Culture

Dermal fibroblasts are specialized cells deep in the skin that generate connective tissue and help the skin recover from injury. Some fibroblasts have the ability to convert into fat cells that reside under the dermis, giving the skin a plump, youthful look and producing a peptide that plays a critical role in fighting infections.

In a study published in Immunity on December 26, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers and colleagues show how fibroblasts develop into fat cells and identify the pathway that causes this process to cease as people age.

"We have discovered how the skin loses the ability to form fat during aging," said Richard Gallo, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Dermatology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and senior author on study. "Loss of the ability of fibroblasts to convert into fat affects how the skin fights infections and will influence how the skin looks during aging."

Don't reach for the donuts. Gaining weight isn't the path to converting dermal fibroblasts into fat cells since obesity also interferes with the ability to fight infections. Instead, a protein that controls many cellular functions, called transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β), stops dermal fibroblasts from converting into fat cells and prevents the cells from producing the antimicrobial peptide cathelicidin, which helps protect against bacterial infections, reported researchers.

"Babies have a lot of this type of fat under the skin, making their skin inherently good at fighting some types of infections. Aged dermal fibroblasts lose this ability and the capacity to form fat under the skin," said Gallo. "Skin with a layer of fat under it looks more youthful. When we age, the appearance of the skin has a lot to do with the loss of fat."

In mouse models, researchers used chemical blockers to inhibit the TGF-β pathway, causing the skin to revert back to a younger function and allowing dermal fibroblasts to convert into fat cells. Turning off the pathway in mice by genetic techniques had the same result.

Understanding the biological process that leads to an age-dependent loss of these specialized fat cells could be used to help the skin fight infections like Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) -- a pathogenic bacteria that is the leading cause of infections of the skin and heart and a major factor in worsening diseases, like eczema. When S. aureus becomes antibiotic resistant it is known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, which is a leading cause of death resulting from infection in the United States.

The long term goals and benefits of this research are to understand the infant immune system, said Gallo. The results may also help understand what goes wrong in other diseases like obesity, diabetes and autoimmune diseases.

MINNEAPOLIS - Taking antidepressants for depression, having post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety diagnosed by a doctor are risk factors for a disruptive and sometimes violent sleep disorder called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder, according to a study published in the December 26, 2018, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study also found men are more likely to have the disorder.

REM sleep is the dream state of sleep. During normal REM sleep, your brain sends signals to prevent your muscles from moving. However, for people with REM sleep behavior disorder, those signals are disrupted. A person may act out violent or action-filled dreams by yelling, flailing their arms, punching or kicking, to the point of harming themselves or a sleep partner.

"While much is still unknown about REM sleep behavior disorder, it can be caused by medications or it may be an early sign of another neurologic condition like Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies or multiple system atrophy," said study author Ronald Postuma, MD, MSc, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "Identifying lifestyle and personal risk factors linked to this sleep disorder may lead to finding ways to reduce the chances of developing it."

The study looked at 30,097 people with an average age of 63. Researchers screened participants for a variety of health conditions and asked about lifestyle, behavior, social, economic and psychological factors.

In addition, every participant was asked, "Have you ever been told, or suspected yourself, that you seem to act out your dreams while asleep?"

Researchers then identified 958 people, or 3.2 percent, with possible REM sleep behavior disorder, after excluding participants with Parkinson's disease, dementia, Alzheimer's disease or sleep apnea.

Researchers found those with the disorder were over two-and-a-half times as likely to report taking antidepressants to treat depression, with 13 percent of those with the disorder taking them compared to 6 percent of those without the disorder. People with the disorder were also two-and-a-half times as likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder. They were twice as likely to have mental illness, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to have psychological distress.

Other findings were that men were twice as likely as women to have possible REM sleep behavior disorder; 59 percent of those with the disorder were male, compared to 42 percent of those without the disorder. People with possible REM sleep behavior disorder were 25 percent more likely than those without the disorder to be moderate to heavy drinkers, with 19 percent of those with the disorder moderate to heavy drinkers compared to 14 percent of those without the disorder. They had slightly less education, an average of 13.2 years of education compared to an average of 13.6 years for those without the disorder. They also had lower income and were more likely to have smoked.

