Biologists at Indiana University (IU) Bloomington have been locked out of their laboratories for more than a week, after the university suddenly changed locks on its biology building on 7 May. Although university officials restored access to some labs yesterday, many scientists among the dozens originally affected still can't reach their offices or equipment, such as freezers, where crucial reagents are stored. University officials initially told the researchers that the lockdown was done at the request of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is investigating the lab of Roger Innes, a prominent plant microbiologist at IU. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the USDA have been scrutinizing Innes and his research team ever since November 2025, when the FBI arrested postdoctoral fellow Youhuang Xiang for having imported biological samples into the United States from China without declaring them. The USDA has denied ordering the lab lockdown, and a 13 May agency notice sent to Innes that's been seen by Nature prohibits moving samples from the site, but does not request a lab shutdown or work stoppage. Innes and the seven members of his team had to label every biological sample in their lab, including thousands of seeds, to prepare for an official USDA inspection next week, on 19 May. Other labs with shared space have also been asked to label their seed samples....

The human genome contains around 20,000 genes that hold instructions for making working proteins, as most genetic databases now indicate. However, some scientists say there might be thousands more 'dark proteins' with unknown but potentially important roles in cells. An effort announced today in Nature1 gives thousands of these molecules encoded by the human genome an official, new name ' peptideins ' and marks their inclusion in major gene and protein databases used by the life-sciences community. Researchers say the rebranding will bring much-needed attention and effort to working out what different peptideins do in cells. Some have been implicated in diseases including childhood cancers, as well as in basic cellular functions. But what most of them do is unknown, although there is some evidence that many peptideins ' previously called microproteins or non-canonical, 'dark' proteins ' are cellular by-products without a clear function. 'This is a major breakthrough,' says Christoph Dietrich, a bioinformatician at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. 'These microproteins have the potential to really open up a new wave of research.'...

To determine which is faster, natural or artificial selection, one might select examples to compare: while wolves and wild jackals branched off from a common ancestor 3.5 million years ago (natural selection), arctic foxes were domesticated within a couple of decades (artificial selection). The oldest moth species appeared in the fossil record around 200 million years ago (natural selection), while the peppered moth changed from a light-colored to a primarily dark-colored one in just 47 years (artificial selection). But this becomes harder when we consider questions like: Is COVID well-adapted to human hosts' What animal or plant has had as much time to adapt to a new environment as COVID has to humans' Is the persistence of dominant genetic disorders best explained by a lack of purification time (i.e. that humans haven't lived in their current environment long enough to purify out harmful alleles that might have once been adaptive) or something else' Very quickly, two major issues arise. First, 'years' seems an inaccurate unit for expressing evolutionary rates because evolution considers changes between one generation and the next. In absolute terms, dog, moth, and COVID-19 generations occur over different spans of time; yet from the perspective of evolution, all three should probably be treated similarly....

Crystal jellyfish have an eerie beauty: thanks to a natural protein, they emit a faint green glow. For decades, researchers have used that green fluorescent protein and similar molecules to light up the field of biology, tracking what's happening inside cells. Now these ubiquitous tools are getting a glow-up: their quantum properties are being harnessed to make them similar to the fundamental bits of quantum computing. 'These fluorescent proteins that everybody uses as a fluorescent label can actually be turned into a qubit,' says Peter Maurer, a quantum engineer at the University of Chicago in Illinois. The idea 'sounds very science fiction', says Maurer. But the physics isn't new, and the approach has already been shown to work in principle. Fluorescent-protein labels are currently one of the most important tools in biology laboratories around the world. They can monitor the location and activity of proteins, sense conditions inside a cell, check whether drug candidates are targeting the right spots and carry out a range of other tasks. But adding a quantum twist offers up fresh and exciting possibilities, say researchers....