Gut microbiota and antibiotics: Missing puzzle piece discovered

3D model of the small ribonucleic acid MasB.
Image Credit: Alexander Westermann/HIRI

HIRI scientists have identified a small RNA that influences the sensitivity of the intestinal commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron to certain antibiotics.

The intricacies of how intestinal bacteria adapt to their environment have yet to be fully explored. Researchers from the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg and the University of California, Berkeley, USA, have now successfully closed a gap in this knowledge: They have identified a small ribonucleic acid (sRNA) that affects the susceptibility of the gut commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron to specific antibiotics. The findings, published today in the journal Nature Microbiology, could serve as the foundation for novel therapies addressing intestinal diseases and combating antibiotic resistance. 

The gut, a complex ecosystem of numerous microorganisms, plays a pivotal role in human well-being. Factors like dietary changes, medications, or bile salts can influence the microbiota, impacting health. Among the prevalent intestinal bacteria in humans are Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. These gut microbes play a role in breaking down polysaccharides during digestion, contributing to human health. Yet they can also promote infections when the ecosystem is disbalanced, such as after antibiotic treatment. However, the molecular mechanisms enabling these gut microbes to adapt to their environment remain largely unknown.

New Study Reveals Who Was More Vulnerable to Post-COVID Syndrome in Early Phases of the Pandemic

Fatigue, malaise and difficulty breathing were associated with post-COVID syndrome, according to the new Nordic study.
Photo Credit: Kinga Howard

People with post-COVID syndrome (PCS) following the COVID-19 infection often suffer from intense fatigue and dyspnea. This is what emerges from a new Nordic study led by Umeå University and recently published in the BMJ Public Health journal. High blood pressure also appears to be a risk factor for PCS diagnosis, according to the study’s findings.

"These scientific results are an important step in better understanding PCS. By identifying key factors, we can improve diagnosis, adapt care and pave the way for research into more effective treatments," says Anne-Marie Fors Connolly, MD PhD, Assoc Prof, clinical researcher at Umeå University and the study's senior author.

The study analyzed data from over one million people in Sweden who tested positive for COVID-19 during the period from February 2020 to May 2021. Of these, 1.5 percent, just over 16,000 people, were diagnosed with PCS after the main COVID-19 infection. They were diagnosed in both outpatient and inpatient care, which provided large datasets for the researchers to examine the clinical footprint of PCS. The researchers conducted an in-depth study of PCS symptoms in individuals who required ongoing healthcare three months after the COVID-19 infection.

Behavior of ant queens is shaped by their social environment

A black garden ant queen caring for her brood
Photo Credit: © Romain Libbrecht)

The queens in colonies of social insects, such as ants, bees, and wasps, are considered the veritable embodiment of specialization in the animal kingdom. The common perception is that the queen's only task is to lay eggs – and that this attribute is an inherent trait, not influenced by external factors. In contrast, recent research undertaken at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has demonstrated that in certain ant colonies the social environment can play a crucial role in shaping the behavioral specialization of the queens. "With regard to the ant species we studied, it is social factors that control whether queens become specialized or not. Our findings challenge the widely accepted notion of social insect queens as inherently specialized egg-laying machines," stated Dr. Romain Libbrecht.

The research was conducted by the Reproduction, Nutrition, and Behavior in Insect Societies group at JGU under the supervision of Dr. Romain Libbrecht, an evolutionary biologist. The corresponding paper has recently been published in Functional Ecology. Dr. Romain Libbrecht currently works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the Insect Biology Research Institute of the University of Tours.

Seeing a Path to Nerve Regeneration

The image on the left (A) shows four optic nerves that have been crushed. Live nerve tissue glows green in this image, while damaged nerve tissue is dark. The top nerve was not treated with any regenerative factors, and there is no regrowth of the nerve (shown by the uniformly dark area on the right.) The second and third nerves were treated with previously identified regeneration factors, and show some live nerve tissue beyond the crushed area. The bottom nerve was treated with Nfe3, and also shows live nerve tissue beyond the crushed region. (B) shows close-ups of the left, middle, and far right sections of the crushed nerves. The nerve treated with Nfe3 (bottom) shows regeneration as good or better than the nerves treated with the other factors (middle two rows).
Image Credit: Courtesy of researcher Et al Experimental Neurology and University of Connecticut

This opens a whole new novel realm of research. It could help glaucoma and other types of nerve damage

Damage to the optic nerve can lead to irreversible blindness. A newly investigated regeneration factor could change that, UConn researchers report in the May 2024 issue of Experimental Neurology.

