Biology Graduate Student Contributes to Research in Neurodegenerative Disease

PhD student Asmer Aliyeva
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University at Albany

Asmer Aliyeva, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the biology department at the College of Arts and Sciences, is working to reveal the molecular mechanisms behind neurodegenerative diseases. In collaboration with her colleagues in the Berglund Lab, Aliyeva aim is to identify possible therapeutic targets against this class of disease, with a focus on spinocerebellar ataxias (SCAs).

Spinocerebellar ataxias are a group of progressive neurodegenerative diseases that affect coordination and balance, for which there is currently no cure. Aliyeva’s research looks at transcriptomic changes in patient-derived cell lines that could holds clues for common disease mechanisms associated with different types of SCAs. 

Recent findings suggest that dysregulation of alternative splicing plays a key role in disease progression, which could lead to new biomarkers and therapeutic discoveries. Aliyeva recently led a study on this topic, coauthored with members of the Berglund Lab at the RNA Institute, published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. 

Aliyeva's research also examines how defects in alternative splicing contribute to the disease and whether these changes can be used as potential biomarkers for monitoring disease onset and progression. This work is a crucial first step in providing a better understanding of potential pathways for future treatments of these diseases.

Native bee populations can bounce back after honey bees move out

A native bee sits on a purple flower on the left, while a honey bee sits on a yellow flower on the right.  Photo Credit: © Margarita López-Uribe

Managed honey bees have the potential to affect native bee populations when they are introduced to a new area, but a study led by researchers at Penn State suggests that, under certain conditions, the native bees can bounce back if the apiaries are moved away.

The research, published in the Journal of Insect Science, examined the effects of migratory beekeeping — the practice of moving honey bee colonies to a different location for part of the year — on native bee populations. 

The researchers found that when managed honey bees were moved into an area, the population of native bees decreased in abundance and diversity. However, in places where apiaries were kept for years and then removed, the native bee populations once again increased in both total numbers and species diversity.

Margarita López-Uribe, the Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor of Entomology in the College of Agricultural Sciences and co-author of the paper, said the findings suggest that while migratory beekeeping can be a disturbance to native bees, it may also be possible for those populations to recover.

Spliceosome: How Cells Avoid Errors When Manufacturing mRNA

Quality control during splicing: When an error in the precursor mRNA is detected, the spliceosome is blocked, the recruited control factors interrupt the “normal” cycle, and a molecular short circuit causes the spliceosome to disassemble.
Image Credit: © K. Wild, K. Soni, I. Sinning

Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary

• Main Discovery: Researchers successfully visualized a "blocked" spliceosome at high resolution for the first time, revealing the specific mechanism by which cells detect and discard errors during the mRNA splicing process.
• Methodology: The team utilized cryo-electron microscopy to examine defective spliceosomes purified from the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, employing molecular markers to isolate the specific complexes stalled by quality control factors.
• Key Data: The study produced the first atomic-level representation of a discarded spliceosome, demonstrating that a "molecular short circuit" occurs upon error detection to trigger the immediate disassembly of the faulty complex.
• Significance: Elucidating this quality control mechanism is critical for medical science, as splicing errors are a primary cause of hereditary genetic disorders and are strongly associated with neurodevelopmental conditions and cancer.
• Future Application: These detailed structural models provide a foundational blueprint for analyzing molecular malfunctions in splicing-related diseases, which may facilitate the development of targeted therapies for conditions caused by aberrant gene expression.
• Branch of Science: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
• Additional Detail: The proteins responsible for this quality control process are conserved from fission yeast to humans, indicating that this error-correction mechanism has remained evolutionarily stable and fundamental to eukaryotic life

Genetic research unlocks new ways to prevent and treat multiple long-term conditions

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline stock image

The largest study to date to analyze millions of both genetic and patient records on the long-term health conditions of later life has identified opportunities for new ways to prevent and treat multiple overlapping conditions.  

Currently, nine million people in the UK live with two or more long-term conditions at the same time – known as multimorbidity. Their treatment accounts for half of the NHS budget. 

Led by the University of Exeter Medical School and funded by the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the GEMINI study looked at both genetics and clinical information from more than three million people in the UK and Spain.  

