Research shows climate change boosts likelihood of toxin releases from algal blooms in American lakes

 

Blue-green algae scums washing up on shore of Milford Reservior, Kansas, in 2017.
Photo Credit: Ted Harris

A broad analysis of lake water quality across the United States reveals human-driven climate change is increasing risks of high toxin concentrations from algal blooms in U.S. lakes, posing increasing hazards to people and wild and domestic animals, including dogs.

The investigation, recently published as the cover story in Nature Water, relies on data from lake-water samples from 2,804 U.S. lakes collected between 2007 and 2017 by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The authors, including a researcher at the University of Kansas, use the EPA’s data to predict the likelihood that a toxin called microcystin, produced by some blue-green algal species, will spike above water quality thresholds in the years ahead. Microcystin can damage the liver in humans and can kill wild and domestic animals.

UConn Health Researchers Find that Youthful Proteins Help Nerves Regrow

Three sections of optic nerve were injured by crushing (the white diamond on the far left of each nerve marks the crush point.) The lower two nerves each express genes (Rpl7 or Rpl7a) newly identified by the Trakhtenberg lab as promoting nerve axon regeneration. The axons carry the bright green dye. The insets to the right show how much more axon regrowth is occurring in the nerves that express the regeneration genes, and how no regrowth happens in the normal control (top).
Image Credit: Courtesy of Trakhtenberg Lab/UConn Health

Damaged nerves of the brain, eye, and spinal cord cannot grow back. But specific gene therapies might be able to change this, leading to treatments for paralysis and other forms of nerve damage, UConn Health researchers report in the October issue of Experimental Neurology.

Axons are the long arms of nerve cells that reach from our extremities to our spinal cord, and from our eye to our brain. Injuries that smash or sever axons—and often the large bundles of axons that we commonly call nerves—can cause paralysis, blindness, lack of sexual function, or other devastating outcomes. Most of the time, these central nervous system axons don’t repair themselves, and we have no good treatments for this.

Axons fail to regenerate for several reasons. Some of them have to do with the environment the axon grows in, but another reason is that the ability to grow is lost as the nervous system matures during and after birth. The loss of key proteins prevents regrowth once an organism matures, reports a team of researchers at UConn School of Medicine.

BNP Peptide a Culprit in Eczema

Image Credit: Freepik

Researchers from North Carolina State University have pinpointed a particular peptide’s role in activating atopic dermatitis, or eczema. The work could lead to more effective treatments for the condition.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a skin condition characterized by itching, irritated and thickened skin at the site of the irritation. The brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) is a peptide, or short chain of amino acids, that is elevated in patients with AD.

“BNP is expressed in sensory neurons, the neurons responsible for conveying sensation to the brain via the spinal cord,” says Santosh Mishra, associate professor of molecular biomedical sciences at NC State and corresponding author of the work. “We know from previous work that BNP helps translate the sensation of itch from the skin to the brain. In this work we wanted to see if BNP was involved in activating AD.”

In a chemically induced mouse model of AD, the researchers saw that mice without BNP did not exhibit the thickened or irritated skin commonly associated with AD, and their itching was reduced compared with control mice who did have BNP.

Scientists propose super-bright light sources powered by quasiparticles

A team of scientists ran advanced computer simulations on supercomputers to propose a way to use quasiparticles for super-bright light sources.
Image Credit: Bernardo Malaca

An international team of scientists is rethinking the basic principles of radiation physics with the aim of creating super-bright light sources. In a new study published in Nature Photonics, researchers from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Portugal, the University of Rochester, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Applied Optics Laboratory in France proposed ways to use quasiparticles to create light sources as powerful as the most advanced ones in existence today, but much smaller.

“The most fascinating aspect of quasiparticles is their ability to move in ways that would be disallowed by the laws of physics governing individual particles.”

Quasiparticles are formed by many electrons moving in sync. They can travel at any speed—even faster than light—and withstand intense forces, like those near a black hole.

“The most fascinating aspect of quasiparticles is their ability to move in ways that would be disallowed by the laws of physics governing individual particles,” says John Palastro, a senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an associate professor at the Institute of Optics.

New non-invasive form of deep brain stimulation could provide alternative treatment for brain diseases

Photo Credit: Helix Centre

Researchers at the UK Dementia Research Institute have developed a new form of deep brain stimulation that does not require surgery and could provide an alternative treatment option for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

The exciting new technology has been successfully trialed with 20 healthy volunteers for the first time by Dr Nir Grossman and Dr Ines Violante and the team at the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at Imperial College London and the University of Surrey.

Known as temporal interference (TI), it works by safely delivering differing frequencies of electrical field through electrodes placed on the scalp and different parts of the head. The overlapping electrical fields enable a deep region of the brain known as the hippocampus to be targeted by electrical stimulation, without affecting the surrounding areas – a procedure that until now required brain surgery. 

Cut emissions and improve farming to protect wilderness

Photo Credit: Dave Willhite

Humanity must cut carbon emissions and use farmland more efficiently to protect our planet’s remaining wilderness, new research shows.

Climate change is making some wilderness areas more suitable for crop growing, heightening the risk of agricultural expansion, especially in northern areas including Canada, Scandinavia and Russia.

