Culture

In her Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at the University of Miami, assistant professor of Psychology Elizabeth Losin investigates the mechanisms underlying racial and ethnic disparities related to pain and pain treatment. She looks at the role the brain plays using functional MRI (fMRI) and the impact of social and cultural factors, including the doctor-patient relationship and stressful life experiences such as discrimination.

In the study "Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain," published today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Losin; Tor Wager, Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College; and colleagues identify possible brain and social factors underlying racial and ethnic disparities in pain. The researchers found that African American participants reported greater pain in response to a controlled pain stimulation than Hispanic or non-Hispanic white participants did. African Americans also exhibited differences in their brain responses to pain, which correlated with their personal histories of experiencing discrimination.

"There's evidence that both the general public and clinicians believe that African Americans are less sensitive to pain than non-Hispanic whites; yet research, including our own, shows exactly the opposite." said Losin. "Minorities, particularly African Americans, actually report more pain."

These inaccurate racial and ethnic biases about pain could have medical consequences.

"If medical professionals, whether consciously or unconsciously, believe that African Americans feel less pain than others, clinicians may be less inclined to alleviate the pain of their African American patients," explained Losin. Understanding why these pain biases exist, therefore, is a key step toward closing the pain gap - in other words, eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in pain and its treatment.

In the study, Losin and her team measured brain responses using an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine while simultaneously inducing pain in participants via a laboratory heating apparatus on the arm. Outside the MRI scanner, they asked participants questions about different aspects of their lives, including stressful life experiences and previous experiences with pain. The subject group consisted of 88 participants (28 African Americans, 30 Hispanic Americans, and 30 non-Hispanic white Americans) from the Denver metro area, who were recruited and tested by Losin in Wager's Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

All of the study participants were administered the same controlled pain stimulation. African Americans, however, reported greater pain than Hispanic or non-Hispanic white participants, which is consistent with previous studies. During this study, the researchers also looked for differences in brain responses to pain. Using the MRI scanner, the researchers identified two specific areas of the brain, the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which responded to pain more strongly in African American participants than the other two groups. Prior research has found that these two brain regions also respond more strongly to pain in chronic pain patients.

The researchers think that the similarity between the increased pain sensitivity observed in African Americans in their study and that which is typically seen in chronic pain patients may be due to stress.

"We know that stressful experiences early in life predispose people to developing chronic pain," said Losin. The results of this study suggest that a history of other kinds of stressful experiences, including discrimination or having a mistrust of doctors, may change the brain in ways that may cause people to respond more strongly to physical pain.

"These findings exemplify how neuroimaging is teaching us that there are multiple contributions to pain," noted Wager, "and that we need to consider the broader psychological and cultural setting when we think about what is underlying pain and how to address it." This study suggests that racial and ethnic disparities in pain may be a symptom of a much broader problem, underscoring the impacts of racial and social discrimination in society.

The findings point to a promising avenue for reducing pain-related health disparities in the near term, however: building greater trust between African American patients and their doctors. Ongoing experiments in Losin's laboratory are aimed at understanding the relationship between patients' trust in their doctors and their experience of pain.

Despite the differences observed, Losin pointed out that the groups in this study were more alike than different. "An important part of studying group differences is also to look for similarities," Losin explained. "In our study, brain systems related to the sensory aspects of physical pain were responding very similarly across all ethnic groups."

"It's a common misconception that any difference you see between groups of people must be an intrinsic difference, rooted in our biology. But the differences we found in this study were related to people's life experiences."

This, according to Losin, is good news: "It reaffirms our similarities and provides hope that racial and ethnic disparities in pain can be reduced."

Climate change is affecting the health of agricultural soils. Increased heat and drought make life easy for the pathogenic fungus Pythium ultimum. As an international team of researchers led by the Universities of Kassel and Bonn has shown, the fungus causes almost total crop failure in peas after a hot and dry stress event. Short-term soil recovery seems to be possible only in exceptional cases. The study has now been published in the journal Applied Soil Ecology.

Pythium ultimum is an aggressive fungus that is transmitted through the soil and infects the roots in the seedling of important agricultural crops such as beets and peas but also corn, soybeans and potatoes. The plants develop root rot and die. "In some cases, there may be a total failure of the germinating seedlings," states Dr. Christian Bruns of the Section of Organic Farming and Cropping Systems at the University of Kassel. However, soils also have protective mechanisms against these pathogens. Certain fungi act like "bodyguards" and protect the roots of plants, while some microorganisms parasitize the harmful fungus or simply consume it.

The scientists took soil samples from very different locations in cool and damp Scotland, temperate northeast Germany and dry and warm eastern Hungary. The soil samples, including the microorganisms living there, were put under stress in climate chambers with heat (40 degrees Celsius) and drought (only half soil moisture) and then infected with the aggressive fungus Pythium ultimum. The researchers investigated the effects of this stress event on the pathogen and ultimately the plants by subsequently sowing peas in these pre-treated soils.

Dramatic effect: Hardly a pea plant survived

The effect was dramatic: "Only a few of the young pea plants survived, and these withered under the fungal attack," summarizes Prof. Dr. Thomas Döring from the Agroecology and Organic Farming Group at the University of Bonn. In all soils, the stress event of heat and drought led to a strong reduction in resistance to Pythium ultimum. Soils from Scotland suffered the most, and those from Hungary the least. "Apparently the protective microorganisms in the soils of cool, damp Scotland are less adapted to heat and drought than in Hungarian soils, which are often exposed to high temperatures and droughts in summer," assumes Döring.

