Culture

Researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered that more sociable fish suppress their own personality when they are with a partner.

Fish, much like humans, exhibit a wide range of different personalities. Individuals vary in qualities such as how social they are and their willingness to take risk (boldness).

The new study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was carried out on three-spined sticklebacks.

At three to 4 cm, these fish are the smallest freshwater fish in the UK and are widespread in ponds, lakes, rivers and estuaries. They are a popular subject for scientists studying animal behaviour due to the variability in their social behaviour, spending long periods both alone and in groups.

The team at Bristol scored the fish as "sociable" or "unsociable". They then tested the fish for boldness when alone, and who led when the fish were paired up.

The scientists saw that bolder fish, as found before, were more likely to act as leaders.

However, this was only observed less sociable fish. When looking at more sociable fish, they observed that individual boldness did not affect decision making when in a pair.

In animals, boldness is a personality trait that is often correlated with behaviours such as exploration, aggression and leadership. Leaders of a group often have increased access to encountered food. However, leadership is risky, being a more likely target for predators.

One of the study's authors, Dr Christos Ioannou from the University of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, said: "The study shows that risk taking when alone may not predict riskiness when in a group for the more social individuals, instead they are more likely to conform to what others are doing. It brings into question whether testing individuals alone for risk taking behaviour is relevant."

Until now, a single personality trait has not been shown to supress other aspects of personality. However, sociability skews bold fish towards conformity. It seems that the benefits of group cohesion, say the researchers, are more important for decision making than the bold behaviour of an individual alone.

Killer whales have a formidable reputation as one of the ocean's most ferocious predators. Hunting stealthily in packs, some populations pursue ocean-going mammals, however, other killer whales prefer to dine on a diet of fish alone, posing little or no threat to the mammals that share their waters. Knowing that some species, including birds and mammals, are capable of assessing the risk that they are under from predators in the vicinity, Matthew Bowers from Duke University, USA, and colleagues wondered whether aquatic mammals that are known to reside alongside killer whales and feature on their menu could distinguish the calls of the predatory killers from those of other marine mammals. With his PhD supervisors, Douglas Nowacek and Andrew Read from Duke University, USA, and Ari Friedlander (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA), Vincent Janik (University of St Andrews, UK) and Brandon Southall (Southall Environmental Associates, USA), Bowers decided to investigate how pilot whales and Risso's dolphins react to the calls of killer whales. They publish their discovery that a subset of orca calls - with many of the characteristics that are found in human screams - trigger whales and dolphins to flea, while other less threatening calls do not provoke cetaceans to take evasive action, in Journal of Experimental Biology at http:/jeb.biologists.org.

Sailing 40 miles off the North Carolina coast to monitor pods of pilot whales and to Catalina Island off the coast of California to observe small groups of Risso's dolphins, Bowers and his colleagues prepared to play recordings of killer whales and social calls from pilot whales, Risso's dolphins and humpback whales to the animals while observing their reactions. 'Each playback experiment was an all-day endeavour', says Bowers, who describes tagging one member from each group with a data-logger that recorded the sounds heard by the animals, in addition to their depth and movements. Then, while the team played the whale, dolphin and killer whale recordings into the water from one boat, Danielle Waples from Duke University observed the animals' movements from a second inflatable.

Bowers recalls that the pilot whales and dolphins appeared to remain calm when most of the sounds - including many of the killer whale calls - were played into the water. However, he was astonished by the animal's reactions when he broadcast four specific killer whale calls. 'It was crazy to see a group of animals respond so strongly to something you're doing', says Bowers, describing the response of the Risso's dolphins as a stampede and adding, 'The strong and differential responses to this subset of killer whale calls was eye opening'.

Back in the lab, Bowers and Nicola Quick estimated how much energy the animals were using to build a sense of their urgency and reconstructed the dolphin and pilot whales' movements; they noticed that the two species' reactions were completely different. While the pilot whales assembled into a tight group that dived down toward the alarming sound, the Risso's dolphins clustered together and fled in the opposite direction at high speed for more than 10 km.

The team also correlated the animals' movements with the sounds that they had heard and found unique features in the distressing killer whale recordings that did not occur in calls by members of their own species, the humpback whale calls or the killer whale calls that had not provoked panic. The distressing calls had many sound structures that occur in mammalian distress cries, including human wails. 'The signal starts to jump around in an unpredictable fashion', says Bowers, explaining that the features are disturbing because our brains can't filter out the erratic sounds and ignore them. 'We suggest that these calls convey information about the predators' behaviour or intent', he says, and could warn potential victims of the killer in their midst.

June 12, 2018 - CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Heart defects are the most common type of birth defect, and can be caused by mutations in the gene CHD4. Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have now revealed key molecular details of how CHD4 mutations lead to heart defects.

The team, in their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, found that the CHD4 protein normally works in developing heart muscle cells to repress the production of muscle-filament proteins that are meant to operate in non-heart types of muscle cell. The failure of this repression leads to the development of abnormal, "hybrid" muscle cells that can't pump blood as efficiently as normal heart cells.

"For patients with congenital heart defects linked to CHD4 mutations, this research helps explain why their hearts don't work as well as normal, and suggests strategies for therapeutic intervention," said study senior author Frank Conlon, PhD, a professor in the departments of biology and genetics at UNC and a member of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute.

The research was a collaborative effort involving the Conlon Laboratory, the laboratory of Ian Davis, MD, PhD, associate professor in UNC's division of pediatric hematology-oncology, and the laboratory of Paul Wade, PhD at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The team, including first author Caralynn M. Wilczewski, a graduate student in the Conlon Laboratory, began by engineering mice whose developing embryos lack CHD4 just in their heart cells. The embryonic mice developed severe cardiac defects midway through gestation and none was born alive. These results confirmed the necessity for CHD4 in heart development.