By assessing “future climate suitability” for more than 1,700 crop varieties, the study projects 2.7 million square kilometers of wilderness will become newly suitable for agriculture over the next 40 years.

This is 7% of the world’s total remaining wilderness outside Antarctica.

The study, by the University of Exeter, also projects that the variety of crops that can be grown will decrease on 72% of currently cultivable land worldwide – further driving pressure to expand farming into wilderness.

Antibiotic resistance can impair subsequent adaptations in bacteria, new Concordia research suggests

Farhan Chowdhury (left) and Brandon Findlay; “Instead of relying on antibiotic cocktails, we can have an alternative where sequential antibiotic therapies are applied. This can lead to better therapies and give patients more time to recover before resistance evolves.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Concordia University

Researchers at Concordia’s Department of Biology and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have discovered a possible new avenue of treatment that can help slow antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

PhD candidate Farhan Chowdhury and associate professor Brandon Findlay recently shared the results of their research in a recent paper published in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases. The researchers describe how a strain of the bacteria E. coli is left severely weakened after it has developed resistance to the antibiotic chloramphenicol (CHL). This weakness leaves the bacteria unable to adapt to other types of antibiotics.

Understanding the ways in which resistance impairments evolve can help clinicians better target pathogens in patients.

“Instead of relying on antibiotic cocktails, we can have an alternative where sequential antibiotic therapies are applied,” Chowdhury explains.

“Clinicians can select the sequence of medication by seeing if a first antibiotic imposes deficits on the bacteria, which would slow down the evolution of resistance in the subsequent ones. This can lead to better therapies and give patients more time to recover before resistance evolves.”

Understanding mutualism can help control the spread of invasive species

The subalpine fir has a mutualistic relationship with belowground fungi.
Photo Credit: Khilav Majmudar, University of Minnesota

Cooperation between species to help each other's survival is known as mutualism. It is seen among many types of organisms, such as plants and fungi that exchange nutrients with one another, plants that provide bees with nectar in exchange for pollination, and sea anemones that provide protection for clown-fish in exchange for excreted nutrients. Recently, scientists have found evidence that some invasive plants become even more invasive in the presence of helpful partners, as can happen with certain pine trees and fungi or fig trees and wasps. But other studies have suggested that species that didn't rely on mutualist partners were more invasive. 

Recent research at the University of Minnesota, published in the journal Ecology, attempted to identify the conditions under which a mutualistic partner could make a species more or less invasive. To study this, they built mathematical models called integro-difference equations (IDEs). IDEs take into account the effects of mutualism on growth and dispersal of species and are useful tools to model spatial processes. Mathematical models are helpful in understanding ecological processes like invasion that occur over many years and can be difficult to study in the field.

Electrons are quick-change artists in molten salts, chemists show

When exposed to radiation, electrons produced within molten zinc chloride, or ZnCl2, can be observed in three distinct singly occupied molecular orbital states, plus a more diffuse, delocalized state.
Illustration Credit: Hung H. Nguyen/University of Iowa

In a finding that helps elucidate how molten salts in advanced nuclear reactors might behave, scientists have shown how electrons interacting with the ions of the molten salt can form three states with different properties. Understanding these states can help predict the impact of radiation on the performance of salt-fueled reactors.

The researchers, from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Iowa, computationally simulated the introduction of an excess electron into molten zinc chloride salt to see what would happen.

They found three possible scenarios. In one, the electron becomes part of a molecular radical that includes two zinc ions. In another, the electron localizes on a single zinc ion. In the third, the electron is delocalized, or spread out diffusely over multiple salt ions.

Because molten salt reactors are one of the reactor designs under consideration for future nuclear power plants, “the big question is what happens to molten salts when they’re exposed to high radiation,” said Vyacheslav Bryantsev, leader of the Chemical Separations group at ORNL and one of the scientists on the study and an author of the paper. “What happens to the salt that is used to carry the fuel in one of those advanced reactor concepts?”

Lactate-producing bacteria inside tumors promote resistance to radiation therapy

Lactobacillus iners taken from cervical cancer tumor samples spread on agar plate.
Image Credit: Courtesy of David Lo.

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered that lactate-producing intratumoral bacteria drives resistance to radiation therapy, suggesting that lactic acid-producing bacteria present in various cancers may serve as novel therapeutic targets.

The study, published today in Cancer Cell, reported that a particular bacterial species, Lactobacillus iners (L. iners), caused cancer cells to respond to radiation by rewiring metabolic signaling pathways to resist treatment. The researchers also found that L. iners was associated with poorer clinical outcomes in patients with cervical cancer.

“These lactic acid-producing bacteria are seemingly responsible for changing signaling pathways by priming cancer cells to use lactate instead of glucose to fuel growth and proliferation from oxidative stress following radiation therapy,” said corresponding author Lauren Colbert, M.D., assistant professor of Radiation Oncology. “This is potentially paradigm shifting, and we currently are working on novel approaches to target these specific intratumoral bacteria. We are hopeful that these efforts will lead us to approaches that can benefit patients across several types of cancer.”