Blindness and vision impairment due to optic nerve damage affect more than 3 million people in the US alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The most common reason for that damage is glaucoma, a family of eye diseases that affect the flow of liquid in the eye, eventually damaging the long bundle of cells that connect the retina to the brain. That bundle of cells is the optic nerve. They don’t grow back after being damaged, leading to permanent vision loss.

Now, a team of researchers in the lab of UConn School of Medicine neuroscientist Ephraim Trakhtenberg have shown that a protein previously thought unimportant can stimulate regrowth of nerve cells. The protein is called nuclear factor erythroid 3 (Nfe3), and it is unique to nerves originating in the retina. Normally it is not produced by adult neurons.

Protect habitat to prevent pandemics

Photo Credit: Vlad Kutepov

An international research team has proposed using ecological perspectives to prevent the occurrence of disease outbreaks.

Pandemics begin when disease-harboring animals, such as bats, come in close proximity with people, livestock or other animals and pass on new pathogens. Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, Nipah, Hendra and possibly Ebola have all fatally spilled over from bats to humans, sometimes through an intermediate host.

Led by Cornell University expert, Professor Raina Plowright, the international team has proposed a roadmap for how to prevent the next pandemic by conserving natural areas and promoting biodiversity, thereby providing animals with enough food, safe havens and distance to limit contact and transfer of pathogens to humans.

Professor Plowright said: “The world is focused on how can we detect and then contain a novel pathogen once it is circulating in humans, rather than how can we prevent that pathogen from entering the human population in the first place.”

The roadmap uses insights from recently published case studies to explain the mechanisms linking environmental change and spillover of pathogens from animals to humans and identifies ecological interventions to disrupt these links and policy frameworks to implement them.

Blood analysis predicts sepsis and organ failure in children

Photo Credit: Edward Jenner

University of Queensland researchers have developed a method to predict if a child is likely to develop sepsis and go into organ failure.

Associate Professor Lachlan Coin from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience said sepsis was a life-threatening condition where a severe immune response to infection causes organ damage.

“Our research involved more than 900 critically ill children in the emergency departments and intensive care units of four Queensland hospitals,” Dr Coin said.

“Blood samples were taken from these patients at the acute stage of their infection, and we analyzed which genes were activated or deactivated.

“We were able to identify patterns of gene expression which could predict whether the child would develop organ failure within the next 24 hours, as well as whether the child had a bacterial or viral infection or a non-infectious inflammatory syndrome.”

Professor Luregn Schlapbach from UQ’s Child Health Research Centre said sepsis is best treated when recognized early, so the finding could help clinicians in the future.

Astronomers discover 49 new galaxies in under three hours

The MeerKAT radio telescope, located in South Africa, enabled this discovery of 49 brand new galaxies.
Photo Credit: South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)

An international team of astronomers has discovered 49 new gas-rich galaxies using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

Dr Marcin Glowacki, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, led the research, which aimed to study the star-forming gas in a single radio galaxy.  Although the team didn’t find any star-forming gas in the galaxy they were studying, Dr Glowacki instead discovered other galaxies while inspecting the data.

In total, the gas of 49 galaxies were detected. Dr Glowacki said this was a great example of how fantastic an instrument like MeerKAT is for finding the star-forming gas in galaxies.

The observations, which lasted less than three hours and were facilitated by IDIA (Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy), made this discovery possible.

“I did not expect to find almost fifty new galaxies in such a short time,” Dr Glowacki said. “By implementing different techniques for finding galaxies, which are used for other MeerKAT surveys, we were able to detect all of these galaxies and reveal their gas content.”

The new galaxies have been informally nicknamed the 49ers, a reference to the 1849 California gold rush miners. Dr Glowacki views the 49 new galaxies as valuable as gold nuggets in our night sky. Many galaxies are near each other, forming galaxy groups, with several identified in one observation.

Human brains are getting larger. That may be good news for dementia risk

Image Credit: Dmitriy Gutarev

A new study by researchers at UC Davis Health found human brains are getting larger. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s.

The researchers hypothesize the increased brain size may lead to an increased brain reserve, potentially reducing the overall risk of age-related dementias.