"Our research does not show that these risk factors cause REM sleep behavior disorder, it only shows they are linked," said Postuma. "Our hope is that our findings will help guide future research, especially because REM sleep behavior disorder is such a strong sign of future neurodegenerative disease. The more we understand about REM sleep behavior disorder, the better positioned we will be to eventually prevent neurologic conditions like Parkinson's disease."

A limitation of the study was that 96 percent of participants were white, meaning the results may not apply to people of other ethnic backgrounds.

Washington, DC - Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges, including figuring out how to be part of a new community. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants.

The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination," says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. "This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one's self-concept."

To detect bias, the researchers ran a trilogy of hypothetical transportation accidents: trolley, plane dilemma, and lifeboat. In each variation of these moral dilemmas, participants were asked to imagine that men's lives were at risk. The men that could be saved or sacrificed might be white with a name like "Dan" or "Alex," an immigrant with the name "Mark" or "Adam," or an immigrant with a name associated with China or the Middle East, such as "Qiu," "Jiang," or "Ahmed."

The researchers focused most of their effort on using white participants, to more clearly delineate ingroups and outgroups in their research

In the trolley scenario, people tended to sacrifice the one to save the many, which is a common finding. However, white participants were more likely to sacrifice an immigrant with their original name than someone white or an immigrant with an anglicized name.

Their second study involved a plane crash scenario and possibly leaving someone behind with a broken leg. The white men continued to show similar bias patterns, but the women did not.

In the final scenario, throwing a life preserver to a man named Muhammad and risking the lives of everyone on board a lifeboat, brought similar results. However, for participants who scored as favorable towards multicultural groups, being an immigrant named "John" actually improved ones' chances for survival. But for participants who scored as favorable towards assimilating minority groups, only being white increased the chance to be saved. Zhao says they've seen this bias before in some of their other research.

The authors stress that encouraging people to change their name is not the desired outcome of this research. What's needed, says Zhao, is "the whole society should work together to improve the system to promote diversity and inclusion."

To that end, Zhao and colleagues are working on intervention studies in which to train people to recognize and pronounce common ethnic names and phonemes, hopefully improving intergroup communication and reducing the need for Anglicizing ethnic names.

For the first time, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, Portugal, have shown that neuronal cell death in Alzheimer's disease (AD) may actually not be a bad thing - on the contrary, it may be the result of a cell quality control mechanism trying to protect the brain from the accumulation of malfunctioning neurons. Their results, which were obtained using fruit flies that had been genetically modified to mimic the symptoms of human AD, were published in the journal Cell Reports.

The cell quality control mechanism at play is called cell competition. It leads to the selection of the fittest cells in a tissue by enabling a "fitness comparison" between each cell and its neighbors - with the fitter cells then triggering the suicide of less fit ones.

It has been recently shown that cell competition is a normal, powerful anti-aging mechanism in the body in general and in the brain in particular. "In 2015, we discovered that clearing unfit cells from a tissue was a very important anti-aging mechanism to preserve organ function, says Eduardo Moreno, principal investigator of the Cell Fitness lab at the CCU.

His team reasoned that, if these fitness comparisons happened in normal aging, they could also be involved in neurodegenerative diseases associated with accelerated aging, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease or Huntington's disease, Moreno explains. "This had never been tested", he says. In collaboration with Christa Rhiner's Stem Cells and Regeneration lab at the CCU, they started by testing AD hallmarks in fruit fly models of the disease.

For this, they bred fruit flies that had been genetically manipulated to express in their brain the human amyloid-beta protein, that forms aggregates in the brains of AD patients. The formation of amyloid-β aggregates in the brain is a crucial step in the development of AD.

The transgenic flies displayed symptoms and pathologies similar to those of AD patients: "they showed loss of long-term memory, accelerated aging of the brain and motor coordination problems, all of which got worse with age", specifies Christa Rhiner, whose team studied the cognitive and motor functions of the flies.

The first thing the scientists wanted to do was to see whether in these flies, neuronal death was indeed activated by the process of fitness comparison - in other words, "that the neurons were not dying on their own but being killed by fitter neighbors", Moreno points out.

"When we started, the current view was that neuronal death must be always detrimental. And much to our surprise, we found that neuronal death actually counteracts the disease", says Dina Coelho, first author of the study. What happened was that when she blocked neuronal death in the flies' brain, the insects developed even worse memory problems, worse motor coordination problems, died earlier and their brain degenerated faster.

