Culture

East Hanover, NJ. May 3, 2021. An international team of multiple sclerosis (MS) researchers showed that longitudinal changes in social cognition are associated with psychological outcomes of daily living, suggesting that social cognition may exert a central role in people with MS. The article, "Social Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis: A 3-Year Follow-Up MRI and Behavioral Study" (doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11030484) was published on March 9, 2021, in Diagnostics. It is available open access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8001246/.

The authors are Helen M. Genova, PhD, of Kessler Foundation's Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research, and Stefano Ziccardi, PhD, Marco Pitteri, PhD, and Massimiliano Calabrese, MD, of the University of Verona. Dr. Genova also has an academic appointment at Rutgers University.

Some recent MS research, including work led by Dr. Genova, has shown that social cognition deficits may affect people with MS who otherwise have no other cognitive impairments. Social cognition, which is required to understand and process the emotions of others, is an extremely important skill set for forming successful relationships with others, and deficits in this area can significantly affect a person's quality of life.

Previous studies investigating the prevalence of social cognition impairment among people with MS suggested that impairment tracked with symptoms such as cognitive fatigue. More research was needed to clarify these results and determine whether changes to the area of the brain called the amygdala--known to be associated with emotions--correlated with social cognition. Moreover, no study had investigated the social cognition performance in people with MS with a longitudinal perspective, meaning that no data existed on the evolution of social cognition deficits over time.

In this three-year follow-up study, MS researchers conducted a longitudinal investigation of the evolution of social cognition deficits and amygdala damage in a group of 26 cognitively-normal people with relapsing-remitting MS. They analyzed the association between social cognition and several domains related to psychological well-being. Concurrently, they investigated the evolution of amygdala lesion burden and atrophy and their association with social cognition performance.

To gather data, the team used a battery of neuropsychological tests; social cognition tasks to assess theory of mind, facial emotion recognition, and empathy; and 3T-MRI to analyze structural amygdala damage. They then compared these findings to baseline data collected from participants three years prior.

The results confirmed that, despite being classified as cognitively normal, people with relapsing-remitting MS showed a significantly lower performance in several social cognition domains as compared to a matched group of healthy controls. These domains include facial emotion recognition, in particular fear and anger, as well as empathy. Longitudinal changes in the social cognition domain were also found to be associated with psychological outcomes of daily living, such as depression, anxiety, fatigue, and social functioning quality of life.

"We confirmed the longitudinal stability of social cognition deficits in cognitively-normal people with relapsing-remitting MS, mirroring the amygdala structural damage and psychological well-being," said Dr. Genova. "These results confirm that social cognition exerts a key role in MS, affecting individuals' everyday lives. Our research highlights the need to identify treatments to improve social cognition in this population."

CHICAGO--May 3, 2021-- Patients with one or more health conditions are more likely to be screened for colorectal cancer than those without comorbidities, according to new research in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. However, patients with five or more health conditions are also less likely to be screened than patients with two to four health conditions.

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. resulting in more than 53,000 deaths each year. Regular colorectal screenings, whether colonoscopy or at-home stool test, are the most effective tool to identify and treat the disease at an early stage.

"No prior study, to my knowledge, has assessed the impact of multiple comorbidities on colorectal screenings. It was a real surprise to see how a patient's other health conditions impact their likelihood of being tested," said Ben Greiner, DO, an internist at the University of Texas Medical Branch Hospitals in Galveston, Texas. "Our findings reveal a lack of or myriad health conditions may prevent patients from receiving the preventive care they need."

The study found patients with diabetes, hypertension, skin cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), arthritis, depression, and chronic kidney disease were significantly more likely to be screened than those without these health conditions.

Barriers to care

"It may be that the treating physician or a patient suffering from five or more additional disease states is fatigued by more pressing treatment needs and therefore not prioritizing important screenings," said Dr. Greiner. "I also worry about the person who has no other health conditions and is either not seeing their doctor on a regular basis or, because of their otherwise clean bill of health, not following the screening recommendation."

A large U.S. study found that an increase in screening adherence of roughly 40% corresponded with a 52% reduction in cancer mortality. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 23 (4.3%) for men and 1 in 25 (4.0%) for women. The ACS guidelines recommend that all patients aged 45 or older be screened.

Chestnut Hill, MA (5/3/2021) -- The billion-year-old fossil of an organism, exquisitely preserved in the Scottish Highlands, reveals features of multicellularity nearly 400 million years before the biological trait emerged in the first animals, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology by an international team of researchers, including Boston College paleobotanist Paul K. Strother.

The discovery could be the "missing link" in the evolution of animals, according to the team, which included scientists from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia. The microfossil, discovered at Loch Torridon, contains two distinct cell types and could be the earliest example of complex multicellularity ever recorded, according to the researchers.

The fossil offers new insight into the transition of single celled organisms to complex, multicellular animals. Modern single-celled holozoa include the most basal living animals and the fossil discovered shows an organism which lies somewhere between single cell and multicellular animals, or metazoa.

"Our findings show that the genetic underpinnings of cell-to-cell cohesion and segregation -- the ability for different cells to sort themselves into separate regions within a multicellular mass -- existed in unicellular organisms a billion years ago, some 400 million years before such capabilities were incorporated into the first animals," said Strother, a research professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College.

The fossil's discovery in an inland lake shifts the focus on the first forms of early life from the ocean to freshwater.

