Culture

WHO: Giovanni Traverso, MB, BChir, PhD, Associate Physician, Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women's Hospital; corresponding author of a new article published in JAMA Network Open.

Peter Chai, MD, MMS, Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital; first author.

WHAT: In the age of COVID-19, mobile robotic telehealth systems could help clinicians and patients interact without contact. Last spring, some health care systems deployed robotic systems within a hospital to evaluate and interact with patients. In a JAMA Network Open article, Traverso and colleagues report the results of a national survey and a cohort study in an emergency department (ED), which analyzed patients' satisfaction with an initial evaluation conducted by a robotic system. Overall, 92.5 percent of patients were accepting of and satisfied with their experience.

"Taken together, this investigation suggests that a robotic system to facilitate contactless tele-triage in the ED is feasible, acceptable, and could have a large public health impact during the COVID-19 pandemic," the authors write.

In the cohort study, 40 stable patients in the Brigham's ED agreed to have their medical histories recorded by a four-legged, dog-like robotic system called Dr. Spot. The system, which includes four cameras and a mounted tablet, is operated remotely by a single emergency medicine provider. Of the participants, 92.5 percent reported satisfaction with Dr. Spot, and 82 percent stated that their experience was as good as an in-person encounter.

Results of the national survey, which was completed by 1,000 participants, indicated that individuals believe robotic systems are most useful for facilitating patient-physician interactions, acquiring contactless vital signs, and conducting basic SARS-CoV-2 testing by obtaining nasal and oral swabs. Participants also demonstrated approval of robotic systems that could support placement of intravenous catheters, and, for those who are critically ill, provide potential assistance with tasks like turning patients (proning).

"We anticipate robotic systems can be developed to assist with these tasks, especially during surges of patients with potential COVID-19 infection," the authors write. "Minimizing human contact with individuals who may have COVID-19 disease, but are otherwise well, may reduce the risk of in-hospital disease transmission and enable high-risk health care workers to safely interact with patients through tele-triage."

Biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, due primarily to human activity. Illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade is one of the major drivers of these declines, while much wildlife trade is legal, and the quantity of trade provides the opportunity to launder illegally sourced and traded species and products.

Researchers from the Conservation Forensics Lab at HKU and Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity, analyzed trends in global legal wildlife trade from 1997 to 2016, and revealed that legal wildlife trade averaged $220 billion per year over this period, approximately double the international trade in tea, coffee and spices, and eclipsing - by order of magnitude - annual trade in trafficked wildlife, estimated between $7-23 billion each year.

This tremendous legal trade is declared using the Harmonized System (HS) Code system, a global product classification system which is used for encompassing all traded commodities globally; in which, seafood, furniture and fashion were the largest categories of traded wildlife commodities.

The research shows that legal wildlife trade remains largely unexamined, despite its scale, and that 34% of trade is declared using overly broad codes that only specify taxonomic class and above. The research team therefore suggests that the HS Codes be distilled to increase traceability and help monitor trade. The paper has been published in the science journal Global Ecology and Conservation.

Hong Kong as a major transit hub

The vast majority of legal wildlife trade involved seafood (~82%), with the top trading countries being the USA, China and Japan. When removing seafood from the analysis, Hong Kong was the overall top wildlife trader globally, especially in trade for fashion (furs and skins) and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). This indicates the pivotal role of this small territory as a major transit hub for global wildlife trade, especially as a re-exporter: more than 90% of the wildlife/wildlife products imported into the territory are re-exported. Additionally, Thailand and Vietnam are also important re-exporters, as they are among the top five exporters of "processed wildlife". Targeting these locations for resource allocation (financial, personnel, training, equipment) in customs inspections of wildlife could have a maximum impact relative to investment.

This research, led by PhD student Astrid ANDERSSON from the Conservation Forensics Lab at HKU and Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity, relied on data from the UN Comtrade database, which includes official statistics of international trade. The database uses the HS Code system, in which approximately 5,300 codes encompassing all traded commodities globally. Since the primary function of these code are to provide data for statistics and tax purposes, rather than the ecological considerations, it is not designed to track individual products, and can be very broad, with a single code encompassing up to thousands of species.

Breaking the broad codes for sustainability

Though the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora(see note 1) (CITES) appendices track and regulate legal trade in more than 35,000 threatened species, there are still many thousands more species traded for which there is little-to-no traceability, for examples, various reptiles, birds and fish are traded at high volumes and diverse across major markets, and species-level information is lost in these general codes.

Andersson and her colleagues found that much legal wildlife trade is conducted under vague, all-encompassing codes with broad descriptions, some of which are used particularly frequently. For example, CITES does not cover many songbirds, fish, trees or plants traded. These species are often traded as pets, furniture or traditional medicine - the very categories identified as having frequent use of broad codes. The "Live reptile" code includes nearly 10,000 snake, lizard, turtle and crocodilian species, only approximately 10% of which are documented by CITES. In the pet category, 95% of trade in the pets category was declared under broad codes such as "Live ornamental fish", "Other live birds" and "Live reptiles" - not allowing for tracking of trade of individual species. CITES only includes 162 species of fish - which leaves thousands of fish also traded untraceably under the "Live ornamental fish" code.