CHD4, the protein encoded by the CHD4 gene, normally works as part of a multi-protein "machine" that helps regulate gene activity within the nuclei of cells. The researchers therefore conducted a set of experiments to measure and analyze the changes in developing heart-muscle cell gene activity when CHD4 is absent. They found that the CHD4 protein normally binds directly to DNA in a way that represses the activity of genes that encode non-heart muscle proteins. These proteins help make up the springy fibers (myofibrils) that contract and relax when muscles work.

The team determined that when the CHD4 protein is absent, these other, non-cardiac muscle proteins are inappropriately produced in developing heart muscle cells. They become incorporated into the myofibrils in these cells, forming abnormal, hybrid myofibrils that lack the functional properties of the normal heart.

Wilczewski developed an advanced ultrasound technique and used it to record the activity of the tiny hearts developing in mice--organs which in mid-gestation are only about as large as the period at the end of this sentence.

"We observed that the hearts lacking CHD4 and having these abnormal cardiac myofibrils had severely reduced ventricular contractions, indicating a loss of the ability to pump blood normally," Wilczewski said.

"These findings indicate that normal cardiac development in mice depends on the repression of non-cardiac myofiber proteins in heart muscle cells, to allow the formation of normal cardiac myofibers capable of sustaining normal heart contractions," Conlon said.

The findings provide the first clear insight into the mechanism of CHD4-related cardiac defects. They also suggest the possibility that restoring the normal repression of non-cardiac myofiber proteins could prevent heart defects in cases where CHD4 is mutated.

The researchers now plan to investigate the ways in which specific human CHD4 mutations lead to cardiac defects.

In addition, they plan to use the new ultrasound technology developed by Wilczewski in further research. "This technology has broad applications for testing models of congenital heart disease," Conlon said.

Doctors are increasingly fighting cancer by stimulating patients' immune systems. SNSF-supported researchers have now discovered a method for predicting the likelihood of treatment success.

Immunotherapy changes a patient's immune system to allow it to attack cancer cells and either destroy them or at least keep them from growing. But the therapy only works for a minority of patients. Researchers supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) have now discovered how to better predict who will respond to the therapy and who will not.

Unmasking tumours

The key is a protein known as PD-1, which sits on the surface of human immune cells. Until recently, PD-1 was regarded as their Achilles heel because cancer cells attach to the protein, thereby protecting themselves from immune system attack. "It's as though the tumour were wearing camouflage", says project lead Alfred Zippelius, Deputy Head of Medical Oncology at University Hospital Basel. Immunotherapy blocks the attachment site so the immune cells can "see" the cancer again.

An international research group led by Zippelius has now shown that immune cells with the most PD-1 are best able to detect tumours (*). In addition, these PD-1-rich cells secrete a signalling compound that attracts additional immune cells to help fight the cancer. "Therefore these patients have a better chance of responding to immunotherapy", says Daniela Thommen, first author of the study, who is currently at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam on an SNSF mobility fellowship.

Increasing the success rate

At present, still only a fraction of patients respond to immunotherapy. "If we could tell from the outset who the therapy will work for, we could increase the success rate. That would reduce side effects and also lower costs", says Zippelius.

The new findings will enable researchers to develop a practical tool that could ultimately help doctors to decide which patients will benefit from a simple immunotherapy approach and which will require more intensive treatment - for example a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. For that to happen, researchers must first find a way of distinguishing patients based on the amount of PD-1 in their immune cells.

Immunotherapy is becoming increasingly important. "What's revolutionary about it is that some patients may remain cured after years of treatment - even in the case of tumours that have otherwise proved resistant to therapy", says Zippelius. In the meanwhile, University Hospital Basel has set up its own tumour board (a group of doctors with different specialities) for immunotherapy.

People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

"High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing," said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

But there is at least one significant difference.

Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain's social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.

"This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence," Wallmark said.

Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.

"If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people," said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies -- among other things -- how music affects the brain.

"This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other," he said.

This may seem obvious.

"But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation," Wallmark said. "In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past."

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, in the article "Neurophysiological effects of trait empathy in music listening."

The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.

"The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy -- 'feeling into' a piece of art," said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

"On the other hand," Iacoboni said, "the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions."

Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy

Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.

Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy -- for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another's shoes.

The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.

Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain's reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.

The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.

Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry

In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others' behaviors and intentions.

Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.

Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data -- answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.

Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.

Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored

A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy -- how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.

Activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.

In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences -- for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.

"This study contributes to a growing body of evidence," Wallmark said, "that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction."

A new scientific report from an international team of psychological researchers aims to resolve the so-called "reading wars," emphasizing the importance of teaching phonics in establishing fundamental reading skills in early childhood. The report, published in in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows how early phonics skills are advanced with a rich reading curriculum throughout the school years.

Scientists Anne Castles (Macquarie University), Kathleen Rastle (Royal Holloway University of London), and Kate Nation (University of Oxford) report their conclusions as part of a thorough, evidence-based account of how children learn to read. They synthesize findings from more than 300 research studies, book chapters, and academic journal articles published across a variety of scientific fields.

"We decided to bring this knowledge together in one place to provide an accessible overview," Nation says. "We didn't want it to be buried in the scientific literature, we wanted it to be useful to teachers charged with the vital task of teaching children to read."

For several decades, the "reading wars" have been waged between teachers, parents, and policymakers who champion a phonics-based approach (teaching children the sounds that letters make) and those who support a "whole-language" approach (focused on children discovering meaning in a literacy-rich environment).