Published in eBioMedicine  research has identified genetic overlaps in 72 long-term health conditions associated with ageing, to identify where specific genes are linked to two or more conditions. With more than 2,500 combinations of conditions analyzed, the program aims to unlock cases where a drug or prevention strategies can prevent or delay the onset of multimorbidity. It also revealed genetic connections that explain why certain conditions may be more likely to co-occur in the same patient. 

Air pollution clouds the mind and makes everyday tasks challenging

Photo Credit: Chris LeBoutillier

People’s ability to interpret emotions or focus on performing a task is reduced by short-term exposure to particulate matter (PM) air pollution, potentially making everyday activities, such as the weekly supermarket shop, more challenging, a new study reveals.

Scientists discovered that even brief exposure to high concentrations of PM may impair a person’s ability to focus on tasks, avoid distractions, and behave in a socially acceptable manner.

Researchers exposed study participants to either high levels of air pollution - using candle smoke - or clean air, testing cognitive abilities before and four hours after exposure. The tests measured working memory, selective attention, emotion recognition, psychomotor speed, and sustained attention.

Publishing their findings in Nature Communications, researchers from the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester reveal that selective attention and emotion recognition were negatively affected by air pollution – regardless of whether subjects breathed normally or only through their mouths.

Air pollution impacts an aging society

Age-related health impacts of PM2.5.
Annual average AVSL (age-adjusted value of statistical life) and variation of premature deaths attributable to PM2.5 among individuals in different age groups from 2001 to 2019 across Japan’s 47 prefectures.
Image Credit: ©2025 Long et al.
(CC-BY-ND)

Air pollution is a growing health issue worldwide, and its impacts are often underestimated in aging societies like Japan. A new study led by researchers from the University of Tokyo highlights how fine particulate pollution, or PM2.5, not only worsens health outcomes, but also creates significant socioeconomic challenges in regions with aging populations and limited medical resources. The researchers hope these findings motivate policymakers to tackle the interrelated issues behind this problem.

PM2.5 refers to microscopic particles of pollution small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, leading to severe respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. PM2.5 are small enough to evade the body’s natural defenses in the nose and throat, making direct prevention difficult. This becomes especially problematic in elderly populations.

“As we age, our immune systems weaken and our bodies are less able to defend against pollutants. Even moderate exposure can exacerbate pre-existing conditions, leading to higher hospitalization rates and premature mortality,” said lead author Associate Professor Yin Long. “Our study provides new insights into impacts of PM2.5 in aging regions, with a particular focus on the mismatch between those impacts and regional medical resource distribution.”

First distributed quantum algorithm brings quantum supercomputers closer

Dougal Main and Beth Nichol working on the distributed quantum computer.
Photo Credit: John Cairns.

In a milestone that brings quantum computing tangibly closer to large-scale practical use, scientists at Oxford University’s Department of Physics have demonstrated the first instance of distributed quantum computing. Using a photonic network interface, they successfully linked two separate quantum processors to form a single, fully connected quantum computer, paving the way to tackling computational challenges previously out of reach. The results have been published in Nature. 

The breakthrough addresses quantum’s ‘scalability problem’: a quantum computer powerful enough to be industry-disrupting would have to be capable of processing millions of qubits. Packing all these processors in a single device, however, would require a machine of an immense size. In this new approach, small quantum devices are linked together, enabling computations to be distributed across the network. In theory, there is no limit to the number of processors that could be in the network.  

Improved Brain Decoder Holds Promise for Communication in People with Aphasia

Brain activity like this, measured in an fMRI machine, can be used to train a brain decoder to decipher what a person is thinking about. In this latest study, UT Austin researchers have developed a method to adapt their brain decoder to new users far faster than the original training, even when the user has difficulty comprehending language.
Image Credit: Jerry Tang/University of Texas at Austin.

People with aphasia — a brain disorder affecting about a million people in the U.S. — struggle to turn their thoughts into words and comprehend spoken language.

A pair of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated an AI-based tool that can translate a person’s thoughts into continuous text, without requiring the person to comprehend spoken words. And the process of training the tool on a person’s own unique patterns of brain activity takes only about an hour. This builds on the team’s earlier work creating a brain decoder that required many hours of training on a person’s brain activity as the person listened to audio stories. This latest advance suggests it may be possible, with further refinement, for brain computer interfaces to improve communication in people with aphasia.

