Protein study could one day advance Parkinson’s, breast cancer care

Jonathan Pruneda, Ph.D., led a study to explore how a form of the common protein ubiquitin is modified during an infection with illness-causing bacteria. With further research, his study's findings could lead to improved care for Parkinson's disease and breast cancer.
Photo Credit: OHSU/Christine Torres Hicks

New research from Oregon Health & Science University could one day lead to therapies that prevent or treat diseases and infections tied to a protein that’s found in all human cells.

A study published today in the journal Molecular Cell describes how the protein ubiquitin is modified during a bacterial infection. The study details the steps taken to create a form of the protein known as lysine 6 polyubiquitin, where a long chain of ubiquitin molecules are linked through the amino acid lysine. This form of ubiquitin helps cells communicate by sending a molecular message — communication that remains poorly understood.

Previous research has indicated that this form of ubiquitin may be linked to the development of Parkinson’s disease and breast cancer. However, the details of how lysine 6 polyubiquitin is formed or how it is involved in disease aren’t yet clear.

To explore this, OHSU scientists turned their attention to illness-causing bacteria and how they manipulate lysine 6 polyubiquitin during infection. Researchers isolated enzymes used by E. coli and Salmonella to cause food poisoning and other illnesses, and observed how the enzymes interacted with ubiquitin.

Allured by Night Light

Skyglow — how bright the night sky is because of artificial light — is a top predictor of where large numbers of migrating birds are going to stop and rest during their migrations across the U.S.
Image Credit: Jeffrey C. Chase

Billions of migrating birds take flight across North America each fall and spring, heading south to their wintering grounds or north to their breeding grounds. 

Most of these birds are songbirds and they’re on the move at night. At times during their long migration, they need to stop, rest and refuel before they take off again. But instead of landing in their typical habitats such as forests or wetlands, artificial light is drawing them within and around cities. 

That’s a problem, said Jeff Buler, a University of Delaware professor of wildlife ecology, because light pollution can be an “ecological trap” for birds. 

“It lures them into cities where they’re at greater risk of colliding with buildings or mortality from other sources like feral cats,” Buler said. 

New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds that skyglow — how bright the night sky is because of artificial light — is a top predictor of where large numbers of migrating birds are going to stop and rest during their migrations across the U.S.

The study, which uses bird stopover data from 2016 to 2020, is a collaboration between UD’s Buler and researchers at Colorado State University, the National Park Service, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Michigan State University. The research was supported with funding from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Plague from Egypt: topos or reality?

Fortress in Alexandria, Egypt
From Alexandria and Pelusium, goods and people traveled from Egypt to the entire Mediterranean region. Did epidemics also spread along this route?
Photo Credit: Juan Nino

Many reports from antiquity about outbreaks of plague mention Egypt as the source of pestilences that reached the Mediterranean. But was this really the case? Researchers from the University of Basel are conducting a critical analysis of the ancient written and documentary evidence combined with archaeogenetic findings to add some context to the traditional view.

Red and inflamed eyes, bad breath, fever, violent convulsions, boils and blisters over the entire body: these and other symptoms are mentioned by historian Thucydides in connection with the “Plague of Athens”, which lasted from 430 to 426 BCE. He suspected that the epidemic originated in Aithiopia. “This area isn’t to be confused with the country we now know as Ethiopia, but was a more general term used at the time to refer to the region south of Egypt,” explains Professor Sabine Huebner, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Basel.

Contemporary accounts suggest that later epidemics in the Mediterranean also started in Egypt and Aithiopia, such as the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Cyprian and the Justinianic Plague, which ravaged the ancient world between the second and sixth centuries.

Understudied cell in the brain could be key to treating glioblastoma

Perivascular fibroblasts observed in the study
Image Credit: Courtesy of the researcher / University of Notre Dame

Glioblastoma is one of the most treatment-resistant cancers, with those diagnosed surviving for less than two years.

In a new study in NPJ Genomic Medicine, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have found that a largely understudied cell could offer new insight into how aggressive, primary brain cancer is able to resist immunotherapy.

“A decade ago, we didn’t even know perivascular fibroblasts existed within the brain, and not just in the lining of the skull,” said Meenal Datta, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Notre Dame and senior author on the study. “My lab’s expertise is examining tumors from an engineering and systems-based approach and looking at the novel mechanical features in rare cancers that may have been understudied or overlooked.”

Using standard bioinformatics and newer AI-based approaches, Datta’s TIME Lab began analyzing different genes expressed in the tumor microenvironment related to the extracellular matrix — or the scaffolding cells create to support future cell adhesion, migration, proliferation and differentiation — and other various cell types. What they found was a surprising, fairly new cell type: perivascular fibroblasts. These fibroblasts are typically found in the blood vessels of a healthy brain and deposit collagen to maintain the structural integrity and functionality of brain vessels.

Clinical trial proves that the ketogenic diet is effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease

Photo Credit: David B Townsend

It’s official: The ketogenic diet proved to be effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in the first randomized controlled clinical trial of ketogenic metabolic therapy for PKD.

“I’m really happy about these clinical trial results,” said UC Santa Barbara biologist Thomas Weimbs, whose lab was part of an international collaboration to investigate the effect of the fasting response known as ketosis on the cysts that are the hallmark of the disease. “We now have the first evidence in humans that the cysts really don’t like to be in ketosis and that they don’t seem to grow.”

The researchers’ study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

Nurture over nature

For PKD patients, these findings represent an opportunity to control a genetic disease that leads to a progressive condition, causing pain and robbing them of their quality of life, and often resulting in the need for dialysis and kidney transplantation as the cysts destroy the kidneys’ ability to effectively filter and remove waste from the body.