Critically endangered species such as Straw-headed bulbuls, a songbird popular in the pet trade due to their singing ability, have been driven nearly to extinction due to wildlife trade. Species that are currently common, such as the Oriental Magpie-robin, are increasingly seen in wildlife markets and without sufficient monitoring these could also face severe population declines across their range.

The current HS Code system may not be perfectly designed for tracking wildlife trade, but it is the only available method to date for tracking international legal trade for non-endangered species, and these trades are tracked via the CITES. The authors of the study suggest that the system could be refined to allow for better tracking of wildlife trade. "Our research constitutes a first step in uncovering the issues that are inherent in the current system, and detailing how it can be improved to protect biodiversity," says Astrid Andersson, PhD student and author of the research. "We identify countries/territories where targeted enforcement could be particularly impactful, and priority wildlife trade areas for additional, species-specific code allocation," she adds.

The current prevalence of broad HS Code descriptions provides a low-resolution trade landscape characterized by vague parameters preventing effective monitoring of trade. This impedes enforcement and results in undetected mislabeling of protected species by a number of means, including covert farming and trading in protected species, fraudulent declaration of wild-caught individuals within a farm-sourced shipment, and underreporting trade volumes. These issues would become more detectable if HS Codes relating to wildlife were broken down to genus or species level.

"Unsustainable trade in wildlife poses a major threat to biodiversity globally. While much international wildlife trade is legal, the scale of this trade can lead to unnoticed over-exploitation of species because we cannot properly monitor the level of trade," says Dr Caroline DINGLE, Director of the Conservation Forensics Lab at HKU, Senior Lecturer from

the Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity and co-author of the study. "It is important to have systems in place which allow us to monitor legally traded wildlife to prevent further biodiversity declines, and to continuously adjust these systems in response to new patterns of trade." Dingle added.

Less than one-third of COVID-19 clinical trials are led by women, which is half the proportion observed in non-COVID-19 trials, according to research led by Queen Mary University of London, University of St Andrews, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The study suggests that gender disparities during the pandemic may signify not only a lack of women's leadership in international clinical trials and new research projects, but also may expose the imbalances in women's access to research activities and funding during health emergencies.

The results of the study are being publicised to mark International Women's Day on Monday 8 March. This year's theme is 'Choose To Challenge' which aims to encourage people to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality.

The research team searched a database of all COVID-19 clinical trials from 1 January 2020 to 26 June 2020 and recorded the gender of the principal investigator of each clinical trial, where that data were available (1,548 clinical trials). They then looked at the same information from clinical trials on breast cancer and type 2 diabetes as a comparison.

The results, published in the journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection, showed that only 27.8 per cent (430/1548) of principal investigators among COVID-19-related studies were women, which is significantly different compared to 54.9 per cent (156/284) and 42.1 per cent (56/133) for breast cancer and type 2 diabetes trials over the same period, respectively.

Lead researcher Professor Chloe Orkin from Queen Mary University of London said: "The COVID-19 pandemic offers numerous opportunities for research and leadership that could equalise opportunity in a new field, but the results suggest the opposite.

"The pandemic has reinforced the prevailing gender norms in which men continue to both allocate and be allocated the lion's share of funding, leadership and authorship roles. There is an urgent need to challenge the structural and institutional biases that favour men.

"Research teams that are diverse and representative of society are better able to generate a broad range of ideas and innovations that are relevant for all groups, especially those most impacted by COVID-19. Increasing the representation of women and minoritised groups in leadership positions may also provide valuable role-modelling for future generations of scientists."

The authors say that, before COVID-19, women occupied fewer leadership positions, led fewer funded studies, and applied for and received less grant funding than men. The 'motherhood penalty' (employment gap that occurs when women take parental leave) impacts the rate of academic advancement and in turn the receipt of institutional support to secure funding. These imbalances contribute to systemic inequalities that hamper women's access to and progress in science.

Data also suggest that across all disciplines, despite an increased number of peer-reviewed articles submitted to journals during the pandemic, women published fewer papers than men in 2020. This may indicate a similarly reduced involvement of women in research leadership positions and an imbalanced distribution of grants and funding - important indicators of advancement in a scientist's academic career.

The authors explain that one potential contributor for this discrepancy seen in COVID-19 clinical trials is the speed demanded by the research agenda during the pandemic. The sense of urgency in starting clinical trials may lead to an abandonment of any checks and balances around equality and inclusion that would have otherwise encouraged the involvement of women scientists.

Dr Muge Cevik, virologist and clinical lecture in infectious diseases, University of St Andrews, said: "As a community, we must recognise that there is a tendency to "turn to men" in times of crisis both for leadership and scientific expertise, highlighting the need to challenge this culture. This may include setting up review committees that are gender balanced, available funding to be provided to equal number of PIs, or funding gender balanced trial teams, and overall ensuring that funding agencies are aware of the lack of women leadership in clinical trials."

