Underactive immune response may explain obesity link to COVID-19 severity

Intensive care unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital 
Photo Credit: Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Scientists at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID) and Wellcome Sanger Institute showed that following SARS-CoV-2 infection, cells in the lining of the lungs, nasal cells, and immune cells in the blood show a blunted inflammatory response in obese patients, producing suboptimal levels of molecules needed to fight the infection.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been almost 760 million confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection, with almost 6.9 million deaths. While some people have very mild – or even no – symptoms, others have much more severe symptoms, including acute respiratory distress syndrome requiring ventilator support.

One of the major risk factors for severe COVID-19 is obesity, which is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of over 30. More than 40% of US adults and 28% of adults in England are classed as obese.

While this link has been shown in numerous epidemiological studies, until now, it has not been clear why obesity should increase an individual’s risk of severe COVID-19. One possible explanation was thought to be that obesity is linked to inflammation: studies have shown that people who are obese already have higher levels of key molecules associated with inflammation in their blood. Could an overactive inflammatory response explain the connection?

Upgraded tumor model optimizes search for cancer therapies

Study co-authors (from left) Caleb Bashor, Antonios Mikos and Letitia Chim.
Photo Credit: Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University

Tumor cells won’t show their true selves in a petri dish, isolated from other cells.

To find out how they really behave, Rice University researchers developed an upgraded tumor model that houses osteosarcoma cells beside immune cells known as macrophages inside a three-dimensional structure engineered to mimic bone. Using the model, bioengineer Antonios Mikos and collaborators found that the body’s immune response can make tumor cells more resistant to chemotherapy.

The study, which is published in Biomaterials, sheds light on why some cancer drugs that appear to be good candidates in the lab do not perform as well as expected in actual patients. It underscores weaknesses in traditional tumor modeling and points the way toward more effective cancer therapies.

“Existing tumor models used to test drug performance do not mimic the actual environment in the human body closely enough,” Mikos said. “We are trying to create an environment for the experiment that is closer to what is happening in the organism of actual patients. Having such an environment will allow us to test multiple drugs in a time- and cost-effective way.”

Widespread species are gaining even more ground, new study shows

The cabezon Scorpaenichthys marmoratus
Photo Credit: Steve Lonhart (SIMoN / MBNMS)

Widespread animal and plant species benefit from human impacts on nature and can spread even further. In contrast, species with a small range retreat even further. This is shown in a new study by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), which was published in "Nature Communications". The team analyzed data from over 200 studies and was able to show that protected areas can mitigate some of the effects of biodiversity change and slow down the systematic decline of less common species.

Every living species on the planet has its own unique geographic range, with some species occurring over large parts of the globe, while others inhabiting only a few select areas. But does the range size of a species influence how it responds to human activities and changes in the number of sites it occupies over time?

A team led by researchers from iDiv and MLU set out to evaluate the connection between the size of a species’ range and the changes in their regional occupancy over time. To do so, the researchers used an extensive dataset of 238 studies that monitored plant and animal species assemblages from across many sites for 10-90 years. From these time series, they were able to determine which species were increasing in the numbers of sites they occupied through time, which were decreasing in their site occupancy, and which stayed the same. They then wanted to compare the trends of species to the size of their ranges to see if there was a connection. To determine the range sizes of nearly 19,000 species from across the tree-of-life that were identified in the time series, they used data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which includes data on the occurrences of species from across the world, including data collected from popular smartphone apps like iNaturalist and eBird.

Discovering the Unexplored: Synthesis and Analysis of a New Orthorhombic Sn3O4 Polymorph

Tuning the reaction conditions such as degree of filling and gas composition can have a major impact on the products obtained by hydrothermal synthesis obtained. This was clearly represented in the new Tokyo Tech study where they synthesized an unreported orthorhombic polymorph of Sn3O4 instead of conventional monoclinic phase by optimizing the conditions inside the hydrothermal reactor. The orthorhombic Sn3O4 has a narrower bandgap than the conventional one, thus making it useful as a visible-light active photocatalyst.

Oxides of tin (SnxOy) are found in many of modern technologies due to their versatile nature. The multivalent oxidation states of tin—Sn2+ and Sn4+—impart tin oxides with electroconductivity, photocatalysis, and various functional properties. For the photocatalysis application of tin oxides, a narrow bandgap for visible-light absorption is indispensable to utilize a wide range of solar energy. Hence, the discovery of new SnxOy could help improve the efficiency of many environmentally significant photocatalytic reactions like water splitting and CO2 reduction. While there are many theoretical and computational predictions of the new stable SnxOy, there still remains a need for experimental studies that can turn the predictions into reality.

Sculpting quantum materials for the electronics of the future

Artistic view. Curvature of the space fabric due to the superposition of spin and orbital states at the interface between lanthanum aluminate (LaAlO3) and strontium titanate (SrTiO3).
Illustration Credit: © Xavier Ravinet – UNIGE

An international team led by the UNIGE has developed a quantum material in which the fabric of space inhabited by electrons can be curved on-demand.

The development of new information and communication technologies poses new challenges to scientists and industry. Designing new quantum materials - whose exceptional properties stem from quantum physics - is the most promising way to meet these challenges. An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and including researchers from the universities of Salerno, Utrecht and Delft, has designed a material in which the dynamics of electrons can be controlled by curving the fabric of space in which they evolve. These properties are of interest for next-generation electronic devices, including the optoelectronics of the future. These results can be found in the journal Nature Materials.

