Culture

Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that a calorie labelled is not the same as a calorie digested and absorbed, when the food source is almonds.

The findings should help alleviate concerns that almonds contribute to weight gain, which persist despite the widely recognized benefits of nuts as a plant-based source of protein, vitamins and minerals.

"Nuts have generally been thought of as healthy the last two decades, but the messaging around nuts has often come with a disclaimer that they are high in fat and energy," said John Sievenpiper, principal investigator on the study and an associate professor in the departments of nutritional sciences and medicine at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine.

"We still see that caveat in the media and on the internet today, and it has been part of many clinical guidelines, although that is changing," said Sievenpiper, who is also a staff physician and scientist at St. Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto.

"Other researchers have shown that there is a bioaccessibility issue with nuts, that a calorie labelled may not be a calorie absorbed. This study quantifies that effect with almonds in a relevant population," Sievenpiper said.

The journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings published the findings today.

The researchers found that after digestion, about 20 per cent of calories derived largely from fat in almonds remained unabsorbed, which they observed in stool samples. That translated to about two per cent less energy absorbed from the diet overall among study participants.

A person eating the same amount of almonds in a daily diet of 2,000 to 3,000 calories would absorb 40 to 60 calories less than would be predicted by Atwater factors, on which many food labels are based. That could result in weight loss up to 2.9 kilograms or 6.3 pounds over a year, assuming no compensation in the form of increased intake or decreased energy expenditure.

Participants in the study did not gain weight, which is consistent with the majority of high-quality trials that measure nut consumption and weight gain, some of which show an association with weight loss, Sievenpiper said.

The researchers used a randomized crossover trial to study 22 women and men with high cholesterol, who underwent a series of three, month-long dietary interventions separated by a week-long washout period.

All study participants consumed an NCEP Step-2 diet (low in saturated fat and cholesterol, part of the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program). The three dietary interventions were full-dose almonds (75 grams per day or three quarters of a cup); half-dose almonds plus half-dose muffins; and full-dose muffins as a study control.

Nutritional makeup of the muffins matched the almonds in amount of protein, fibre and fats.

"One unique aspect of this study is that it assessed people with high cholesterol, who are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease," said Stephanie Nishi, a doctoral student in nutritional sciences at the time of the study who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rovira i Virgili in Spain.

"That has not been done in this population before, and it's important because this group typically gets many messages to eat more nuts, owing to the evidence for nut consumption and heart health," Nishi said.

Nishi and Sievenpiper both said there is a big gap between the number of nuts people are recommended to consume and how many they actually eat, generally and in populations at risk for cardiovascular and other disease.

Further barriers stemming from concerns about weight gain are counter-productive, they said.

Diabetes Canada recently adjusted their guidelines based in part on the study's findings, and to avoid the stigma around nuts and weight gain, said Sievenpiper, who has contributed to guidelines for patients with diabetes and other metabolic disorders, and for cardiovascular disease.

A recent study finds U.S. companies that have a substantial number of employees in foreign jurisdictions with lower tax rates are more likely than their peers to "artificially" locate earnings in those jurisdictions - and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is less likely to challenge these complex tax-planning activities.

"Many politicians seek to encourage domestic employment and discourage sending jobs overseas," says Nathan Goldman, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of accounting in North Carolina State University's Poole College of Management. "To do that, they'll need to address elements of corporate tax policy that effectively encourage corporations to ramp up their percentage of foreign employees."

The researchers were interested in determining how foreign employment affected income shifting by large companies, and tax uncertainty regarding the foreign transactions of those companies. Income shifting is when companies artificially locate earnings in a low-tax jurisdiction. For example, one form of income shifting is when a company alters intercompany pricing by charging unusual prices to transfer income from the part of the company that earned the money to the part of the company that is based in a low-tax jurisdiction - particularly when there is no reason to do so other than to avoid taxes. Tax uncertainty refers to the likelihood that an IRS audit will result in the company having to pay more in taxes.

For this study, the researchers looked at data from 815 large, multinational companies based in the U.S. The researchers collected financial data on all of the companies for each year between 2000 and 2016. During that time period, all of the companies had at least one year during which they recorded at least $100 million in foreign sales. The average firm in the sample, during the average year, had 18,763 employees, of which 8,499 were employed outside the U.S.

The researchers used empirical models that allowed them to identify whether companies were recording unusually high profit margins in low-tax jurisdictions relative to the U.S. - which would suggest that companies were engaging in income shifting.

The researchers found companies that had a higher percentage of foreign employees were more likely to have unusually high profit margins overseas. In addition, those companies recorded fewer unrecognized tax benefit reserves on their financial statements, which reflects lower tax uncertainty. In other words, companies appear to be facing less scrutiny from the IRS related to their aggressive tax planning activities.

"Think of it this way: If a company only has a few employees in a low-tax jurisdiction and claims a huge profit there, the IRS is likely going to single that company out - the amount of profit is out of scale with the size of the operation," Goldman says. "But if a company has a lot of employees in that jurisdiction, the profits appear more reasonable, and the relevant business activities are less likely to get singled out by the IRS for a rigorous audit.