Co-author Professor Paul Sax, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said: "Given the long and unfortunate legacy of imbalance in gender representation in biomedical research, it is critically important that men promote and augment the work of their women colleagues. It is only through this support that we can ensure more equitable gender participation in science - a process that ultimately will benefit everyone."

Scars inside the abdomen, known as adhesions, form after inflammation or surgery. They can cause chronic pain and digestive problems, lead to infertility in women, or even have potentially life-threatening consequences such as intestinal obstruction. If adhesions develop, they must be operated on again. They also make subsequent surgical interventions more difficult. This leads to substantial suffering for those affected and is also a significant financial burden for the healthcare system. In the USA alone, adhesions in the abdomen result in healthcare costs of 2.3 billion dollars per year.

Knowledge about the cause of adhesions is still incomplete, and there no therapy for them. "Because the disease has been largely overlooked in research, we have started this program in Bern to find out more about the development of adhesions," says Daniel Candinas, Co-author of this study. It had already been suspected that special immune cells, called macrophages, play a decisive role in the development. This was confirmed by Joel Zindel and Daniel Candinas from the Department of Visceral Surgery and Medicine at Inselspital and Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR) at the University of Bern.

Then, Zindel continued his research at the University of Calgary in Canada in the group led by Paul Kubes, as they are considered world-leading in the field of macrophages in the abdominal cavity. Thanks to Zindel's clinical expertise and the Canadian researchers' know-how, it was possible to develop a new imaging system using cutting-edge microscopy that allows to see inside the living body. This allowed them to catch the macrophages in flagrante and on film, as they form shapes that then lead to the adhesions.

The researchers were also able to describe the molecular mechanisms behind this. The results of the study have now been published as the cover story of the journal Science.

New technology developed

Macrophages are found in what is called peritoneal fluid, a lubricant between the peritoneum, which is inner lining of the abdominal wall, and a similar lining around the organs in the abdominal cavity. Macrophages passively swim around in this fluid, much like plankton in the sea. Their tasks include eliminating pathogens, but also sealing injuries in the abdominal cavity as quickly as possible.

How they accomplish the latter, i.e., recognizing an injury and moving there, was unclear until now. Since these cells behave in the test tube very differently from the way they do in the body, Zindel and Kubes developed a new microscopy technique that allowed them to use the thinnest part of the abdominal wall as a window to look into the peritoneal caity, the "native habitat" of these macrophages and film them as they move arround.

When macrophages lose control

When there is an injury within the abdominal cavity, macrophages aggregate within minutes to form clot-like structures. In this way, they seal the injury. As the researchers led by Zindel and Kubes have discovered, the molecular mechanism behind this is based on special, non-specific receptors that recognize a variety of structures. Simply by being moved through the fluid via respiratory or digestive movement, these receptors act to initiate clotting around a wound. What works fine for smaller injuries becomes a problem for large ones, however, such as surgically opening the abdominal wall, or inserting an implant. "In larger injuries, the macrophages get out of control - the clots don't stop growing and form long strands," Zindel explains. "We were able to show that these strands are what lead to the adhesions."

This could have evolutionary reasons: Macrophages are optimized by evolution to cope well with small injuries. "Let's take the example of a hunter who is injured by a deer antler," Zindel says. "The macrophages seal all the internal holes as quickly as possible - which is the only way to survive." However, when air enters the abdominal cavity during abdominal surgery or foreign bodies are implanted, the macrophages are overwhelmed because evolution has not prepared them for this challenge. "In this case, the macrophages become harmful and cause adhesions," Zindel explains.

Patent pending

The researchers found that when the corresponding receptors are blocked in mice, it leads to fewer adhesions. Thus, a patent application has been filed for the use of the active ingredient against adhesions. The findings are relevant to many areas of research, as there are no other immune cells which are being recruited as quickly as macrophages in the abdominal cavity. Similar mechanisms could be present in other cavities such as the heart or lungs, or could play a role not only in injuries but also diseases such as abdominal tumors.

"This is an example of how laboratory research has high translational value," says Daniel Candinas. Together with Calgary, the Bernese researchers will now look for partners in the industry and are hopeful that they will be able to confirm the efficacy of the compound in human tissue as well. In the future, patients could, for example, be given a drug before surgery that suppresses the macrophage reaction and inhibits the formation of adhesions.

Researchers from the University of Seville and Pompeu Fabra University argue that sports information on social media is dominated by men and football. This leaves out women's sports, sports featuring athletes with disabilities and minority disciplines, thus repeating the reality of the traditional media. That is the main conclusion of a study analysing more than 7,000 tweets published by the profiles of four public media in four European countries.

The study analysed the posts by the Twitter profiles providing sports news of the public broadcasters of Spain (RTVE), France (France TV), Ireland (RTÉ) and Italy (RAI). Between 30% and 58% of the tweets by these media related to football. However, differences were observed between them, mainly depending on the successes of national athletes, the tradition of certain sports in those countries and, a decisive factor in television, whether the media outlet in question held the broadcasting rights of the competitions being reported.