“If you have PKD, the dogma is that it’s a genetic disease,” Weimbs said. “And no matter what you do, you progress toward kidney failure and diet doesn’t make any difference, which unfortunately most patients are told to this day.” 

Unraveling the Conduction Mechanisms in a Novel Perovskite Oxide

Image Credit: Singkham

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), in collaboration with Tohoku University and others, have investigated a unique and promising material for next-generation electrochemical devices: hexagonal perovskite-related oxide Ba7Nb3.8Mo1.2O20.1. They unveiled the material's unique ion-transport mechanisms, something that will pave the way for better dual-ion conductors and a greener future.

Clean energy technologies are the cornerstone of sustainable societies, and solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) and proton ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) are among the most promising types of electrochemical devices for green power generation. These devices, however, still face challenges that hinder their development and adoption.

Ideally, SOFCs should operate at low temperatures to prevent unwanted chemical reactions from degrading their constituent materials. Unfortunately, most known oxide-ion conductors, a key component of SOFCs, only exhibit decent ionic conductivity at elevated temperatures. As for PCFCs, not only are they chemically unstable under carbon dioxide atmospheres, but they also require energy-intensive, high-temperature processing steps during manufacturing.

Dual-ion conductors, however, offer a solution to these problems. By facilitating the diffusion of both protons and oxide ions, these conductors can achieve high total conductivity at lower temperatures, thereby improving the performance of electrochemical devices. Still, the underlying conducting mechanisms behind this material remain poorly understood.

VR users need an emotional connection to virtual worlds, not better graphics

Realistic graphics are only important when the virtual world triggers a sense of threat
Image Credit: Sara Kurig

Being wowed by powerful graphics is not enough for a person to feel fully immersed in a virtual-reality (VR) world – a strong emotional response to the simulated environment is essential too, according to a new study from the University of Bath.

Indeed, field of view and visual realism – achieved through cutting-edge graphics and usually powered by high-end headsets – can be relatively unimportant in creating a believable VR experience. Far more important is the way a user is made to feel (e.g. happy or scared) within the virtual environment, the study found.

Dr Crescent Jicol, principal investigator of the study, said: “A lot of money goes into making headsets and screens better and into rendering virtual worlds more realistic, but more effort needs to be centered on improving the user’s emotional experience.”

Though the findings of this Bath study may ultimately reduce the pressure on gamers to overspend on high-end VR equipment, the implications of this work extend beyond entertainment: in the years ahead, VR is expected to play an ever-growing role in many areas of life, from workplace training to medical rehabilitation programs.

Searching for axions with the ATLAS detector

Professor Dr. Matthias Schott
Photo Credit: Sabrina Hopp

The research group of Professor Matthias Schott of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) today published the results of an extensive series of measurements at the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The data were recorded during the second runtime of the LHC between 2015 and 2018. The aim of the experimentally challenging measurement program is to search for axion-like particles that could be produced in certain decays of the Higgs particle - and as novel particles could explain the deviation of the experimentally determined anomalous magnetic moment of the muon from its theoretical prediction. The work is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant from Matthias Schott. They represent the experimental test of an axion model developed by Prof. Dr. Matthias Neubert, theoretical physicist and spokesperson of PRISMA+, and are thus an ideal example of the valuable interplay between theory and experiment at the Mainz site.

Axions are hypothetical elementary particles that were initially postulated to solve a theoretical shortcoming of the strong interaction, the so-called strong CP problem. For many years, axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) have also been considered promising candidates for dark matter. "Against this background, physicists have developed numerous experiments to search for very light ALPs in particular," explains Prof. Dr. Matthias Schott.

Chance twists ordered carbon nanotubes into ‘tornado films’

Jacques Doumani is a graduate student in applied physics at Rice and the lead author of a study published in Nature Communications.
Photo Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Chiral materials interact with light in very precise ways that are useful for building better displays, sensors and more powerful devices. However, engineering properties such as chirality reliably at scale is still a significant challenge in nanotechnology.

Rice University scientists in the lab of Junichiro Kono have developed two ways of making wafer-scale synthetic chiral carbon nanotube (CNT) assemblies starting from achiral mixtures. According to a study in Nature Communications, the resulting “tornado” and “twisted-and-stacked” thin films can control ellipticity ⎯ a property of polarized light ⎯ to a level and in a range of the spectrum that was previously largely beyond reach.

“These approaches have granted us the ability to deliberately and consistently introduce chirality to materials that, until now, did not exhibit this property on a macroscopic scale,” said Jacques Doumani, a graduate student in applied physics at Rice and the lead author of the study. “Our methods yield thin, flexible films with tunable chiral properties.”

A good night’s sleep may help to generate false memories, a new study reveals

Sleep may play a key role in distorting memories
Photo Credit: Vlada Karpovich
Edited: Scientific Frontline 

From misremembering that movie quote to forgetting that vital ingredient from the shops for the evening dinner, the human memory is not always reliable. Now, researchers have discovered that sleep may play a key role in distorting memories, but perhaps in a good way.

In psychological experiments, false memories often arise when people are given a list of related words to memorize, and falsely remember a word being there that would have fit the category but in fact was missing.

Lure words

As part of this study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers from the University of York’s Department of Psychology tested 488 participants on their ability to recall a list of words 12 hours after seeing them, with some of the participants being allowed to sleep in the 12-hour interim.

They found that those who had slept remembered more of the words on the list than those who had not, but they were also more likely to give words that weren't on the list, but were related. 

The related incorrect words are known as "lure words". If a list contained words like nurse, hospital and sick, the false memories may include lure words like doctor.