The telecommunications of the future will require new, extremely powerful electronic devices. These must be capable of processing electromagnetic signals at unprecedented speeds, in the picosecond range, i.e. one thousandth of a billionth of a second. This is unthinkable with current semiconductor materials, such as silicon, which is widely used in the electronic components of our telephones, computers and game consoles. To achieve this, scientists and industry are focusing on the design of new quantum materials.

First detection of neutrinos made at a particle collider

The FASER (Forward Search Experiment) detector in the tunnel of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
Photo Credit: © 2021-2023 CERN

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that played an important role in the early phase of the universe. They are key to learning more about the fundamental laws of nature, including how particles acquire mass and why there is more matter than antimatter. Despite being among the most abundant particles in the universe they are very difficult to detect because they pass through matter with almost no interaction. They are therefore often called “ghost particles”.

Neutrinos have been known for several decades and were very important for establishing the standard model of particle physics. But most neutrinos studied by physicists so far have been low-energy neutrinos. Previously, no neutrino produced at a particle collider had ever been detected by an experiment. Now, an international team including researchers from the Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP) of the University of Bern has succeeded in doing just that. Using the FASER particle detector at CERN in Geneva, the team was able to detect very high energy neutrinos produced by brand a new source: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The international FASER collaboration announced this result on March 19 at the MORIOND EW conference in La Thuile, Italy.

Parasites alter likelihood of fish being caught by anglers

Itsuro Koizumi (second from left) and Ryota Hasegawa (first from right), authors of the paper, with Taro Matsuda of Setsunan University (center), and Masashiro Naka (first from left) and Chiharu Furusawa (second from right) of the Koizumi lab
Photo Credit: Itsuro Koizumi

Parasitic infections in salmonid fish can increase or decrease their vulnerability to angling, depending on their body condition.

Angling, a type of fishing, is a popular pastime across the world, and is known to be 40,000 years old. Angling usually takes place in natural bodies of water, which may have populations of wild fish, or be stocked with cultured fish. Fish caught by angling may either be consumed, or may be immediately released.

Parasites are very common in nature, found everywhere that their hosts are found. Parasites are known to alter the susceptibility of fish to predators. Angling can be considered predation of fish; however, there has been almost no in-depth research on how parasites affect the susceptibility of fish to angling.

Associate Professor Itsuro Koizumi at the Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, and graduate student Ryota Hasegawa have investigated how a mouth and gill parasite of the whitespotted char, a salmonid fish, affects its vulnerability to angling. Their findings were published in the journal The Science of Nature.

New way to study molecular drivers of cancer

Ch4 kinases.

Clearer understanding about the markers and drivers of cancer cell proliferation has emerged from research that identifies new opportunities to overcome convergence with complex enzymes, known as kinases.

The work paves the way for new approaches to study the molecular drivers of disease states such as cancer.

Kinases are a specific family of proteins that add phosphates to other molecules – a process called phosphorylation, which can change the function of their substrates (target proteins). In humans, more than 500 kinases phosphorylate approximately 15% of all proteins. However, more than one kinase can phosphorylate the same substrate, and this can occur at the same or different sites. This is known as convergence, and can often make it difficult to study a specific kinase or substrate, as the activity of multiple kinases can hamper analysis.

Understanding the complex kinase network is important, as dysregulation of these proteins can drive disease, such as the survival and spread of cancer cells or their resistance to therapeutics.

While most kinase research has tended to focus on characterizing phosphorylation networks between kinases and their substrates, researchers in the Janovjak Lab at Flinders University’s College of Medicine and Public Health have taken a different tack by analyzing how common convergence is across all human kinases, and using these insights to dissect it experimentally.

New study counts the environmental cost of managing knotweed

Invasive Knotweed
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Swansea University

New Swansea University research has looked at the long-term environmental impact of different methods to control Japanese knotweed.

The invasive species has been calculated to cost more than £165 million to manage every year in the UK alone. Its presence can blight property purchases for households across the country.

This has led to the development of different ways of trying to control it but with sustainability becoming increasingly important, understanding the effect of these management methods is vital.

A new study, led by biosciences lecturer Dr Sophie Hocking and looking at the entire life cycle and long-term impacts of different management approaches, has just been published in online journal Scientific Reports.

Dr Hocking said: “In light of the current climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, invasive species management and sustainability have never been so important.

New Study Provides First Comprehensive Look at Oxygen Loss on Coral Reefs

Coral reefs at a study site off Taiping Island, South China Sea.
Photo Credit: Yi Bei Liang

Scripps Oceanography scientists and collaborators provide first-of-its-kind assessment of hypoxia, or low oxygen levels, across 32 coral reef sites around the world

A new study is providing an unprecedented examination of oxygen loss on coral reefs around the globe under ocean warming. Led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a large team of national and international colleagues, the study captures the current state of hypoxia—or low oxygen levels—at 32 different sites, and reveals that hypoxia is already pervasive on many reefs.

The overall decline of oxygen content across the world’s oceans and coastal waters—a process known as ocean deoxygenation—has been well documented, but hypoxia on coral reefs has been relatively underexplored. Oxygen loss in the ocean is predicted to threaten marine ecosystems globally, though more research is needed to better understand the biological impacts on tropical corals and coral reefs.

The study, published March 16 in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to document oxygen conditions on coral reef ecosystems at this scale.