The findings were published in JAMA Neurology.

“The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,” said Charles DeCarli, first author of the study. DeCarli is a distinguished professor of neurology and director of the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “Genetics plays a major role in determining brain size, but our findings indicate external influences — such as health, social, cultural and educational factors — may also play a role.”

Electrochemistry helps clean up electronic waste recycling, precious metal mining

A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows how electrochemistry can be used to extract precious metals from discarded electronics in an efficient and environmentally friendly manner. 
Photo Credit: Fred Zwicky

A new method safely extracts valuable metals locked up in discarded electronics and low-grade ore using dramatically less energy and fewer chemical materials than current methods, report University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering. 

Gold and platinum group metals such as palladium, platinum and iridium are in high demand for use in electronics. However, sourcing these metals from mining and current electronics recycling techniques is not sustainable and comes with a high carbon footprint. Gold used in electronics accounts for 8% of the metal’s overall demand, and 90% of the gold used in electronics ends up in U.S. landfills yearly, the study reports. 

The study, led by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Xiao Su, describes the first precious metal extraction and separation process fully powered by the inherent energy of electrochemical liquid-liquid extraction, or e-LLE. The method uses a reduction-oxidation reaction to selectively extract gold and platinum group metal ions from a liquid containing dissolved electronic waste. 

Elusive 3D printed nanoparticles could lead to new shapeshifting materials

Optical images of truncated tetrahedrons forming two large hexagonal grains at an anti-phase boundary (left), and transforming into a quasi-diamond phase that initiated at the anti-phase boundary (right). Scale bars are 25 um.
Image Credit: David Doan & John Kulikowski

Stanford materials engineers have 3D printed tens of thousands of hard-to-manufacture nanoparticles long predicted to yield promising new materials that change form in an instant.

In nanomaterials, shape is destiny. That is, the geometry of the particle in the material defines the physical characteristics of the resulting material.

“A crystal made of nano-ball bearings will arrange themselves differently than a crystal made of nano-dice and these arrangements will produce very different physical properties,” said Wendy Gu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, introducing her latest paper which appears in the journal Nature Communications. “We’ve used a 3D nanoprinting technique to produce one of the most promising shapes known – Archimedean truncated tetrahedrons. They are micron-scale tetrahedrons with the tips lopped off.”

In the paper, Gu and her co-authors describe how they nanoprinted tens of thousands of these challenging nanoparticles, stirred them into a solution, and then watched as they self-assembled into various promising crystal structures. More critically, these materials can shift between states in minutes simply by rearranging the particles into new geometric patterns.

This ability to change “phases,” as materials engineers refer to the shapeshifting quality, is similar to the atomic rearrangement that turns iron into tempered steel, or in materials that allow computers to store terabytes of valuable data in digital form.

“If we can learn to control these phase shifts in materials made of these Archimedean truncated tetrahedrons it could lead in many promising engineering directions,” she said.

Novel electrochemical sensor detects dangerous bacteria

By using a customized surface to bait the targeted pathogens, they separate by themselves from a mixture of many different bacteria. This makes it easy to detect them electrochemically.
Illustration Credit: Sebastian Balser, Andreas Terfort Research Group, Goethe University Frankfurt

Researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt and Kiel University have developed a novel sensor for the detection of bacteria. It is based on a chip with an innovative surface coating. This ensures that only very specific microorganisms adhere to the sensor – such as certain pathogens. The larger the number of organisms, the stronger the electric signal generated by the chip. In this way, the sensor is able not only to detect dangerous bacteria with a high level of sensitivity but also to determine their concentration. 

Each year, bacterial infections claim several million lives worldwide. That is why detecting harmful microorganisms is crucial – not only in the diagnosis of diseases but also, for example, in food production. However, the methods available so far are often time-consuming, require expensive equipment or can only be used by specialists. Moreover, they are often unable to distinguish between active bacteria and their decay products. 

By contrast, the newly developed method detects only intact bacteria. It makes use of the fact that microorganisms only ever attack certain body cells, which they recognize from the latter's specific sugar molecule structure. This matrix, known as the glycocalyx, differs depending on the type of cell. It serves, so to speak, as an identifier for the body cells. This means that to capture a specific bacterium, we need only to know the recognizable structure in the glycocalyx of its preferred host cell and then use this as “bait".

