Culture

Modern bioinformatics allows us to take a look into the past and find out when certain species diverged during evolution, which of them still are genetically close to each other, and which are not. An international team of researchers, which, among others, includes the academic supervisor of ITMO University's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity and researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, and other research centers from all over the world, analyzed the genomes of extinct and living lions. They managed to determine when the divergence took place, as well as come to several other conclusions on genetic diversity of the modern lion population in India. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Lions are one of the most powerful and dangerous predators on the planet. Many cities and countries use lion images on their coats of arms as a symbol of power and strength.

However, according to scientists, nowadays lions are in great danger of extinction. In the last two centuries, a 90% reduction in the population took place. During the last 150 years, Cape and Barbary lions were exterminated. Today, apart from zoos, you can meet these animals only in Western and Central Africa, as well as in the Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary, Gujarat, India. To comprehend the process of reduction in the lion population and prevent their extinction, scientists need to answer several questions considering their evolution history.

An international research team, which includes specialists from different countries and continents, as well as Stephen O'Brian, the academic supervisor of ITMO University's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, has analyzed the remains of cave lions kept in museums and found during paleontological expeditions. The results of the analysis were compared with those of modern lions. It was concluded that cave lions and modern species diverged about 500,000 years ago.

The scientists have also discovered that lion ancestors which used to live in Central and Western Africa diverged from the ancestors of subspecies that used to inhabit Northern Africa, and now inhabit India, about 70,000 years ago. A quite popular myth about lions being artificially brought to India in the pre-colonial era is therefore proved to be false.

This research may have a direct impact on the attempts of the restoration of the Northern-African lion population. If the scientists manage to determine the closest relatives of Barbary subspecies, it will make the restoration more scientifically substantiated and possibly more successful. All the more so due to the fact that in various zoos there are animals which are considered to be derived from Barbary lions gifted to Moroccan rulers in the 19th century.

One of the important conclusions that the scientists came to is that there is no clear evidence that cave lions, which went extinct 10,000-15,000 years ago, or Cape and Barbary lions, which went extinct recently, had a problem with genetic diversity. It means that their extinction evidently was not caused by degeneration and accumulation of deleterious mutations in the population.

However, the reduction in genome diversity can be clearly detected in the modern population of Indian lions. As they have been living in a comparatively small area for centuries, inbreeding often took place. This resulted in cranial defects, low sperm count and testosterone levels, as well as smaller manes. These facts should be taken into consideration during the attempts to save the Indian lion population from extinction.

"The obtained results demonstrate the power given to us by the era of genome research. We can apply it to discover the secrets of the past by reading the fragments of DNA taken from modern species' ancestors. Apart from that, a troubling reduction in Indian lion genetic material was proved," Stephen O'Brien concludes.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Corn cultivation spread from Mesoamerica to what is now the American Southwest by about 4000 B.C., but how and when the crop made it to other parts of North America is still a subject of debate. In a new study, scientists report that corn was not grown in the ancient metropolis of Cahokia until sometime between A.D. 900 and 1000, a relatively late date that corresponds to the start of the city's rapid expansion.

The findings are published in the journal American Antiquity.

The research team determined the age of charred corn kernels found in homes, shrines and other archaeological contexts in and around Cahokia. The researchers also looked at carbon isotopes in the teeth and bones of 108 humans and 15 dogs buried in the vicinity.

Carbon-isotope ratios differ among food sources, with isotope ratios of corn being significantly higher than those of almost all other native plant species in the region. By analyzing the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in teeth and bones, the team determined the relative proportion of different types of foods the people of Cahokia ate in different time periods.

The corn remnants and isotope analyses revealed that corn consumption began in Cahokia between 900 and 1000. This was just before the city grew into a major metropolis.

"There's been an idea that corn came to the central Mississippi River valley at about the time of Christ, and the evolution of maize in this part of the world was really, really slow," said retired state archaeologist Thomas Emerson, who led the study. "But this Cahokia data is saying that no, actually, corn arrived here very late. And in fact, corn may be the foundation of the city."