However, when she boosted the fitness comparison process, thus accelerating the death of unfit neurons, the flies expressing the AD-associated amyloid-beta proteins showed an impressive recovery. "The flies almost behaved like normal flies with regard to memory formation, locomotive behavior and learning", says Rhiner, and this at a time point where the AD flies were already strongly affected.

This means that the anti-aging mechanism in question keeps working well in Alzheimer's disease and shows that, in fact, "the neuronal death protects the brain from more widespread damage and therefore the neuronal loss is not what is bad, it is worse not to let those neurons die", Moreno emphasizes. "Our most important finding is that we have probably been thinking the wrong way about Alzheimer's disease. Our results suggest that neuronal death is beneficial because it removes neurons that are affected by noxious beta-amyloid aggregates from brain circuits, and having those dysfunctional neurons is worse than losing them" Moreno concludes.

The results could have crucial therapeutical implications. "Some molecules have already been identified as potential inhibitors of cell suicide, and some experimental drugs exist, and are being tested which inhibit those inhibitors of cell death, therefore accelerating neuronal death", says Moreno.

But he cautions: "this work has been done in fruit flies". It will be necessary to see, whether these results on neuronal death in Alzheimer's also hold true for humans.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Humans can get by in the most basic of shelters, can scratch together a meal from the most humble of ingredients. But we can't survive without clean water. And in places where water is scarce--the world's deserts, for example--getting water to people requires feats of engineering and irrigation that can be cumbersome and expensive.

A pair of new studies from researchers at The Ohio State University offers a possible solution, inspired by nature.

"We thought: 'How can we gather water from the ambient air around us?'" said Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. "And so, we looked to the things in nature that already do that: the cactus, the beetle, desert grasses."

Their findings were published Dec. 24 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The works were co-authored with Ohio State Ph.D. student Dev Gurera and with Ohio State engineering researcher Dong Song.

Bhushan's work focuses on finding nature-inspired solutions to societal problems. In this case, his research team looked to the desert to find life that survives despite limited access to water.

The cactus, beetle and desert grasses all collect water condensed from nighttime fog, gathering droplets from the air and filtering them to roots or reservoirs, providing enough hydration to survive.

Drops of water collect on wax-free, water-repellant bumps on a beetle's back, then slide toward the beetle's mouth on the flat surface between the bumps. Desert grasses collect water at their tips, then channel the water toward their root systems via channels in each blade. A cactus collects water on its barbed tips before guiding droplets down conical spines to the base of the plant.

Bhushan's team studied each of these living things and realized they could build a similar--albeit larger--system to allow humans to pull water from nighttime fog or condensation.

They started studying the ways by which different surfaces might collect water, and which surfaces might be the most efficient. Using 3D printers, they built surfaces with bumps and barbs, then created enclosed, foggy environments using a commercial humidifier to see which system gathered the most water.

They learned that conical shapes gather more water than do cylindrical shapes--"which made sense, given what we know about the cactus," Bhushan said. The reason that happens, he said, is because of a physics phenomenon called the Laplace pressure gradient. Water gathers at the tip of the cone, then flows down the cone's slope to the bottom, where a reservoir is waiting.

Grooved surfaces moved water more quickly than ungrooved surfaces--"which seems obvious in retrospect, because of what we know about grass," Bhushan said. In the research team's experiments, grooved surfaces gathered about twice as much water as ungrooved surfaces.

The materials the cones were made out of mattered, too. Hydrophilic surfaces--those that allowed water to bead up rather than absorbing it--gathered the most water.

"The beetle's surface material is heterogeneous, with hydrophilic spots surrounded by hydrophobic regions, which allows water to flow more easily to the beetle's mouth," Bhushan explained.

The research team also experimented on a structure that included multiple cones, and learned that more water accumulated when water droplets could coalesce between cones that were one or two millimeters apart. The team is continuing those experiments, Bhushan said.

The work so far has been done on a laboratory-only level, but Bhushan envisions the work scaled up, with structures in the desert that could gather water from fog or condensation. That water, he thinks, could supplement water from public systems or wells, either on a house-by-house basis, or on a community-wide basis.

There is precedent for the idea: In areas around the world, including the Atacama Desert in Chile, large nets capture water from fog and collect it in reservoirs for farmers and others to use. Those nets might not be the most efficient way of harnessing water from the air, Bhushan believes.