The scientists investigated how well the various soils can recover by taking a break of several weeks after treatment with heat and drought before infecting the soil with the harmful fungus and sowing the peas. Whilst a soil sample from Scotland showed some recovery, with slightly more peas growing in it in comparison, the harmful effect of the fungus seemed to be made worse by the recovery phase in the samples from Hungary.

"The decisive factor seems to be how quickly the protective microorganisms are able to reproduce after the stress event," says Bruns, referring to the results of other studies. "This ability is apparently not so pronounced in the soil samples from Hungary." Soils that are highly resistant to drought and heat therefore do not seem to have such a high recovery capacity.

Heat and drought increase the susceptibility to soil pathogens

All this indicates that if the climate in temperate and northern latitudes heats up more, the microorganisms in the soil will not be able to adapt as quickly. "Heat and drought have a negative impact on the soil organisms protecting plants from diseases," says Döring. "This increases the plants' susceptibility to soil-borne pathogens," adds Bruns. In view of the advancing climate change, this may significantly increase the risk of plant diseases and crop failures. However, further research is still needed.

Sixty-six million years ago, in the emerged lands of Laurasia -now the northern hemisphere- a primitive land tortoise, measuring about 60 cm, managed to survive the event that killed the dinosaurs. It was the only one to do so in this area of the world, according to a Spanish palaeontologist who has analysed its peculiar fossils, found in France.

All turtle species we know of today are descendants of two lineages that separated during the Jurassic, more than 160 million years ago. But their members were not the only ones that existed. There had been many groups of primitive tortoises before them, in an earlier evolutionary position.

Some of these ancient reptiles managed to survive at a time when dinosaurs dominated the Earth. However, virtually all of the early groups of turtles disappeared after an asteroid impact that took place 66 million years and wiped out 70% of life on the planet.

Only the so-called "horned turtles" or meiolaniids managed to hold out, more specifically in Gondwana, the current southern hemisphere, according to fossils found in Oceania and South America. Their last representatives managed to co-exist relatively recently with humans, who hunted them to extinction. No other primitive turtle had appeared in the records of the last 66 million years.

After 10 years of study, the palaeontologist Adán Pérez García, from the Evolutionary Biology Group of the National University of Distance Education (UNED, Spain), now confirms that, in the northern hemisphere, on the ancient continent called Laurasia, a primitive land turtle also survived the mass extinction of the late Cretaceous period.

This was Laurasichersis relicta, an extinct turtle genus and species that corresponds to a new form, with very peculiar anatomical characteristics, and whose lineage evolved independently from that of the Gondwana tortoises, from which it separated 100 million years earlier.

"The reason why Laurasichersis survived the great extinction, while none of the other primitive North American, European or Asian land turtles managed to do so, remains a mystery," Pérez García, the sole author of the paper published in Scientific Reports magazine, has confided to Sinc.

A drastic change after extinction

The impact of the asteroid plunged the Earth into a spiral of gas emissions, molten material and acid rain that caused a sudden warming of the climate and transformed the landscapes in which the turtles lived.

"The fauna of European turtles underwent a radical change: most of the forms that inhabited this continent before the extinction disappeared, and their role in many ecosystems was left vacant until the relatively rapid arrival of new groups from various places in North America, Africa and Asia," the palaeontologist points out.

All of them, identified in these new ecosystems, seemed to belong to the two lineages that have persisted to this day, but the new study allows us to recognize that they were not alone. The appearance in a site in northeastern France of fossils of the shell, limbs and skull of Laurasichersis relicta shows that this primitive species also survived the mass extinction event in Laurasia.

However, its origin stems from another continent: "It is the last representative of a group previously identified in China and Mongolia, where it was known since the Jurassic, more than 100 million years before the new European Laurasichersis turtle existed. This group arrived on this continent very shortly after the end of the Mesozoic, 66 million years ago," says the researcher.

A special turtle

The shell of the newly discovered turtle was just over 60 cm long during adulthood and, like other primitive reptiles, it could not retract its neck into its shell to conceal its head from predators. This physical limitation allowed it to develop other protective mechanisms such as an armor with large, mutually linked spikes, which were hard structures located on the neck, legs and tail.

Its peculiar shell is one of the most remarkable features of this reptile and one of the characteristics that make it unique. This complex structure was made up of numerous plates. "Although the number of plates is usually the same in most turtles, the ventral shell region of the new species was provided with a greater number of these elements than those known in any other turtle," Pérez García stresses.

After the 10-km-diameter meteorite hit the Earth, the large dinosaurs ceased to be part of the landscape, but the turtle, which lived in humid environments with forest areas, coexisted with new predators. The latter quickly dominated the positions of the food chain that had remained available when most animals disappeared.

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University develop a novel gas imaging system to simultaneously visualize and measure gases that are released through the skin in real-time

Tokyo, Japan - Gases emitted from the human body have been used since ancient Greek times to diagnose the sick; the same principle with a modern, technological makeover could now become a simple tool to identify metabolic disorders, genetic diseases and cancer.

A new method, developed by researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University and recently published in the journal ACS Sensors, now makes it possible to image and measure gases, called volatile organic compounds or VOCs, that are released through the skin in real-time.

VOCs that are released through the skin reflect the VOCs present in circulating blood. It is known that certain VOCs, such as ethanol, which is a component of alcoholic beverages, are significantly related to alcohol metabolism. Besides, it has been reported that VOCs would be associated with certain skin diseases, such as psoriasis. Although VOCs can already be commonly analyzed in laboratories using big, expensive machines, convenient, practical devices that provide accurate measurements for routine use in the clinical setting have been lacking. In addition, being able to see how gases are released through the skin over time has remained a challenge.