The research team included Illinois State Archaeological Survey archaeobotanist Mary Simon; bioarchaeologist Kristin Hedman; radiocarbon dating analyst Matthew Fort; and former graduate student Kelsey Witt, now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.

Beginning in about 1050, Cahokia grew from "a little village of a few hundred people to part of a city with 5,000 to 10,000 people in an archaeological instant," Emerson said. The population eventually expanded to at least 40,000. This early experiment in urban living was short-lived, however. By 1350, after a period of drought and civil strife, most of the city's population had dispersed.

Scientists who theorize that corn came to the central Mississippi River valley early in the first millennium A.D. are overlooking the fact that the plant had to adapt to a completely different light and temperature regime before it could be cultivated in the higher latitudes, said Simon, who conducted an exhaustive analysis of corn kernels found at Cahokia and elsewhere in the Midwest.

"Corn was originally cultivated in Mesoamerica," she said. "Its flowering time and production time are controlled by the amount of sunlight it gets. When it got up into this region, its flowering was no longer corresponding to the available daylight. If you planted it in the spring, it wouldn't even start to flower until August, and winter would set in before you could harvest your crop."

The plant had to evolve to survive in this northerly climate, Simon said.

"It was probably only marginally adapted to high latitudes in what is now the southwestern United States by 0 A.D.," she said. "So, the potential for successful cultivation in the Midwest at this early date is highly problematic."

When they analyzed the carbon isotopes in the teeth and bones of 108 individuals buried in Cahokia between 600 and 1400, researchers saw a signature consistent with corn consumption beginning abruptly between 950 and 1000, Hedman said. The data from dogs buried at and near Cahokia also corresponded to this timeline.

"That's where you see this big jump in the appearance of corn in the diet," Hedman said. "This correlates very closely with what Mary Simon is finding with the dates on the maize."

"Between 900 and 1000 is also when you start to see a real shift in the culture of Cahokia," Emerson said. "This was the beginning of mound construction. There was a massive growth of population and a dramatic shift in ideology with the appearance of fertility iconography."

Artifacts uncovered from Cahokia include flint-clay figurines of women engaged in agricultural activities and vessels marked with symbols of water and fertility. Some of the items depict crops such as sunflowers and squash that predated the arrival of corn.

"It wasn't like the Cahokians didn't already have an agricultural base when corn arrived on the scene," Simon said. "They were preadapted to the whole idea of cultivation."

The absence of corn iconography in artifacts from the city reflects corn's status as a relative newcomer to the region at the time Cahokia first flourished, Emerson said.

For Army scientists, the goal of neuroscience research is pursuing the inner workings of the human brain to advance scientific understanding and improve Soldier performance.

Researchers recently applied new techniques to modify brain activity. Not only are these techniques used to characterize and study complex networks such as in telecommunications or social networks -- they describe how different nodes, or elements of the network: brain regions in neuroscience, or individuals in social networks, interact with each other.

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, in collaboration with academic partners, collaborated on a neurostimulation study, where they safely and non-invasively modified brain activity and then characterized the dynamics of the brain's response to this modification. This research provides some of the foundational knowledge for future technologies that may one day expedite cognitive processes. The journal Network Neuroscience published the recent discoveries.

Researchers from the lab, Drs. Javier Garcia, Steven Thurman and Jean Vettel, along with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Irvine, investigated foundational questions to how local processing in the brain harmonizes with global dynamics using dynamic community detection on rapidly changing brain signals.

"A flexible brain region is one that easily engages with other brain regions and/or networks," Garcia said. "In marrying these methods and techniques, we find that there are precise and measurable local (stimulated region) and global (whole brain) effects that travel common oscillatory patterns in the brain often implicated in tasks related to vision, attention and motor control. This puts us a little closer to harnessing the power of neurostimulation for behavioral modification."

The researchers combined new and different techniques and methods to add to the novelty of their discovery.

"The first is neurostimulation, which uses simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography," Garcia said. "[This] is a type of neurostimulation that causes a changing magnetic field near your scalp, which in turn induces current into whatever conductive body is next to it -- in this case, it's your brain."