Thus, basketball, motorcycling, handball and indoor football received greater prominence from RTVE. Each of them accounted for between 8.6% and 10.1% of all tweets. Rugby stood out (21%) on France TV, followed by skiing, tennis and motor sports, with the Dakar rally taking centre stage. Irish broadcaster RTÉ regularly reported on local sports such as Gaelic football (12.5%), hurling (7.45%) and horse racing (5.2%). And on Italy's RAI, where football took the highest share of tweets published (58.3%), other major and traditional sports in the country's sporting culture, such as cycling, were very present. The study also underscores that athletics, one of the sports with the longest tradition and the backbone of the Olympic Games, was barely visible on Twitter, with a share ranging between 1.48% and 2.84% in the media analysed.

France TV offered more diverse coverage, as its publications covered a total of 36 sporting disciplines. It was followed by RTVE and RTÉ with 35 and RAI with 28. However, two thirds of these other sports had only an anecdotal or casual presence, with less than 15 tweets per sport.

"It is striking that these are corporations with a clear public service duty that, in theory, should make more of an effort to accommodate a greater plurality of voices, sources and topics," says José Luis Rojas, professor in the Department of Journalism II at the University of Seville and author of the study along with Xavier Ramon, professor at the Pompeu Fabra University.

The pattern is repeated with regard to diversity in terms of gender or disability. Female athletes were underrepresented in all the profiles analysed, accounting for an average of only 9.4% of the total number of tweets published by the four public broadcasters, compared to 84.5% whose protagonist was male and around 6% with mixed protagonists. Hardly any differences were observed between the countries in this respect. France TV gave most presence to women athletes, accounting for 13.2% of its tweets.

This information imbalance was even more evident when it came to athletes with disabilities. Only 43 of the 7,426 tweets in the study referred to athletes with disabilities. "This is very striking considering that the Paralympic Games were held in the year covered by the study," says Professor Rojas.

These data show that Twitter reproduces the sports media coverage model that existed before social media and, as such, contributes to reinforcing, rather than alleviating, information gaps in the media's agenda. The push that these media give to distribute content, their visibility, their impact to reach global audiences and also their interaction, are not being used by the media to offer greater diversity in their coverage.

On the contrary, researchers argue that the media use social media, in this case Twitter, to multiply the visibility of their content and to reinforce the promotion of their coverage and their media brand. Many of their tweets focus on raising the visibility of their broadcasts and the work of their employees, through self-promotion of programmes, and by offering highlights of their coverage, especially events for which they have the broadcast rights. These publications do not always respond purely to criteria of newsworthiness. Instead, the main intention is to have an impact and achieve audience interaction, to reach as many people as possible. For this reason, the study's authors argue that, in their approach to sports coverage, these public media hardly differ from private media companies.

Researchers in the UK have developed a way to coax microscopic particles and droplets into precise patterns by harnessing the power of sound in air. The implications for printing, especially in the fields of medicine and electronics, are far-reaching.

The scientists from the Universities of Bath and Bristol have shown that it's possible to create precise, pre-determined patterns on surfaces from aerosol droplets or particles, using computer-controlled ultrasound. A paper describing the entirely new technique, called 'sonolithography', is published in Advanced Materials Technologies.

Professor Mike Fraser from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath, explained: "The power of ultrasound has already been shown to levitate small particles. We are excited to have hugely expanded the range of applications by patterning dense clouds of material in air at scale and being able to algorithmically control how the material settles into shapes."

The researchers believe their work could revolutionise printing, improving the speed, cost, and precision of non-contact patterning techniques in air. Their work already shows the potential of sonolithography for biofabrication.

Dr Jenna Shapiro, research associate in the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol and lead author of the article, said: "Sonolithography enables gentle, non-contact and rapid patterning of cells and biomaterials on surfaces. Tissue engineering can use biofabrication methods to build defined structures of cells and materials. We are adding a new technique to the biofabrication toolbox."

Professor Bruce Drinkwater, professor of Ultrasonics in Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering, added: "The objects we are manipulating are the size of water drops in clouds. It's incredibly exciting to be able to move such small things with such fine control. This could allow us to direct aerosol sprays with unheard of precision, with applications such as drug delivery or wound healing."

Beyond its applications in biomedicine, the team has shown the technique to be applicable to a variety of materials. Printed electronics is another area the team is keen to develop, with sonolithography being used to arrange conductive inks into circuits and components.

DNA sequencing of bacteria found in pigs and humans in rural eastern North Carolina, an area with concentrated industrial-scale pig-farming, suggests that multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains are spreading between pigs, farmworkers, their families and community residents, and represents an emerging public health threat, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

S. aureus is commonly found in soil and water, as well as on the skin and in the upper respiratory tract in pigs, other animals, and people. It can cause medical problems from minor skin infections to serious surgical wound infections, pneumonia, and the often-lethal blood-infection condition known as sepsis. The findings provide evidence that multidrug-resistant S. aureus strains are capable of spreading and possibly causing illness in and around factory farm communities in the U.S.--a scenario the authors say researchers should continue to investigate.