"Water supply is a critically important issue, especially for people of the most arid parts of the world," Bhushan said. "By using bio-inspired technologies, we can help address the challenge of providing clean water to people around the globe, in as efficient a way as possible."

Fathers as well as mothers can experience post-natal depression - and it is linked to emotional problems for their teenage daughters, new research has found.

Almost one in 20 new fathers suffered depression in the weeks after their child was born, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry and co-authored by Professor Paul Ramchandani of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

The research, based on a sample of more than 3,000 families in Bristol, UK, also identified a link between post-natal depression in men and depression in their daughters as they reached adulthood.

At 18, girls whose fathers had experienced depression after their birth were themselves at greater risk of the condition, researchers found. The "small but significant" increased risk applied only to daughters; sons were not affected.

One reason for this "handing on" effect could be that post-natal depression in fathers is sometimes linked with an increased level of maternal depression, researchers concluded. This might mean that family life is more disrupted for everyone with higher levels of stress for all. It may also be that the having one or both parents with depression affects the way in which parents interact with their children.

It is unclear why girls may be more affected at this age. There may be links to specific aspects of father-daughter relationships as girls go through adolescence, the research team suggests.

The findings are important because they have implications for perinatal services, which have traditionally considered post-natal depression to be a potential problem for mothers only, the study's authors say. They highlight the importance of recognising and treating depression in fathers during the postnatal period, and call on health professionals to consider both parents when one reports depression.

Professor Ramchandani said: "Research from this study of families in Bristol has already shown that fathers can experience depression in the postnatal period as well as mothers. What is new in this paper is that we were able to follow up the young people from birth through to the age of 18, when they were interviewed about their own experience of depression. Those young people whose fathers had been depressed back when they were born had an increased risk of depression at age 18 years.

"We were also able to look at some of the ways in which depression in fathers might have affected children. It appears that depression in fathers is linked with an increased level of stress in the whole family, and that this might be one way in which offspring may be affected.

"Whilst many children will not be affected by parental depression in this way, the findings of this study highlight the importance of providing appropriate help to fathers, as well as mothers, who may experience depression."

Paternal depression campaigner Mark Williams, who set up the lobby group Fathers Reaching Out and campaigns for mental health screening for new fathers as well as mothers, said: "Fathers' Postnatal Depression impacts on the whole family when unsupported, often resulting in fathers using negative coping skills, avoiding situations and often feeling anger.

"In my experience of working with families, it's sometimes only the father who is suffering in silence but sadly very few are asked about their mental health after becoming a parent."

Earlier research by the same academic team found post-natal depression in fathers was linked to behavioural and emotional problems in their children at three and a half and seven. The effect seems to happen because paternal depression may negatively affect the way a family functions - causing conflict between partners and prompting maternal depression.

The new paper, Association of Maternal and Paternal Depression in the Postnatal Period with Offspring Depression at Age 18 Years, was based on the experiences of 3,176 father and child pairs drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children - an ongoing cohort study launched in 1991.

A new Tel Aviv University study describes a process to make bioplastic polymers that don't require land or fresh water -- resources that are scarce in much of the world. The polymer is derived from microorganisms that feed on seaweed. It is biodegradable, produces zero toxic waste and recycles into organic waste.

The invention was the fruit of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU's Porter School of Environmental and Earth Sciences and Prof. Michael Gozin of TAU's School of Chemistry. Their research was recently published in the journal Bioresource Technology.

According to the United Nations, plastic accounts for up to 90 percent of all the pollutants in our oceans, yet there are few comparable, environmentally friendly alternatives to the material.

"Plastics take hundreds of years to decay. So bottles, packaging and bags create plastic 'continents' in the oceans, endanger animals and pollute the environment," says Dr. Golberg. "Plastic is also produced from petroleum products, which has an industrial process that releases chemical contaminants as a byproduct.

"A partial solution to the plastic epidemic is bioplastics, which don't use petroleum and degrade quickly. But bioplastics also have an environmental price: To grow the plants or the bacteria to make the plastic requires fertile soil and fresh water, which many countries, including Israel, don't have.

"Our new process produces 'plastic' from marine microorganisms that completely recycle into organic waste."