"One of the takeaways here is that the tax code effectively encourages companies to increase the percentage of their employees who work in foreign jurisdictions that have low tax rates. Not just because of a higher U.S. tax rate, but because the company is better able to substantiate the economic substance of their transactions, resulting in a higher likelihood of defending these aggressive tax planning activities in an IRS audit."

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (04/12/2021) — A new probe into the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed correlations to six unhealthy eating behaviors, according to a study by the University of Minnesota Medical School and School of Public Health. Researchers say the most concerning finding indicates a slight increase or the re-emergence of eating disorders, which kill roughly 10,200 people every year — about one person every 52 minutes.

U of M Medical School’s Melissa Simone, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, collaborated with School of Public Health professor and head of the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, MPH, to learn from study participants in Neumark-Sztainer’s Project EAT between April and May 2020.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the rapid implementation of public health policies to reduce transmission of the virus. While these protections are necessary, the disruptions to daily life associated with the ongoing pandemic may have significant negative consequences for the risk of eating disorders and symptoms,” said Simone, who is the lead author of the study. “Eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates across all psychiatric health concerns, and therefore, it is important to try to make links between the consequences of the pandemic and disordered eating behaviors.

The study aimed to understand potential associations between stress, psychological distress, financial difficulties and changes in eating behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data. Simone’s findings, published in theInternational Journal of Eating Disorders, found six key themes of eating behavior changes:

Mindless eating and snacking;
Increased food consumption;
Generalized decrease in appetite or dietary intake;
Eating to cope;
Pandemic-related reductions in dietary intake;
And, a re-emergence or marked increase in eating disorder symptoms.

Approximately 8% of those studied reported extreme unhealthy weight control behaviors, 53% had less extreme unhealthy weight control behaviors and 14% reported binge eating. The study revealed that these outcomes were significantly associated with poorer stress management, greater depressive symptoms and moderate or extreme financial difficulties.

“There has been a lot of focus on obesity and its connection with COVID-19. It is also important to focus on the large number of people who have been engaging in disordered eating and are at risk for eating disorders during and following the pandemic,” said Neumark-Sztainer, who is the principal investigator of Project EAT. “The majority of the young adults in our study are from diverse ethnic/racial and lower income backgrounds, who often do not receive the services they need. To ensure health inequities do not increase, we need to meet the needs of these populations.”

Simone added, “The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely persist long beyond the dissemination of a vaccine. Because our findings suggest that moderate or severe financial difficulties may be linked with disordered eating behaviors, it is essential that eating disorder preventive interventions and treatment efforts be affordable, easily accessible and widely disseminated to those at heightened risk. As such, online or mobile-based interventions may prove to be effective and accessible modes for targeted intervention efforts.”

This study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL116892, R35HL139853: Principal Investigator: D. Neumark-Sztainer), the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (TL1R002493, UL1TR002494), and the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH082761).

BOSTON - (April 12, 2021) - A new source of energy expending brown fat cells has been uncovered by researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center, which they say points towards potential new therapeutic options for obesity. According to the new report, published today by Nature Metabolism, the key lies in the expression of a receptor called Trpv1 (temperature-sensitive ion channel transient receptor potential cation subfamily V member 1) -- a protein known to sense noxious stimuli, including pain and temperature.

Specifically, the authors point to smooth muscle cells expressing the Trpv1 receptor and identify them as a novel source of energy-burning brown fat cells (adipocytes). This should translate into increased overall energy expenditure - and ultimately, researchers hope, reduced weight.

Brown fat or brown adipose tissue is a distinct type of fat that is activated in response to cold temperatures. Its primary role is to produce heat to help maintain body temperature and it achieves that by burning calories. This has raised the prospect that such calorie burning can be translated into weight loss, particularly in the context of obesity.

"The capacity of brown and beige fat cells to burn fuel and produce heat, especially upon exposure to cold temperatures, have long made them an attractive target for treating obesity and other metabolic disorders," said senior author Yu-Hua Tseng . "And yet, the precise origins of cold-induced brown adipocytes and mechanisms of action have remained a bit of a mystery."

The source of these energy-burning fat cells was previously considered to be exclusively related to a population of cells that express the receptor Pdgfrα (platelet derived growth factor receptor alpha). However, wider evidence suggests other sources may exist. Identifying these other sources would then open up potential new targets for therapy that would get around the somewhat uncomfortable use of cold temperatures to try to treat obesity.

The team initially investigated the general cellular makeup of brown adipose tissue from mice housed at different temperatures and lengths of time. Notably, they employed modern single cell RNA sequencing approaches to try to identify all types of cells present. This avoided issues of potential bias towards one particular cell type - a weakness of previous studies, according to the authors.

"Single cell sequencing coupled with advanced data analysis techniques has allowed us to make predictions in silico about the development of brown fat," said co-author Matthew D. Lynes. "By validating these predictions, we hope to open up new cellular targets for metabolic research."

As well as identifying the previously known Pdgfrα-source of energy burning brown fat cells, their analysis of the single cell RNA sequencing data suggested another distinct population of cells doing the same job - cells derived from smooth muscle expressing Trpv1*. The receptor has previously been identified in a range of cell types and is involved in pain and heat sensation.