"Writing is a code for spoken language, and phonics provides instruction for children in how to crack that code," says Castles. "Phonics is an essential basis for becoming a good reader, but it isn't enough on its own -- one aim of our review was to describe the other key ingredients that must be combined with phonics to support good reading development."

To acquire sophisticated literacy skills, for example, children must progress from identifying individual sounds to recognizing whole words. They must also be able to pull forth the meaning of different words quickly within a particular context in order to comprehend a whole unit of text, whether it's a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire page.

Although teachers, parents, and policymakers recognize literacy as an essential skill that all children should learn, existing policies and practices often fail to incorporate the most effective strategies for learning and teaching reading. As a result, low literacy remains a pressing issue in developed and developing nations around the world.

"We have a really strong scientific understanding of how children learn to read, and there is no longer any need for 'reading wars,'" says Rastle. "Our review describes this evidence base, and provides concrete recommendations for drawing on it in the classroom."

In a commentary accompanying the report, psychological scientist Rebecca Treiman (Washington University in St. Louis) dismantles two common misconceptions that often stymy evidence-based approaches to reading instruction: that reading to children teaches them how to read and that children learn to read though independent discovery. The new report provides critical insight, Treiman says, because it highlights the specific processes by which early phonics instruction allows children to gain understanding and reading experience over time.

"Literacy opens up knowledge, opportunity, and enjoyment. Building it requires good instruction, solid foundations in vocabulary and language comprehension, and extensive reading practice," Castles, Rastle, and Nation note. "By taking advantage of the strong evidence base around what helps children learn to read, we can support more children to go on to become confident, skilled readers."

To prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease, scientists need to better understand how the disease differs between women and men, according to a paper published June 12 in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.

Written by the Society for Women's Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer's Disease, the paper states that more research is needed into sex differences in Alzheimer's disease to improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for both women and men.

"A growing body of research shows us that Alzheimer's disease differs between women and men," said Pauline M. Maki, PhD, chair of the SWHR Network on Alzheimer's Disease and co-senior author on the paper. "To improve the diagnosis of the disease and to speed the development of new treatments and interventions, we must better understand how the biological and sociocultural differences between women and men are influencing the development, progression, and treatment of Alzheimer's."

About 5.7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's disease, two-thirds of whom are women. In the U.S., Alzheimer's is the fifth leading cause of death for women and the eighth leading cause of death for men. Alzheimer's and other dementias will cost the U.S. an estimated $277 billion this year, and on its current trajectory, the annual costs could rise to more than $1.1 trillion dollars by 2050.

While progress has been made in Alzheimer's research, little attention has been given to the differences between women and men, resulting in a lack of knowledge and awareness about this topic in the research community and in the public, the researchers note.

Biological sex plays a role in Alzheimer's disease risk. For example, some risk factors have a stronger effect in one sex. The most common genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's is APOE ε4, but women with APOE ε4 are at greater risk for developing Alzheimer's than men with APOE ε4.

Presentation and progression of Alzheimer's also differs between the sexes. After receiving a diagnosis of dementia, women decline faster than men. Women are also more likely to show outward signs of dementia than men who have the same amount of Alzheimer's pathology, such as plaques and tangles in the brain. But we do not yet understand why.

To promote future research, the paper identifies gaps in knowledge like these and makes recommendations on high-priority areas.

These priority research areas include:

Potential risk factors that affect only one sex, like menopause and pregnancy disorders, and the influence of sex hormones like estrogen on brain function

Differences between women and men in risk factors that affect both sexes, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, exercise, and depression

Sex differences in genetic risk factors like APOE ε4

Sex and gender differences in racial and ethnic subgroups

Gender differences in caregiving and how the burden of caregiving influences Alzheimer's risk for the caregiver

Differences between women and men in response to current Alzheimer's therapeutics and those in development

Differences between women and men in the detection, diagnosis, progression, management, and treatment of Alzheimer's

Recipe for the perfect balance of breaks and repairs in our genome could help fight cancer and brain ageing

New discovery gives insight into chemotherapy resistant cancers such as rhabdosarcoma - the most common soft tissue cancer in children

Findings could have significant implications in brain ageing which has an effect on memory and cognitive function

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered what keeps the perfect balance of breaks and repairs in our DNA - something which could help improve the success of chemotherapy and combat neurodegeneration associated with ageing.

Our genome, where precious genetic information is stored, is challenged with thousands of breaks every day.

Cells possess an army of proteins that search for, detect and fix these breaks to maintain genome integrity, but little is known about how the cell fine-tunes the level of response in these repair factories to suit each and every repair event.

The level of proteins in our cells is controlled by synthesis and degradation. Cells get rid of proteins when not needed by attaching a small peptide called ubiquitin.

The new study, led by Dr Sherif El-Khamisy at the University of Sheffield's Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, has revealed an enzyme called UCHL3, which controls DNA repair by removing ubiquitin marks from TDP1 - a DNA repair protein. The findings also have implications in brain ageing which has an affect on memory, cognitive function and learning.

An overexpression of UCHL3 causes less ubiquitination of TDP1 and increases its protein level, which is found in chemotherapy resistant cancers such as rhabdosarcoma - the most common soft tissue sarcoma in children, which has a debilitating effect on the muscles, tendons and cartilage.

Too little UCHL3, however, was found to cause more ubiquitination of TDP1 reducing its level in neurological diseases such as ataxias - a group of disorders that affect co-ordination, balance and speech.

Dr El-Khamisy said: "This study identifies UCHL3 as a novel therapeutically druggable target where suppression of its activity can improve cancer treatment, whereas encouraging and fuelling its activity can combat neurodegeneration.