Animals, or etazoa, are one of only five groups of organisms that have evolved complex multicellularity - organisms that grow from a single cell that develops into a myriad of different cells and tissues. Animals probably evolved from unicellular ancestors that went through multicellular stages during their life cycles, said Strother, an expert in paleobotany and palynology, the study of fossil spores and pollen. Land plants, too, achieved complex multicellularity when they evolved from simpler algal ancestors some time during the early Paleozoic from about 500 to 400 million years ago..

"We describe here a new fossil that is similar to living unicellular relatives of animals, belonging to the group Ichthyosporea," said Strother. "Our fossil shows life-cycle stages with two different kinds of cells, which could be the first step toward the evolution of complex multicellularity in the evolutionary lineage leading to the Metazoa."

The study was based on populations of cells preserved in the mineral phosphate that were collected from billion-year-old lake deposits found in the northwest Scottish Highlands, Strother said. Samples are prepared in rock thin sections which allow microfossils to be seen under the light microscope or with a focused ion beam microscope.

The microfossils were discovered as part of an ongoing project to describe life living in freshwater lakes one billion years ago, using samples collected in Scotland and Michigan by Strother beginning in 2008, with support from NASA and the National Geographic Society, and now the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK.

The new fossil has been described and formally named Bicellum brasieri in the new report.

Strother said the discovery has the potential to change the way scientists look at the earliest forms of life on Earth.

"Our study of life in billion-year-old lakes is challenged by our ability to determine which kinds of organisms are represented in these deposits," he said. "Previously we have assumed that most of what we see in these deposits are various kinds of extinct algae, but the morphological features of Bicellum really are more like those of modern-day unicellular relatives of animals. This is causing us to broaden our approach to reconstructing the diversity and ecology of life on Earth one billion years ago."

The discovery will allow researchers to expand upon a more thorough reconstruction of the life-cycle of Bicellum, Strother said.

"Armed with comparative morphology with modern day Ichthyosporeans, we may be able to recognize additional morphogenic stages and determine how a single generative cell divides to become a multicellular cell mass," he said.

People have become accustomed to having their temperature checked during the pandemic because fever is a key indicator of COVID-19.

A new commentary by Washington State University College of Nursing Associate Professor Catherine Van Son and Clinical Assistant Professor Deborah Eti proposes that taking a temperature is a less useful indicator of infection in older adults and that a pulse oximeter be used instead.

The paper, published in Frontiers in Medicine, said baseline temperatures are lower in older adults. A lower baseline temperature means a fever may be overlooked using the CDC's standard definition of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or greater.

"In fact," the paper says, "upwards of 30% of older adults with serious infections show mild or no fever."

Other common signs of COVID may also be dismissed and attributed to aging, such as fatigue, body aches and loss of taste or smell.

Additionally, some COVID-19 patients have no visible signs of having low oxygen levels, such as shortness of breath, yet have oxygen saturation below 90%. Such asymptomatic hypoxia can be associated with extremely poor outcomes.

Van Son and Eti say inexpensive, portable pulse oximeters should be considered for wide use in COVID-19 screenings of older adults because the devices can detect changes in oxygen saturation without other indications of infection.

"Detecting (asymptomatic hypoxia) is critical for the prevention of infection progression and initiating treatment," they wrote. "Earlier interventions could help patients avoid highly invasive procedures (i.e., intubation) and improve the allocation of scarce healthcare resources."

Palo Alto, CA--New work from a Stanford University-led team of researchers including Carnegie's Arthur Grossman and Tingting Xiang unravels a longstanding mystery about the relationship between form and function in the genetic material of a diverse group of algae called dinoflagellates.

Their findings, published in Nature Genetics, have implications for understanding genomic organizational principles of all organisms.

Dinoflagellates include more than 2,000 species of marine and freshwater plankton, many of which are photosynthetic, and some of which also ingest other organisms for food. They play a wide variety of roles in various ecosystems, including extreme environments, and are predominantly known to humans as the cause of toxic "red tides" and as the source of most ocean bioluminescence.

Some photosynthetic dinoflagellates are also crucial to the health of coral reefs. These algae are taken up by individual coral cells and form mutually beneficial relationships through which nutrients are exchanged. Ocean warming and pollution can cause this relationship between the alga and animal to break down, resulting in ghostly white "bleached" corals that are at risk of starvation, which could lead to the death of reef ecosystems.

"Like animals and plants, dinoflagellates are complex eukaryotic organisms and are evolutionarily interesting because their genetic material is packaged in a way that is unique among organisms with complex cellular architecture," said lead author Georgi Marinov of Stanford University.

One defining characteristic of eukaryotes is that their DNA is housed inside a nucleus within each cell and is organized as separate units called chromosomes. Furthermore, in most eukaryotes, segments of DNA are wound around a spool-like complex of proteins called a nucleosome. This organization is thought to predate the common ancestor of all eukaryotes. It helps to condense the genetic material into a small space and control access to the DNA and how the genes encoded in it are activated to direct the cell's physiological functions.

"By contrast, even though dinoflagellates are eukaryotes, their genome is not packaged as nucleosomes, but rather appears to be permanently condensed and exist in a liquid crystal state," Grossman explained. "We still have so much to learn about how genome architecture influences genome function in all eukaryotes; so, dinoflagellate's exceptional 'tight' packaging of DNA may help us understand the similarities and differences in organizational principles among eukaryote genomes."