"We wanted to develop a tool that makes it easy to monitor human health in a non-invasive way," says the corresponding author of the study Prof. Kohji Mitsubayashi. "Even dating back to ancient Greece, physicians knew that a patient's breath could offer clues to their ailments. And nowadays, everybody has heard of the breathalyzer. The problem with breath is that it is not suitable for long-term monitoring of VOCs. The skin, on the other hand, offers an easy way for the continuous monitoring of VOCs without putting extra burden on the individual."

To achieve their goal, the researchers mounted a ring light consisted of an array of UV light-emitting diodes on a camera lens, which together enabled the real-time imaging of VOCs emanated from the skin surface. In a proof-of-principle experiment, the researchers aimed to detect ethanol in a subject who had consumed alcohol. Because the skin surface can be uneven, they used a so-called "2D Mako" to equalize the complex skin surface and to enable the accurate measurement of ethanol over time. To facilitate the detection of ethanol, the researchers drew on the same principle as the human body uses to get rid of ethanol by placing a mesh with an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) on the subject's skin via 2D Mako. Once gaseous ethanol hit this mesh, a byproduct of the enzymatic reaction, NADH was generated and emitted fluorescence, which was utilized to gas-imaging.

"We were able to show a dynamic change in the concentration of ethanol over time after alcohol consumption," says postdoctoral research fellow and lead author of the study Kenta Iitani. "Our results indicate that metabolic monitoring and early disease screening can be achieved by measuring blood VOCs via transcutaneous gas release".

Being able to reliably measure VOCs could help clinicians to evaluate how alcohol influences the skin and contributes to the development of skin disorders. Adaptation of this gas imaging system to other gases could further enable the study of other diseases by monitoring the release of VOCs.

Researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München, Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have developed a novel therapeutic approach to cure chronic hepatitis B. The scientists found that the large amount of hepatitis B virus proteins expressed in the liver prevents the body's immune system to defeat the virus, consequently preventing an effective therapy. The researchers were able to show that knocking down the expression of the virus' proteins enables successful vaccination with TherVacB, a novel therapeutic vaccine.

Around 260 million humans, more than three percent of the world's population, are chronically infected by the hepatitis B virus. As a result, every year, 880,000 people worldwide die of liver failure or hepatocellular carcinoma. Currently no curative therapy is available. The therapies available to date inhibit virus replication, but need to be given long-term. As long as infected people cannot form an adequate immune response, the virus will survive. This is precisely where Prof. Ulrike Protzer, head of the Institute of Virology at Helmholtz Zentrum München and TUM, and her team start.

Novel therapeutic approach

Using a preclinical mouse model, the researchers found that proteins of the hepatitis B virus prevent that certain immune cells of the body, so-called CD8+ T-cells become effective. Based on these finding, the scientists developed a novel therapeutic approach: first, the expression levels of the virus proteins are knocked down, and then the immune cells are activated by therapeutic vaccination. In contrast to conventional vaccinations, which aim to prevent diseases before outbreak, such a therapeutic vaccination aims to cure already existing chronic diseases.

Successful suppression of virus proteins in mice

Consequently, the researchers first developed a method to suppress the hepatitis B virus proteins. They used siRNAs, small ribonucleic acid molecules that bind to the messenger RNA of the virus' proteins. By labelling the messenger RNA with siRNA, the infected cell receives the signal that the viral RNA is undesired and removes it. In this way protein expression is knocked down. However, the suppression of protein expression alone was not sufficient to reverse the inhibition of the CD8+ T-cells in chronically infected mice.

Infection cured in mice

The scientists therefore had to go one step further: "We then combined the siRNA method with a therapeutic vaccination developed by us. This enabled us to trigger a strong immune response against the virus. This led to cure of hepatitis B virus infection in two different mouse models," explains Dr. Thomas Michler, physician and one of the two first authors of the study.

Novel therapeutic vaccination soon in a clinical trial

The newly developed vaccine, called TherVacB, will be tested as an immunotherapy in a two-year clinical trial starting in 2021. "The therapeutic vaccine we have developed is indeed very promising as it induces neutralizing antibodies and T-cell responses," said Dr. Anna Kosinska, the other first author of the study. The vaccine will be administered in three doses every four weeks. It has been designed to target the majority of all hepatitis B viruses and therefore will be beneficial to most people infected worldwide.

"We are very pleased that for the clinical trials of TherVacB we are able to cooperate with a consortium of Europe's leading virologists, immunologists and hepatologist, guided by Helmholtz Zentrum München," adds Protzer. The consortium will receive funding of more than € 10 million from the European Union within the program Horizon 2020 (H2020-SC1-2019).

A recent study by the University of Kent has called for an increase in scientific surveys and collection of specimens to confirm the extinction of ultra-rare species.

Dr David Roberts, a conservation scientist at Kent's Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, concluded from research that there is currently insufficient scientific surveys to determine whether many of the Earth's rarest species, those known only from a single specimen, still exist.

As a case study, Dr Roberts investigated the orchids of Madagascar utilising three different methods of scientific survey effort. Results showed that as of 2000, up to nine of the 236 orchid species known from a single specimen could be extinct. Furthermore, up to two additional species could be considered as extinct by 2018 - assuming no new scientific collections have been made. However, whether the remaining 225 orchid species still exist is unknown as there have been insufficient scientific surveys to determine their fate.