"Defective DNA repair is a common theme in a number of neurological disorders including motor neuron disease and dementia. Finding novel approaches to fuel the cell's ability to repair genomic breaks may hold promise in improving treatment of a broad range of neurological diseases."

The five-year study is funded by a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award to Dr El-Khamisy and involved collaborations across departments at The University of Sheffield and internationally.

The full study is published today (12 June 2018) in the journal Cell Reports.

Every time we send an e-mail, a tweet, or stream a video, we rely on laser light to transfer digital information over a complex network of optical fibers. Dozens of high-performance lasers are needed to fill up the bandwidth and to squeeze in an increasing amount of digital data. Researchers have now shown that all these lasers can be replaced by a single device called a microcomb.

A microcomb is an optical device that generates very sharp and equidistant frequency lines in a tiny microphotonic chip. This technology was developed about a decade ago and is now reaching a maturity level that enables new applications, including lidar, sensing, timekeeping and of course optical communications.

The soul of a microcomb is a tiny optical cavity that confines laser light in space. Therefore, this technology provides a fantastic playground to explore new nonlinear physical phenomena. These conditions have now been utilised by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, in cooperation with researchers at Purdue University, USA. Victor Torres Company, Associate Professor at Chalmers, is one of the authors of a paper that was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

"We observed that the optical frequencies of the microcomb interfered destructively over a short period of time, thus providing the formation of a wave inside the cavity that resembled a 'hole' of light. The interesting aspect of this waveform is that it yielded a sufficient amount of power per frequency line, which was essential to achieve these high-performance experiments in fiber communication systems", says Victor Torres Company.

The physical formation of these "dark" pulses of light is far from being fully understood, but the researchers believe that their unique properties will enable novel applications in fiber-optic communication systems and spectroscopy.

"I will be able to explore these aspects thanks to the financial support of the European Research Council (ERC)", says Victor Torres Company. "This is a bright start to better understand the formation of dark pulses in microresonators and their potential use in optical communications. The research could lead to faster and more power-efficient optical communication links in the future."

The results are the fruit of a collaborative effort between researchers at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, who fabricated the samples, and the group of Professor Peter Andrekson at the Photonics Laboratory at Chalmers, which hosts world-class experimental facilities for fiber-optic communications research.

"Our findings do not represent the first demonstration of a microcomb in fiber communications, but it is the first time that the microcomb has achieved a performance compatible with the strong demands of future communication systems", says Peter Andrekson, who is also one of the co-authors of the paper.

The main author is Attila Fülöp, who defended his doctoral thesis "Fiber-optic communications with microresonator frequency combs" at the Photonics Laboratory in April.

"Working with the microcomb and this experiment has been a great experience. This proof-of-concept demonstration has allowed us to explore the requirements for future chip-scale data transmitters while at the same time proving the potential of this very exciting dark pulse comb technology", he says.

A University of Central Florida team has designed a nanostructured optical sensor that for the first time can efficiently detect molecular chirality - a property of molecular spatial twist that defines its biochemical properties.

Determining chirality is critical for new drug development.

Think of molecules as having little hands. They are not identical, but they serve almost undistinguishable functions. You can grip, pinch, punch and open your hands, regardless of whether you use your left or right hand. But when you get to some functions, such as writing, it matters if you are right-handed or left-handed.

Scientists have struggled to determine if molecules have unique left- or right-hand functions because their physical attributes such as length, weight, density, elasticity, etc. appear to be identical.

UCF's NanoScience Technology Center Associate Professor Debashis Chanda and Ph.D. student Abraham Vazquez-Guardado have figured out a unique way to do it. The interaction between light and the specially designed nanostructure they built creates a strong chiral light field - called superchiral light. Such a nanostructure does not have geometrical chirality yet it creates two opposite light chirality (left or right) on demand. When light and matter's chirality match, just as hand-shaking with our right hand, successful identification happens. Therefore, this rotating light field has the ability to probe and identify any chiral molecule like drugs, proteins or DNAs. The light field lets scientist see the tiny hands, so to speak.

Their findings were recently published in the Physical Review Letters journal (PRL, 120, 137601, 2018) https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.137601.

"Chirality detection is vital in the drug-development industry, where newly synthesized chiral drugs also have two-handed strands and always form with the same likeliness during the synthesis process," Chanda said. "But while one chiral strand constitutes the active element in the drug, its opposite can turn out to be toxic or render detrimental side effects. Consequently, pharmacological and toxicological characterization of chirality plays a crucial role in the pharmaceutical drug industry and FDA approval process."

By being able to detect chirality at this level, scientists will have a better way to identify what may be causing bad side effects or perhaps finding places to upload life-saving drugs.

In this preliminary study, the UCF team demonstrated chiral molecule-detection sensitivity that is four times higher compared to the conventional technique, but without the extensive and tedious sample preparation and at much lower sample volume.

The single optical element thin-film chirality sensor, when fabricated based on low cost and large-area nanoimprinting technique, will immensely benefit drug design and protein-conformation identification, both of paramount importance in treating and understanding several diseases, Chanda added.

Despite efforts to eradicate it, syphilis is on the rise. Until now, most health agencies focused on treating infected people and their sex partners but new discoveries may make a vaccine possible, UConn Health researchers report in the 12 June issue of mBio.

The World Health Organization estimates that 10.7 million people between the ages of 15 and 49 had syphilis in 2012, and about 5.6 million people contract it every year. In the U.S., its prevalence is growing, particularly among men who have sex with men. In many developing nations, it is growing among women sex workers and their clients.