To delve into this question, the research team--which also included Stanford's Alexandro E. Trevino, Anshul Kundaje, and William J. Greenleaf--used sophisticated technology to map the 3-D spatial relationships of the genetic material of the dinoflagellate Breviolum minutum.

"Our work revealed topological features in the Breviolum genome that differ from the various models of dinoflagellate genome organization that have been predicted since the 1960s," said Xiang.

They found evidence of large self-interacting regions of DNA in the dinoflagellate genome called "topologically associating domains." The work suggests that this genomic architecture is induced by the process by which genes are transcribed into RNA; this RNA is subsequently translated into proteins that perform the cell's various activities.

In fact, when transcription was inhibited, the architecture 'loosened up', indicating that the rigidly preserved topographical features are, indeed, a function of gene activity.

"There are many more questions raised by these results, which represent a big step forward in unraveling the mysteries of the dinoflagellate genome. They are also providing a new perspective on structure-function relationships inherent to chromosomes," Grossman concluded.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. --A new study found overlooked tsunami hazards related to undersea, near-shore strike-slip faults, especially for coastal cities adjacent to faults that traverse inland bays. Several areas around the world may fall into this category, including the San Francisco Bay area, Izmit Bay in Turkey and the Gulf of Al-Aqaba in Egypt.

The study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Ahmed Elbanna and professor Ares Rosakis of the California Institute of Technology used the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to model tsunami hazards related to strike-slip faults around the globe. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Whenever we saw large tsunamis triggered by earthquakes along strike-slip faults, people assumed that perhaps the earthquake had caused an undersea landslide, displacing water that way," Rosakis said.

The researchers said that a strike-slip fault exists when two blocks of rock on the fault line slide horizontally past one another. The San Andreas Fault is an example of a strike-slip fault.

In September 2018, a moderate 7.5 magnitude earthquake and unexpectedly powerful tsunami swept through Palu, a city situated on the inland side of Palu Bay on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The quake occurred along a northwest-southeast trending strike-slip fault that runs through the city and plunges below the bay along Palu's northwest shore.

"It looked like a bulldozer had come in and leveled the town," said co-author Costas Synolakis, the president of Athens College and a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California, who surveyed the area following the devastating event. "This is why it is so important that we try to understand what really happened."

Studies exploring connections between strike-slip faulting and tsunamis exist. However, they focus on specific fault systems or geographic locations, obscuring the complex details of the fault geometry and bathymetry, the study reports.

"What is unique about our study is that instead of considering a location-specific event, we focused on the fundamentals of a strike-slip fault system interacting within the boundaries of a narrow bay," Elbanna said. "We opted to simulate a very basic planar fault passing through a very simplified smooth-bottomed bay, similar to a bathtub. Having this simplified baseline model allows us to generalize to any place on the planet that may be at risk."

Intersonic earthquakes are fault ruptures that happen so quickly that their movement outpaces the seismic shear waves they generate - like a sonic boom, but with the shock wave moving through the earth's crust. The simulations found that intersonic earthquakes can provide enough energy and large enough horizontal displacements to trigger large tsunami waves.

When such earthquakes occur within a narrow bay, the researchers reported three distinct phases that can lead to a tsunami: the initial fault movement and shockwave causing almost instantaneous shaking of the coastal land; the displacement of water while the earthquake is occurring; and gravity-driven motion of the tsunami wave after the ground motion has subsided that carries the wave to shore.

Click here for a video explaining this motion.

"Each of these phases will have a different effect depending on the unique geography of the surrounding land and bathymetry of the bay," Elbanna said. "And, unlike the earthquakes and subsequent water displacement that occur many miles offshore, an earthquake and tsunami that occurs within the narrow confines of a bay will allow for very little warning time for the coast."

Elbanna compares the effect of horizontal strike-slip fault displacements to holding a water cup in your hand and shaking it horizontally.

"The sloshing motion is a result of the horizontal shaking. When an earthquake occurs along a strike-slip fault in a narrow bay, the horizontal ground motion pushes and pulls the boundaries of the bay leading to displacement of water in the vertical direction and initiation of the tsunami," he said.

Click here for a video explaining this motion.

"The physics-based model used in this study provides critical insight about the hazard associated with strike-slip faulting, particularly, the need to account for such risk to mitigate future damage to other bays traversed by strike-slip faults," said Illinois graduate student Mohamed Abdelmeguid, who conducted the simulations along with former graduate student Xiao Ma, currently a senior research scientist at Exxon Mobil.

The at-risk regions identified by the team - Northern California, Turkey and Egypt - have experienced intersonic earthquakes in the past, and the researchers recommend revisiting the tsunami hazard rating of underwater strike-slip faults, particularly those traversing narrow bays.

"It may not look like the tsunami scene from Dwayne Johnson's 'San Andreas' movie, but the tsunami risk for Northern California and several places worldwide need to be seriously revisited," Elbanna said.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Sometime between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, prehistoric humans took their first steps into Sahul, an ancient landmass made up of modern Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. But nobody knows which way they went after that.

"One of the really big unanswered questions of prehistory is how Australia was populated in the distant past. Scholars have debated it for at least 150 years," said Sandia National Laboratories archaeologist and remote sensing scientist Devin White.

Now, an international team of scientists using a Sandia supercomputer in the largest reconstruction ever attempted of prehistoric travel has mapped the probable "superhighways" that led to the first peopling of Australia. Their results were published April 29 in Nature Human Behaviour.