The study was published online February 22 in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers in recent years have been collecting samples of S. aureus from pigs, farmworkers, farmworkers' family members, and community residents--including children--in the top pig-producing counties in North Carolina. For the study, they sequenced the DNA from some of these samples to determine the relation of the strains found in pigs and people. They found that the strains were very closely related, providing evidence for transmission between pigs and people. Most of the strains carried genes conferring resistance to multiple antibiotics.

"We found that these livestock-associated S. aureus strains had many genes that confer resistance to antimicrobial drugs commonly used in the U.S. industrialized pig production system," says study first author Pranay Randad, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bloomberg School's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering.

"These findings warrant future investigations into the transmission dynamics in nearby communities and disease burden associated with these strains in the United States," says study senior author Christopher Heaney, PhD, associate professor in the same department.
Epidemiologists have long suspected that S. aureus and other bacteria are transmitted from humans to pigs on factory farms, and thereafter evolve antibiotic resistance within the pigs. The animals are routinely given antibiotics to prevent outbreaks in their dense concentrations on factory farms. The drug-resistant bacterial strains may then be transmitted back to humans, becoming a potentially serious source of disease.

In recent years, Heaney and colleagues have been gathering S. aureus isolates from pigs and farmworkers at factory-scale pig farms in North Carolina, one of the leading pig-farming states. Their research has shown that livestock-associated strains of S. aureus, many of them antibiotic-resistant strains, can be found not only in pigs but also in farmworkers, their family members, and residents living nearby.

For the new study they performed whole-genome sequencing on 49 of these S. aureus isolates to characterize these strains at the DNA level and get a more precise picture of their interrelatedness.

One finding was that all these isolates, whether taken from humans or pigs, belonged to a grouping of S. aureus strains known as clonal complex 9 (CC9).

"This CC9 is a novel and emerging subpopulation of S. aureus that not many people have been studying, apart from a few reports in Asia," Randad says.

The researchers also determined from their analysis that the CC9 isolates from North Carolina were closely related, in many cases implying recent transmission between pigs and people. Moreover, virtually all of the isolates that appeared to be involved in transmission between pigs and humans were multidrug resistant, suggesting that diseases these isolates cause could be hard to treat.

The scope of the study didn't include evaluating S. aureus-related disease among people in the affected communities, but one of the pig farmworkers who carried a CC9 isolate in their nose reported a recent skin infection.

"In other countries, such as in Europe, we see a high level of coordinated research on this topic from a public health perspective, with open access to collect bacterial isolates from pigs raised on factory farms, but so far in the U.S. not as much is being done," Randad says.

Researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have collaborated on two studies examining the socioeconomic factors involved in the spread of COVID-19.

Professor Alex Bentley and postdoctoral fellow Damian Ruck, both from the Department of Anthropology, joined Josh Borycz, a librarian at Vanderbilt University, to conduct the studies.

"One of our studies considers the global scale of nations and the other uses the national scale for US counties to analyze results during 2020," explained Bentley.

The studies show that the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths are significantly affected by the cultural values and demographics of local or national populations.

"Local and national leaders have to work within the parameters set by the values and demographics of their constituents. Top-down government decisions are important, but bottom-up effects from the population matter too," added Ruck.

For the US, researchers were able to use the abundance of county-level data to help predict the true number of COVID-19 infections at a given time. This is important because cases were severely underestimated in early 2020. The model identifies the five most predictive factors as population size, population density, public transportation use, percentage of the population that is African American, and Democrat election vote share.

The researchers' work shows how measuring relatively stable features of society, such as culture and demographics, can help predict the spread of COVID-19. As such factors will change little over the course of a pandemic, this information could help in planning for the deployment of scarce resources in future pandemics.

A new study from the University of Iowa sought to begin development of a possible approach to reduce the risk that college-aged men engage in sexually aggressive acts or risky sexual behavior.

The study authors, led by Teresa Treat, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Iowa, developed a 12-point list of sexual assault prevention strategies. The list was created by the researchers based on previous research into risk factors that are associated with sexually aggressive acts--such as heavy alcohol consumption, difficulties reading women's cues, and not seeking consent for sexual activity.

The authors found that 71% of the college-aged men surveyed used the sexual assault prevention strategies on a regular basis over the past year. Yet 15% of the survey takers reported they seldom or never used the preventative strategies, and men who said they have engaged in sexually aggressive actions had been much less likely to use the strategies than their peers.

The authors say the strategies may offer a potential avenue to tackling sexually aggressive behavior.

"We think we have a promising set of potential preventative strategies. We found most college men use these prevention strategies regularly," says Treat, the study's corresponding author. "The downside is some college men don't use them much at all. Those college men who don't use them much at all are much more likely to be sexually aggressive. So, future research should aim to evaluate whether they may be useful prevention targets."