The electrical current that is non-invasively injected into your brain then disrupts the neural firing at the stimulated region, but it is unclear what kind of downstream non-local effects this stimulation will produce, he said.

"This method and related methods are often controversial because it's often very difficult to determine what behavioral effect is actually due to the stimulation, and given the variety of stimulation protocols, it is often difficult to determine the specificity of the effect," Garcia said. "In our research, we kept it simple and pulsed four regions related to attention and visual processing every four or so seconds."

They paired this stimulation with EEG, which measures the electrical current emanating from the brain -- through the scalp -- and inspected the effects of stimulation.

"Effects of this specific type of stimulation do not last more than one second," Garcia said. "To look at the effects on the brain from this stimulation, we used some network science approaches, specifically dynamic community detection."

This research supports the lab's current research in Human-Autonomy Teaming and the goal of providing foundational knowledge products to enable future adaptive teaming neurotechnologies.

"As part of human basic research for the laboratory, we often look at associations between physiology and behavior, perhaps finding that a brain network may be associated with a particular behavior or optimal performance within a narrow task," Garcia said. "This type of research will support future adaptive neurotechnologies that may be used in human-autonomy teams where behavioral missteps may be predicted and avoided or it could enable a non-human agent synthetic metacognitive abilities to know how a member of the team will perform in particular situations and assess team and individual performance."

This research goes one step beyond this and provides some foundational knowledge that may enable a robot to neurally nudge the brain to perhaps prime an individual for an upcoming task when a particular outcome is needed.

"While technologically we are pretty far from this scenario, the foundational research that measures the impact of subtle nudges of electrical injection in the brain is necessary to attain these sort of human-autonomy teaming neurotechnologies," Garcia said.

HOUSTON - (May 14, 2020) - Early studies show evidence of COVID-19 genetic material in fecal matter, but more work is needed to determine if the virus can be spread through stool, according to a new review paper from a Rice University epidemiologist.

"Potential Fecal Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: Current Evidence and Implications for Public Health" will appear in an upcoming edition of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases and is available online. The paper reviewed an ever-changing body of literature on detection of the novel coronavirus in fecal matter of COVID-19 patients.

"Most of the studies that have been done so far are picking up viral RNA in the feces rather than infectious virus," said E. Susan Amirian, an epidemiologist with Rice's Texas Policy Lab and the study's lead author. "However, a few studies have showed that infectious virus may be present in stool samples."

Amirian said the mere presence of genetic material is less worrisome than if infectious amounts of viable virus are found in stool in future studies, as that would imply it is possible for it to be transmitted to others through feces. She said if future research continues finding viable virus in stool, this could have important implications, especially for those working in the restaurant industry, nursing homes, day cares, etc.

"Ultimately, more research is needed to determine whether exposure to stool is spreading this virus and making the pandemic worse," Amirian said. "But given this possibility, it behooves us to be more careful, especially in settings where people have an increased risk of morbidity and death due to COVID-19."

Amirian said there's no downside to exercising an abundance of caution in following good personal hygiene practices until we know more.

"There are plenty of other diseases out there that are transmitted through fecal contamination, including hepatitis A and norovirus," she said. "Following a high level of precaution will help just in case COVID-19 can be spread this way."

Some people with HIV need to undergo an allogeneic stem cell transplantation in order to treat different types of blood cancer. Most of the patient's immune cells are eliminated during these transplantations. Stem cells from a healthy donor are then used to replace the patient's damaged bone marrow and restore their immune system.

"In the first weeks after an allogeneic stem cell transplantation, during which the donor´s cells and the patient´s cells still exist together, the CD4+ T cells (helper cells) were strongly activated. This activation could promote reactivation of the HI virus and re-seeding of the infection in expanding CD4+ donor T-cells," according to the study's first author, Dr. Johanna Eberhard from the UKE.

In cooperation with researchers from the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Eberhard found that new, specific T-cell responses to HIV proteins from donor cells developed after this time. This indicates that the donor cells were in contact with HI viruses during their expansion and had learnt to react against them. This confirms the existence of a "window of vulnerability" during which infection of donor cells can occur, said Dr. Eberhard.

