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Developmental endocrinology is a fascinating and mature field that investigates the role of hormones in the growth and development of living organisms. Hormones influence various life processes, from the earliest stages of life to old age. As a study of bodily communication at the cellular and humoral level, it integrates all aspects of health. As such, women’s healthcare and research find a comfortable home here. As a multidisciplinary field, developmental endocrinology draws on knowledge and uses tools from several other areas, including developmental biology, genetics, physiology, and neuroscience. All these approaches unlock new insights into interactions involving growth and development, reproduction, metabolism, and behavior, all as influenced by hormonal action. Developmental endocrinology will continue to shed light on how hormones impact health and disease across the lifespan, and its enormous translational value makes it a crucial area of research that supports the health of women. Despite advances in the field, it is important to acknowledge that there has been a shortfall in investment in women’s health overall, including underinvestment in research in the specific context of women’s reproduction.
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This content will become publicly available on June 1, 2026
Overcoming the “speed limit” in fusion-mediated biological processes
Condensed matter studies have shown that fusion of two lipid membranes requires drastic structural rearrangements and is thus intrinsically slow. Interestingly, all forms of life on Earth use fusion to carry out some of the most fundamental life processes—communication, growth, metabolic homeostasis—that must be accomplished on timescales as short as a fraction of a millisecond. How do living systems beat the prohibitively slow speed limit imposed by membrane fusion? How do they tune the fusion timescale so that it matches a particular biological function? Here it is argued that fusion-mediated life processes as diverse as viral infection, muscle growth, and neuronal communication have all evolved at a common strategy that can be captured through a unifying relationship between the timescale of the process and the strength of the relevant trigger. Activated motion in a bias field along an emergent collective coordinate provides a suitable physical picture. The timescale is set by a reduced quantity defined as the trigger strength in the active state scaled by a system-specific critical parameter. The unified description suggests simple physical principles that organize the complexity of living systems and evolutionarily drive them toward functional behavior.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2232049
- PAR ID:
- 10624057
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Institute of Physics (AIP) Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Low Temperature Physics
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1063-777X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 798 to 803
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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