137 papers
Physiology explores how living systems function, from the microscopic signals inside a single cell to the complex rhythms of an entire organism. This field seeks to understand the mechanical, physical, and biochemical processes that keep life moving, offering crucial insights into health, disease, and the body's remarkable ability to adapt.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category from bioRxiv to make these rapid discoveries accessible to everyone. For each study, we provide both a clear, plain-language explanation and a detailed technical summary, ensuring that whether you are a curious student or a seasoned researcher, you can grasp the latest findings without getting lost in jargon.
The papers listed below represent the newest physiological research recently shared on bioRxiv, ready for you to explore.
This naturalistic mobile EEG study reveals that the bidirectional relationship between sleep and food intake in healthy individuals is primarily driven by the timing of meals and sleep rather than meal quality or composition, showing that later meals delay sleep onset while later sleep shifts subsequent eating patterns, without evidence that large or late meals negatively impact sleep quality.
This paper employs a multiscale Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (DLA) approach to model collagen fiber self-assembly across three scales, analyzing how resulting liver fibrosis alters fluid flow and impacts the propagation and metabolism of both molecular and nanoparticle drug delivery vehicles.
This study establishes the first genome-wide, cell-type-resolved molecular portrait of the cardiac Purkinje fiber in sheep and validates a generalizable strategy for identifying stable, accessible, and cross-species conserved markers, such as contactin-5, to enable precise identification and targeting of these cells in both large-animal models and humans.
This study identifies that peri-Schlemm's canal macrophages secrete VEGFA to compensate for age-related vascular stress and maintain aqueous humor outflow homeostasis, suggesting that enhancing TIE2 signaling could serve as a therapeutic strategy to preserve intraocular pressure regulation in glaucoma.
This study demonstrates that reproductive experience induces permanent increases in maternal body mass and longitudinal growth through mechanisms independent of growth hormone signaling, a finding supported by both mouse models and human data showing that women with isolated growth hormone deficiency are significantly shorter if they have never been pregnant.
This study demonstrates that sustained normobaric hypoxia elicits robust and reproducible acute increases in plasma erythropoietin across repeated sessions in healthy older adults, confirming the continued engagement of hypoxia-responsive pathways and supporting its potential as an intervention for brain health in aging.
This study demonstrates that glucose metabolism via the pentose phosphate pathway elevates cytosolic redox potential in pancreatic alpha cells, thereby preserving PKA activity and ensuring adequate glucagon secretion during hypoglycemia.
This study presents the first quantitative bottom-up model estimating that building one kilogram of human skeletal muscle requires a total metabolizable energy intake of approximately 14,570 kJ (3,481 kcal), accounting for stored tissue energy, synthesis costs, physiological deposition efficiency, maintenance during accretion, and diet-induced thermogenesis.
This study demonstrates that Isl1-expressing neurons in the central amygdala coordinate ingestion by driving bite force through a GABAergic depolarization of the jaw-closing reflex and simultaneously modulating gastric pH and motility via vagal pathways.
This study demonstrates that hydrogen sulfide-mediated vasodilation relies on a signaling pathway where H2S stimulates heme oxygenase-2 to produce carbon monoxide, which subsequently activates TRPV4 and SK/IK channels to induce vascular relaxation.