Further investigations with mouse models confirmed that the Trpv1-positive smooth muscle cells gave rise to the brown energy-burning version of fat cells especially when exposed to cold temperatures. Additional experiments also showed that the Trpv1-positive cells were a source for beige fat cells that appear in response to cold in white fat, further expanding the potential influence of Trpv1-expressing precursor cells.

"These findings show the plasticity of vascular smooth muscle lineage and expand the repertoire of cellular sources that can be targeted to enhance brown fat function and promote metabolic health," added lead author.

Brown adipose tissue is the major thermogenic organ in the body and increasing brown fat thermogenesis and general energy expenditure is seen as one potential approach to treating obesity, added Shamsi.

"The identification of Trpv1-expessing cells as a new source of cold-induced brown or beige adipocytes suggests it might be possible to refine the use of cold temperatures to treat obesity by developing drugs that recapitulate the effects of cold exposure at the cellular level," said Tseng.

The authors note that Trpv1 has a role in detecting multiple noxious stimuli, including capsaicin (the pungent component in chili peppers) and that previous studies suggest administration in both humans and animals results in reduced food intake and increased energy expenditure.

Tseng added: "Further studies are now planned to address the role of the Trpv1 channel and its ligands and whether it is possible to target these cells to increase numbers of thermogenic adipocytes as a therapeutic approach towards obesity."

Histones are tiny proteins that bind to DNA and hold information that can help turn on or off individual genes. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a technique that makes it possible to examine how different versions of histones bind to the genome in tens of thousands of individual cells at the same time. The technique was applied to the mouse brain and can be used to study epigenetics at a single-cell level in other complex tissues. The study is published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

"This technique will be an important tool for examining what makes cells different from each other at the epigenetic level," says Marek Bartosovic, post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institute. "We anticipate that it will be widely implemented by the broad biomedical community in a wide variety of research fields."

Even though all cells in our bodies contain exactly the same genetic information written in DNA, they read and execute this information differently. For example, a neuron in the brain reads the DNA differently than a skin cell or a fat cell. Epigenetics play a crucial role in the interpretation of the genetic information and allows the cells to execute specialized functions.

Modification of histones is one type of epigenetic information. Histones are attached to DNA like beads on a string and decorate it as "epigenetic stickers". These stickers label which genes should be turned on or off. All together this system coordinates to ensure that thousands of genes are switched on or off at the right place and time and in the right cell.

To better understand how cells become different and specialized, it is important to know which parts of the DNA are marked by which histone "stickers" in each individual organ and in each individual cell within that organ. Until recently, it was not possible to look at histone modifications of an individual cell. To examine the histone modifications in one specific cell type, a very high number of cells and cumbersome methods of cell isolation would be required. The final epigenetic histone profile of one cell type would then be an averaged view of thousands of cells.

In this study, the researchers describe a method that introduces a new way of looking at histone modifications in unprecedented detail in a single cell and at a large scale. By coupling and further optimizing other epigenomic techniques, the researchers were able to identify gene regulatory principles for brain cells in mice based on their histone profile.

"Our method--single-cell CUT&Tag--makes it possible to examine tens of thousands of single cells at the same time, giving an unbiased view of the epigenetic information in complex tissues with unparalleled resolution," Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, associate professor at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Karolinska Institute, says. "Next, we would like to apply single-cell CUT&Tag in the human brain, both in development and in various diseases. For instance, we would like to investigate which epigenetic processes contribute to neurodegeneration during multiple sclerosis and whether we would be able to manipulate these processes in order to alleviate the disease."

What exactly happens when the corona virus SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell? In an article published in Nature, a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry paints a comprehensive picture of the viral infection process. For the first time, the interaction between the coronavirus and a cell is documented at five distinct proteomics levels during viral infection. This knowledge will help to gain a better understanding of the virus and find potential starting points for therapies.

When a virus enters a cell, viral and cellular protein molecules begin to interact. Both the replication of the virus and the reaction of the cells are the result of complex protein signaling cascades. A team led by Andreas Pichlmair, Professor of Immunopathology of Viral Infections at the Institute of Virology at TUM, and Matthias Mann, Head of the Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has systematically recorded how human lung cells react to individual proteins of the covid-19 pathogen SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS coronavirus, the latter of which has been known for some time.

A detailed interaction map

To this end, more than 1200 samples were analyzed using the state-of-the-art mass spectrometry techniques and advanced bioinformatic methods. The result is a freely accessible dataset that provides information on which cellular proteins the viral proteins bind to and the effects of these interactions on the cell. In total, 1484 interactions between viral proteins and human cellular proteins were discovered. "Had we only looked at proteins, however, we would have missed out on important information", says Andreas Pichlmair. "A database that only includes the proteome would be like a map containing just the place names but no roads or rivers. If you knew about the connections between the points on that map, you could gain much more useful information."

According to Pichlmair, important counterparts to the network of traffic routes on a map are protein modifications called phosphorylation and ubiquitination. Both are processes in which other molecules are attached to proteins, thereby altering their functions. In a listing of proteins, these changes are not measured, so that there is no way of knowing whether proteins are active or inactive, for example. "Through our investigations, we systematically assign functions to the individual components of the pathogen, in addition to the cellular molecules that are switched off by the virus," explains Pichlmair. "There has been no comparable mapping for SARS-CoV-2 so far," adds Matthias Mann. "In a sense, we have taken a close look at five dimensions of the virus during an infection: its own active proteins and its effects on the host proteome, ubiquitinome, phosphoproteome and transcriptome."