Their methods could help organizations like the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency forecast modern day human migration resulting from climate change or sudden humanitarian crises, while the new maps could inform the search for undiscovered archaeological sites. The research team believes it also might be possible to apply their approach to other areas of the world, further illuminating the human story since the first migrations out of Africa about 120,000 years ago.

Powered by 125 billion simulations run on a supercomputer typically used to develop autonomous systems and machine learning technologies, the team's research is the first high-resolution computational analysis of human migration at a continental scale, dividing the entire supercontinent into pixels 1,640 feet (500 meters) across.

"It is the largest and most complex project of its kind that I'd ever been asked to take on," said White, who wrote the primary algorithm used, called "From Everywhere to Everywhere," and overhauled it to program the way-finders. For more than 15 years, White has used geospatial analysis, remote sensing and high-performance computing to study human transportation networks.

Archaeologist and computational social scientist Stefani Crabtree, a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and professor at Utah State University in Logan led the study.

"We decided it would be really interesting to look at this question of human migration because the ways that we conceptualize a landscape should be relatively steady for a hiker in the 21st century and a person who was way-finding into a new region 70,000 years ago," Crabtree said. "If it's a new landscape and we don't have a map, we're going to want to know how to move efficiently throughout a space, where to find water, and where to camp -- and we'll orient ourselves based on high points around the lands."

Researchers packed a virtual 25-year-old woman with 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of tools and water and sent her on billions of walks across the continent as it would have looked 50,000 years ago. Her task: find the paths that require the fewest calories to traverse without straying too far from reliable sources of water or from highly visible landscape features like large rock outcrops. The team found that the simulations returned to certain paths again and again, which the researchers dubbed "superhighways," that line up well with the earliest known archaeological sites on the continent.

Researchers affiliated with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) also contributed to the project and explained the strong connection between Aboriginal communities, the landscape they have traveled across for millennia and a timeless realm known as the Dreaming.

"Australia's not only the driest, but also the flattest populated continent on Earth," said Sean Ulm, the center's deputy director and a distinguished professor of archaeology at Queensland, Australia-based James Cook University. "Our research shows that prominent landscape features and water sources were critical for people to navigate and survive on the continent. In many Aboriginal societies, landscape features are believed to have been created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Every ridgeline, hill, river, beach and water source is named, storied and inscribed into the very fabric of societies, emphasising the intimate relationship between people and place. The landscape is literally woven into peoples' lives and their histories. It seems that these relationships between people and country probably date back to the earliest peopling of the continent."

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, mass vaccinations have begun to raise the tantalizing prospect of herd immunity that eventually curtails or halts the spread of SARS-CoV-2. But what if herd immunity is never fully achieved - or if the mutating virus gives rise to hyper-virulent variants that diminish the benefits of vaccination?

Those questions underscore the need for effective treatments for people who continue to fall ill with the coronavirus. While a few existing drugs show some benefit, there's a pressing need to find new therapeutics.

Led by The University of New Mexico's Tudor Oprea, MD, PhD, scientists have created a unique tool to help drug researchers quickly identify molecules capable of disarming the virus before it invades human cells or disabling it in the early stages of the infection.

In a paper published this week in Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers introduced REDIAL-2020, an open source online suite of computational models that will help scientists rapidly screen small molecules for their potential COVID-fighting properties.

"To some extent this replaces (laboratory) experiments, says Oprea, chief of the Translational Informatics Division in the UNM School of Medicine. "It narrows the field of what people need to focus on. That's why we placed it online for everyone to use."

Oprea's team at UNM and another group at the University of Texas at El Paso led by Suman Sirimulla, PhD, started work on the REDIAL-2020 tool last spring after scientists at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) released data from their own COVID drug repurposing studies.

"Becoming aware of this, I was like, 'Wait a minute, there's enough data here for us to build solid machine learning models,'" Oprea says. The results from NCATS laboratory assays gauged each molecule's ability to inhibit viral entry, infectivity and reproduction, such as the cytopathic effect - the ability to protect a cell from being killed by the virus.

Biomedicine researchers often tend to focus on the positive findings from their studies, but in this case, the NCATS scientists also reported which molecules had no virus-fighting effects. The inclusion of negative data actually enhances the accuracy of machine learning, Oprea says.

"The idea was that we identify molecules that fit the perfect profile," he says. "You want to find molecules that do all these things and don't do the things that we don't want them to do."

The coronavirus is a wily adversary, Oprea says. "I don't think there is a drug that will fit everything to a T." Instead, researchers will likely devise a multi-drug cocktail that attacks the virus on multiple fronts. "It goes back to the one-two punch," he says.

REDIAL-2020 is based on machine learning algorithms capable of rapidly processing huge amounts of data and teasing out hidden patterns that might not be perceivable by a human researcher. Oprea's team validated the machine learning predictions based on the NCATS data by comparing them against the known effects of approved drugs in UNM's DrugCentral database.

In principle, this computational workflow is flexible and could be trained to evaluate compounds against other pathogens, as well as evaluate chemicals that have not yet been approved for human use, Oprea says.

"Our main intent remains drug repurposing, but we're actually focusing on any small molecule," he says. "It doesn't have to be an approved drug. Anyone who tests their molecule could come up with something important."