The survey group included more than 560 males at Arizona State University and Iowa, who earned course credit in a psychology class. The men answered questions that ranged from general biographical information (age, ethnicity, et cetera) to alcohol consumption, attitudes about women, sexual experience, and attitudes about sex.

The authors are revising the strategies based on feedback from the college students, and hope to administer the survey to a more racially and ethnically diverse pool.

"We also are in the beginning stages of figuring out how these protective strategies might be incorporated into prevention programs for further evaluation," Treat says.

In terms of risky sexual behavior, the study found:

Seven in 10 college-aged men surveyed reported they engaged in risky sexual behavior in the last year.
55% of college-aged men surveyed reported they used the preventative strategies on a regular basis when it came to risky sexual behavior.

Nearly 3 in 10 (29%) of college-aged men surveyed reported they seldom or never used the preventative strategies when it came to risky sexual behavior.

A monoclonal antibody "cocktail" developed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to neutralize the COVID-19 virus is effective against all known strains, or variants, of the virus, according to a report published in the journal Nature Medicine.

That was one of the findings reported by a multi-institutional team led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In cell-culture studies, the researchers determined the ability of monoclonal antibodies as well as antibodies isolated from the "convalescent plasma" of previously infected people to neutralize highly transmissible variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that have arisen in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Brazil and elsewhere.

In general, most of the monoclonal antibodies that have been developed to combat COVID-19 showed "diminished neutralizing potency," specifically against strains of the virus bearing a specific mutation at position 484 in the surface "spike" protein, which enables the virus to attach to and enter its host cell in the body.

However, several other highly neutralizing monoclonal antibody cocktails, including those developed at VUMC, showed intact or only mildly diminished activity against the variants tested, possibly because they target sites on the spike protein other than the highly mutable E484K residue.

The study indicated substantially reduced neutralization of variants viruses containing this E484K mutation by antibodies in the sera of both previously infected and COVID-19 vaccinated individuals, further highlighting the need for variant-resistant treatments like the VUMC antibody cocktail.

"This study highlights the importance of rationally designed antibody cocktails like those we developed," said James Crowe, Jr., MD, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center (VVC) and Ann Scott Carell Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt.

"We chose two antibodies to create a mixture that specifically would resist escape by SARS-CoV-2," Crowe said. "Fortunately, this work and several other papers recently published show that the protection mediated by the antibodies we discovered that are now in six different phase 3 clinical trials should extend to all current variants of concern."

Robert Carnahan, PhD, associate VVC director and associate professor of Pediatrics, added, "These findings that the antibodies we are developing inhibit the new SARS-CoV-2 variants well are made even more important by the fact that some previously approved monoclonal antibody treatments look very unlikely to protect against these variants.

"Using our variant-resistant antibody cocktails likely will provide an important new tool for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic," Carnahan said.

Functioning ecosystems provide the basis for security, basic material needs, health, social interaction and individual liberty. This is how the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005 described it, dividing ecosystem services into the following categories: The provisioning services; goods such as food, water, firewood and timber, the regulating services; pollination, water filtering function of the soil, flood and erosion protection, and the cultural services; recreation, places of inspiration, and education. Many of these services are indirectly and directly linked to the presence of species. For this reason, species conservation is often put forward as a measure for the conservation of vital natural services.

"However, most previous studies argue that areas important for ecosystem services do not necessarily correspond to those important for biodiversity conservation," said senior author Prof Henrique Pereira from iDiv and MLU. "We were able to show that this is probably because these studies only look at a few ecosystem services, and species-linked services are rarely among them."

In their new study, the researchers selected nine different species-linked ecosystem services for which data were available on the occurrence and distribution of the species providing them in Europe. These are wild food, medicinal plants, fodder, pest control, carcass removal, seed dispersal, wildlife watching, hunting, and existence value; this is the benefit we derive from knowing that rare and endangered species continue to exist. To find out which species provide these services, they searched databases for functional characteristics such as medicinal value, edibility, but also their importance for hunting and wildlife watching.

The researchers then created individual maps of how the providers of these services are distributed in Europe. They then did the same for nine typical biophysical ecosystem services that are not linked to species, such as agricultural production, livestock farming and carbon storage. They compared these maps in computer models and calculated where there is spatial overlap and how the different ecosystem services influence each other.

The results show that, especially on a larger spatial scale, biophysical and species-linked ecosystem services often occur simultaneously. This became more evident the more ecosystem services were considered. The regions where species conservation and ecosystem services play a role thus coincided more often than previously assumed. Negative correlations between the two approaches were found predominantly for agricultural production, which, among other things, limits regulating ecosystem services such as water purification and cultural services such as natural beauty.

"With our study, we show that there are strong connections between species diversity and ecosystem services," said first author Dr Silvia Ceau?u, who conducted the study at iDiv and MLU. She recently joined the Centre for Biodiversity and Environmental Research at University College London. These connections need to be made more visible in assessments of nature's contributions to human wellbeing in order to fully understand how to manage and protect these benefits to humans."