“Being able to access semantic representations using both language and vision opens new doors for neurotechnology, especially for people who struggle to produce and comprehend language,” said Jerry Tang, a postdoctoral researcher at UT in the lab of Alex Huth and first author on a paper describing the work in Current Biology. “It gives us a way to create language-based brain computer interfaces without requiring any amount of language comprehension.”

Genetic diversity is on the decline, but this trend can be slowed

Photo Credit: Tomáš Malík

Genetic diversity is crucial to the ability of animals and plants to adapt to changes in the climate and environment. A major international meta-analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that genetic diversity is declining globally. But there is hope – effective conservation measures can slow this trend.

For a species to adapt to changes in its environment, a high degree of genetic variation between individual entities is crucial. The greater the diversity, the more likely it is that certain genes will make, for example, a plant more resistant to drought or an animal better adapted to higher temperatures. These genes can then be passed on to future generations and contribute to the survival of the species.

An international research team that includes Uppsala University, Stockholm University and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency has analyzed genetic changes in 628 species over a period of more than 30 years. The study is based on data from more than 80,000 scientific papers and shows that genetic diversity is declining globally, especially among birds and mammals. At the same time, there are conservation measures that have proven to be effective.

“Overall, the study shows that there are effective conservation methods and data that allow for strategic targeting of actions. But then the genetic component needs to be considered,” says Sara Kurland, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences and one of the researchers behind the study.

New technology lights way for accelerating coral reef restoration

Improving coral feeding habits can have a positive domino effect on the marine ecosystem.
Photo Credit: Francesco Ungaro

Scientists have developed a novel tool designed to protect and conserve coral reefs by providing them with an abundance of feeding opportunities. 

The device, dubbed the Underwater Zooplankton Enhancement Light Array (UZELA), is an autonomous, programmable underwater light that works to draw in nearby zooplankton, microscopic organisms that coral feed on. 

After testing the submersible on two species of coral native to Hawaii over six months, researchers found that UZELA could greatly enhance local zooplankton density and increase the feeding rates of both healthy and bleached coral. Importantly, providing coral with greater amounts of food makes them stronger and more likely to be resilient against certain environmental threats, like heat stress or ocean acidification.

This result is impressive, especially at a time when rising ocean temperatures are forcing entire coral reefs to the cusp of collapse, said

Whale poop contains iron that may have helped fertilize past oceans

A blue whale photographed in September 2010.
Photo Credit: NOAA

The blue whale is the largest animal on the planet. It consumes enormous quantities of tiny, shrimp-like animals known as krill to support a body of up to 100 feet (30 meters) long. Blue whales and other baleen whales, which filter seawater through their mouths to feed on small marine life, once teemed in Earth’s oceans. Then over the past century they were hunted almost to extinction for their energy-dense blubber.

As whales were decimated, some thought the krill would proliferate in predator-free waters. But that’s not what happened. Krill populations dropped, too, and neither population has yet recovered.

A recent theory proposes that whales weren’t just predators in the ocean environment. Nutrients that whales excreted may have provided a key fertilizer to these marine ecosystems.

Research led by University of Washington oceanographers supports that theory. It finds that whale excrement contains significant amounts of iron, a vital element that is often scarce in ocean ecosystems, and nontoxic forms of copper, another essential nutrient that in some forms can harm life.

The open-access study, the first to look at the forms of these trace metals in what’s commonly known as whale poop, was published in January in Communications Earth & Environment.

Microplastics discovered in Antarctica

A view over the Ellsworth Mountains, West Antarctica.
Photo Credit: Steve Gibbs, BAS

Scientists have discovered microplastics in the snow near some of Antarctica’s deep field camps, revealing how far-reaching plastic pollution has become. While not new, it’s the first time these tiny pieces of plastic have been found in remote locations.