For a long time, health agencies have tried to eliminate syphilis by treating people who contract it, tracking down the patients' recent sex partners, treating them and their partners, until the healthcare workers found everyone who could have been exposed to the disease. But this method is limited by people's willingness and ability to reveal their sexual contacts. It's also limited by the difficulty diagnosing syphilis.

"Syphilis is the great imitator; it can look like hyper pigmentation, or other conditions," says Dr. Juan C. Salazar, chair of pediatrics at UConn Health and physician-in-chief at Connecticut Children's Medical Center.

And, the sexually transmitted disease poses serious health consequences. Syphilis is the second leading cause of stillbirth and miscarriage worldwide and, if left untreated, it can cause strokes, dementia, and other neurological disease.

Salazar was born in Colombia, where, in the city of Cali, about seven percent of young, sexually active people have evidence of syphilis.

About 15 years ago, he introduced UConn Health researchers to a group of health care professionals at CIDEIM, an infectious disease research institute in Cali, and they started an ongoing relationship: UConn Health researchers received access to a large population of patients for their studies, and the Cali clinicians and researchers received high-level training in recognizing and treating syphilis.

UConn Health personnel often visit Cali, and researchers from CIDEIM have come to UConn Health to train in advanced laboratory techniques in immunology and molecular biology. It's a good exchange, and it's helped fuel breakthroughs like the one the researchers discuss in their recent mBio paper.

Syphilis is hard to study because, unlike many disease causing bacteria, it cannot be grown in a lab dish or in mice. Besides humans, the only animal commonly found in laboratories that is susceptible to syphilis is the rabbit. But rabbits clear syphilis infections quickly, so new rabbits must be infected regularly to maintain a strain of Treponema pallidum, the syphilis-causing bacteria.

The second reason syphilis is hard to study is because the bacteria causes the disease is so delicate. Most disease causing bacteria are pretty tough--you can wash them, dry them, and then look at their exteriors in great detail under a microscope. T. pallidum doesn't survive that rough treatment. It tends to break open and spill its guts, making a mess, and also making it impossible to figure out which proteins are supposed to be on the outside of the bacteria.

And those proteins on the outside of the bacteria are key--they are how our immune system recognizes bacterial invaders. They are how vaccines work, too. The search to find and identify these proteins in syphilis has taken a long, long time. T. pallidum was first identified in 1905, but until now, no one has been able to figure out which proteins it sports on its outer membrane.

Researchers have tried all kinds of tricks. When genetic analysis became available, they started looking at T. pallidum's genetic code, in hopes that the genes for its exterior proteins would look like the genes other bacteria have. But T. pallidum is part of the spirochete phylum of bacteria--they're spiral shaped and weird, about as closely related to other bacteria as we are to invertebrates.

Just about the only easy thing about T. pallidum's genetic code is its size: it has only about 1,000 genes, total. That's small. Small enough for a human to analyze.

When UConn Health microbiologists Justin Radolf and Melissa Caimano began analyzing the genetics of the syphilis bacteria they collected from patients in Colombia, as well as the syphilis samples sent to them by collaborators in San Francisco and the Czech Republic, they began to notice that the strains from different places were very similar. Not many genes differed. And that makes sense--in an organism with such a small genetic code, every gene must be essential. The genes would only mutate into a different form if it was a matter of life and death. And what controls life and death for T. pallidum?

"They're mutating to avoid the immune system," Radolf says. Radolf and Caimano's team suspected that these mutating genes coded for the proteins they were looking for. So they began testing them. They used a computer modeling program to model the proteins these genes would make, and see if those proteins had the characteristic barrel shape that bacteria use for proteins on their outer membranes. It turned out that many of them did.

The researchers then actually made the proteins and tested whether they folded into that barrel shape in real life. And then finally, they made antibodies for the proteins and showed that these antibodies did indeed attach to the exteriors of intact T. pallidum bacteria. This meant they'd found their marks--the proteins were there.

Of course, proteins that mutate a lot to hide from the immune system aren't good candidates for a vaccine. For a vaccine, you want the opposite; proteins that are always the same in every syphilis bacteria. So the final step in the team's work was to go back through T. pallidum's genetic code to find genes that coded for proteins in the outer membrane that never changed, using the genes they'd already found as clues.

"You want the best candidate outer membrane protein for a vaccine, the one that varies the least," says Caimano.

They found them, and now the researchers plan to use them to immunize rabbits to prove they could work as a vaccine. They're also looking for even more diverse types of syphilis.

The UConn Health researchers will be collaborating with researchers at the University of North Carolina to enroll patients in Guangzhou, China, and Lilongwe, Malawi to make sure the syphilis they've been studying is representative of syphilis worldwide. If the proteins they've identified really do end up becoming a vaccine, they want it to benefit as many people as possible.

"Every time you go into a developing country, you need to leave something of benefit to the healthcare providers and their patients," Salazar says. Even better if a vaccine comes out of it that benefits the entire world.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Efforts to address social inequalities in income, education and employment opportunity can be boosted simply by the manner in which that inequity is presented, according to new research from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

If you benefit from an inequity, how you handle the situation could depend upon how it is described to you, Professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette found.

Her study tested people's willingness to surrender part of a bonus at work as a way of studying the presentation of an unjust imbalance or inequity.

"The manner in which you frame inequity or privilege, whether it's focused on the self - my unearned privilege -- or focused on the other - his or her unfair disadvantage - can influence the extent to which you want to rectify it," Rosette said.

"When attempting to influence individuals who are in a position to help rectify financial and social inequity, the way in which you phrase it makes a difference," Rosette said.

Previous research had found framing inequity as a group advantage made members of the group more likely to support efforts to address the inequity. But Rosette found the opposite is true for individuals.

"We show that at the individual level, when you tell a person that what they have received is unearned," Rosette said, "it triggers self-serving biases and they become less likely to rectify the inequity."