An abnormal build up of carbohydrates -- sugars and starches -- in the kernels and leaves of a mutant line of corn can be traced to one misregulated gene, and that discovery offers clues about how the plant deals with stress.

That is the conclusion of Penn State researchers whose previous study discovered the Maize ufo1 gene responsible for creating the mutant corn line. They now are assessing its effects and potential for inclusion in breeding new lines of corn better able to thrive in a warming world. The finding of higher sugar levels in plant tissues in their latest study is just another aspect for plant geneticists to consider.

"This discovery has implications for food security and breeding new crop lines that can better deal with a changing climate -- with corn, there is still a lot to be done," said Surinder Chopra, professor of maize genetics in the College of Agricultural Sciences. "In fact, there is a great deal of genetic and phenotypic diversity in corn, and we can use that diversity and ask the question, 'How is the ufo1 gene distributed in the existing 10,000 germplasm lines?'"

Can plant geneticists select for some of that diversity and incorporate the ufo1 gene to improve corn? That is the question Chopra is trying to answer, starting with this new study that found elevated sugar levels in seeds and leaves of the mutant corn line.

What traits can be improved in corn with the ufo1 gene's help?

"Certainly, stress tolerance, but also likely seed development, which has implications in seed yield as well as improved biomass," Chopra said. "And we would like to develop a better plant type that could grow in more dense culture, yet still be more productive. And finally, we need to look at resiliency and sustainability. Can we breed corn lines that get the same amount of yield with lower fertilizer inputs and need less water?"

Chopra started research on the Maize ufo1 gene because of its association with an orange/red pigmentation in the mutant corn line. Celebrated maize geneticist Charles Burnham, at the University of Minnesota, identified this conspicuous ufo1 mutant circa 1960. Another well-known maize geneticist, Derek Styles, with the University of Victoria, Canada, a student of Burnham's, then chose the name, which stands for "unstable factor for orange."

In 1997, Styles sent Chopra seeds for the mutant line. Since then, he introgressed its genes into an inbred line maintained by his research group at Penn State. In 2019, Chopra solved the genetic mystery behind ufo1.

However, it turns out that the gene controls many plant characteristics beyond pigmentation. Still, ufo1 is just one gene, and it is not functioning alone in the corn genome, Chopra noted.

There are more than 30,000 genes in the maize plant, so it is important to learn how ufo1 interacts with other genes before plant geneticists could use it in breeding a new type of crop, he added. "In order to go to the breeding aspect, we first need to learn how this gene actually functions," Chopra said. "We need to learn about how it partners with proteins, and learning about those protein interactions will be the goal of future research."

But for now, this study revealed how accumulation of sugars in corn seed is modified in the presence or absence of the ufo1 gene, according to Debamalya Chatterjee, doctoral student in agronomy, who spearheaded the research.

"Down the road, we could use this knowledge of the ufo1 gene in breeding, to perform better crosses that make more resilient and more productive hybrids, where sugars and starches are in balance," he said.

The researchers took a step in that direction today (May 3) when they published their findings in Plant Physiology, reporting that the maize ufo1 mutant gene affects cell differentiation, influences carbohydrate and hormone accumulation in the plant, and modulates expression patterns of essential genes involved in corn seed development.

All plant materials analyzed in the study were grown during 2016-2020 summers at the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center, Rock Springs, and in greenhouse and plant growth chamber facilities at Penn State's University Park campus. Inbreds and genetic stocks were obtained from the Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

May 3, 2021

Using social values for profit cheapens them, a new study cautions.

Toronto - Businesses sometimes align themselves with important values such as a clean environment, feminism, or racial justice, thinking it's a win-win: the value gets boosted along with the company's bottom line.

But be careful, warns new research from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Using these values primarily for self-interested purposes such as profit or reputation can ultimately undermine their special status and erode people's commitment to them.

"It sets a different norm for appropriate use of the value," says research author Rachel Ruttan, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the Rotman School, who co-authored the study with Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. "These are things that we are supposed to pursue as ends in themselves and this is shifting how people might think about that."

In multiple studies using hundreds of participants, Dr. Ruttan found that people exposed to more self-interested uses of "sacred" values not only demonstrated diminished regard for those values subsequently but were less willing to donate to causes that supported them.

A social media post wishing "Happy Earth Day," from NASCAR, the stock car racing organization, reduced people's subsequent respect for the annual environmental protection event, compared to a similar post from a group dedicated to ecological conservation. In another study, participants aware of a 2015 "paid patriotism" scandal, where the National Football League was revealed to have accepted money from the U.S. military for game-day flag presentations and the honouring of military members, showed less concern for patriotic displays than those unaware of the case.

Participants in yet another study were less likely to donate to an environmental cause after reading about a fictional report in which many organizations had launched pro-environmental campaigns in pursuit of profits.

Typically, values that are obviously under threat trigger people's moral outrage, such as when money intended to promote workplace diversity is reallocated to cover other expenses. But that impulse isn't switched on when the value appears to be at least superficially supported -- even if it's really being leveraged for a very different purpose. That less pure use gets subtly normalized and is how the value's status ends up corrupted, says Prof. Ruttan.

Still, it is possible for an organization to associate itself with social values and not diminish them, she says. But organizations must show "legitimate commitment" toward the value. She points to the example of an environmentally branded clothing company that discourages customers from purchasing replacements for its jackets, offering to repair their worn ones instead.

"That is a real commitment to sustainability, where they're actively taking on a cost," says Prof. Ruttan.