Insights into how the virus works

Among other things, the database can also serve as a tool to find new drugs. By analyzing protein interactions and modifications, vulnerability hotspots of SARS-CoV-2 can be identified. These proteins bind to particularly important partners in cells and could serve as potential starting points for therapies. For example, the scientists concluded that certain compounds would inhibit the growth of SARS-CoV-2. Among them were some whose antiviral function is known, but also some compounds which have not yet been studied for efficacy against SARS-CoV-2. Further studies are needed to determine whether they show efficacy in clinical use against Covid-19.

"Currently, we are working on new anti Covid-19 drug candidates, that we have been able to identify through our analyses," says Andreas Pichlmair. "We are also developing a scoring system for automated identification of hotspots. I am convinced that detailed data sets and advanced analysis methods will enable us to develop effective drugs in a more targeted manner in the future and limit side effects in advance."

April 12, 2021 - For critically ill COVID-19 patients treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), the risk of death remains high - but is much lower than suggested by initial studies, according to a report published today by Annals of Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

The findings support the use of ECMO as "salvage therapy" for COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or respiratory failure who do not improve with conventional mechanical ventilatory support, according to the new research by Ninh T. Nguyen, MD, Chair of the Department of Surgery, University of California, Irvine Medical Center (UCIMC) and colleagues. "Our findings refute previous reports of futility for ECMO therapy in the setting of COVID-19," states Fabio Sagebin, MD, of the UCIMC Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is a life-sustaining therapy for carefully selected patients with respiratory or circulatory failure. Requiring specialized equipment and highly trained professionals, ECMO is mainly provided at large medical centers.

While some hospitals have been using ECMO therapy for COVID-19 patients with severe ARDS, there is a "paucity of data" on outcomes, according to the authors. Initial case series reported "exceedingly high" mortality rates: over 90 percent.

Dr. Nguyen and colleagues used the nationwide Vizient hospital database to analyze outcomes of 11,182 patients with COVID-19 and ARDS who received ECMO between April and September 2020. The patients were treated at 155 US medical centers; numbers of patients treated with ECMO ranged from 1 to 38 per hospital. The majority of patients were under the age of 50 years (57.9 percent) with about 37 percent aged 51 to 64 years. Only about five percent were aged 65 years or older.

For these ECMO-treated COVID-19 patients with ARDS, the overall rate of in-hospital death was 45.9 percent. Although high, that is roughly half the mortality rate reported in smaller ECMO studies from early in the pandemic. It's also comparable to the 39 percent death rate in a recent analysis of about 1,000 patients from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization registry (largely treated at higher-volume ECMO centers).

For patients in the new study, average length of hospital stay was lengthy: 37 days, including 29 days in the intensive care unit. The in-hospital mortality rate increased with age: from about 25 percent for patients aged up to 30 years, to 42 percent for those aged 31 to 50 years, 53 percent for those aged 51 to 64, and 74 percent for those aged 65 or older.

The researchers performed a subset analysis comparing patients aged 18 to 64 who were treated with (1,113 patients) or without ECMO (16,343 patients). In-hospital mortality was 44.6 percent for the ECMO-treated patients compared to 37.9 percent for those treated without ECMO.

"Our data showed that patients with COVID-19 and ARDS treated with conventional ventilatory support had a high risk of death and patients selected for ECMO, which is a higher risk group, had a similarly high rate of death," according to Dr. Sagebin. "The data suggests that in appropriately selected patients, we can save lives with this therapy."

The researchers note some limitations of their database study, including the lack of data regarding the extent and severity of ARDS or response to ventilatory support measures.

Dr. Nguyen states: "Although ECMO therapy appears to show a benefit, it is a costly and resources intensive therapy including long length of hospitalization that is not readily available at most medical centers. In the setting of a pandemic when the number of severely ill patients outpaced the availability of limited resources, then this therapy will require appropriate selection of patients that would be most likely to benefit."

In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, a team led by USC Stem Cell scientist Michael Bonaguidi, PhD, demonstrates that neural stem cells - the stem cells of the nervous system - age rapidly.

"There is chronological aging, and there is biological aging, and they are not the same thing," said Bonaguidi, an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Gerontology and Biomedical Engineering at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "We're interested in the biological aging of neural stem cells, which are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of time. This has implications for the normal cognitive decline that most of us experience as we grow older, as well as for dementia, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and brain injury."

In the study, first author Albina Ibrayeva, a PhD candidate in the Bonaguidi Lab in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, joined her colleagues in looking at the brains of young, middle-aged and old mice.

By tracing individual neural stem cells, or NSCs, over the course of several months, they identified "short-term NSCs" that quickly differentiate into more specialized neurons, and "long-term NSCs" that continually divide and replicate themselves to maintain an ongoing reserve of stem cells with the ability to generate many different cell types in the brain. This key population of long-term NSCs divided less often and failed to maintain their numbers as the mice aged.