The researchers harnessed microorganisms that feed on seaweed to produce a bioplastic polymer called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA). "Our raw material was multicellular seaweed, cultivated in the sea," Dr. Golberg says. "These algae were eaten by single-celled microorganisms, which also grow in very salty water and produce a polymer that can be used to make bioplastic.

"There are already factories that produce this type of bioplastic in commercial quantities, but they use plants that require agricultural land and fresh water. The process we propose will enable countries with a shortage of fresh water, such as Israel, China and India, to switch from petroleum-derived plastics to biodegradable plastics."

According to Dr. Golberg, the new study could revolutionize the world's efforts to clean the oceans, without affecting arable land and without using fresh water. "Plastic from fossil sources is one of the most polluting factors in the oceans," he says. "We have proved it is possible to produce bioplastic completely based on marine resources in a process that is friendly both to the environment and to its residents.

"We are now conducting basic research to find the best bacteria and algae that would be most suitable for producing polymers for bioplastics with different properties," he concludes.

New York, NY (December 24, 2018) - Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and The Rockefeller University have discovered a new use for a long-standing computational concept known as "blacklisting," which is commonly employed as a form of access or spam control, blocking unwanted files and messages. Using blacklisting as a filter to single out genetic variations in patient genomes and exomes that do not cause illness, researchers have successfully streamlined the identification of genetic drivers of disease. This method is described in the December 2018 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.

In whole-exome sequencing--the process of identifying variations in protein-coding genes to determine the genetic underpinnings of any given illness--tens of thousands of genetic variants are identified, but only a few are deemed pathogenic, meaning disease-causing. Traditionally, in order to identify pathogenic mutations, scientists must sift through considerable amounts of data and remove genetic variants that are unlikely to cause disease, slowing down the process of genetic analysis and, subsequently, clinical treatment. To address this cumbersome process, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine and The Rockefeller University investigated and subsequently identified a large portion of the non-pathogenic genetic variants, from which the "blacklist" was generated. Following this, they developed a program, known as ReFiNE, and a corresponding webserver that other researchers can use to automate the creation of their own blacklists.

"Until now, there has been no viable published method for filtering out non-pathogenic variants that are common in human genomes and absent from current genomic databases," said Yuval Itan, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine and senior author of the publication. "Using the blacklist, researchers will now be able to remove genetic 'noise' and focus on true disease-causing mutations."

Noting the data-centric society we live in, Dr. Yuval says efficiency is key. His hope is that this contemporary tool can be used by clinicians, researchers, and scientists across the globe to conduct genetic analysis more quickly and accurately, helping to accelerate the pace of genomic medicine.

The paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

Meteor burst communication is based on using meteors as cryptography assistants. Meteor trails reflect radio waves, which makes them suitable for radio transmissions at distances of up to 2,000 kilometers. Unpredictable nature of meteors makes pose a significant hindrance for signal interception.

Associate Professor Amir Sulimov explains, "Each meteor trail forms a kind of a shadow resembling an ellipse on the Earth's surface. All communication stations within that area can tune in on the channel. Meteor trails help determine a specific area where potential malefactors can try to intercept the signal."

Traditionally, it was theorized that the longest radius of interception lies along the radio line between legal points A and D, while the shortest radius, conversely, is perpendicular to that axis.

"In our research, we are the first to show that this trend may not be persistent in meteor systems, especially on short lines of less than 500 km. Because of the random nature of meteor arrivals, orientations of the large and small radiuses can differ significantly. And the degree of that difference is also variating, depending on seasonal and daily meteor cycles. Such regularities make meteor communication interception quite difficult.

"Experiments and models showed that the practical possibility of intercepting a meteor channel disappears at 30 kilometer distances, but theoretical chances persist at distances of up 300 km along small radiuses and 850 kilometers along large radiuses," concludes Sulimov.

The obtained data may be used for meteor cryptography. Further research should show the distances at which partial interception of cryptographic keys is feasible.

The relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain anatomy is mostly stable from childhood to early adulthood, according to a longitudinal neuroimaging study of more than 600 healthy young people published in JNeurosci. This finding draws attention to the importance of preschool life as a period when associations between SES and brain organization may first develop.