Consumers, meanwhile, should think critically about the campaigns they see and resist taking automatic cues from them about how to think about the values these campaigns appear to promote.

"Grassroots action is still important and upholding our own commitment to these causes is still very valuable in the face of all of this information," says Prof. Ruttan.

TORONTO - Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique.

This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.

"The goal of this study was to understand what makes human brain cells 'human,' and how human neuron circuitry functions as it does," says Dr. Taufik Valiante, neurosurgeon, scientist at the Krembil Brain Institute at UHN and co-senior author on the paper.

"In our study, we wanted to understand how human pyramidal cells, the major class of neurons in the neocortex, differ between the upper and bottom layers of the neocortex," says Dr. Shreejoy Tripathy, a scientist with the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics at CAMH and co-senior author on this study.

"In particular, we wanted to understand how electrical features of these neurons might support different aspects of cross-layer communication and the generation of brain rhythms, which are known to be disrupted in brain diseases like epilepsy."

With consent, the team used brain tissue immediately after it had been removed during routine surgery from the brains of patients with epilepsy and tumours. Using state-of-the-art techniques, the team was then able to characterize properties of individual cells within slices of this tissue, including visualizations of their detailed morphologies.

"Little is known about the shapes and electrical properties of living adult human neurons because of the rarity of obtaining living human brain tissue, as there are few opportunities other than epilepsy surgery to obtain such recordings," says Dr. Valiante.

To keep the resected tissue alive, it is immediately transferred into the modified cerebrospinal fluid in the operating room then taken directly into the laboratory where it is prepared for experimental characterization.

It is rare to study human tissue because accessing human tissue for scientific inquiries requires a tight-knit multidisciplinary community, including patients willing to participate in the studies, ethicists ensuring patient rights and safety, neurosurgeons collecting and delivering samples, and neuroscientists with necessary research facilities to study these tissues.

After initial analysis, members of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics used further large-scale data analysis to identify the properties that distinguished neurons in this cohort from each other. These properties were then compared to those from other centres doing similar work with human brain tissue samples, including the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences in Seattle, Washington.

Noted in the team's findings:

A massive amount of diversity among human neocortical pyramidal cells

Distinct electrophysiological features between neurons located at different layers in the human neocortex

Specific features of deeper layer neurons enabling them to support aspects of across-layer communication and the generation of functionally important brain rhythms

The teams also found notable and unexpected differences between their findings and similar experiments in pre-clinical models, which Dr. Tripathy believes is likely reflective of the massive expansion of the human neocortex over mammalian and primate evolution.

"These results showcase the notable diversity of human cortical pyramidal neurons, differences between similarly classified human and pre-clinical neurons, and a plausible hypothesis for the generation of human cortical theta rhythms driven by deep layer neurons," says Dr. Homeira Moradi Chameh, a scientific associate in Dr. Valiante's laboratory at Krembil Brain Institute and lead author on the study.

In total, the team was able to characterize over 200 neurons from 61 patients, reflecting the largest dataset of its kind to-date and encapsulating almost a decade's worth of painstaking work at UHN and the Krembil Brain Institute.

"This unique data set will allow us to build computational models of the distinctly human brain, which will be invaluable for the study of distinctly human neuropathologies," says Dr. Scott Rich, a postdoctoral research fellow in Dr. Valiante's laboratory at the Krembil Brain Institute and co-author on this work.

"For instance, the cellular properties driving many of the unique features identified in these neurons are known to be altered in certain types of epilepsy. By implementing these features in computational models, we can study how these alterations affect dynamics at the various spatial scales of the human brain related to epilepsy, and facilitate the translation of these 'basic science' findings back to the clinic and potentially into motivations for new avenues in epilepsy research."

"This effort was only possible because of the very large and active epilepsy program at the Krembil Brain Institute at UHN, one of the largest programs of its kind in the world and the largest program of its kind in Canada," says Dr. Valiante.

LUGANO, Switzerland, 3 May 2021 - As breast cancer becomes a largely curable disease, with more than 70% of women surviving at least 10 years after diagnosis across most of Europe thanks to early detection and treatment, (1) the quality of life after cancer has become an important aspect of the patient journey - one that may be inadequately addressed with current standards of follow-up. A study presented at the ESMO Breast Cancer 2021 Virtual Congress (2) has shown that breast cancer survivors differ widely in the burden of symptoms they experience after the end of treatment and thereby revealed an unmet need for tailored approaches to follow-up care. (3)

Lead author Kelly de Ligt from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam explained the rationale for the study: "Follow-up programmes are different in each country. In the Netherlands, for instance, breast cancer survivors have an annual visit with their treating physician for a follow-up period of five years, or 10 years if they are young. Previous studies had assessed side-effects experienced after the end of treatment as independent items, but in reality, survivors usually experience multiple symptoms that can add up and weigh heavily on their daily life. We wanted to measure the overall burden on their health-related quality of life and see if any patterns emerged that would better inform us on which individuals require active symptom management."

Women who had been surgically treated with or without adjuvant treatment for breast cancer stages I to III were selected between one and five years after diagnosis from the Netherlands Cancer Registry, which contains comprehensive information about diagnosis and treatment for all cancer patients in the Netherlands. A total of 404 participating survivors were questioned about their experienced burden for fatigue, nausea, pain, shortness of breath, insomnia, appetite, constipation, diarrhoea, as well as emotional and cognitive symptoms.