As extinction is final, we need to have as much information as possible. This can come from digitising and making already existing data (that is currently locked away in museum cupboards) widely available. Furthermore, it can come from collecting new knowledge through scientific surveys and making this data widely available as quickly as possible, as well as collecting other information such as the current state of habitats which can be a useful indicator as to whether species still possibly exist.

Dr Roberts said: 'Most species are poorly known because of the very fact they are rare, which brings challenges for conservation practitioners. With conclusions of extinction being made on available data, it is difficult to know if an ultra-rare species is extinct or may have just gone unnoticed. The conservation community needs to work in collaboration to adapt to developing species data resources to deliver more accurate assessments of some of the world's rarest species.'

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg have described a previously unrecognized mechanism of bacterial transcriptional regulation that is obviously widespread in bacteria. In the future, their findings could also help fight antibiotic resistance.

Within their environment, bacteria often encounter various kinds of changes. In order to survive under stress or changing conditions, bacteria have to respond fast and adequate to achieve a physiological adaptive response. This mostly happens by specifically adapting gene expression. Thus, transcriptional regulation is one of the biggest means by which bacteria adapt to external stress conditions.

Initiation of transcription in bacteria only occurs upon the binding of a key component known as the sigma factor (σ factor) to the RNA polymerase (RNAP) core enzyme in order to form the complete and catalytically active holoenzyme. This holoenzyme then recognizes key promotor elements and subsequently enables transcription. During external stress conditions, the primary σ factor is replaced by an alternative σ factor, which differs from the former with respect to the promoter sequences that it recognizes. Thus, holoenzyme formation with this alternative σ factor results in the transcription of corresponding stress-response genes. Among the various classes of alternative σ factors, the most abundant ones are the extracytoplasmic function (ECF) σ factors. Sigma factors are commonly known to be intrinsically active, which means that the bacterial cell has to keep them in an inactive state until their action is warranted.

Novel mechanism of transcriptional regulation

There are several mechanisms for regulating σ factor activity. Usually, alternative σ factors stay retained in an inactive state by sequestration into a complex with an anti-σ factor. Upon a specific stimulus, the inhibitory effect of the anti-σ factor is alleviated and the σ factor is released for interaction with the RNA polymerase.

However, in collaboration with researchers from SYNMIKRO in Marburg, the Max Planck researchers have revealed a previously unknown mechanism of transcriptional regulation, which instead relies on intrinsically inactive σ factors that are unable to bind the RNAP core enzyme. Only upon phosphorylation on a specific residue is the σ factor activated and able to bind the RNAP in formation of the holoenzyme and consequently drive expression of specific genes. An extensive bioinformatics analysis indicated that this transcriptional regulation by σ-phosphorylation is a general mechanism in bacteria, presenting a new paradigm in transcriptional regulation.

"A special property of this mechanism is its modularity", Research Group Leader Simon Ringgaard explains. "Our discoveries reveal how nature has merged two distinct regulation mechanisms - threonine kinase signaling and regulation of σ factor activity - as joint forces, in order to achieve the ability of environmental adaptation."

The novel sensing and signaling pathway also regulates antibiotic resistance

Ringgaard's model organism itself represents a field of application: Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a severe human pathogen and the leading agent of seafood borne gastroenteritis in the world. The Max Planck researchers identified an ECF σ factor / threonine-kinase pair (named EcfP / PknT) that is responsible for sensing polymyxin antibiotics stress and mediating bacterial resistance towards polymyxin in V. parahaemolyticus. The PknT kinase is activated when cells are treated with polymyxin antibiotics. Activated PknT in turn activates EcfP, which results in expression of genes required for polymyxin antibiotic resistance.

Polymyxins constitute a class of antibiotics that count as a last resort to treat Gram-negative infections. Because antibiotic resistance is a severe public health concern worldwide, it is very important to understand how cells sense and respond to antibiotic treatment. The identification of mechanisms that regulates polymyxin antibiotic resistance in V. parahaemolyticus opens up new avenues of research in fighting this and probably other important human pathogens. Ultimately, the work of the Marburg researchers provides fundamental insights in the regulation of gene expression and cellular adaptation in the entire bacterial kingdom.

ITHACA, N.Y. - One strategy for reducing food waste's environmental impact is as counterintuitive as it is straightforward: Open more grocery stores.

That's according to new research from Elena Belavina, associate professor at the School of Hotel Administration in the Cornell University SC Johnson College of Business.

The spoiled milk, moldy vegetables and expired meat we discard when cleaning out the fridge make a surprisingly large contribution to global warming. One-third of all food produced is wasted, a problem responsible for carbon emissions equivalent to all road transportation, said Belavina.

"The more stores you have, the lower food waste is going to be," said Belavina, an expert in operations management and supply chains. "Very small increases in store density can have a very high impact."

When consumers can purchase perishable goods nearby, Belavina said, they shop more often but buy less each time, ultimately wasting less.

"There's less food sitting at home," Belavina said. "As a result, there is a much lower likelihood that something will be spoiled, and we'll actually be able to eat all of the stuff that we've purchased before its expiration date."

For example, Belavina found that in Chicago, which she said is typical of many American cities, adding just three or four markets within a 10-square-kilometer area (about four square miles) would reduce food waste by 6% to 9%.

That would achieve an emissions reduction comparable to converting more than 20,000 cars from fossil fuels to electric power, Belavina reports in "Grocery Store Density and Food Waste," published in the journal Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.