Cassidy McDermott, Armin Raznahan, and colleagues analyzed brain scans of the same individuals collected over time between five and 25 years of age. Comparing this data to parental education and occupation and each participants' intelligence quotient (IQ) allowed the researchers to demonstrate positive associations between SES and the size and surface area of brain regions involved in cognitive functions such as learning, language, and emotions. In particular, this is the first study to associate greater childhood SES with larger volumes of two subcortical regions - the thalamus and striatum - thereby extending previous SES research that has focused on its relationship to the cortex. Finally, the researchers identify brain regions underlying the relationship between SES and IQ. A better understanding of these relationships could clarify the processes by which SES becomes associated with a range of life outcomes, and ultimately inform efforts to minimize SES-related variation in health and achievement.

Galanin-like peptide (GALP) is a short peptide made up of 60 amino acid residues. This sequence is homologous across several species. The hypothalamic arcuate nucleus is the place where GALP is produced. GALP has diverse physiological effects such as the regulation of feeding, energy metabolism, and reproductive behavior. Neurons that contain GALP also express leptin receptors; at the same time these neurons form a network in the hypothalamus and these contain various amounts of peptides that regulate their feeding behavior.

New research has shown that, GALP consists of anti-obesity action when it comes to its role in consumption of food and nutrition. After the administration of GALP into the lateral ventricle a decline in the respiratory quotient was also found. It is inferred that that because of GALP, lipid metabolism could be accelerated. This is a recently discovered physiological action for this peptide.

In this review, recent research about how GALP regulates feeding and energy metabolism has been summarized. Attention on the regulation mechanism of lipid metabolism that takes place in peripheral tissues through the autonomic nervous system is also given. The effectiveness of the nasal administration of GALP is also presented from a perspective of basic research and clinical application.

Adaptations to environmental change are the most important asset for the persistence of any plant or animal species. This is usually achieved through genetic mutation and selection, a slow process driven by chance. Faster and more targeted are so called epigenetic modifications. They do not alter the genetic code but promote specialisations during cell maturation. A new study carried out by scientists from the Leibniz-IZW in Germany shows for wild guinea pigs that epigenetic modifications specific to individual environmental factors are passed on to the next generation. The study is published in the scientific journal Genes.

The team of researchers around Alexandra Weyrich from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin, Germany, studied two groups of male wild guinea pigs. One group was fed a protein-reduced diet for two months, the other group was exposed to an increase in ambient temperature of ten degrees (Celsius) for the same period. The animals responded to these changes through epigenetic modifications at the cellular level. "Epigenetic modifications have been studied for some time. What we were after was to determine, whether these modifications are passed on to the next generation of guinea pigs and whether fathers played a role in this", says Weyrich. The team studied offspring sired by males prior to their exposure to the environmental change and those sired by these males after the two-month experimental period - each time sired with the same females who were not exposed to these changes in conditions. The comparison revealed significant differences in the the methylation pattern of the offsprings' DNA - for the scientists documentation that "inheriting" parental epigenetic responses to environmental changes is possible and that males can play an important role in these processes. "We were most interested in comparing the two different groups", Weyrich adds. "Our results show for the first time that the epigenetic response to environmental changes comprises two parts: A general part, which reflects the fact that there was some environmental change - independent of the specific factor of change. And a very specific part that is the specific response to a particular environmental change."

Rapid environmental change in the context of man-made global change, including climate change, for example rising temperatures or changes in resource availability and food supply, pose significant challenges to plants and animals. For some species these challenges can become existential threats. Corals for instance are highly temperature-sensitive and the reproduction of some frog and crocodile species are closely linked to specific temperature constellations. With the radical environmental changes currently underway, species that show a high adaptability have an advantage. The well-known mechanism of mutation and selection, however, may be too slow to cope with rapid changes. It relies on accidental changes to the genetic code which may or may not provide an advantage to survival and reproduction (natural selection). So-called epigenetic modifications can translate environmental changes much faster provided the genome already contains the necessary flexibility for an adequate response. During epigenetic modifications, the genetic code is not altered but specific genes are activated and strengthened or shut down through several chemical processes. These processes are also common during cell maturation, when cells specialise to differentiate into skin, bone or liver cells.

