the Ting lab. This work was conducted in collaboration with Research Fellow, Ing-Shouh Hwang, from the Institute of Physics. The research was funded by the Academia Sinica Career Development Award and the National Science and Technology Council's 2030 Cross-Generation Young Scholars Program – Excellent Young Scholars.

Viruses are widespread infectious agents, but we know little about their origin times due to the general absence of fossil records. The research team of Chuan Ku, Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology, developed a host-calibrated dating method and inferred the evolutionary timescale of giant viruses (Nucleocytoviricota), which cause important diseases (e.g., Mpox, African swine fever) and infect various eukaryotes. The team found that giant viruses are much younger than eukaryotes, originated in an era with significantly higher oxygen levels than before (consistent with their high demand for mitochondria and energy), and spread across all major lineages of eukaryotes through extensive host shifts within the last hundreds of millions of years. This study was published on February 20, 2025 in Molecular Biology and Evolution, and was funded by Academia Sinica Career Development Award and National Science and Technology Council. The first author is Hwee Sze Tee, a postdoctoral research fellow.

A research team led by Dr. Yin-Ru Chiang from the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica has isolated and characterized a novel anaerobic bacterium from the intestine of the giant mudskipper. This bacterium can convert testosterone (the primary male hormone in humans) into estrogen in an oxygen-free environment. This discovery challenges the traditional scientific understanding that estrogen production requires oxygen and aromatase (a monooxygenase unique to vertebrates). Genomic analysis reveals that this bacterium possesses a special gene cluster that produces a novel methyltransferase, generating estrogen by removing the methyl group between the A/B rings of testosterone. This anaerobic bacterium uses one of the Earth's earliest metabolic pathways (namely Wood-Ljungdahl pathway) to utilize the obtained methyl groups for energy production and cell construction. This new discovery in microbial metabolism suggests that anaerobic bacteria may have possessed the ability to produce estrogen early in Earth's evolutionary history. The research also partially explains why some invertebrates have estrogen in their bodies despite lacking aromatase. Furthermore, the identification of estrogen-producing bacteria in animal guts opens new avenues for potential microbiome-based hypoestrogenism therapies to supplement estrogen in menopausal or ovariectomized females, offering an innovative alternative to current hormone replacement strategies. Future research will prioritize investigating whether anaerobic estrogenesis and corresponding bacteria occur in the intestines of humans and other mammals. The research findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on March 08, 2025.

The newest issue of Disquisitions on the Past & Present has been published by the Institute of History and Philology. Articles in this issue (Vol. 43) include