Scientists are unraveling the secrets of red and grey squirrel competition

Image Credit: Gemini Advance AI

In a first of its kind study, researchers have identified significant differences between the diversity of gut bacteria in grey squirrels compared to red squirrels which could hold the key to further understanding the ability of grey squirrels to outcompete red squirrels in the UK. 

New research, published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology, looked to understand more about the mechanisms by which grey squirrels are able to gain an advantage over red squirrels. Chris Nichols, Conservation Evidence Manager at the Woodland Trust, and co-author of the study, said:

“The more we know about grey squirrels, the more equipped we’re going to be in the future to tackle the threats they pose to red squirrels and our native trees, which is one of the biggest problems for forest conservation in the UK.”

Grey squirrels are an invasive, non-native species introduced from North America to sites in Great Britain and Ireland between 1876 to 1929. They out-compete the native red squirrels and multiply thanks to various traits including their ability to access a broader range of food sources including the bark of UK broadleaved trees. This causes significant damage to the trees, and is a behavior that, prior to this research, was not completely understood. 

Asexual Propagation of Crop Plants Gets Closer

Two varieties of the model plant thale cress: on the left a significantly larger hybrid variety, on the right the standard variety for laboratory research.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Desnoyer, UZH

When the female gametes in plants become fertilized, a signal from the sperm activates cell division, leading to the formation of new plant seeds. This activation can also be deliberately triggered without fertilization, as UZH researchers have shown. Their findings open up new avenues for the asexual propagation of crop plants.

Seeds are the end product of plant reproduction. Whether directly as food, or indirectly as animal feed, they provide around 80 percent of human calorie consumption. In the millennia since humans first settled, we have bred countless plant varieties with advantageous characteristics, such as increased yields, improved quality, resistance to pests or hardiness. Where possible, farmers use hybrid varieties, which are created by crossing two inbred lines and are more resistant and higher-yielding than normal varieties. The problem is that these desired properties are lost during propagation and, therefore, hybrid seeds have to be recreated every year.

Targeting inflammation to tackle long covid

Illustration Credit: Gerd Altmann

Overactivation of the immune system leading to circulation of inflammatory proteins around the body contributes to the development of long covid, and could be targeted to provide treatments for patients, finds new research.

Cardiff University research has uncovered biological markers that could be targeted by repurposing medication to treat long covid.

The research conducted extensive analysis of plasma samples obtained from a large cohort of healthy post-covid individuals and non-hospitalized patients with long covid. They found that the complement system – a system that plays a crucial part of the immune system, consisting of a group of proteins that work together to enhance the function of antibodies and immune cells – was commonly overactivated in those with long covid.

“The covid-19 pandemic has left a global legacy of ill health, with long covid estimated to affect up to 1.9 million people in the UK. Long covid can last for months or years after the triggering infection and is associated with diverse symptoms including brain fog, chest pain, breathlessness, fatigue, and sensory problems. The causes of this disease remain largely unknown, emerging evidence suggests an important role for chronic inflammation."
Professor Paul Morgan 'Professor of complement biology, Division of Infection and Immunity

The life of a Stone Age man has been mapped

Illustration Credit: Niels Bach
CC-BY 4.0

Researchers have mapped the life of a Stone Age man in detail. New scientific methods have revolutionized archaeology and the Swedish-Danish team of researchers at the University of Gothenburg are now able to state that “Vittrup Man”, a Stone Age man found in a bog in Denmark, travelled across a wide geographical area during his lifetime.

Vittrup Man was first discovered in 1915. His skull had been split by at least eight blows from a club and his body placed in a wetland in north Jutland. Until recently, this was all we knew about him. Researchers now know that he had travelled a long way before his death in about 3200 BCE. He must have led an interesting life.

“He comes from the north, from a relatively cold area, and it must have been a coastal area because the food he ate as a child came from the sea,” says archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren, a member of the research team.

Scientists help discover new treatment for many cancers

UniSA/CCB Professor Greg Goodall, part of the team that made the landmark discovery.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of South Australia 

Australian scientists have made a major discovery that could underpin the next generation of RNA-based therapeutics, and lead to more potent and longer-lasting RNA-based drugs with an even wider array of potential uses.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre scientists Vi Wickramasinghe and Linh Ngo and collaborator Greg Goodall at the University of South Australia and SA Pathology’s Centre for Cancer Biology, have described a new pathway that could help to overcome a major drawback of RNA-based therapeutics to date.

Currently these breakthrough therapeutics utilize mRNA – injectable genetic material that produces a desired therapeutic or vaccine effect, but they can also break down quickly once absorbed into the human body.

“It’s the linear shape of mRNA that makes it relatively unstable and lack durability inside the body and this has been a limiting factor in the potential application of RNA-based therapeutics for diseases such as cancer,” explains Dr Wickramasinghe, senior author on the paper.

New Algorithm Disentangles Intrinsic Brain Patterns from Sensory Inputs

Image Credit: Omid Sani, Using Generative Ai

Maryam Shanechi, Dean’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the USC Center for Neurotechnology, and her team have developed a new machine learning method that reveals surprisingly consistent intrinsic brain patterns across different subjects by disentangling these patterns from the effect of visual inputs.