"One of the most important epigenetic modifications is the so-called DNA methylation", Weyrich explains. The scientists compared methylation patterns of the offspring sired before and after environmental conditions experienced by the fathers, focsuing on sections of the genome that showed differential methylation (differentially methylated regions, DMRs). Specific responses both to rising temperatures and to the altered diet could be traced to the methylation patterns in the genomes of the offspring. "Previously, most epigenetic studies were carried out using populations of laboratory animals that have been living under artificial conditions for generations. Studies on wild species are still rare", Weyrich says. "Our comparative study design fostered these new insights." In order to understand in more detail how epigenetic modifications in the context of environmental changes are passed on to future generations, further studies in this field are required.

ANN ARBOR--A new University of Michigan study of interbreeding between two species of howler monkeys in Mexico is yielding insights into the forces that drive the evolution of new species.

How do new species emerge in nature? One common but overly simplified version of the story goes like this: A population of animals or plants becomes geographically isolated--by a river that changes course or a mountain range that rises up, for example--and the two separated groups accumulate genetic differences over time as they adapt to their environments in isolation.

Eventually, the DNA of the two groups is so different that the two populations are considered distinct species. Voilà, speciation has occurred.

In reality, the process is much more complex than that. While geographic isolation can start the speciation process, evolutionary biologists believe that other forces--including various forms of natural selection--can help to complete it.

The new U-M study provides rare empirical evidence that multiple forms of natural selection, including a contentious one called reinforcement, are helping to complete the speciation process in a natural howler monkey "hybrid zone," a place where the two species coexist and occasionally interbreed in a process called hybridization.

The study is scheduled for online publication Dec. 22 in the journal Molecular Ecology. In the paper, the researchers use the primate hybrid zone to identify parts of the genome that are likely to contain genes underlying speciation and to test for signals of the selection forces that shaped them.

"We observed patterns in the genetic data suggesting that hybridization is playing a direct role in completing the speciation process by enhancing genetic differences between species," said U-M doctoral candidate Marcella Baiz, the study's first author. The other authors are Liliana Cortés-Ortiz and Priscilla Tucker of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

"We found a signal for multiple forms of natural selection driving species differences, including reinforcement, a process that has been highly debated," Baiz said. "This result is particularly notable because empirical evidence for reinforcement is extremely rare, especially genetic evidence."

The two species at the center of the study, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys, diverged about 3 million years ago and lived apart until relatively recently when they came into contact again--perhaps within the last 10,000 years--in a roughly 12-mile-wide hybrid zone in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco.

A species was once defined as a group of actually or potentially interbreeding individuals that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. The concept of reproductive isolation is key to that definition and means that despite any hybridization, true species maintain their uniqueness.

However, the modern view of what a species is does not require full reproductive isolation, and hybridization has been discovered to be quite common in nature.

At the howler monkey hybrid zone in Mexico where U-M's Cortés-Ortiz and her colleagues have worked for about two decades, analysis of DNA samples has confirmed that black and mantled howler monkeys interbreed and produce hybrid offspring. The fact that hybridization is occurring between the two groups means that reproductive isolation is incomplete.

Evolutionary biologists believe that various natural selection pressures can help complete the process by strengthening barriers to gene flow between two groups, pushing them toward full reproductive isolation.

And because natural selection favors organisms that successfully reproduce over those that don't, it is biased against hybrids, which sometimes die before reproducing or are simply incapable of reproducing.

Natural selection tries to block the formation of these "unfit" hybrids. One way to do that is to gradually increase the genetic differences between two groups of organisms--in this case black and mantled howler monkeys--so that it's more difficult for them to mate and to produce hybrid offspring.

While working to thwart the formation of hybrids in this way, natural selection strengthens reproductive isolation by increasing genetic differences. This process is called reinforcement; while the idea has been around for more than a century, empirical evidence to support it is scarce.

To test for the presence of reinforcement, Baiz and her colleagues compared the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living the Tabasco hybrid zone to the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living far from the hybrid zone.

If reinforcement is working to thwart hybridization and to strengthen reproductive isolation, then the genetic differences between the two species in the hybrid zone should be greater than the genetic differences between monkeys of these two species living on either side of the hybrid zone.

And that's exactly what Baiz and her colleagues found when they compared genetic markers that are at or near genes likely associated with reproductive isolation.

"Speciation is a complex process that can be driven by direct and indirect mechanisms that interact to maintain and strengthen the process, and this study is one of the few natural examples that documents this," Baiz said.