"We're still lacking biodiversity data to truly map species-based ecosystem services at large scales," said Henrique Pereira. "So we need more research on the question of how ecosystem services at the landscape and regional scale depend on the abundance and traits of the species present." For Europe, the researchers are therefore currently establishing the EuropaBON project, which is intended to make this, and other such data available to stakeholders in the future.

African American breast cancer survivors are four times more likely to die from breast cancer than women of all other races and ethnicities, and they have a disproportionately high rate of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD).

New research led by George Mason University's College of Health and Human Services faculty Dr. Michelle Williams assessed African American breast cancer survivors' risk factors and knowledge about CVD in the Deep South, where health disparities between African American women and women of other races is even larger. They found that although African American breast cancer survivors have a higher prevalence of CVD risk factors, their knowledge about CVD is low.

The study was published in the Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice in February.

Specifically, participants scored low on knowledge about heart attack symptoms and CVD-related medical information. Participants with healthier diets and higher levels of education had higher levels of CVD knowledge.

"We know that several CVD risk factors, such as hypertension and obesity, can be modified through lifestyle behavior changes," adds Williams. "This is promising, but breast cancer survivors must be better informed about CVD risk by their health care providers."

Their study included surveys of 70 breast cancer survivors who identified as African American or Black in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Georgia.

"Our findings highlight the importance of informing African American breast cancer survivors about their increased risk for co-morbidities such as CVD and providing them with access to culturally appropriate CVD risk reduction interventions aimed at a variety of education levels," explains Williams.

Williams and colleagues are currently conducting the next phase of the study, which will provide more in-depth information about CVD risk factors among African American breast cancer survivors.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Studies of the microbiome in the human gut focus mainly on bacteria. Other microbes that are also present in the gut -- viruses, protists, archaea and fungi -- have been largely overlooked.

New research in mice now points to a significant role for fungi in the intestine -- the communities of molds and yeasts known as the mycobiome -- that are the active interface between the host and their diet.

"We showed that the gut mycobiome of healthy mice was shaped by the environment, including diet, and that it significantly correlated with metabolic outcomes," said Kent Willis, M.D., an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and co-corresponding author of the study, published in the journal Communications Biology. "Our results support a role for the gut mycobiome in host metabolic adaptation, and these results have important implications regarding the design of microbiome studies and the reproducibility of experimental studies of host metabolism."

Willis and colleagues looked at fungi in the jejunum of the mouse small intestine, site of the most diverse fungal population in the mouse gut. They found that exposure to a processed diet, which is representative of a typical Western diet rich in purified carbohydrates, led to persistent differences in fungal communities that significantly associated with differential deposition of body mass in male mice, as compared to mice fed a standardized diet.

The researchers found that fat deposition in the liver, transcriptional adaptation of metabolically active tissues and serum metabolic biomarker levels were all linked with alterations in fungal
community diversity and composition. Variations of fungi from two genera -- Thermomyces and Saccharomyces -- were the most strongly associated with metabolic disturbance and weight gain.

The study had an ingenious starting point. The researchers obtained genetically identical mice from four different research animal vendors. It is known that gut bacterial communities vary markedly by vendor. Similarly, the researchers found dramatically different variability by vendor for the jejunum mycobiomes, as measured by sequencing internal transcribed spacer rRNA. At baseline, mice from one of the vendors had five unique fungal genera, and mice from the other three vendors had three, two and one unique genera, respectively.

They also looked at interkingdom community composition -- meaning bacteria as well as fungi -- and found large baseline bacterial community differences. From this initial fungal and bacterial diversity, they then measured the effects of time and differences in diet -- standardized chow versus the highly processed diet -- on fungal and bacterial community composition.

The researchers also addressed a fundamental question: Are the fungal organisms detected by next-generation sequencing coming from the diet, or are they true commensal organisms that colonize and replicate in the gut? They compared sequencing of the food pellets, which contained some fungi, and the contents of the mouse jejunum to show the jejunum fungi were true commensal colonizers.

Thus, this study, led by Willis -- and co-corresponding author Joseph Pierre, Ph.D., and co-first authors Tahliyah S. Mims and Qusai Al Abdallah, Ph.D., from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tennessee -- showed that variations in the relative abundance and composition of the gut mycobiome correlate with key features of host metabolism. This lays a foundation towards understanding the complex interkingdom interactions between bacteria and fungi and how they both collectively shape, and potentially contribute to, host homeostasis.

"Our results highlight the potential importance of the gut mycobiome in health, and they have implications for human and experimental metabolic studies," Pierre said. "The implication for human microbiome studies, which often examine only bacteria and sample only fecal communities, is that the mycobiome may have unappreciated effects on microbiome-associated outcomes."

The research was mostly done at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, where Willis was an assistant professor before joining the Division of Neonatology in the UAB Department of Pediatrics last summer.

The translational research in the Willis Lung Lab at UAB seeks to understand how such commensal fungi influence newborn physiology and disease, principally via exploring the gut-lung axis in bronchopulmonary dysplasia, a lung disease of premature newborns. The study in Communications Biology using adult animals, Willis says, helped develop models for on-going research in newborn animals.