The study, Framing advantageous inequity with a focus on others: A catalyst for equity restoration, is newly published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Rosette worked with Christy Zhou Koval of Hong Kong University, who received her Ph.D at Fuqua.

The researchers asked 199 white participants to imagine they were sales associates who were to receive a performance bonus. They were told an audit had found company policy had assigned sales opportunities unfairly based on race. Then they were given the opportunity to share some or all of their bonus.

Participants who were told a specific black colleague had been unfairly disadvantaged by the policy were willing to give up more of the bonus than those told they had been given an unfair advantage because they were white. They also gave up more than the participants who were told that all white personnel were undeservedly advantaged, or that all black employees were unfairly disadvantaged. A second study replicated the results.

"When we frame inequity as a person's undeserved privilege, that person tends to justify their status by talking down the other party, describing the colleague as lazy or incompetent. This disparagement then justifies their decision not to share their rewards even though they were unfairly distributed in the first place." Rosette said. "Simply by changing the framing and presenting inequity as another person's undeserved disadvantage, we find people are more interested in addressing it and are less likely to blame the other person."

The findings suggest that understanding how people think about the disadvantages of others may be just as important as understanding how people think about their own advantages - especially when the goal is to encourage behaviors and policies to redress the imbalance.

"It's two sides of the same coin," Rosette said. "How you look at it determines whether you are willing to address inequity. Our findings suggest the focus should be on the disadvantages bestowed upon the other person, rather than the unearned privileges that accumulate to the self."

WASHINGTON -- A systemwide change to the culture and climate in higher education is needed to prevent and effectively respond to sexual harassment, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. There is no evidence that current policies, procedures, and approaches - which often focus on symbolic compliance with the law and on avoiding liability -- have resulted in a significant reduction in sexual harassment.

The report, which examines sexual harassment of women in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine, concludes that the cumulative result of sexual harassment is significant damage to research integrity and a costly loss of talent in these academic fields. The report urges institutions to consider sexual harassment equally important as research misconduct in terms of its effect on the integrity of research.

Colleges and universities and federal agencies should move beyond basic legal compliance to adopt holistic, evidence-based policies and practices to address sexual harassment, the report says. It notes that sexual harassment often occurs in an environment of generalized incivility and disrespect. In contrast, sexual harassment is less likely to occur when organizational systems and structures support diversity, inclusion, and respect.

"A change to the culture and climate in our nation's colleges and universities can stop the pattern of harassing behavior from impacting the next generation of women entering science, engineering, and medicine," said Paula Johnson, co-chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report, and president of Wellesley College.

In addition, the report urges Congress and state legislatures to consider a range of actions, including prohibiting confidentiality in settlement agreements and allowing lawsuits to be filed directly against alleged harassers, not just their institutions. It recommends that judges, academic institutions, and administrative agencies rely on scientific evidence about the behavior of targets and perpetrators of sexual harassment when assessing both institutional compliance with the law and the merits of individual claims. And it urges professional societies to use their influence to address sexual harassment in the scientific, medical, and engineering communities they represent, and to help promote professional cultures of civility and respect.

Among the report's findings:

Sexual harassment is common in academic science, engineering, and medicine. In a survey the University of Texas System conducted among its graduate and undergraduate students, about 20 percent of female science students, more than a quarter of female engineering students, and more than 40 percent of female medical students experienced sexual harassment from faculty or staff. The Pennsylvania State University System conducted a similar survey and found that 33 percent of its female undergraduates and 43 percent of its female graduate students (all disciplines) experienced sexual harassment from faculty or staff; so did 50 percent of female medical students. As these surveys reveal, women students in academic medicine experience more frequent sexual harassment perpetrated by faculty and staff than women students in science and engineering. In addition, the best available analysis to date found that 58 percent of women faculty and staff in academia (all disciplines, not limited to science, engineering, and medicine) experienced sexual harassment. Other research shows that women of color experience more harassment -- sexual, racial/ethnic, or a combination of the two -- than other groups.

Organizational climate is the single most important factor in determining whether sexual harassment is likely to happen in a work setting. The degree to which an organization's climate is seen by those within it as permissive of sexual harassment has the strongest relationship with how much sexual harassment occurs in that organization. There is often a perceived tolerance for sexual harassment in academia, the report says.

Gender harassment is by far the most common form of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can take three forms: gender harassment (verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey hostility, objectification, exclusion, or second-class status about members of one gender); unwanted sexual attention (unwelcome verbal or physical sexual advances, which can include assault); and sexual coercion (when favorable professional or educational treatment is conditioned on sexual activity).

Gender harassment - behaviors that communicate that women do not belong or do not merit respect - is by far the most common type of sexual harassment. Although often unrecognized as a form of sexual harassment or considered a "lesser" form of it, gender harassment that is severe or frequent can result in the same negative outcomes as isolated instances of sexual coercion. And when an environment is pervaded by gender harassment, other types of sexual harassment are more likely to occur.

When women are sexually harassed, their least common response is to formally report the experience. Many women do not report because they perceive -- accurately, the report notes -- that they may experience retaliation or other negative outcomes if they do so. Instead, women cope with sexual harassment most often by ignoring or appeasing the harasser and seeking social support.

Sexual harassment undermines women's professional and educational attainment and mental and physical health. When women experience sexual harassment in the workplace, the professional outcomes include declines in job satisfaction, performance, or productivity; increases in job stress; and withdrawal from the organization. When students experience sexual harassment, the educational outcomes include greater truancy, dropping classes, receiving lower grades, or dropping out. These conclusions are based in part on a study commissioned by the committee that interviewed women who had experienced at least one sexually harassing behavior in the last five years.