Analysis of their answers allowed the identification of three main subgroups of breast cancer survivors experiencing low, intermediate and high symptom burdens respectively. "In the low-burden group, to which almost a third of patients belonged, women were less affected compared to the average found among a representative sample of 1,300 women of the general population in the Netherlands, who filled out the same questionnaire," de Ligt elaborated. "I was pleasantly surprised to find that so many survivors were doing as well or even better than the average Dutch woman." A further 55% of study participants were classed in the intermediate-burden subgroup, which had similar results to the general population, though their scores for fatigue, insomnia and cognitive symptoms were slightly worse.

Within the high-burden subgroup, meanwhile, de Ligt was alarmed by the results observed: "This was the smallest group, only 15% of our population, but nonetheless, one in six women in our study had worse scores than the general population for all symptoms - and the differences, ranging between 15 and 20 percentage points, were large enough to be considered not just statistically significant, but clinically relevant as well," she explained. According to de Ligt, these findings confirm the necessity for personalised approaches to the follow-up of cancer patients, some of whom still require special attention as late as five years after diagnosis.

The study results further showed that patients with comorbidities such as heart disease and diabetes were more likely to experience a high symptom burden. "This association was so strong in our analysis that we were not able to link the level of symptom burden patients reported with the type of therapy they had received. However, because we measured symptom burden and comorbidities at the same time in the study, we cannot draw conclusions from these findings alone," de Ligt added. "Future research should attempt to measure patients' health-related quality of life through Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) before the start of treatment for breast cancer and afterwards to allow us to measure the effect of the therapy."

Nadia Harbeck, LMU University Hospital of Munich, Germany, a breast cancer expert not involved in the study, commented: "As a clinician, I was surprised that the analysis revealed no associations between the treatments patients had received and the burden-related subgroup they belonged to, because I would think that any therapy we administer - for example having just surgery plus radiotherapy versus undergoing an extensive course of systemic treatment both before and after the surgery - does have an impact on the symptom burden patients experience over the five-year follow-up period. Gathering data from a larger group of women could help us to gain more insight, and it would be interesting to see this study reproduced in other countries to ascertain whether there are also cultural and social factors impacting patients' answers."

She added: "In my experience, some patients could do without the quarterly visits to their outpatient practitioner, which are part of the standard follow-up protocol in Germany, while others do need that regular interaction with a physician. It is not always easy to distinguish between them initially, because when I see my patients right after treatment, they are so busy returning to their normal lives that a lot of the physical and emotional burden they feel is not there yet or is suppressed. In addition, some patients are not naturally communicative about their personal experience with the disease. This new data shows that if we specifically assessed women's needs in this respect at different stages in their follow-up journey, we could adapt the care we offer not just to their risk of recurrence, but also to their physical and mental state over time. The gynaecologists, family doctors and nurses who help us in follow-up care should be made aware of these findings."

The important role of outpatient healthcare providers in breast cancer patients' post-treatment journey is confirmed by another study which has revealed that among 621 breast cancer patients treated at Oulu University Hospital in Finland, between 2003 and 2013, only a minority (25%) of cancer relapses were detected during pre-planned control visits. (4) More than half of the 95 cases of recurrence were identified as a result of patients contacting their physician about a new symptom they were experiencing, most commonly pain.

"It is essential to reinforce the message to patients that if they feel anything unusual, they should mention it without delay to a medical professional, along with the information that they are a breast cancer survivor, to ensure that any connection with the cancer is not missed - especially when a lot of time has passed since the initial diagnosis," Harbeck emphasised. "As anticancer therapies have become more effective, the pattern of metastasis has changed over the years and can affect any organ, so there is not just one main symptom or area of the body to be attentive to. Patients therefore need to be well-informed and must be made to feel comfortable about contacting their physician outside of their planned consultations if necessary."

A research team from the Institut de Neurociències at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (INc-UAB) has showed that inhibition through a drug of the Tac2 neuronal circuit, involved in the formation of the memory of fear, has opposite effects on the ability to remember aversive events in mice according to sex: it is reduced in male mice and increased in female mice.

Is the first time that a drug has been shown to produce this opposite effect on the memory of male and female mice. The study also evidences that opposing molecular mechanisms and behaviours can occur in memory formation depending on sex. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

The research group on Translational mechanisms of the memory of fear led by Raül Andero, professor and researcher at ICREA, has been studying the functioning of fear memory for years to find treatments for pathologies associated with traumatic experiences, such as post-traumatic stress and phobias.

The research team had identified that the Tac2 circuit, located in the amygdala, could be temporarily blocked by the effect of a drug they are studying. This drug, called Osanetant, was able to reduce the capacity to recall traumatic events in male mice. In the study published now, they discovered that this same drug produces the opposite effect in female mice, increasing their fear memory.

This opposite effect is explained by the fact that, in blocking the Tac2 pathway, the drug interacts with the neuronal receptors of two sex hormones: testosterone in males and estrogen in females. In addition, it has been observed that hormonal fluctuations during the oestrous cycle in female mice, equivalent to the menstrual cycle in women, vary the effects of the drug on the ability to remember aversive events.

''These results demonstrate the ability that hormones have to modulate the formation of fear memories, and show the need to consider sex differences and hormonal cycles in the design of pharmacological treatments for psychiatric disorders'', says Antonio Florido, INc-UAB predoctoral researcher and first author of the article.