FINDINGS

Emergency medical personnel in Alameda County, California, use a screening process for determining whether to "medically clear" patients experiencing psychiatric emergencies before transporting them. They identify patients who are at low risk for medical emergencies and take them directly to a special Psychiatric Emergency Service facility specifically designed for people experiencing psychiatric crises. The protocol used by Alameda County emergency medical staff is an alternative to standard protocols, in which all patients are transported to the nearest emergency department. During a five-year period ended Nov. 1, 2016, Emergency Medical Services staff used the protocol to transport 41 percent of 53,000 psychiatric emergency cases to the stand-alone psychiatric emergency service facility. As a result, 22,000 psychiatric patients were treated at a specialized facility without first undergoing the standard trip to the emergency department.

BACKGROUND

Patients with psychiatric emergencies on involuntary holds are often taken to traditional hospital emergency departments. However, patients sometimes spend hours to days in an emergency department bed waiting for treatment and access to specialized psychiatric personnel to conduct mental health evaluations. Psychiatric Emergency Services were established to address this gap. Patients still are evaluated to determine that they are not suffering from a life-threatening illness before they are transported to a psychiatric emergency services facility.

METHOD

The researchers examined data for 542,000 Emergency Medical Service encounters in Alameda County over five years. They noted that because the data are from just one county, the results may not be applicable to counties that have a fundamentally different strategy for managing psychiatric crises before transportation.

IMPACT

Paramedics have the ability to distinguish acute psychiatric crises, which can mimic symptoms of a physical ailment, from life-threatening medical illnesses. As a result, they can safely divert psychiatric cases from frequently overextended emergency departments in hospitals to specialized psychiatric facilities. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using protocols to assist paramedics in evaluating patients' medical conditions in the field in order to help direct them to an appropriate facility.

Does alcohol on greeting cards undermine public health messages about harmful drinking?

Themes of drunkenness on cards are popular, but sends the message that this is normal

Birthday and Christmas cards featuring alcohol or harmful drinking "reflect and reinforce a social attitude that excess alcohol consumption is acceptable and associated with celebration," warn experts in The BMJ today.

Tracey Polak, Assistant Director of Public Health, and Virginia Pearson, Chief Officer for Communities, Public Health, Environment and Prosperity at Devon County Council say these cards "influence views on drinking and reinforce this as a social norm."

And with the UK buying more cards per person than any other nation (an average of 33 each a year) they urge the public to reflect on whether the message is one that they condone and wish to pass on.

Sir Henry Cole is widely credited with 'inventing' the first Christmas card in the UK in 1843, depicting a scene showing people drinking.

In 1980, an analysis of greeting cards revealed themes that suggested getting drunk is a natural and desirable concomitant of celebrations, and that drunkenness is humorous, enjoyable, and harmless.

Today, one billion greeting cards are sold in the UK annually, and alcohol remains a popular theme.

Illustrations and texts portray alcohol as enjoyable and fun, and can range from a glass of champagne with the word 'Cheers' to those that are more excessive and encourage binge drinking, explain the authors.

Phrases such as 'let's get wrecked', 'all the gin' and 'trollied' are printed across images of people clearly drunk, surrounded by empty bottles, drinking directly from a bottle, or in some case unconscious.

But the idea that excess drinking as shown on many greeting cards cards is normal, enjoyable and to be encouraged is at variance with public health messages, they argue.

They point out that over 10 million people across the UK are drinking at levels which increase their risk of health harms, and alcohol consumption is the leading risk factor for ill-health, early death and disability in those aged 15 to 49.

As the card market adapts and produces new themes, they say it is worth considering whether it influences societal views or whether societal views influence the card market.

They suspect the truth lies probably in the middle. "As cards with alcohol themes become more prevalent then a cultural norm develops where drinking in association with celebration becomes the expected."

And while manufacturers are unlikely to respond to public health lobbying to depict more responsible drinking, "they may change what they produce if consumers choose not to buy cards depicting irresponsible drinking."

But whether this leads to changes in alcohol consumption is, however, another question, they say. There is little evidence of effective interventions which impact on social norm, with marketing, labelling, and advertisements designed to reduce excess drinking being shown to have small, short term and inconsistent impacts.

Ultimately the authors believe that the responsibility for choosing cards lies with the purchaser "so perhaps it is worth reflecting the next time that you choose one whether the message is one that you condone and wish to pass on," they conclude.