The scientists next examined thousands of genes in the long-term NSCs, which were dividing less often and had slipped into an inactive state known as quiescence. The gene activity of the quiescent NSCs varied greatly in young versus middle-aged animals. As expected, there were changes in genes that control how long-term NSCs divide, as well as generate new neurons and other brain cells. Remarkably, there were many important changes in gene activity related to biological aging at younger ages than anticipated. These pro-aging genes make it more difficult for cells to repair damage to their DNA, regulate their genetic activity, control inflammation and handle other stresses.

Among the pro-aging genes, the scientists were most intrigued by Abl1, which formed the hub of a network of interrelated genes.

"We were interested in the gene Abl1, because no one has ever studied its role in neural stem cell biology--whether in development or in aging," said Ibrayeva.

Using an existing, FDA-approved chemotherapy drug called Imatinib, scientists could easily inhibit the activity of the gene Abl1. The scientists gave older mice doses of Imatinib for six days. After the drug blocked the activity of the gene Abl1, the NSCs began to divide more and proliferate in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory.

"We've succeeded in getting neural stem cells to divide more without depleting, and that's step one," said Bonaguidi. "Step two will be to induce these stem cells to make more neurons. Step three will be to demonstrate that these additional neurons actually improve learning and memory. Much work remains to be done, but this study marks exciting progress towards our goal of identifying prescription drugs that could rejuvenate our brains as we grow older."

Young scientists from NUST MISIS have presented multilayer antibacterial coatings with a prolonged effect and a universal spectrum of action. The coating is based on modified titanium oxide and several antiseptic components. The coatings can be used in modern implantology as a protective layer for the prevention of concomitant complications - inflammation or implant rejection. The results of the work have been published in the international scientific journal Applied Surface Science.

Antibacterial coatings are currently being actively researched, as the search for alternatives to traditional antibiotics is growing. They can be applied to implants, thereby preventing inflammation caused by nosocomial infections.

Nevertheless, the creation of antibacterial, but at the same time biocompatible and bioactive surfaces is a problem that the scientific community has been solving for many years, and the "dream materials" have not been developed.

Young scientists from the NUST MISIS Laboratory of Inorganic Nanomaterials have created an innovative multilayer coating that synthesizes the protective properties of nanoparticles, biopolymers, anticoagulants and antibiotics. The antibiotic and silver nanoparticles provide an antibacterial effect, while heparin prevents bacterial cells from sticking to the tissue surface, which reduces the amount of antibacterial agent required.

"The method of obtaining a multilayer coating is a combination of several technologies: first, using magnetron sputtering, a thin bioactive nanostructured coating of the TiCaPCON composition was obtained, then silver particles were introduced into the coating by ion implantation, then a biopolymer layer, which plays the role of a carrier for bactericidal molecules of heparin and gentamicin in the preparation, was applied", - said the author of the work, a researcher at the NUST MISIS Inorganic nanomaterials laboratory Elizaveta Permyakova.

The chemical composition of the resulting coating layers was carefully studied by the developers using infrared and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Scientists have found out that the incorporation of therapeutic components occurs throughout the whole plasma-applied polymer layer.

Together with colleagues from the State Research Center for Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, the scientists studied the effect of each type of the antibacterial component (silver ions, gentamicin and heparin) on the antibacterial activity and biocompatibility of the obtained coatings.

According to the results of in vitro studies, the coatings showed cellular compatibility and demonstrated excellent (up to 99%) bactericidal efficacy against the antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacterial strain.

"The combination of several bactericidal fillers and silver ions with a bioactive coating made of titanium oxide modified with calcium and phosphorus ensured biocompatibility and a long - up to 7 days - antibacterial effect of the resulting coatings," emphasized Elizaveta Permyakova.

According to the developers, the innovative coatings can be used as an antibacterial implant modifier, allowing it to accelerate implantation by reducing the risks of associated inflammation and stimulating the growth of osteoblastic cells.

Researchers are currently planning to move to the preclinical development stage.

DES PLAINES, IL - At the beginning of prioritized health care personnel (HPC) immunization, there was a high rate of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and receipt, with physicians and advance practice providers having the highest overall proportion. These are the findings of a surveillance project on COVID-19 vaccination rates among emergency department staff at United States academic medical centers, which will be published in the April issue of the Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) journal, a peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM).

The project report, published in a research letter titled Vaccination rates and acceptance of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination among U.S. emergency department health care personnel, also found that a substantial percentage of emergency department HPCs declined vaccination, primarily due to concerns over safety. Because of this, the authors suggest that efforts at educating HCPs about the safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines may be warranted, especially in groups that had the most vaccine (i.e., nonclinical, nursing, and Black HCPs).

The lead author of the report is Walter A. Schrading, MD, of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Alabama, Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama. The project findings are discussed with Dr. Schrading in a recent AEM Early Access podcast.

Commenting on the study is Elizabeth Goldberg, MD, an associate professor of emergency medicine and health services, policy & practice at Brown University. Her research focuses on improving emergency care for older adults and she is the cofounder of MyCovidRisk.app, a web-based tool to help individuals estimate their COVID-19 risk and reduce their risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

"This study by Schrading and Trent et al. demonstrates that emergency department physicians and advance practice providers almost never declined COVID-19 vaccination (

A team led by University of Minnesota researchers has discovered that deep-sea bacteria dissolve carbon-containing rocks, releasing excess carbon into the ocean and atmosphere. The findings will allow scientists to better estimate the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere, a main driver of global warming.