Most big cities are well below the ideal density of grocery stores that would minimize food waste, the research determined. In Chicago, that would be about 200 markets within a 10-square-kilometer area - compared to 15 currently - but most of the benefit from reduced emissions would be achieved by about 50 stores. New York City, with its abundance of produce stands and neighborhood markets, comes closest to its ideal density.

Urban planners, city governments and activists should pursue policies encouraging an optimal density of grocery stores based on each city's population, she said. Retailers' sustainability plans should analyze how their store networks and supply chains contribute to food waste and emissions overall.

"We actually see some moves across the globe toward going a little bit back in time and reviving those small corner stores, mom and pop stores, smaller-format stores," she said.

Why are some people better able to fight off the flu than others? Part of the answer, according to a new study, is related to the first flu strain we encounter in childhood.

Scientists from UCLA and the University of Arizona have found that people's ability to fight off the flu virus is determined not only by the subtypes of flu they have had throughout their lives, but also by the sequence in which they are been infected by the viruses. Their study is published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.

The research offers an explanation for why some people fare much worse than others when infected with the same strain of the flu virus, and the findings could help inform strategies for minimizing the effects of the seasonal flu.

In addition, UCLA scientists, including Professor James Lloyd-Smith, who also was a senior author of the PLoS Pathogens research, recently completed a study that analyzes travel-related screening for the new novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV. (The research is under review; a preprint is online.)

The researchers report that screening travelers is not very effective for the 2019 coronavirus -- that it will catch less than half of infected travelers, on average -- and that most infected travelers are undetectable, meaning that they have no symptoms yet, and are unaware that they have been exposed. So stopping the spread of the virus is not a matter of just enhancing screening methods at airports and other travel hubs.

"This puts the onus on government officials and public health officials to follow up with travelers after they arrive, to isolate them and trace their contacts if they get sick later," said Lloyd-Smith, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Many governments have started to impose quarantines, or even travel bans, as they realize that screening is not sufficient to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

One major concern, Lloyd-Smith said, is that other countries, especially developing nations, lack the infrastructure and resources for those measures, and are therefore vulnerable to importing the disease.

"Much of the public health world is very concerned about the virus being introduced into Africa or India, where large populations exist do not have access to advanced medical care," he said.

The researchers, including scientists from the University of Chicago and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, have developed a free online app where people can calculate the effectiveness of travel screening based on a range of parameters.

Solving a decades-old question

The PLoS Pathogens study may help solve a problem that had for decades vexed scientists and health care professionals: why the same strain of the flu virus affects people with various degrees of severity.

A team that included some of the same UCLA and Arizona scientists reported in 2016 that exposure to influenza viruses during childhood gives people partial protection for the rest of their lives against distantly related influenza viruses. Biologists call the idea that past exposure to the flu virus determines a person's future response to infections "immunological imprinting."

The 2016 research helped overturn a commonly held belief that previous exposure to a flu virus conferred little or no immunological protection against strains that can jump from animals into humans, such as those causing the strains known as swine flu or bird flu. Those strains, which have caused hundreds of spillover cases of severe illness and death in humans, are of global concern because they could gain mutations that allow them to readily jump not only from animal populations to humans, but also to spread rapidly from person to person.

In the new study, the researchers investigated whether immunological imprinting could explain people's response to flu strains already circulating in the human population and to what extent it could account for observed discrepancies in how severely the seasonal flu affects people in different age groups.

To track how different strains of the flu virus affect people at different ages, the team analyzed health records that the Arizona Department of Health Services obtains from hospitals and private physicians.

Two subtypes of influenza virus, H3N2 and H1N1, have been responsible for seasonal outbreaks of the flu over the past several decades. H3N2 causes the majority of severe cases in high-risk elderly people and the majority of deaths from the flu. H1N1 is more likely to affect young and middle-aged adults, and causes fewer deaths.

The health record data revealed a pattern: People first exposed to the less severe strain, H1N1, during childhood were less likely to end up hospitalized if they encountered H1N1 again later in life than people who were first exposed to H3N2. And people first exposed to H3N2 received extra protection against H3N2 later in life.

The researchers also analyzed the evolutionary relationships between the flu strains. H1N1 and H3N2, they learned, belong to two separate branches on the influenza "family tree," said James Lloyd-Smith, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and one of the study's senior authors. While infection with one does result in the immune system being better prepared to fight a future infection from the other, protection against future infections is much stronger when one is exposed to strains from the same group one has battled before, he said.

The records also revealed another pattern: People whose first childhood exposure was to H2N2, a close cousin of H1N1, did not have a protective advantage when they later encountered H1N1. That phenomenon was much more difficult to explain, because the two subtypes are in the same group, and the researchers' earlier work showed that exposure to one can, in some cases, grant considerable protection against the other.

"Our immune system often struggles to recognize and defend against closely related strains of seasonal flu, even though these are essentially the genetic sisters and brothers of strains that circulated just a few years ago," said lead author Katelyn Gostic, who was a UCLA doctoral student in Lloyd-Smith's laboratory when the study was conducted and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. "This is perplexing because our research on bird flu shows that deep in our immune memory, we have some ability to recognize and defend against the distantly related, genetic third cousins of the strains we saw as children.

"We hope that by studying differences in immunity against bird flus -- where our immune system shows a natural ability to deploy broadly effective protection -- and against seasonal flus -- where our immune system seems to have bigger blind spots -- we can uncover clues useful to universal influenza vaccine development."