Co-authors with Willis, Pierre, Mims and Al Abdallah in the study, "The gut mycobiome of healthy mice is shaped by the environment and correlates with metabolic outcomes in response to diet," are Justin D. Stewart, Villanova University, Radnor, Pennsylvania; and Sydney P. Watts, Catrina T. White, Thomas V. Rousselle, Ankush Gosain, Amandeep Bajwa and Joan C. Han, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

The body is amazing at healing itself. However, sometimes it can overdo it. Excess scarring after abdominal and pelvic surgery within the peritoneal cavity can lead to serious complications and sometimes death. The peritoneal cavity has a protective lining containing organs within our abdomen. It also contains fluid to keep the organs lubricated. When the lining gets damaged, tissue and scarring can form, creating problems. Researchers at the University of Calgary and University of Bern, Switzerland, have discovered what's causing the excess scarring and options to try to prevent it.

"This is a worldwide concern. Complications from these peritoneal adhesions cause pain and can lead to life-threatening small bowel obstruction, and infertility in women," says Dr. Joel Zindel, MD, University of Bern, Switzerland, and first author on the study who worked on this research as a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow at the University of Calgary. "People sometimes require a second surgery."

The research published in Science, was conducted in mice and shows the excess scarring is caused by macrophages, a type of white blood cell that rushes to the surgical site to start to repair the injury.

"Joel developed a new method using the highly specialized imaging equipment in my lab that gave scientists the first look at what these macrophages are doing in real-time," says Dr. Paul Kubes, PhD, principal investigator on the study and professor at the Cumming School of Medicine. "We are still working to understand why the macrophages take on this repair work as they are known for attacking pathogens. Whatever they are responding to, it's clear their involvement is causing the scarring problem."

The researchers also discovered two ways to inhibit this natural response. They either removed the macrophages, or they introduced a drug to block the macrophage stickiness. Both processes were very effective in stopping the adhesions.

"We believe the macrophage response has not made the evolutionary leap to understand that surgery is beneficial and not a threat to survival," says Kubes. "It's possible, that the body is reacting to the surgery, that having the organs exposed to the environment is interpreted as a threat, like an attack from a predator. The body doesn't understand that the surgeon will do the critical repair work."

Macrophages are also present in humans, and the research team believes the response seen in mice is likely to translate to both adults and children. They hope to move to trials on human cells, soon, and eventually clinical trials.

"Every surgeon does operations for people who have these abdominal adhesions," says Zindel. "It would be amazing to be able to prevent this surgical complication. It would not only benefit individuals, it would create significant savings for the healthcare system, by reducing hospital costs for readmission and surgery."

Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have successfully reprogrammed a glial cell type in the central nervous system into new neurons to promote recovery after spinal cord injury--revealing an untapped potential to leverage the cell for regenerative medicine.

The group of investigators published their findings March 5 in Cell Stem Cell. This is the first time scientists have reported modifying a NG2 glia--a type of supporting cell in the central nervous system--into functional neurons after spinal cord injury, said Wei Wu, PhD, research associate in neurological surgery at IU School of Medicine and co-first author of the paper.

Wu and Xiao-Ming Xu, PhD, the Mari Hulman George Professor of Neuroscience Research at IU School of Medicine, worked on the study with a team of scientists from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Xu is also a primary member of Stark Neurosciences Research Institute, where he leads the Indiana Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Group.

Spinal cord injuries affect hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, with thousands more diagnosed each year. Neurons in the spinal cord don't regenerate after injury, which typically causes a person to experience permanent physical and neurological ailments.

"Unfortunately, effective treatments for significant recovery remain to be developed," Xu said. "We hope that this new discovery will be translated to a clinically relevant repair strategy that benefits those who suffer from a spinal cord injury."

When the spinal cord is injured, glial cells, of which there are three types--astrocyte, ependymal and NG2--respond to form glial scar tissue.

"Only NG2 glial cells were found to exhibit neurogenic potential in the spinal cord following injury in adult mice, but they failed to generate mature neurons," Wu said. "Interestingly, by elevating the critical transcription factor SOX2, the glia-to-neuron conversion is successfully achieved and accompanied with a reduced glial scar formation and increased functional recovery following spinal cord injury."

The researchers reprogrammed the NG2 cells from the mouse model using elevated levels of SOX2--a transcription factor found inside the cell that's essential for neurogenesis--to neurons. This conversion has two purposes, Xu said: generate neurons to replace those lost due to a spinal cord injury and reduce the size of the glial scars in the lesion area of the damaged tissue.

This discovery, Wu said, serves as an important target in the future for potential therapeutic treatments of spinal cord injury.

The partnership between the laboratory of Chun-Li Zhang, PhD, professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and Xu's laboratory at IU School of Medicine greatly benefited the research, Xu added, by offering complementary expertise in neuronal reprogramming and in spinal cord injury, respectively.

"Such a collaboration will be continued between the two laboratories to address neuronal remodeling and functional recovery after successful conversion of glial cells into functional neurons in future," Xu said.