The study is published in The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that is part of the Nature family of publications and the official journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME).

"If CO2 is being released into the ocean, it's also being released into the atmosphere, because they're constantly interchanging gases between them," explained Dalton Leprich, the first author on the paper and a Ph.D. student in the University of Minnesota's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. "While it's not as big of an impact as what humans are doing to the environment, it is a flux of CO2 into the atmosphere that we didn't know about. These numbers should help us home in on that global carbon budget."

The researchers began studying sulfur-oxidizing bacteria--a group of microbes that use sulfur as an energy source--in methane seeps on the ocean floor. Akin to deep-sea coral reefs, these "seeps" contain collections of limestone that trap large amounts of carbon. The sulfur-oxidizing microbes live on top of these rocks.

After noticing patterns of corrosion and holes in the limestone, the researchers found that in the process of oxidizing sulfur, the bacteria create an acidic reaction that dissolves the rocks. This then releases the carbon that was trapped inside the limestone.

"You can think of this like getting cavities on your teeth," Leprich said. "Your tooth is a mineral. There are bacteria that live on your teeth, and your dentist will typically tell you that sugars are bad for your teeth. Microbes are taking those sugars and fermenting them, and that fermentation process is creating acid, and that will dissolve away at your teeth. It's a similar process to what's happening with these rocks."

The researchers plan to test out this effect on different mineral types. In the future, these findings could also help scientists use dissolution features--holes, crevices, or other evidence that rocks have been dissolved by bacteria--to discover evidence of life on other planets, such as Mars.

"These findings are but one of the many examples of the important and understudied role that microbes play in mediating the cycling of elements on our planet," said Jake Bailey, a University of Minnesota Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences associate professor and corresponding author of the study.

Cows don't seem to have a whole lot going on most of the time. They're raised to spend their days grazing in the field, raised for the purpose of providing milk or meat, or producing more cows. So when students in UC Santa Barbara ecologist Doug McCauley's lab found themselves staring intently at satellite image upon image of bovine herds at Point Reyes National Seashore, it was funny, in a "Far Side" kind of way.

"There were about 10 undergrads involved in the project, spotting cows from space -- not your typical student research and always amusing to see in the lab," McCauley said. They became proficient at discerning the top view of a cow from the top view of rocks or the top view of other animals, he added.

"After about eight months, we ended up with more than 27,000 annotations of cattle across 31 images," said Lacey Hughey, an ecologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute who was a Ph.D. student in the McCauley Lab at the time, and the leader of the cow census. "It took a long time."

All of the rather comical cow counting had a serious purpose, though: to measure the interactions between wildlife and livestock where their ranges meet or overlap. Roughly a third of the United States' land cover is rangeland, and where these grazing areas abut wildland, concerns over predation, competition and disease transmission are bound to arise.

Such is the case at Point Reyes National Seashore, a picturesque combination of coastal bluffs and pastureland about an hour's drive north of San Francisco. As part of a statewide species restoration plan, native tule elk were reintroduced to the park's designated wilderness area in the 1990s, but they didn't stay in their little corner of paradise for very long.

"Some of them actually ended up swimming across an estero and establishing this herd -- which is known as the Drake's Beach Herd -- near the pastoral zone of the park, which is leased to cattle ranchers," said Hughey, the lead author of a collaborative study with the University of Nevada, Reno, that appears in the journal Biological Conservation. Cattle fences don't stop elk either, she said; they can easily cross or break through them to enter pastures. The situation was also somewhat unique in that the Drake's Beach elk live in the area year-round, thanks in large part to the stable climate, so grazing pressure on the land is constant.

Where's the beef?

"So we were wondering, how do elk and cattle co-exist in this landscape?" Hughey said. "The story between elk and cattle is actually pretty complex. We know from other studies that elk and cattle can be competitors, but they can also be facilitators. We also didn't know very much about which habitats elk preferred in this part of the park and how the presence of cattle might influence an elk's decision to spend its time in one place over another."

The researchers set out to answer these questions with two large datasets generated by the park -- GPS monitoring data from collared elk, and field-based transect surveys of the elk. What was missing, however, was information on the cows.

"We knew quite a bit about where the elk were, but we didn't have any information about where the cows were, except that they were inside the fences," she said. Knowing the precise number and location of cows relative to the elk herd would be necessary to understand how both species interact in a pastoral setting.

"Because the elk data was collected in the past, we needed a way to obtain information on cattle populations from the same time period. The only place we could get that was from archived, high-resolution satellite imagery," Hughey said. Hence, the satellite cowspotting.

Their conclusion? Elk have acclimated to cattle at Point Reyes by avoiding cow pastures in general and by choosing separate foraging sites on the occassions that they co-occur. Taken together, these findings suggest that elk select habitat in a manner "that reduce[s] the potential for grazing conflicts with cattle, even in cases where access to forage is limited."

In addition to helping shed light on the ecological relationship between cows and tule elk at Point Reyes, satellite imaging can also define their areas of overlap -- an important consideration in the assessment of disease risk, the researchers said.