The study was conducted at field camps, at Union Glacier and Schanz Glacier (near the Ellsworth Mountains), where researchers were carrying out field work, and the South Pole where the US Antarctic Program has a research station. It is the first time a new and advanced technique has been used to detect microplastics as small as 11 micrometers (about the size of a red blood cell) in the snow in Antarctica. The study is published this week (6 February 2025) in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The findings surprised the team as microplastics were found at concentrations ranging from 73 to 3,099 particles per liter of snow. Most of these particles (95%) were smaller than 50 micrometers (0.005 cm, the size of most human cells), suggesting previous studies may have underestimated the extent of microplastic pollution in the region due to less sensitive detection methods.

Previous methods involved hand-picking particles and fibers out of samples for laboratory analyses. However, the newer technique involves melting snow through filter paper and scanning this at a high resolution, using infrared spectroscopy, so any plastics above 11 micrometers can be identified.

Recycling the unrecyclable

Recovered carbon fibers.
This might look like something you’d see on the floor of a barber’s shop, but it’s actually a clump of reclaimed carbon fibers. Photo Credit: ©2025 Jin et al.
(CC-BY-ND)

Epoxy resins are coatings and adhesives used in a broad range of familiar applications, such as construction, engineering and manufacturing. However, they often present a challenge to recycle or dispose of responsibly. For the first time, a team of researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, developed a method to efficiently reclaim materials from a range of epoxy products for reuse by using a novel solid catalyst.

There’s a high chance you are surrounded by epoxy compounds as you read this. They are used in electronic devices due to their insulating properties; clothing such as shoes due to their binding properties and physical robustness; building construction for the same reason; and even in aircraft bodies and wind turbine blades for their ability to contain strong materials such as carbon fibers or glass fibers. It’s hard to overstate the importance of epoxy products in the modern world. But for all their uses, they inevitably have a downside: Epoxy compounds are essentially plastics and prove difficult to deal with after their use or at the end of the life of an epoxy-containing product.

Mutations in two gene pairs point to a promising drug target in 5 percent of adult cancers

Illustration Credit: Natalie Velez, Broad Communications

Scientists from the Cancer Dependency Map (DepMap) at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Columbia University have discovered that about 5 percent of adult cancers rely heavily on a gene called PELO to survive and that disabling the gene kills those cancer cells. These cancers have mutations in one of two genes, FOCAD or TCC37.

The finding, described in Nature, is a new synthetic lethality — a pair of genetic changes that together kill cancer cells. The researchers say that PELO is a promising target, and that genetic testing could identify cancer patients with FOCAD or TCC37 mutations who would benefit from new PELO-targeting drugs.

“These cancers are a huge unmet medical need, because we don’t have effective drugs for them,” said Francisca Vazquez, co-senior author on the study along with postdoctoral researcher Edmond Chan, now an assistant professor at Columbia University. Vazquez is also director of DepMap, which systematically probes cancer cell lines for genetic vulnerabilities. 

“Targeting synthetic lethalities is a good way to expand the repertoire of tumors we’re able to treat,” Vazquez said. “This new synthetic lethality we found shows how powerful the DepMap datasets can be.”

Patricia Borck, a DepMap research scientist in Broad’s Cancer Program, is first author on the study.

Cutting edge technology shows promise in tackling deadly brain tumors

Delivering advanced gene-editing tools directly to the tumor site can improve the body’s defense against glioblastoma
Image Credit: Gemini

A new study led by Khuloud Al Jamal, Professor of Drug Delivery & Nanomedicine, has found an innovative strategy to combat glioblastoma (GB), a fast-growing and aggressive type of brain tumor.

GB is a brain tumor originating in the brain or spinal cord. Despite advances in cancer treatment, it can remain resistant to therapies, including immune checkpoint (ICP) blockade therapies. ICP blockade works by targeting specific proteins on immune or tumor cells to prevent tumors from evading the immune system. While effective in other cancers, this approach has shown limited success in treating GB. The is due to complex interactions between immune cells and glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs), which suppress the immune response and reduce the effectiveness of these therapies.

In the study, published in Advanced Science, Professor Al Jamal and her team revealed how they have taken a novel approach to overcome this challenge by focusing on the mesenchymal subtype of GSCs, which is particularly aggressive and therapy resistant. The study employed lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) — tiny, fat-based carriers — to transport CRISPR RNAs, an advanced gene-editing tool, to GSC and immune cells in therapeutically relevant tumor models.