Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. , Article number: (2026) Cite this article We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply. The Rab11 endosomal recycling pathway is exploited by important respiratory RNA viruses such as IAV and RSV, aiding viral egress from the apical surface of polarized epithelial cells. Late in infection, Rab11-containing vesicles specifically transport viral ribonucleoprotein (vRNP) complexes towards the cell surface before packaging and budding. Rather than employing traditional Rab11-positive recycling endosomes, virus-infected cells generate remodelled Rab11-containing vesicles, as observed during IAV infection. Besides Rab11, no other conserved host co-factors have been identified among these various vRNP trafficking vesicles. Here we discover and confirm myoferlin's association with IAV vRNPs in the cytoplasm and colocalisation with Rab11 during late stages of infection. We also find that this role is conserved in late-stage vRNP trafficking of other viruses, including RSV and SeV. Myoferlin likely recruits the EHD family of proteins, which are involved in endosomal biogenesis, to these unique vRNP trafficking endosomes, highlighting myoferlin's pivotal role in viral replication. LC-MS/MS raw data are available on the PRIDE repository under the accession number PXD052709, while processed data are available in the Supplementary Information. 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Differential cytopathogenesis of respiratory syncytial virus prototypic and clinical isolates in primary pediatric bronchial epithelial cells. Villenave, R. et al. Cytopathogenesis of Sendai virus in well-differentiated primary pediatric bronchial epithelial cells. Download references This research was funded in part by an ERC-STG grant, PTFLU 949506 awarded to D.G.C. This research received infrastructure support from the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's University Belfast. We would like to thank Adam McShane and Dr Dessi Malinova for providing the Atto 647N-conjugated transferrin used in the transferrin uptake experiments. Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, UK Stefano Bonazza, Hannah L. Turkington, Swathi Sukumar, Emily Peate, Hannah L. Coutts, Joshua J. Montgomery, Courtney Hawthorn, Erin M. P. E. Getty, Olivier Touzelet, Judit Barabas, Ultan F. Power & David G. Courtney Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar ; Writing—review & editing: S.B., H.L.T., S.S., E.P., H.L.C., J.J.M., C.H., E.M.P.E.G., O.T., J.B., U.F.P., and D.G.C. ; Funding acquisition: D.G.C. Correspondence to David G. Courtney. The authors declare no competing interests. Nature Communications thanks Toru Takimoto and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Reprints and permissions Bonazza, S., Turkington, H.L., Sukumar, S. et al. Myoferlin is a component of late-stage vRNP trafficking vesicles for enveloped RNA viruses. Nat Commun (2026). Download citation Received: 15 May 2024 Accepted: 30 January 2026 Published: 07 February 2026 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69386-0 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative (Nat Commun) ISSN 2041-1723 (online) © 2026 Springer Nature Limited Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Astronomers say the Milky Way may not contain a supermassive black hole at its center after all. Instead, the galaxy's core could be dominated by an enormous concentration of dark matter that produces the same powerful gravitational effects. This unseen material, which makes up most of the universe's total mass, may be able to explain two very different observations at once. Near the galaxy's center, stars move in fast, chaotic paths just light hours (often used to measure distances within our own solar system) from the core. These stars race around the galactic center at speeds reaching several thousand kilometres per second. The research team proposes that a specific form of dark matter made of fermions, which are lightweight subatomic particles, could instead form an unusual cosmic structure that fits what astronomers observe at the Milky Way's core. According to the model, this fermionic dark matter would naturally form a very dense and compact central core, surrounded by a much larger and more diffuse halo. Together, the core and halo would behave as a single, continuous system. A key piece of evidence comes from new observations by the European Space Agency's GAIA DR3 mission. They argue this strengthens the fermionic dark matter explanation. Standard Cold Dark Matter models predict halos that extend outward with a long power law tail. In contrast, the fermionic model produces a more compact halo with tighter outer edges. "This is the first time a dark matter model has successfully bridged these vastly different scales and various object orbits, including modern rotation curve and central stars data," said study co author Dr. Carlos Argüelles of the Institute of Astrophysics La Plata. The model had already cleared an important hurdle. In an earlier study by Pelle et al. (2024), also published in MNRAS, researchers showed that when an accretion disk shines light onto these dense dark matter cores, the result is a shadow like feature. The dense dark matter core can mimic the shadow because it bends light so strongly, creating a central darkness surrounded by a bright ring." More precise measurements from tools like the GRAVITY interferometer on the Very Large Telescope in Chile, along with searches for photon rings, could provide decisive evidence. Photon rings are expected around true black holes but would not appear in the dark matter core model. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Low-Dose THC May Help Protect the Gut and Liver in HIV One Overlooked Gene May Shape Nearly All Alzheimer's Risk New Treatment Wipes Out Cancer Cells Without Harming Healthy Tissue Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.