Around the world, influenza remains a major killer. The past two flu seasons have been more severe than expected, said Michael Worobey, a co-author of the study and head of the University of Arizona's department of ecology and evolutionary biology. In the 2017-18 season, 80,000 people died in the U.S., more than in the swine flu pandemic of 2009, he said.

People who had their first bout of flu as children in 1955 -- when the H1N1 was circulating but the H3N2 virus was not -- were much more likely to be hospitalized with an H3N2 infection than an H1N1 infection last year, when both strains were circulating, Worobey said.

"The second subtype you're exposed to is not able to create an immune response that is as protective and durable as the first," he said.

The researchers hope that their findings could help predict which age groups might be severely affected during future flu seasons based on the subtype circulating. That information could also help health officials prepare their response, including decisions about who should receive certain vaccines that are only available in limited quantities.

Salmonella is a key cause of foodborne gastroenteritis around the world, with most outbreaks linked to eggs, poultry meat, pork, beef, dairy, nuts and fresh produce.

Now Flinders University researchers have found a simple solution for preventing salmonellosis affecting eggs through surface contamination, giving crucial help for food services industries.

Raw eggs are used in many food products such as mayonnaise, mousse, eggnog, and artisanal ice cream. However, a problem is associated with eggshells being contaminated with the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (ST).

To address this issue, the Flinders research team aimed to develop a decontamination method that removed ST contamination from the eggshell without impacting the egg's usability.

Using a method that employed equipment commonly found in commercial kitchens, the researchers decontaminated eggs by placing them in a sous-vide cooker with the water heated to 57C. Complete decontamination of ST was achieved by treating eggs for 9 minutes. The decontamination method uses kitchen equipment commonly used for sous-vide cooking,

The results, published recently in the journal Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, is the first study to look at decontamination of ST on the eggshell.

The decontaminated eggs were found by chefs, using measurements and acceptability scores, to have no significant difference in their quality or performance as an ingredient when compared with nontreated eggs.

A preview of the paper, 'A Successful Technique for the Surface Decontamination of Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium Externally Contaminated Whole Shell Eggs Using Common Commercial Kitchen Equipment' (November 2019) by Thilini Keerthirathne, Kirstin Ross, Howard Fallowfield and Harriet Whiley is online DOI: 10.1089/fpd.2019.2734

A second study by the Flinders environmental health research team examined the effectiveness of current Australian guidelines that recommend raw egg mayonnaise should be prepared and stored under 5C and adjusted to a pH less than 4.6 or 4.2.

Despite these guidelines, a significant numbers of salmonellosis outbreaks continue to be recorded every year in Australia.

The researchers found that the survival of Salmonella Typhimurium in mayonnaise is significantly improved at 4C and that lower temperatures protected ST from the bactericidal effect of low pH.

"We found that the preparation of mayonnaise at pH 4.2 or less and incubating it at room temperature for at least 24 hours could reduce the incidence of salmonellosis," says Flinders environmental health researcher Thilini Keerthirathne.

"But there is a risk of storing mayonnaise at 37C. If the pH is not correctly measured, the warmer temperatures will promote the growth of salmonella. As such it is crucial to ensure the pH of the mayonnaise if at pH 4.2 or less."

There is a constant spring-cleaning in our cells: The cell's own recycling system, so-called autophagy, fills garbage bags with cellular waste, transports them to the recycling yard and makes the decomposed material available again. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, have now been able to show in the model organism yeast that the membrane of the garbage bags, known as autophagosomes, is newly produced on the spot around the garbage and not built of already existing components.

The self-renewal of cells through autophagy is a central process in the body. It also plays a role in ageing and many age-related diseases. The rule of thumb is: the more recycling, the longer you live. "If we manage to optimize the autophagy machinery, this could improve health in old age, but of course we first need to understand precisely how it works," explains Martin Graef, research group leader at the Max Planck Institute.

Therefore, Maximilian Schütter, a doctoral student in Martin Graef's research group, took a close look at how the garbage bags are made. These so-called autophagosomes consist of phospholipid membranes that form around the cellular waste and then transport it for recycling. Until now, it has always been assumed that membranes already present in the cell are assembled around the waste. However, the researchers have now been able to show that the membrane is instead newly formed on the spot. To do this, a protein located on the membrane of the autophagosomes activates free fatty acids and makes them available for the production of phospholipids, which are then incorporated into the expanding membrane.

"This discovery is so fundamental that not only our view of autophagy has changed, but many new research approaches are opening up," explains Graef. It is known, for example, that recycling in the cells deteriorates when a diet is very rich in fat. "We may have found an explanation for this. Since free fatty acids are incorporated into the membrane, a change in the composition of the fats might have a direct effect on autophagy as a result of a different diet."

With the start of the new year, gyms are at their busiest and many people are trying to establish a workout routine to improve their health. Getting an edge by making exercise easier and more effective could be the difference between success and guiltily returning to the warm embrace of the couch. What if doing something as simple as listening to a particular type of music could give you that edge?

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology is the first to show that listening to music at a higher tempo reduces the perceived effort involved in exercise and increases its benefits. These effects were greater for endurance exercises, such as walking, than for high-intensity exercises, such as weightlifting. The researchers hope that the findings could help people to increase and improve their exercise habits.

Many people listen to music while exercising and previous studies have documented some of the benefits. For instance, music can distract from fatigue and discomfort and increase participation in exercise. However, "how" we experience music is highly subjective, with cultural factors and personal preferences influencing its effects on individuals. Music is multifaceted with various aspects such as rhythm, lyrics and melody contributing to the experience.