Sexual harassment training has not been demonstrated to change behavior. While sexual harassment training can be useful in improving knowledge of policies and of behaviors that constitute sexual harassment, it has not been demonstrated to prevent sexual harassment or change people's behaviors or beliefs.

Colleges and Universities Need Strong Leadership, Increased Transparency and Accountability

Preventing and effectively addressing sexual harassment of women in academia is a significant challenge, but research shows what will work to prevent sexual harassment, says the report. College and university presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs should make the reduction and prevention of sexual harassment an explicit goal of their tenure. "Ultimately, success in addressing this challenge will require strong and effective leadership from administrators at every level within academia, as well as support and work from all members of our nation's college campuses - students, faculty, and staff," said committee co-chair Sheila Widnall, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The report offers evidence-based recommendations as a road map for academic institutions:

Address gender harassment. Leaders in academia and at research and training sites should pay increased attention to and enact policies that cover gender harassment, as a way to address the most common form of sexual harassment and to help prevent other types of harassment.

Improve transparency and accountability. Systems in which prohibitions against unacceptable behaviors are clear and that hold members of the community accountable for meeting behavioral and cultural expectations established by leadership have lower rates of sexual harassment. Academic institutions should develop and share clear policies on sexual harassment and standards of behavior. These policies should include a range of clearly stated, escalating disciplinary consequences for perpetrators found to have violated the policy, and the disciplinary actions taken should correspond to the severity and frequency of the harassment. Decisions regarding disciplinary actions should be made in a fair and timely way, following an investigative process that is fair to all sides.

Create diverse, inclusive, and respectful environments. Academic institutions should work to create a diverse, inclusive, and respectful environment where these values are aligned with and integrated into the structures, policies, and procedures of the institution. They should take explicit steps to achieve greater gender and racial equity in hiring and promotions, and thus improve the representation of women at every level. They should combine anti-harassment efforts with civility promotion programs. Focusing evaluation and reward structures on cooperation and collegiality rather than solely on individual-level teaching and research could have a significant impact on improving the environment in academia.

Diffuse the hierarchical and dependent relationship between faculty and trainees. To reduce the risk of sexual harassment, academic institutions should consider mechanisms such as mentoring networks or committee-based advising, and departmental funding rather than funding only from a principal investigator.

Provide support for targets of sexual harassment. Academic institutions should convey that reporting sexual harassment is an honorable and courageous action. They also should provide alternative, less formal ways of recording information about the experience and reporting it when a target is not comfortable filing a formal report. Regardless of whether a formal report is filed, institutions should provide targets of harassment with ways to access support services such as health care and legal services, and develop approaches for preventing targets of harassment from experiencing retaliation.

The decision to claim credit for a cyberattack on a government or institution depends on both the goals of the attack and the characteristics of the attacker, according to a study co-authored by a UConn political scientist that is one of the first to look into the voluntary claiming of cybersecurity operations.

The type of attacker - whether a state or a non-state actor such as a terrorist group - determines whether credit is claimed for a cyberattack and how it is communicated, according to the study, "Rethinking Secrecy in Cyberspace: The Politics of Voluntary Attribution," forthcoming in the Journal of Global Security Studies. Co-authors of the study are Evan Perkoski, assistant professor of political science at UConn, and Michael Poznansky, assistant professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Affairs.

Among the findings of the study:

Both states and non-state actors face similar decisions in the lifecycle of a cyberattack, yet the characteristics of each can cause their strategies to diverge, "particularly with the optics of credit claiming."

While most research treats cyber operations as distinct from more traditional elements of state power, states "may be able to leverage their cyber assets to achieve many of the same goals most frequently pursued with conventional forces."

The decision to privately or publicly acknowledge sponsorship of an attack may provide "crucial information about both their motives and identity."

Perkoski says that in developing the study, a distinction was drawn between cybercrime and cyberblackmail because "they are inherently different forms of cyber operations with different goals in mind."

He notes that typically the goal of cybercrime is personal or financial gain, which does not follow the same logic as states operating against other states in cyberspace. In the case of cyberblackmail, the attacker wants the victim to know something was stolen, such as when North Korea hacked into the servers at Sony following the release of "The Interview," a film about assassinating its leader, Kim Jong-un.

"They hacked into Sony servers, stole certain information, and said we want you to do X or we'll release this information," Perkoski says. "It was a form of pretty basic blackmail. It's not operating on the same kind of pattern of state-on-state or non-state-on-state intervention in cyberspace. In that case, you only want to communicate with the person you've hacked and let them know you have this material. It's a different dynamic than a state trying to coerce an opponent to give up their nuclear arms program."

The researchers began their collaboration studying cybersecurity several years ago while they were both fellows at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Perkoski is a specialist in political violence and terrorism, while Poznansky studies clandestine and covert interventions.

Perkoski says the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election fits into the study's findings. Russian operatives reportedly hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers to obtain emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, and then used social media trolls to sway public opinion toward Donald J. Trump's campaign.

"Russia wouldn't get as many benefits from claiming their operation," he says. "They're not looking to get attention for their message or cause. They're really looking to influence the way events might unfold. Because it's unclear, it makes it hard for the U.S. to take a hard stance against them. You can always play devil's advocate and say maybe it wasn't Russia, as President Trump has said. Maybe it was some guy in his basement hacking on his own. In that case, it makes sense that Russia doesn't want to claim credit, to limit possible escalatory dynamics."