What ‘6-7,' demons and The Big Bang Theory tell us about prime numbers Prime numbers have fascinated humankind for generations—here are three of the most intriguing primes For millennia, these numbers, divisible only by 1 and themselves, have fascinated humankind. They guard many secrets, including how they are distributed on the number line, and efforts to identify more and more primes have occupied generations of scholars. Euclid proved some 2,300 years ago that there are infinitely many prime numbers. And yet, some primes seem more interesting than others. I've compiled my personal short list of three extraordinary prime numbers and their stories. If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. A few years after the episode aired in 2010, mathematician Christopher Spicer of what is now Morningside University (then Morningside College) wondered if there were more “Sheldon primes” that shared these properties. In 2015 he worked with two of his then students, Jessie Byrnes and Alyssa Turnquist, to search the first 10 million prime numbers; they found no other Sheldon prime among them. Three years later, in 2019, Spicer and Carl Pomerance, a number theorist at Dartmouth College, showed conclusive proof that the Sheldon prime was unique. First, the researchers showed that there can be no Sheldon prime larger than 10⁴⁵. While 10⁴⁵ is unimaginably large, it is nonetheless a finite value, which means, in principle, a computer can systematically search all prime numbers between 2 and 10⁴⁵ for other Sheldon primes. Of course, today's computers aren't quite powerful enough to tackle that task directly. Anyone who was online in 2025 inevitably stumbled across the “6-7” phenomenon. The meme, pronounced “six-seven,” has no deeper meaning; it is not a code for sharing some message or expressing joy or annoyance. Sometimes it's attributed to a boy celebrating a basketball score; sometimes it's the rap song “Doot Doot (6 7),” by Skrilla. Occasionally people point to the height of basketball player LaMelo Ball: six feet, seven inches. The number 67 is certainly interesting from a mathematical perspective. And 67 is part of what mathematicians call the “lazy caterer's sequence,” which indicates the maximum number of pieces a pancake, pizza or other disk can be divided into with n cuts. But if the third cut is cleverly made, the disk can be cut into seven pieces instead of just six. With 11 cuts, a pancake can be divided into up to 67 pieces. You can easily add 0's between the 1 and the three 6's to this number for more beastly palindromes, such as 1,066,601, 100,666,001, 10,006,660,001, and so on. Only when there are 13 0's between each 1 and the 666 do you arrive at a prime number again. In shorter notation, this Belphegor prime number, which was named after a demon, can be written as 1030 + 666 × 1014 + 1. As it turns out, there are more palindromic primes of this form other than 16,661 and the Belphegor prime with 13 0's. This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission. Manon Bischoff is a theoretical physicist and an editor at Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German-language sister publication of Scientific American. If you enjoyed this article, I'd like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history. I hope it does that for you, too. If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized. In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, can't-miss newsletters, must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world's best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription. There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you'll support us in that mission. Subscribe to Scientific American to learn and share the most exciting discoveries, innovations and ideas shaping our world today.