"Together with the results of previous studies, these results show a weak point that may explain why allogeneic stem cell transplants may not completely remove the virus from the body, despite a drastic reduction in the number of infected cells. Additional immunotherapy or gene therapy may be required to achieve ongoing, spontaneous control of HIV infection in people with HIV after allogeneic stem cell transplantation," said the co-author of the study, Associate Professor Dr. Julian Schulze zur Wiesch, senior physician in the medical clinic and polyclinic of the UKE, who carries out research with his working group at the German Center for Infection Research on topics related to curing HIV.

New Rochelle, NY, May 13, 2020--Artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and other key digital technology applications will play a vital role addressing the new healthcare challenges triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a peer-reviewed Special Issue of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology. Click here to read the Special Issue free on the OMICS website through June 13, 2020.

"COVID-19 is undoubtedly among the ecological determinants of planetary health," states Vural Özdemir, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of OMICS in his editorial. "Digital health is a veritable opportunity for integrative biology and systems medicine to broaden its scope from human biology to ecological determinants of health," he said. "This is very important."

Despite a widespread belief that media coverage of artificial intelligence tends to be negative, Colin Garvey and Chandler Maskal, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) report that the majority of the news coverage is positive. Click here to read the article.

A University of Missouri Health Care neurologist has published more than 40 new recommendations for evaluating and treating stroke patients based on international research examining the link between stroke and novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Neurologist Adnan I. Qureshi, MD, a professor of clinical neurology at the MU School of Medicine, led a team of stroke experts from 18 countries with documented COVID-19 outbreaks to develop recommendations for doctors evaluating patients with acute ischemic stroke who have either suspected or confirmed COVID-19 infection.

The international panel noted increased clotting in COVID-19 patients, which raised their risk for stroke. The research team found evidence that young people without previous risk factors for stroke are experiencing ischemic stroke with clots in the arteries of the brain presumably related to a COVID-19 infection. The average onset of stroke in COVID-19 patients occurred 10 days after infection, but in some cases, stroke was the initial symptom.

"People may come to the emergency department with stroke, and that may be the initial manifestation of COVID-19 infection, which puts a clear burden on providers because now you may not know if the patient you are evaluating for stroke may actually have underlying COVID-19 infection," Qureshi said. "The purpose of these recommendations is to provide a step-by-step guide of how to manage these patients. The modifications we suggest have implications for the health of patients, but also the health of those who are involved in their care."

Qureshi's research indicates health care workers are at risk of acquiring COVID-19 from stroke patients and they should take safety precautions while limiting the number of care providers who have direct interaction with each patient. The guidelines also call for providers to treat any suspected COVID-19 stroke patient as though the patient has the infection, ensuring the sanitation of all equipment used during the stroke assessment. If a stroke patient is suspected to have COVID-19, a chest CT scan can provide rapid evidence of a possible infection in the lungs.

"Since COVID-19 actually involves the lungs, a simultaneous scan of the chest and brain can check for stroke and identify changes in the lungs that may identify whether this patient truly has or does not have COVID-19 infection," Qureshi said. "This step has been incorporated into acute stroke protocol at MU Health Care."

Qureshi encourages stroke patients and their family members to recall any symptoms of dry cough, fever or body aches before the stroke, which may help the provider determine if the stroke is related to an underlying COVID-19 infection. If a COVID-19 infection is confirmed and other organs have been affected, guidelines suggest a Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) can provide an overall prognosis before determining the appropriate stroke treatment in COVID-19 patients.

Qureshi's study, "Management of acute ischemic stroke in patients with COVID-19 infection: Report of an international panel," also featured contributions from MU Health Care neurologist Camilo R. Gomez, MD, professor of clinical neurology at the MU School of Medicine. It was recently published by the International Journal of Stroke.