Until now, researchers did not understand the specific properties of music that affect us during exercise, including which types of music are best suited to enhancing certain types of exercise. Understanding these specifics could help to unlock the full potential of music as an exercise enhancer.

The researchers set out to investigate the effect of the tempo of a piece of music on female volunteers performing either an endurance exercise (walking on a treadmill) or a high-intensity exercise (using a leg press).

The volunteers completed exercise sessions in silence, or while listening to pop music at different tempos. The researchers recorded a variety of parameters, including the volunteers' opinions about the effort required to complete the exercises and their heart rate while exercising, as a higher heart rate would mean that the exercise was more beneficial for physical fitness.

"We found that listening to high-tempo music while exercising resulted in the highest heart rate and lowest perceived exertion compared with not listening to music," explained Professor Luca P. Ardigò of the University of Verona in Italy. "This means that the exercise seemed like less effort, but it was more beneficial in terms of enhancing physical fitness."

These effects were more noticeable in volunteers completing the endurance exercise sessions, compared with those performing high-intensity exercises, suggesting that people performing endurance activities such as walking or running may receive the greatest benefit from listening to high-tempo music.

The researchers hope that these results will provide a simple way to improve levels of physical activity. While the current study involved a small group of volunteer subjects, larger studies in the future will be needed to continue exploring the nuances of how music affects our training.

"In the current study, we investigated the effect of music tempo in exercise, but in the future we would also like to study the effects of other music features such as genre, melody, or lyrics, on endurance and high intensity exercise," said Ardigò.

So, you could try playing fast-tempo music next time you hit the gym for a turbo-charged workout. Otherwise, it might at least get your foot tapping while you sit on the couch and eat chocolate.

Baton Rouge, La.-- In a new study published in Science, an AAAS publication, LSU chemistry professor emeritus George Stanley and fellow LSU researchers from the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biological Sciences discovered a new cationic cobalt bisphosphine hydroformylation catalyst system that is highly active and extremely robust.

Catalysts can be viewed as a parallel of the infamous philosopher's stone. They cannot change one element to another, but they can aid in transforming one chemical substance into another, while remaining unchanged themselves. Cobalt, a common mineral, does well in accepting atoms from other molecules and forming complex molecules.

Fellow researchers working on the study alongside Stanley include assistant professor of biological sciences David Vinyard and chemistry graduate students Drew Hood and Ryan Johnson. Researchers from ExxonMobil Chemical Company also contributed to the project.

Majority of industries--about 75 percent--choose to use rhodium-based catalysts because of the low-pressure technologies and cheaper-to-build facilities, but Stanley said not only can cobalt-based catalysts make more--and better versions--of certain aldehyde products, but the price of rhodium is excessive in comparison.

"A cationic cobalt bisphosphine catalyst is only about 20 times slower than the best rhodium catalysts," he said, "despite being 10,000 times less expensive." Today, the price of rhodium has reached closed to $9,800 an ounce, while cobalt has been steady around only 90 cents per ounce.

Louisiana, alone, has three large hydroformylation chemical plants: the ExxonMobil facility in Baton Rouge that uses the high-pressure cobalt catalyst technology; the Shell plant in Geismar that uses the medium-pressure phosphine-modified cobalt catalyst system; and the Dow chemical plant in Taft that uses low-pressure phosphine-modified rhodium catalysts.

"About 25 percent of products produced by hydroformylation require high-pressure cobalt or rhodium technologies," he explained. "This new cationic cobalt bisphosphine technology offers a far more energy efficient catalyst that can operate at medium pressures for these reactions."

Hydroformylation, or oxo, is the catalytic reaction that converts alkenes, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen into more complex organic products, like plasticizers--a substance added to produce flexibility and to reduce brittleness--and cleaning detergents.

Although the group's new cobalt catalyst has low selectivity to the generally desired linear aldehyde product for simple alkenes, Stanley said it has excellent activity and selectivity for internal branched alkenes that are difficult to hydroformylate.

For example, researchers are finding that washing detergents are less likely to dissolve in cold water because of their linearity--a trait found in rhodium catalysts. Cobalt catalysts can make detergent molecules with more "branches" that can react to grease and water in a more efficient way.

Stanley said this is the first major discovery in hydroformylation in at least 50 years.

"What excites me the most is to have a discovery that could have real-life practical applications," he said. "Coming up with a catalyst that is very energy efficient, very green, that can actually be used on the large-scale, industrial side of things is the dream of every chemist."

A 52-year database of the distribution and movements of 35 Atlantic shark species revealed new information on some of the least known species. It also uncovered a few surprises about where sharks go and how long they live.

Scientists collected data for sharks tagged and/or recaptured between 1962 and 2013. The sharks were found in the Atlantic Ocean and associated areas, including the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. Participants tagged a total of 229,810 sharks of 35 species and recaptured 13,419 sharks of 31 species in that time span. The scientific journal Marine Fisheries Review recently published the data in Dec. 2019.

This new atlas updates an earlier version covering 1962 to 1993 and adds information on 22 species. Detailed profiles are provided for 14 shark species, including bull and tiger sharks and smooth dogfish. The updated data significantly extended their known ranges and movements.

Collaborative, Long-Running Program

The Cooperative Shark Tagging Program is the largest and longest-running in the world. The program is a collaborative effort among recreational anglers, the commercial fishing industry, biologists, and NOAA Fisheries. Its goal is to study the life history of sharks in the Atlantic Ocean.