"There's a disease of concern that's been found in the elk herd and also in the cattle, called Johne's disease," Hughey said. The bacteria that cause it can persist in the environment for more than a year, she added, so even though cows and elk rarely share space at the same time, there is still a theoretical risk of transmission in this system.

Sharing space

According to the researchers, the satellite imaging technique is also widely applicable to other areas on the globe where livestock and wildlife ranges overlap.

"The issue of livestock and wildlife being in conflict is a major challenge in a bunch of different contexts in the U.S. and beyond," McCauley said. "It has been surprisingly hard to figure out exactly how these wild animals share space with domestic animals."

These new methods, he said, "will have a transformative impact on understanding how livestock use wildlands -- and how wildlife use grazing lands."

Next stop: Kenya and Tanzania.

Working with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Microsoft AI for Good, University of Glasgow, and University of Twente -- and thanks in large part to the data generated by those cow-tracking UC Santa Barbara undergrads -- Hughey and colleagues are training an algorithm to detect and identify animals in the plains of East Africa, such as wildebeest and, of course, cows.

When Iranian authorities started seizing Barbie dolls from Tehran toy shops in 2012, Mattel Inc. execs faced concerns not only about the dolls' attire -- miniskirts and swimsuits considered immodest in an Islamic country -- but also questions from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about Mattel's ties to Iran.

U.S. businesses are restricted from business in Iran, which U.S. authorities have designated a state sponsor of terrorism (SST). The number of SEC inquiries about potential terrorist ties has grown substantially in recent years, and according to new research from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the increase could reduce the quality of the agency's financial reporting oversight.

"Comments on terrorism are getting to a critical level of importance in terms of what the SEC is asking companies about," said Bill Mayew, a Fuqua accounting professor and co-author of research, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Accounting & Economics. "Investors want to be aware if the companies they invest in are potentially supporting terrorism, but they also want financial statements that are correct. The SEC has to balance both of these issues to protect investors."

TRACKING FOCUS AREAS AT THE SEC

Mayew, along with Fuqua Ph.D. alumni Robert Hills of Penn State and Matthew Kubic of the University of Texas at Austin, analyzed the more than 17,800 comment letters from SEC review staff from 2005 to 2016. Comment letters are typically sent after SEC staff reviews a firm's disclosures to gather more information or notify a firm that its filings contain inaccuracies or errors.

Of the 825 comment letters the SEC sent in 2005, only 2.2% included comments related to SST, the analysis showed. By 2016, that number had grown to 8.4%. Terrorism has become as commonplace a topic in comment letters as questions about financial information such as intangible assets, revenue recognition and taxes, Mayew said.

The researchers found that when SEC comment letters included references to terrorism, the letters were less likely to identify the firm's financial reporting errors.

To determine cases in which errors were caught and missed, researchers analyzed comment letters as well as subsequent corrections, or restatements, from the firms that received comment letters.

Among restatements that investors typically care most about - those containing severe errors - the SECs' average error-detection rate was 31.1%, the data showed. The error-detection rate dropped to 10.6% when letters included the topic of terrorism disclosures, the researchers found.

"The inference from our paper is that when the focus turns to terrorism it appears to come at the expense of financial reporting oversight," Mayew said.

The SEC bases some of its terrorism-related inquiries on contents in financial filings, but may also proactively review sources such as the news and websites for the company and its affiliates for information about firms' possible ties to countries on the U.S. Department of State's SST list, which also includes Cuba, North Korea and Syria.

During the same year news coverage piqued the SEC's interest in Mattel, the SEC also contacted Heinz after reports suggested its ketchup was available in both Cuba and Syria. After financial disclosures, news coverage was the most common source the SEC referenced in its questions about SST issues, the research showed.

AN INFLUX OF LAWYERS

The SEC's attention to firms' financial ties to SST countries began at Congress's behest in 2003 after incidents such as the 2001 World Trade Center attacks spurred new counter-terrorism efforts, Mayew said.

The researchers found that this coincided with a shift in the composition of SEC review staff -- the number of lawyers the review staff has grown while the number of accountants has decreased, the researchers found. Data showed accountants were more likely to ask accounting questions and detect errors in financial statements while lawyers were more likely to ask questions about terrorism-related activities, which limited the likelihood that the review detected errors.

The data also showed when SEC reviewers asked firms about potential ties to SST, the reviewers were less likely to ask a question regarding core financial reporting, which included topics like accounting policies, disclosures related to a firm's narrative explanation about its financial statements (known as MD&A disclosures), or non-GAAP metrics (metrics that fall outside of those reported under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles).

"Core financial reporting topics are known to be associated with financial misreporting," Mayew said. "Interest in SST crowds out inquiries on core financial reporting topics, likely underpinning why SST questions appear to inhibit the SEC's ability to detect financial misreporting."

SHOULD THE SEC REVIEW MORE OR LESS?

Experts inside and outside of the agency have questioned whether the SEC is sufficiently suited to regulate SST disclosure. As long ago as 2008, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association publicly opposed the SEC's activities, involvement in what the professional organization called matters of national security. Even a former SEC chair spoke publicly on the importance of the SEC's independence from political persuasion, and that the commission has, at times, been pushed into areas that may not fall within its core mission.

More recently, the SEC has also been called upon to facilitate accountability on how firms address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and other social issues, such as diversity, equity and inclusion. One such call to action was recently authored by faculty at Duke Law's Global Financial Markets Center, calling on the SEC to integrate ESG disclosures across a number of areas.

