SAN ANTONIO — February 23, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute was part of an international team that demonstrated how complex organic molecules (COMs), key chemical precursors to life, could have been incorporated into Jupiter’s Galilean moons during their formation. The team’s findings have resulted in complementary studies published in The Planetary Science Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offering new insights into the potential for life in the Jovian system.

Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most destructive diseases threatening global citrus production, yet how citrus plants respond to the pathogen at the cellular level has remained unclear. 

A new archaeological study reveals how ancient hunter-gatherer groups lived—and survived—more than a thousand years ago in the transition zone between the Pampas and Patagonia in Argentina. The research, carried out by Martínez and colleagues (2025), focuses on the Zoko Andi 1 site (ZA1), located on the lower basin of the Colorado River, a key location for understanding the daily life of these early settlers in the south.

Understanding the ideal surface geometry for coral settlement and early growth was the shared goal of a new research project that is already achieving success.

Over the past several years, monitoring the transmission fitness of emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants has been critical for pandemic forecasting and public health response. However, existing methods, such as basic reproductive number estimation or phylogenetic analysis, often face limitations in directly comparing variants that dominate at different times or in quantifying their relative advantages with robustness to sampling biases. Thus, developing a data-driven, comparative framework to estimate relative variant fitness and visualize evolutionary trends across time and geography is of paramount importance.

Comorbidity—the co-occurrence of multiple diseases in a patient—complicates diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Understanding how diseases connect at a molecular level is crucial, especially in aging populations and complex conditions like COVID-19, where comorbidities worsen outcomes. While network medicine has used the human interactome—a map of protein-protein interactions—to study these links, accurately predicting comorbid pairs remains challenging.

 

For decades, cancer research has highlighted angiogenesis—the growth of new blood vessels—as a critical process that tumors hijack to fuel their growth. Mathematical models, particularly the classic Keller-Segel system, have been instrumental in simulating how endothelial cells (ECs) migrate toward a tumor driven by chemical gradients. However, most models assume a closed, no-flux boundary at the tumor, which may not reflect the "leaky" nature of real tumor vasculature.

In November 2025, a team led by Dr. Yuting Guo at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed how mitochondria-ER contact sites (MERCS) decode proteotoxic stress via calcium nanodomain regulation, activating adaptive mitochondrial responses. Published in Protein & Cell, the work proposes new therapeutic avenues for neurodegenerative diseases.

A simple palladium-catalyzed reaction system of C₂H₆-O₂-CO-H₂O that enables the selective oxidation of ethane to acetate acid, has been reported in a recent paper published in National Science Review. In the refined reaction system with the addition of sulfuric acid, it achieves remarkable performance with high ethane conversion of 15.7% and high acetate acid selectivity of 92.1%. The reaction pathway and mechanism are clearly interpreted through kinetic and spectroscopic analyses and supported by theoretical calculations. This study offers a promising pathway for the upgrading and utilization of natural gas under mild conditions.