TAMPA, Fla. -- Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR T, has become a game changer for lymphoma and leukemia patients who have relapsed or become resistant to previous treatments. The therapy uses a patient's own immune cells that are re-engineered in the lab to seek out and kill cancer cells when infused back into the patient. Yescarta® (axicabtagene ciloleucel) was the first CAR T-cell therapy approved for the treatment of adults with large B cell lymphoma. The pivotal ZUMA-1 clinical trial that led to its approval showed that 83% of patients responded to the therapy, with 58% having a complete response. But clinical trials often have stringent eligibility criteria and the outcomes observed may not match what physicians see in a real-world clinical setting.

Moffitt Cancer Center organized a consortium of 16 cancer treatment facilities across the U.S. that offer Yescarta as a standard-of-care therapy for patients with relapsed/refractory large B cell lymphoma. They wanted to determine if the safety and effectiveness seen in the ZUMA-1 clinical trial were similar for patients treated with the now commercially available CAR T therapy. Their findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The consortium pooled retrospective data on 298 patients who completed apheresis, the process to remove a patient's T cells, with the intent of having Yescarta manufactured and administered. It is important to point out that of this group, 129 patients (43%) would not have qualified for CAR T-cell therapy based on the ZUMA-1 comorbidity eligibility criteria. Overall, 275 patients (92%) received a Yescarta infusion. In the ZUMA-1 trial, 108 patients received Yescarta.

"Our analysis found that the overall response rate of 82%, and estimated 12 month durable response rate of 47%, for our group of patients compared favorably to the ZUMA-1 trial results," said Frederick Locke, M.D., corresponding author of the study and vice chair of the Department of Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy and co-leader of the Immunology Program at Moffitt. "Durable response rates were encouraging even in patients with significant comorbidities, suggesting that patients need not meet ZUMA-1 eligibility criteria to benefit from axicabtagene ciloleucel."

One adverse reaction that can occur following CAR T therapy is cytokine release syndrome (CRS). This occurs when a large number of cytokines, which are small proteins released by immune cells, are rapidly released into the blood. This can cause a patient to have a fever, increased heart rate, difficulty breathing and low blood pressure. In the ZUMA-1 trial, 11% of patients treated with Yescarta experienced severe CRS. However, in the commercial setting, that number was lower at 7%.

"We believe this observation is due to the greater use of tocilizumab and corticosteroids compared to ZUMA-1, in line with evolving practice patterns for toxicity management," said Michael Jain, M.D., Ph.D., co-first author and assistant member of the Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy Department at Moffitt.

The authors believe this study suggests that patients do not need to meet the ZUMA-1 eligibility criteria to benefit from Yescarta, including upper age limits and those with underlying conditions.

From vast herds of wildebeest thundering across the Serengeti to a malaria-laden mosquito silently stalking a human host, the movement of animals has effects that reverberate throughout the biosphere. The way that animals move governs many ecological interactions including predation, disease transmission, and human-wildlife conflict. Encounter rates, which quantify how often moving individuals come in contact with each other, serve as the "glue" that links movement behavior to ecological processes. While GPS devices have revolutionized the study of animal movement, research on encounter rates has not kept pace. A multidisciplinary research team consisting of ecologists and physicists has found that the gap between the data and how encounter is modeled could have serious consequences for certain ecological predictions (DOI: 10.1016/jtbi.2020.110267).

Specifically, the standard ecological encounter model, dubbed "the law of mass action", has been in use for over 100 years, and assumes that any individual roams freely across the entire range of its population. "When you look at animal tracking data, one of the first things you see is that most animals have home ranges, meaning that each individual typically only uses a small portion of the population range", says Dr. Justin Calabrese, Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding in Görlitz (CASUS), Germany. The disconnect between the data and the mass-action assumption suggests that encounter rate models are due for a rethink. "This matters because the mass-action assumption is everywhere in ecology and related fields" explains Calabrese, "with one current example being the SIR-type (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered) epidemiological models used to understand the spread and control of SARS-CoV-2."

The international, multidisciplinary research team found that incorporating home ranging behavior into encounter rates could drastically change the results, and only under very narrow conditions did the more realistic models mimic mass-action encounter. "This suggests that interacting population models relying on mass action, like SIR disease models, could give very different predictions with a more realistic accounting of movement behavior", explains Dr. Ricardo Martinez-Garcia, Assistant Professor at the ICTP-South American Institute for Fundamental Research in São Paulo. Worryingly, these more realistic encounter rates could either be higher or lower relative to mass action, and were sensitive to the details of the movement behavior. Martinez-Garcia explains that "this kind of context dependence makes it very hard to know even in which direction the predictions of mass-action based models will be off, so this is something we need to explore in the future."

