Wolfson Foundation

As public health practitioners with experience of working in conflict zones, including in the Gaza Strip, we felt compelled to write this Commentary. The relative silence of the international public health community regarding the ongoing mayhem and genocide by Israel in Gaza has been deafening. In stark contrast, medics from Gaza and the region have responded massively both with pleas for an end to the genocide and also by showing us how they are coping with bare essentials in a largely destroyed health system, at the epicentre of the conflict illustrating their deep commitment to preserving life in the midst of a genocide. The voice of the medical community in the global North must rise and change so that a North-South divide on the value of human life does not evolve into a 21st century norm. This major ethical challenge is not just for Gaza but for the global public health community. We explore the ethical imperatives and immense challenges of rebuilding Gaza's health system postconflict. Since the submission of this paper in May 2025, a ceasefire was called for in Gaza (October 10, 2025), but relentless destruction continues with impunity. Subsequently, the number of deaths, injured and displaced people have increased substantially, but this data could not be included in this commentary. However, the major challenges of rebuilding Gaza's health system will remain at the forefront of any efforts for reconstruction.

Accurately inferring neural circuit connectivity from in vivo recordings is essential for understanding the computations that support behavior and cognition. However, current deep learning approaches are limited by incomplete observability and the lack of ground-truth labels in real experiments. Consequently, models are often trained on synthetic data, which leads to the well-known “model mismatch” problem when simulated dynamics diverge from true neural activity. To overcome these challenges, we present Deep Domain-Adaptive Matching (DeepDAM), a training framework that adaptively matches synthetic and in vivo data domains for neural connectivity inference. Specifically, DeepDAM fine-tunes deep neural networks on a combined dataset of synthetic simulations and unlabeled in vivo recordings, aligning the model’s feature representations with real neural dynamics to mitigate model mismatch. We demonstrate this approach in rodent hippocampal CA1 circuits as a proof-of-concept, achieving near-perfect connectivity inference performance (Matthews correlation coefficient ∼0.97–1.0) and substantially surpassing classical methods (∼0.6–0.7). We further demonstrate robustness across multiple recording conditions within this hippocampal dataset. Additionally, to illustrate its broader applicability, we extend the framework to two distinct systems without altering the core methodology: a stomatogastric microcircuit in Cancer borealis (ex vivo) and single-neuron intracellular recordings in mouse, where DeepDAM significantly improves efficiency and accuracy over standard approaches. By effectively leveraging synthetic data for in vivo and ex vivo analysis, DeepDAM offers a generalizable strategy for overcoming model mismatch and represents a critical step towards data-driven reconstruction of functional neural circuits.

In the mouse embryonic forebrain, developmentally distinct oligodendrocyte progenitor cell populations and their progeny, oligodendrocytes, emerge from three distinct regions in a spatiotemporal gradient from ventral to dorsal. However, the functional importance of this oligodendrocyte developmental heterogeneity is unknown. Using a genetic strategy to ablate dorsally derived oligodendrocyte lineage cells (OLCs), we show here that the areas in which dorsally derived OLCs normally reside in the adult central nervous system become populated and myelinated by OLCs of ventral origin. These ectopic oligodendrocytes (eOLs) have a distinctive gene expression profile as well as subtle myelination abnormalities. The failure of eOLs to fully assume the role of the original dorsally derived cells results in locomotor and cognitive deficits in the adult animal. This study reveals the importance of developmental heterogeneity within the oligodendrocyte lineage and its importance for homeostatic brain function.

SUMMARYWhich patterns of neural activity in sensory cortex are relevant for perceptual decision-making? To address this question, we used simultaneous two-photon calcium imaging and targeted two-photon optogenetics to probe barrel cortex activity during a perceptual discrimination task. Head-fixed mice discriminated bilateral whisker deflections and reported decisions by licking left or right. Two-photon calcium imaging revealed sparse coding of contralateral and ipsilateral whisker input in layer 2/3 while most neurons did not show task-related activity. Activating small groups of pyramidal neurons using two-photon holographic photostimulation evoked a perceptual bias that scaled with the number of neurons photostimulated. This effect was dominated by the optogenetic activation of a small number of non-coding neurons, which did not show sensory or motor-related activity during task performance. Patterned photostimulation also revealed potent recruitment of cortical inhibition during sensory processing, which strongly and preferentially suppressed non-coding neurons. Our results provide a novel perspective on the circuit basis for the sparse coding model of somatosensory processing in which a pool of non-coding neurons, selectively suppressed by strong network inhibition during whisker stimulation, can be recruited to enhance perception.HighlightsAll-optical interrogation of barrel cortex during bilateral whisker discriminationSparse coding of contralateral and ipsilateral whisker informationSelective sensory-evoked inhibition helps ensure sparse codingOptogenetic recruitment of stimulus non-coding neurons can aid perception

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is a significant threat to global health. Tumour suppressor gene TP53 mutations are often associated with a more aggressive form of leukaemia and poorer prognoses. This study conducted whole-exome sequencing of leukaemia patients at various treatment stages, including early diagnosis, relapse, and remission. We identified a missense 72 Arg/Pro (rs1042522) homozygous and heterozygous variant along with indel novel intron variant 376-158delAAAAAAA and 993+409delT in TP53. This mutational profile may serve as a predictor of poor treatment success in the Pakistani Pathan (Pakhtun) Population. Theoretical study explores the virtual repurposing of the FDA-approved drugs as inhibitors against these mutant TP53 cancers. The crystal structure of the TP53 proteins was downloaded from Alpha fold database and PDB and subjected to virtual screening by the DrugRep web server while using an FDA-approved drugs library as a ligands database. Our study revealed that Duvelisib and Robinin herb are the top-ranked inhibitors of MUT TP53 as compared to the reference chemotherapy. Duvelisib exhibited a docking score of −10.6 kcal/mol while Robinin herb scored -10.4 kcal/mol. In conclusion the two drugs deserve further consideration as possible cancer treatment option.

Livy and Varro point to the presence of argentariae in late fourth-century BCE Rome. By the first century BCE, this word had become the standard Latin term for ‘banks’. But modern scholars have been divided over whether these references are indeed to banks, or to some other kind of institution. Therefore, the recent discovery in Rome of a graffito which apparently dates from around 300 and contains the word argentarius (the first-century BCE term for ‘banker’) may have implications for our understanding of the emergence of a Roman banking system.

One of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy is waste. Its labour illustrates Deliege’s paradox of material essentiality combined with social stigma and marginalisation. Between 2015 and 2019 the production and disposal of waste in a small South Indian town was traced through its circuits of industrial production (agro-processing), distribution (of people and of food), consumption, the production of labour (human wastes) and the reproduction of society (health care activity). The material substances of waste, their physical organisation and gendered labour processes are mapped onto each circuit. This enables a discussion of three questions: (a) regulative institutions in the formal and informal waste economy; (b) the gendering of property and work in the capitalist waste economy and (c) the gendered significance of collective action. The privatisation of waste work has caused a deterioration in work conditions throughout the waste economy. Literally and metaphorically, waste work is shit-work in which women experience the worst conditions in both physical and economic terms.