‘Winners and losers’ as global warming forces plants uphill

Cerrado savanna in the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, Brazil.
Photo Credit Ana Christina

Some plant species will “win” and others will “lose” as global warming forces them to move uphill, new research shows.

Scientists examined the current range of more than 7,000 plant species in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna, and estimated shifts based on warming by 2040.

The fate of plant species will depend on where they live: lowland species can move uphill for cooler conditions, but mountain plants have nowhere to go.

The study was carried out by the universities of Exeter and Campinas, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin.

“Every plant and animal species has a ‘geographical range’ – the area where conditions are suitable for it to live,” said Mateus Silva, from the University of Exeter.

“As the climate warms, plants’ ranges are shifting, with many species going uphill.

“This is the pattern we found in the Cerrado – suggesting lowland areas may become local extinction hotspots, while mountains will host new combinations of plant species.”

CBD products don’t ease pain and are potentially harmful – new study finds

CBD oil may be popular for treating pain but taking it appears to be a waste of money
Photo Credit: Julia Teichmann

There is no evidence that CBD products reduce chronic pain, and taking them is a waste of money and potentially harmful to health, according to new research led by the University of Bath.

CBD (short for cannabidiol) is one of many chemicals found naturally in the cannabis plant. It’s a popular alternative treatment for pain and is readily available in shops and online in the form of oils, tinctures, vapes, topical creams, edibles (such as gummy bears) and soft drinks.

However, consumers would do well to steer clear of these products, according to the new study.

“CBD presents consumers with a big problem,” said Professor Chris Eccleston, who led the research from the Centre for Pain Research at Bath. “It’s touted as a cure for all pain but there’s a complete lack of quality evidence that it has any positive effects.”

He added: “It’s almost as if chronic pain patients don’t matter, and that we’re happy for people to trade on hope and despair.”

For their study, published this week in The Journal of Pain, the team – which included researchers from the Universities of Bath, Oxford and Alberta in Canada – examined research relevant to using CBD to treat pain and published in scientific journals up to late 2023.

SwRI Develops More Effective Particle Conversion Surfaces for Space Instruments

SwRI space scientists are collaborating with materials specialists to create more effective particle detection surfaces for spacecraft instruments. Pictured is a conversion surface substrate developed specifically for the IMAP-Lo instrument.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of SwRI

Southwest Research Institute is investing internal funding to develop more effective conversion surfaces to allow future spacecraft instruments to collect and analyze low-energy particles. Conversion surfaces are ultra-smooth, ultra-thin surfaces covering a silicon wafer that converts neutral atoms into ions to more effectively detect particles from outer space.

Changing the charge of particles simplifies and enhances detection and analysis capabilities. Dr. Jianliang Lin of the Institute’s Mechanical Engineering Division and Dr. Justyna Sokół of SwRI’s Space Science Division lead the multidisciplinary project. The project builds on the successful creation of conversion surfaces for the IMAP-Lo instrument for the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft. IMAP, which is set to launch in 2025, will help researchers better understand the boundary of our heliosphere, the region of space encompassing the solar system, where the solar wind has a significant influence.

“When low-energy atoms enter the instrument from outer space, they bounce off the conversion surface and either gain or lose an electron, making their electrical charge unbalanced. This makes it easier to increase their speed and analyze their mass and other properties,” Sokół said.

Honey bees at risk for colony collapse from longer, warmer fall seasons

WSU researchers and students collect samples and perform honey bee colony health assessments in orchards near Modesto, CA.
Photo Credit: Brandon Hopkins

The famous work ethic of honey bees might spell disaster for these busy crop pollinators as the climate warms, new research indicates.

Flying shortens the lives of bees, and worker honey bees will fly to find flowers whenever the weather is right, regardless of how much honey is already in the hive. Using climate and bee population models, researchers found that increasingly long autumns with good flying weather for bees raises the likelihood of colony collapse in the spring.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, focused on the Pacific Northwest but holds implications for hives across the U.S. The researchers also modeled a promising mitigation: putting colonies into indoor cold storage, so honey bees will cluster in their hive before too many workers wear out.

“This is a case where a small amount of warming, even in the near future, will make a big impact on honey bees,” said lead author Kirti Rajagopalan, a Washington State University climate researcher. “It’s not like this is something that can be expected 80 years from now. It is a more immediate impact that needs to be planned for.”