09/18/2026
Research Article
Many tissues harbor quiescent stem cells that are activated upon injury, yet how local signals regulate this transition remains unclear. Tal Gordon, Ayelet Voskoboynik and co-authors show that there are significant differences in the injury response by a stem cell population depending on region-specific signalling cues in the tunicate Ciona robusta.
Image credit: pbio.3004000
Current Issue August 2026
09/18/2026
Research Article
How do invasive breast and pancreatic cancer cells thrive in collagen-rich environments under nutrient stress? Mona Nazemi, Elena Rainero and colleagues show that collagen I promotes mTORC1 activation and drives the localization of the LAT1-4F2hc amino acid transporter in the membrane, ensuring a sustained intracellular amino acid supply.
Image credit: pbio.3003555
09/16/2026
Update Article
A prior PLOS Biology study engineered bee gut bacteria to sense their microenvironment. In this new study, Audam Chhun, Philipp Engel, Yolanda Schaerli and co-workers engineer a native honey bee symbiont into a living biosensor for arabinose, revealing its spatial bioavailability within the honey bee gut.
Image credit: Bart Zijlstra
09/16/2026
Methods and Resources
Spatial multi-omics reveal tissue organization through diverse molecular and spatial data, yet integrating these multi-omics and histology datasets remains challenging. Jinxia Wang, Yuying Huo, Xiangyu Li and colleagues develop SpaMOAL, a graph contrastive learning framework that enables accurate spatial domain identification by integrating diverse spatial multi-omics data.
Image credit: pbio.3003690
09/15/2026
Research Article
R1-32-like public antibodies exert selective pressure on SARS-CoV-2 virus, favoring spike protein mutations that promote immune escape. Ling Chen, Jun He, Jianhua Yao, Jincun Zhao, Xiaoli Xiong and co-authors characterize four affinity-matured R1-32-like antibodies and show that they acquire tolerance to SARS-CoV-2 antigenic drift via somatic hypermutation.
Image credit: pbio.3003996
09/15/2026
Research Article
Phages can evade bacterial immunity by disrupting antiviral signals such as cyclic tri-adenylate (cA3), triggering the Panoptes defense systems. Sabine Grüschow, Malcolm White and co-authors show that Type II Panoptes detects cA3 loss and activates a CARF-TM effector to disrupt membranes and stop infection. Read also the associated Primer.
Image credit: pbio.3003934
09/15/2026
Unsolved Mystery
Acute infections are linked to cancer progression in experimental systems, but they can elicit anti-tumor immune responses. This Unsolved Mystery highlights gaps in our understanding of how infections differentially skew immune programs during cancer progression.
Image credit: pbio.3003962
09/08/2026
Essay
Seaweed forests are widely viewed as natural climate solutions, yet warming oceans are driving their rapid decline. This Essay reveals that losses are outpacing restoration efforts by orders of magnitude, raising urgent concerns.
Image credit: Jonas Thomar
09/01/2026
Community Page
This Community Page describes the 100 Diatom Genomes Project, which aims to provide a scalable framework for understanding diatom biodiversity, ecology and evolution, and for investigating their use in biotechnology.
Image credit: Oliver Skibbe
08/28/2026
Editorial
Despite recent progress in clinical research into Women’s Health, basic research is still lagging behind. This Editorial calls for a renewed focus on basic physiology research into both sexes to close the gap.
Image credit: pbio.3003578
Aging affects us all, but we still do not know how the process evolves or if we can modulate its pace. This issue of PLOS Biology presents a Collection of articles that explores different aspects of aging, discussing what challenges still need to be overcome.
This PLOS Biology collection aims to shine a light on the many facets of immunometabolism, highlighting how molecular and cellular mechanisms impact diverse tissue and organismal functions and the exciting potential for leveraging immunometabolism for therapeutic interventions.
Recent technological advancements in omics have unveiled the mechanisms governing tumor progression across spatial and temporal scales. This collection reveals the complexities of the crosstalk between cancer cells and the tumor microenvironment.
Neurotechnology offers unprecedented opportunities to treat neural disorders, restore brain function and enhance cognitive abilities. This collection explores the present and possible futures of neurotechnology to improve human health and cognition.
Translating conservation and biodiversity research from the field into the real world is a complex problem. This collection discusses issues around economics, policy, and how to do research that answers questions that decision makers have.
October 5 - 8
Meet Senior Editor Christian Schnell (cschnell@plos.org)
October 6 - 9
Meet Senior Editor Roli Roberts (rroberts@plos.org)
October 19 - 23
Meet Senior Editor Melissa Vazquez Hernandez (mvazquezhernandez@plos.org)
November 12 - 15
Meet Senior Editor Ines Alvarez-Garcia (ialvarez-garcia@plos.org)
November 17 - 20
Meet Magazine Section Senior Editor Joanna Clarke (jclarke@plos.org).
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