The work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

When performing various everyday movement behaviors, such as reaching for a book, our brain has to take in information, often in the form of visual input — for example, seeing where the book is. Our brain then has to process this information internally to coordinate the activity of our muscles and perform the movement. But how do millions of neurons in our brain perform such a task? Answering this question requires studying the neurons’ collective activity patterns, but doing so while disentangling the effect of input from the neurons’ intrinsic (aka internal) processes, whether movement-relevant or not.

That’s what Shanechi, her PhD student Parsa Vahidi, and a research associate in her lab, Omid Sani, did by developing a new machine-learning method that models neural activity while considering both movement behavior and sensory input.

Better diagnosis and treatment of cryptococcosis

Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Cologne

Global guideline for the management of cryptococcosis, a fungal infection that can have serious health consequences, published in the journal ‘The Lancet Infectious Diseases’

A group of international mycology experts led by Professor Dr Oliver A. Cornely at the University of Cologne has jointly drafted a guideline for the diagnosis and treatment of cryptococcosis, which aims at improving infection management and thus the survival rate of patients. Cryptococcosis is a fungal infection of mainly the lungs that might lead to meningitis. The article ‘Global guideline for the diagnosis and management of cryptococcosis’ was published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Cryptococcosis, especially cryptococcal meningitis (CM) as the most fatal form, is responsible for a high fatality rate among patients. It is one of the most widespread invasive fungal infections in the world and is a major threat particularly to people suffering from immunodeficiencies. For example, around one million cases of cryptococcal meningoencephalitis are diagnosed worldwide every year in people with HIV alone, and more than 600,000 people die from the disease each year. Patients who have undergone a bone marrow transplant or organ transplant are also at high risk of infection. It is transmitted through the inhalation of spores from soil. Other organs are then also infected via the bloodstream. The lungs, brain, skin and bones are most frequently affected.

Compounds released by bleaching coral reefs promote bacteria

Field site in Moʻorea, French Polynesia.
Photo Credit: Milou Arts of NIOZ

On healthy reefs, corals, algae, fishes and microbes live interconnected and in balance—exchanging nutrients, resources and chemical signals. New research led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) revealed that when coral bleaching occurs, corals release unique organic compounds into the surrounding water that not only promote bacterial growth overall, but also promote bacteria that may further stress reefs and pose the risk for more damage.

“Our results demonstrate how the impacts of both short-term thermal stress and long-term bleaching may extend beyond coral and into the water column,” said Wesley Sparagon, co-lead author, postdoctoral researcher in the UH Mānoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources and previous doctoral student with the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

The research team, which included scientists from UH Mānoa, NIOZ, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted experiments on bleached and unbleached corals gathered during a bleaching event in Moorea, French Polynesia in 2019.

“Although coral bleaching is a well-documented and increasingly widespread phenomenon in reefs across the globe, there has been relatively little research on the implications for reef water column microbiology and biogeochemistry,” said Craig Nelson, senior author on the study and professor in SOEST.

Discovery of new plant protein fold may be seed for anti-cancer drugs

The new protein fold from AhyBURP is found in the roots of the peanut plant. The protein uses copper and oxygen to form cyclic peptides. We can investigate how this chemistry occurs more thoroughly now that we know what the protein structure looks like.
Image Credit: Lisa Mydy / University of Michigan

University of Michigan researchers are celebrating their discovery of a new plant biochemistry and its unusual ability to form cyclic peptides—molecules that hold promise in pharmaceuticals as they can bind to challenging drug targets.

Cyclic peptides are an emerging and promising area of drug research.

A new study, led by U-M College of Pharmacy researchers Lisa Mydy and Roland Kersten, revealed a mechanism by which plants generate cyclic peptides.

Mydy identified the new plant protein fold and its novel chemistry, which she said had never been seen before. The protein can generate cyclic peptides, one of which holds potential as an anti-cancer drug.

“It’s extremely exciting,” said Mydy, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry. “This type of discovery doesn’t happen too often.”

A standard blood test can predict a heart attack

Researchers have proceeded from the hypothesis that several important biological processes are active during the months before a heart attack and that these could be detected using a simple blood test.
Photo Credit: Fernando Zhiminaicela

Using the results of a standard blood test and an online tool, you can find out if you are at increased risk of having a heart attack within six months. The tool has been developed by a research group at Uppsala University in the hope of increasing patients’ motivation to change their lifestyle.

Heart attacks are the most common cause of death in the world and are increasing globally. Many high-risk people are not identified or do not take their preventive treatment.

Now researchers led by Professor Johan Sundström at Uppsala University have found that heart attacks can be predicted with a standard blood test.

The problem, according to the researchers, is that risk factors have previously been verified in studies involving five to ten years of follow-up, where only factors that are stable over time can be identified.

“However, we know that the time just before a heart attack is very dynamic. For example, the risk of a heart attack doubles during the month after a divorce, and the risk of a fatal heart event is five times as high during the week after a cancer diagnosis,” says Sundström, who is a cardiologist and professor of epidemiology at Uppsala University.