"As the SEC considers regulating disclosure in other domains such as ESG, our research demonstrates that careful thought must be placed into how the commission changes its staffing and how that could spill over to other areas like financial reporting," Mayew said. "If you now start making SEC staff members review whether financial filings adequately capture climate change risk or racism, for example, it may be headed down the same path as it has with investigating ties to terrorism."

Toronto (April 12, 2021) - Researchers from University Health Network have developed and validated an innovative deep learning model to predict a patient's long-term outcome after receiving a liver transplant.

First of its kind in the field of Transplantation, this model is the result from a collaboration between the Ajmera Transplant Centre and Peter Munk Cardiac Centre. The study, published in Lancet Digital Health, shows it can significantly improve long-term survival and quality of life for liver transplant recipients.

"Historically, we have seen good advances in one-year post-transplant outcomes, but survival in the longer term hasn't significantly improved in the past decades," explains Dr. Mamatha Bhat, a hepatologist with the Ajmera Transplant Centre at UHN and co-senior author of the study.

"This model can guide physicians and help anticipate when and how complications may rise. It can really be paradigm-changing in how we support liver transplant recipients in personalizing their care and helping them live better and longer."

For liver transplant recipients, long-term survival beyond one-year is significantly compromised by an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular mortality, infection and graft failure. Clinical tools to identify patients at risk of these complications are limited.

This model will help clinicians enhance post-liver transplant care using machine learning, allowing them to identify potential risks when formulating patient-specific treatment plans.

The study results show this model is more than 80% accurate in predicting potential complications for liver transplant recipients at any point post- transplantation, based on their medical history and comparing to the millions of data points compiled using artificial intelligence.

"Deep Learning enables timely processing of large-scale datasets, finding patterns and signals that can aid clinicians in better predicting the clinical outcomes and creating specific treatment recommendations," says Dr. Bo Wang, AI Lead at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and co-senior author of this study.

The algorithms for this model were created based on the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR) - a national medical database in the United States, with data from over 42,000 liver transplant recipients. They were then validated using the local dataset from UHN's Ajmera Transplant Centre, which had over 3,200 cases.

The research team now plans to share this model with clinicians so that it can be used across the world. Work is also in progress to evaluate what are the best formats to streamline its use, either developing a software or mobile application.

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2021 -- Spiders are master builders, expertly weaving strands of silk into intricate 3D webs that serve as the spider's home and hunting ground. If humans could enter the spider's world, they could learn about web construction, arachnid behavior and more. Today, scientists report that they have translated the structure of a web into music, which could have applications ranging from better 3D printers to cross-species communication and otherworldly musical compositions.

The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2021 is being held online April 5-30. Live sessions will be hosted April 5-16, and on-demand and networking content will continue through April 30. The meeting features nearly 9,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics.

"The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings," says Markus Buehler, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator, who is presenting the work. "They don't see very well, so they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies." Such vibrations occur, for example, when the spider stretches a silk strand during construction, or when the wind or a trapped fly moves the web.

Buehler, who has long been interested in music, wondered if he could extract rhythms and melodies of non-human origin from natural materials, such as spider webs. "Webs could be a new source for musical inspiration that is very different from the usual human experience," he says. In addition, by experiencing a web through hearing as well as vision, Buehler and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), together with collaborator Tomás Saraceno at Studio Tomás Saraceno, hoped to gain new insights into the 3D architecture and construction of webs.

With these goals in mind, the researchers scanned a natural spider web with a laser to capture 2D cross-sections and then used computer algorithms to reconstruct the web's 3D network. The team assigned different frequencies of sound to strands of the web, creating "notes" that they combined in patterns based on the web's 3D structure to generate melodies. The researchers then created a harp-like instrument and played the spider web music in several live performances around the world.

The team also made a virtual reality setup that allowed people to visually and audibly "enter" the web. "The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you might see but not immediately recognize," Buehler says. "By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really start to understand the environment the spider lives in."

To gain insights into how spiders build webs, the researchers scanned a web during the construction process, transforming each stage into music with different sounds. "The sounds our harp-like instrument makes change during the process, reflecting the way the spider builds the web," Buehler says. "So, we can explore the temporal sequence of how the web is being constructed in audible form." This step-by-step knowledge of how a spider builds a web could help in devising "spider-mimicking" 3D printers that build complex microelectronics. "The spider's way of 'printing' the web is remarkable because no support material is used, as is often needed in current 3D printing methods," he says.

In other experiments, the researchers explored how the sound of a web changes as it's exposed to different mechanical forces, such as stretching. "In the virtual reality environment, we can begin to pull the web apart, and when we do that, the tension of the strings and the sound they produce change. At some point, the strands break, and they make a snapping sound," Buehler says.

The team is also interested in learning how to communicate with spiders in their own language. They recorded web vibrations produced when spiders performed different activities, such as building a web, communicating with other spiders or sending courtship signals. Although the frequencies sounded similar to the human ear, a machine learning algorithm correctly classified the sounds into the different activities. "Now we're trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider," Buehler says. "If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do, and can we begin to communicate with them? Those are really exciting ideas."