One of the challenges in confirming clandestine state-sponsored activities is that it may only be possible from classified documents. Perkoski says scholars are still learning important details about historic events with the release of classified documents decades after the events occurred, such as the recent release of documents concerning the controversial 1961 U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

"When we think about what's happening with the U.S. and Russia, Iran, and North Korea and their cyber operations, it may be another 30 or 40 years until we know what's really going on," he says.

Perkoski says the study helps to clarify the fact that not all cyber operations are inherently anonymous, and that actors may claim credit for them, which then opens the door to using cyber tools as almost traditional instruments of state power. At the same time, there is no firm understanding of how non-state actor groups operate in cyberspace.

"We know a lot about how terrorists and insurgent groups come together, and what sustains them, but we don't have a theory of any of this stuff for a hacking organization and whether they follow the same paradigms or not," Perkoski says. "How do you defeat a militant organization or a hacking collective like Anonymous when they're all spread out around the world, they operate in states that don't have extradition treaties with the United States, and they might even operate in some states that give them de facto immunity? We know, for instance, that some Russian hackers don't get support from the government, but they allow them to operate freely because they're operating in Russia's own interest. That raises a lot of questions about understanding these groups."

At the same time, Perkoski says, as advances in cybersecurity improve the ability of government and law enforcement agencies to track hackers, terror groups and militant organizations are moving away from technology.

"There was a period when government agencies were quite effective at using these tools to their advantage and gaining information. Now I think you're seeing militant groups respond to that and go more low-tech, to avoid some of those weaknesses," he says. "Look at how the U.S. found Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. It wasn't through hacking or satellite imagery. It was by tracking a courier going to his house and meeting with other guys who would go back to Afghanistan. It was very much traditional signals intelligence that the CIA has been using for 50 to 60 years."

A sticky drop of nectar clinging to the tip of a hummingbird's beak drips into the next flower the bird visits. With that subtle change, the microbes within that drop are now in a new environment, teeming with other microbes. This small example of species forced to coexist in the real world has helped the Fukami Lab at Stanford University unravel the relative importance of two theories scientists have had about how species can live together.

It turns out that a less popular theory, having to do with the way organisms respond and contribute to environmental fluctuations, likely plays a bigger role than ecologists had thought - this according to the study of the nectar-dwelling yeast of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. The work, published June 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could influence how scientists model the effects of climate change on organisms.

"This particular experiment was motivated by basic curiosity about how species coexist," said Tadashi Fukami, associate professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. "We experimented with nectar-colonizing yeasts because we had gathered data about them in the wild, such as hummingbirds visits, interactions with flowers, effects of resources. This way we can design lab experiments that have a clear natural context."

From theory to reality

Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain how species coexist in variable environments, called the storage effect and relative nonlinearity. The storage effect holds that species can coexist if they can store gains for lean times and their lean times don't overlap, which means they are mostly competing with individuals belonging to their own species for resources during favorable times. The concept of relative nonlinearity maintains that coexistence can occur when one species thrives off fluctuation in resources, the other thrives off stability in resources, and each species' use of resources contributes to the state - fluctuation or stability - that benefits the other.

Andrew Letten, senior author of the paper, led the study as a postdoctoral fellow in the Fukami Lab. The goal was to understand each mechanism's relative importance to coexistence. He was inspired by a paper led by a theoretical ecologist at Cornell University, which outlined a new method for quantifying the storage effect through statistical simulations.

"Up until that paper, there was no realistic means of quantifying the relative contribution of the two mechanisms," said Letten, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. "When I read it, I literally felt giddy because it was so serendipitously tailored to what we were already doing, but enabled us to take it so much further."

By creating thousands of microcosms, each growing one species of nectar yeasts, the researchers gathered high-resolution data about the complex ways in which the yeasts respond to environmental conditions. Next, they used those data to create scenarios where the yeasts grew in pairs and applied the new method to disentangle the influence of the storage effect from that of relative nonlinearity on the yeasts' coexistence.

"The idea is, you can mathematically model these coexistence mechanisms, knock them out in the simulations, and then that shows you how those species grow without that mechanism," explained Po-Ju Ke, graduate student in biology and co-author on the paper. "For example, relative nonlinearity relies on fluctuations in amino acids in nectar, a primary resource for yeast growth, so we simulated a stable level of amino acids to remove the influence of that mechanism."

Lastly, the researchers compared their simulated results with the results of experiments where two species were grown together. This work is the first to experimentally tease apart the two mechanisms in real organisms and it agreed with the simulations 83 percent of the time.

Looking at their findings, the big surprise was that there were instances where a lack of relative nonlinearity led to one species dying out. This contradicts a common assumption among ecologists.

"Storage effect, maybe because it's an older concept and more intuitive and easier to get data on, has always been assumed to be the main mechanism," said Fukami. "We found they both can be important, but the main finding is that relative nonlinearity is much more important than most ecologists assumed."

Studying at multiple levels

Cell and molecular biology often concentrates on studying a particular pathway in intricate detail, whereas ecology tends to focus on larger systems, studying them holistically. In their current work, the Fukami Lab is pursuing research that can apply to both levels.

"As ecologists, we are working to understand holistically how these yeasts are interacting - in the world, with pollinators, with each other, in the nectar - but we can also use the tools that cell biologists have developed to study baker's yeast to study nectar yeasts in order to gain more precise ecological understanding," said Callie Chappell, a graduate student in the Fukami Lab and lead author of a different paper about developing a general ecological theory using nectar yeasts as new model organisms.

In addition to the fundamental insights into how species can survive together with few resources, the research team hopes that the experiments detailed in the current work will cause ecologists to reconsider how climate change may affect species. Climate change will lead to increased fluctuation in the environment, such as severe weather events, and this work shows that multiple mechanisms of species coexistence in fluctuating environments must be considered simultaneously to predict the fate of species under climate change.