In the field of neurosciences, only one study in females is published for every 5.5 done in males. And research on Tac2 pathway has also been done mostly in males so far.

"Understanding how and why memory processes differ between sexes is key to designing treatments for fear disorders, especially considering that women are the ones who most often present these types of disorders. Some drugs that are already used may not have the expected effects on them", says Raül Andero, the study coordinator. "Our findings may help raise awareness of the need to do research differentiating by sex and promote basic and clinical studies that include the female sex", he adds.

The drug studied is not new, but it is safe for use in humans. However, at the moment it is not being used to treat any disease. Dr. Andero's group is now investigating its potential use in treating fear disorders differently by sex.

In this research, which has been carried out in collaboration with other INc-UAB research groups and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), scientists show the importance of personalized medicine. "Mental health drugs that we have today, not only for memory-related disorders, are not specific enough and may be causing contrary effects to those desired", they conclude.

Diatoms are tiny unicellular plants -- no bigger than half a millimeter -- which inhabit the surface water of the world's oceans where sunlight penetration is plenty. Despite their modest size, they are one of the world's most powerful resources for removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. They currently remove, or "fix," 10-20 billion metric tons of CO2 every year by the process of photosynthesis. But not much is known about which biological mechanisms diatoms use, and whether these processes might become less effective with rising ocean acidity, temperatures, and, in particular, CO2 concentrations. A new study in Frontiers in Plant Science shows that diatoms predominantly use one pathway to concentrate CO2 at the vicinity of carbon fixing enzyme and that this continues to operate even at higher CO2 concentrations.

"We show that marine diatoms are super smart in fixing atmospheric CO2 even at the present-day level of CO2 -- and the variability in surface seawater CO2 levels did not impact the gene expression and abundance of the five key enzymes used in carbon fixation," says the group leader of the study, Dr Haimanti Biswas from the National Institute of Oceanography-CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), India. "This answers a key question about how marine diatoms may respond to the future increase in atmospheric CO2 levels."

The plant kingdom has evolved a wide range of mechanisms for concentrating CO2 from the air, or water, and transforming it into organic carbon. In this way, plants convert CO2 into glucose and other carbohydrates, which they use as building blocks and energy storage. But these different mechanisms have varied strengths and weaknesses. Somewhat ironically, the only carbon-fixing enzyme, RuBisCO, is notoriously inefficient at fixing CO2 and hence plants need to keep CO2 levels high In the vicinity of this enzyme.

To better understand which mechanism diatoms use to concentrate CO2, Biswas and her collaborators, Drs Chris Bowler and Juan Jose Pierella Karluich from the Institut de Biologie de I'Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, mined a data set from the Tara Oceans research expedition. The international Tara expedition collected marine plankton samples from around the world over several years (2009 to 2013). These included more than 200 metagenomes (which show the abundance of the genes responsible for the five key enzymes) and over 220 metatranscriptomes (showing expression of the genes for the five key enzymes) from diatoms of different size classes.

Biswas and her collaborators were particularly interested in how often the genes of five key carbon-fixing enzymes are present, and whether there were any differences in their abundance and expression levels depending on location and conditions. Across all of the samples measured, one enzyme was roughly ten times more abundant than any of the other enzymes. This enzyme -- called carbonic anhydrase -- is especially informative because it also confirms that diatoms are actively pumping in dissolved CO2 inside the cell, as opposed to biochemically transforming CO2 first.

The team also observed complex different patterns of the key enzymes' gene expression, which varied depending on latitude and temperature. The researchers hope to learn more using new datasets from more widely-traveled future expeditions.

"So far, our study indicates that despite variability in CO2 levels, these tiny autotrophs are highly efficient in concentrating CO2 inside the cell," says Biswas. "That's the probable reason for their ability to fix nearly one-fifth of the global carbon fixation on earth."

The legacy of systemic racism in the U.S impacts psychosis risk at the individual and neighborhood level, according to a definitive review published online today. Researchers examined U.S. based evidence connecting social and environmental factors with outcomes relating to psychotic experiences, including schizophrenia.

The review examined potential risk factors and influence of structural racism within three key areas. These included disparities in neighborhoods; trauma and stress experienced at both collective and individual levels; and complications experienced around pregnancy.

Disparities in U.S. neighborhoods perpetuate disadvantage for racially minoritized communities through inequitable access to healthcare, healthy foods, education and employment opportunities, and safe housing, the authors note. These disadvantages are associated with cumulative stress and, some research suggests, heightened risk for psychosis.

A history of trauma is common among people with schizophrenia and more than 85% report at least one adverse childhood experience. Research has associated multiple trauma experiences with increased risk of psychosis. Among people experiencing psychosis, rates of trauma and adversity are significantly higher in marginalized racial groups compared to white people.

Several obstetric complications have been associated with increased risk for psychotic disorders, such as infections, maternal stress and an increase in maternal inflammation. Black women in the U.S. are at substantially increased risk for many obstetric complications compared to white women.

"Being a particular race in and of itself is not the determinant; the systematic racism that constructs the social milieu makes it relevant," the authors conclude.

"Our review suggests the legacy of structural racism in the U.S. is a fundamental cause of racial inequities in social determinants of psychosis," said lead author Deidre M. Anglin, Ph.D., with City College of New York, City University of New York. "Funding priorities, training, and intervention development in North American psychiatry must shift to reflect this evidence."