Objective During the winter season of 2022–2023, numerous countries experienced a surge in invasive Streptococcus pyogenes (iGAS) infections. The role of viral coinfections in the post-COVID surge has not been elucidated. We report nation-wide data describing clinical presentation, microbiological characteristics, and associations with viral infection in adults during this period. Methods A multicenter retrospective cohort stu...

The breakdown of plant material fuels soil functioning and biodiversity. Currently, process understanding of global decomposition patterns and the drivers of such patterns are hampered by the lack of coherent large‐scale datasets. We buried 36,000 individual litterbags (tea bags) worldwide and found an overall negative correlation between initial mass‐loss rates and stabilization factors of plant‐derived carbon, using the Tea...

Whether endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) improves functional outcome in patients with large-vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke that do not comply with inclusion criteria of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but that are considered for EVT in clinical practice is uncertain. We aimed to systematically identify patients with LVO stroke underrepresented in RCTs who might benefit from EVT. Following the premises that (i) patients witho...

The structurally disordered N-terminal half of the prion protein (PrP C ) is constitutively released into the extracellular space by an endogenous proteolytic cleavage event. Once liberated, this N1 fragment acts neuroprotective in ischemic conditions and interferes with toxic peptides associated with neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyloid-beta (Aβ) in Alzheimer’s disease. Since analog protective effects of N1 in prion di...

Hybridization can induce transposons to jump into new genomic positions, which may result in their accumulation across the genome. Alternatively, transposon copy numbers may increase through nonallelic (ectopic) homologous recombination in highly repetitive regions of the genome. The relative contribution of transposition bursts versus recombination‐based mechanisms to evolutionary processes remains unclear because studies on...

Homoploid hybridization after secondary contact between related species can lead to mixtures of genotypes which have the potential for rapid adaptation to new environmental conditions. Here, we focus on a case where anthropogenic changes within the past 200 years have allowed the hybridization between two fish species ( Cottus rhenanus and Cottus perifretum ) in the Netherlands. Specifically, we address the question of the dyn...