Initiated in 1962 by biologist and shark researcher John "Jack" Casey at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, the original group of 74 volunteer anglers began participating in the project in 1963. Since then the program has expanded to include thousands of participants along the entire North American and European Atlantic coasts, including the Gulf of Mexico.

"The program's long-term data has shown the importance of tagging large numbers of each species and recording information in a database to determine shark movements," said Lisa Natanson, a shark researcher in the Apex Predators Program at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center's Narragansett Laboratory in Rhode Island. For example, until the tagging program was 34 years old, no one knew that tiger sharks cross the Atlantic.

An International Effort

Anglers from 32 countries tagged sharks and persons representing 59 countries participated in returns. There are two principal types of tags: the dart or M tag, in use since 1965, and the fin or rototag, used primarily by participating biologists.

Recreational fishermen, most using rod and reel, accomplished the majority of the tagging, followed by biologists using longline and net gear. Commercial fishermen using long line and net gear returned the most tags, followed closely by anglers using rod and reel.

Blue sharks accounted for 51 percent of the tags at nearly 118,000, with sandbar sharks a distant second at just under 36,000. Just over 8,200 blue sharks and 1,471 sandbar sharks were recaptured. Of 20 tagged crocodile sharks, none were recaptured. Most species had more than 100 sharks tagged.

A blue shark also set the record for traveling the greatest distance: 3,997 nautical miles. That shark was tagged off Long Island, New York and recaptured in the South Atlantic off Africa after more than 8 years. A sandbar shark holds the record for the longest time before recapture at 27.8 years.

Thousands of Volunteer Citizen Scientists

Atlas authors Nancy Kohler and Patricia Turner worked in the center's Apex Predators Program at the Narragansett Laboratory and are now both retired from NOAA Fisheries. They noted that the data collected through this program of citizen scientists would not have been possible for any individual, single institution or agency to accomplish.

"A collective of thousands of knowledgeable volunteer recreational and commercial fishermen accomplished this for little more than the cost of the tags, making the cost/benefit ratio for this program extremely low," according to the authors. "The Cooperative Shark Tagging program creates an enormous body of scientific data for understanding distributions and migration patterns for shark species."

The geographic distributions and movements for most shark species--­particularly over large space and time scales--remain largely unknown, but these data are filling in those gaps. This information is vital for developing appropriate management strategies and determining the usefulness of conservation measures.

"Sustainable management is a dynamic process that requires the best available science," said Karyl Brewster-Geisz, a fishery management specialist with NOAA Fisheries' Office of Sustainable Fisheries. "Data from the Cooperative Shark Tagging Program, one of the oldest shark data sets, plays an important role in establishing management measures that provide recreational and commercial fishing opportunities while preventing overfishing."

According to the authors, "Given the fact that shark species are slow growing, long-lived, and highly mobile, with relatively low return rates for tagged sharks, continued tagging efforts are essential to provide this critical life history and population dynamics information."

Cleveland Clinic researchers have identified for the first time an explanation of why patients with identical PTEN mutations often have vastly different clinical presentations.

In a new study published in JAMA Network Open, a team of researchers led by Charis Eng, MD, PhD, of Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute's Genomic Medicine Institute, discovered that copy number variations (CNVs) may act as genomic modifiers that influence the risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or developmental delay (DD) versus cancer risk in individuals with PTEN mutations.

Germline mutations of the tumor suppressor gene PTEN are associated with a group of genetic disorders that increase the risk of certain cancers, cognitive and behavioral deficits, benign growths and tumors (i.e., hamartomas), and macrocephaly. These disorders are known collectively as PTEN hamartoma tumor syndrome (PHTS), but they manifest as a broad, difficult-to-predict range of clinical outcomes and have been found to inexplicably result in distinct subsets of patients with either cancer or ASD/DD. In fact, PTEN is one of the most common genes associated with ASD.

Previous studies have indicated associations between CNVs, or large structural genetic changes involving the deletion and/or duplication of DNA segments, and neurodevelopmental disorders and sporadic cancers. Therefore, specific CNVs may be linked with either ASD/DD or cancer incidence in individuals with PTEN mutations.

To investigate these associations, Dr. Eng's team quantified the total number of CNVs in patients from three PHTS phenotype groups (i.e., PHTS-ASD/DD, PHTS-no ASD/DD and PHTS-cancer) with similar PTEN mutations. They demonstrated an overall increased CNV burden per individual in patients with ASD/DD compared to those without ASD/DD or those with cancer. However, they found no difference in CNV burden between patients without ASD/DD and patients with cancer.

They also determined that 10% of the PHTS-ASD/DD patients carried CNVs associated with neurodevelopmental disorders - compared to only 2.6% of PHTS-no ASD/DD and 1.7% of PHTS-cancer patients - while no CNVs involved in known cancer-associated genes were identified in PHTS-cancer patients.

These findings suggest that CNVs operate as genomic modifiers of ASD/DD risk in individuals with PHTS, meaning they not only provide insight into the ASD/DD versus cancer phenotypes associated with PTEN mutations but also may aid in the prediction of clinical outcomes to inform PHTS medical management. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that CNV burden analysis may also be applied to other clinically heterogeneous disorders for which no outcome-specific predictors are known.

Dr. Eng was the first to link PTEN to Cowden Syndrome, which is a PHTS disorder, and subsequently to ASD. She is the inaugural chair of Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute's Genomic Medicine Institute and inaugural director of the Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare, which includes the PTEN Multidisciplinary Clinic for children and adults with a confirmed or possible diagnosis within the PHTS spectrum.