Encounter rate modeling in ecology has deep interdisciplinary roots. The aforementioned "law of mass action" relies on the concept of the ideal gas, and thus describes animals as erratic particles that move largely at random and do not interact with their environment. To develop this new encounter modeling framework, the team built upon more refined physical concepts borrowed from nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. "The transfer of concepts originally developed in one discipline to solve problems in another is a powerful way to tackle the complexity we see in nature. This work is a clear example of that", says Calabrese who recently joined the newly founded CASUS, which combines systems science with a variety of research disciplines. At CASUS, Calabrese will work at the interface of ecology and Earth system science. Interdisciplinarity, however, is a two-way street. As the encounter between individuals, groups or entities that show limited spatial occupation is a widespread phenomenon in the natural, social and economic sciences, the conclusions of the encounter rate work could extend well beyond ecology.

MANHATTAN, KANSAS -- There are many unanswered questions about COVID-19. A Kansas State University infectious disease scientist and collaborators are offering a possible research road map to find the answers.

Jürgen A. Richt, the Regents distinguished professor at Kansas State University in the College of Veterinary Medicine, has co-authored a critical needs assessment for coronavirus-related research in companion animals and livestock. The article, "A Critical Needs Assessment for Research in Companion Animals and Livestock Following the Pandemic of COVID-19 in Humans," appears in the journal Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. Co-authors include Tracey McNamara from Western University of Health Sciences and Larry Glickman from Purdue University.

"We need to address these challenges in a scientific manner -- in a proactive manner, not in a reactive manner," said Richt, also the director of the university's Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases, known as CEEZAD. "With COVID, every day something is new -- what was correct yesterday, could be wrong today."

Because of the rapid change of knowledge related to coronavirus, Richt and his collaborators wrote the article to stress importance of studying the ways that COVID-19 could spread between humans and animals. The scientists say that research should focus in several areas, including:

The potential for companion animals, such as cats and dogs, to carry the virus.

The economic and food security effects if the virus can spread among livestock and poultry.

National security areas, especially among service animals such as dogs that detect narcotics or explosives because COVID-19 is known to affect smell and cause hyposmia or anosmia.

"If dogs are susceptible and lose their smell and taste, it could affect our national security," said Richt, who also serves on an expert panel for the World Health Organization. "If livestock are also susceptible, it could significantly affect food safety and food security, too."

Richt's recent research has shown that pigs do not seem to be susceptible to coronavirus, but little is known if the virus affects cattle, sheep, chickens or wildlife. He is further studying if other livestock, such as cattle or sheep, may be susceptible to coronavirus.

The K-State Biosecurity Research Institute, or BRI, at Pat Roberts Hall provides the high-security laboratories needed for Richt and other scientists to study SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus responsible for COVID-19. The BRI is a biosafety level-3 facility that houses important multidisciplinary research, training and educational programs on pathogens that affect animals, plants and insects as well as food safety and security.

"Time is of the essence when responding to a new biological threat, and everyone at the BRI greatly appreciates the continued support from K-State leadership who realized the importance of keeping us operational," said Stephen Higgs, director of the BRI and editor-in-chief of Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases. "Thanks to our dedicated and highly skilled BRI staff, we provided the safe, secure environment, training and infrastructure required for research on SARS-CoV-2. The paper explains why Dr. Richt's research in the BRI is so important to all of us and it was great that we were able to publish it so quickly and make it freely available."

Richt's own coronavirus research at the Biosecurity Research Institute focuses on four areas: animal susceptibility and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, therapeutic treatments, diagnostics and vaccines. Richt develops models to test therapies and has collaborated with researchers nationally and internationally. He also is collaborating to test and develop potential vaccines that are safer and do not lead to vaccine-associated enhancement of the disease, which is an important issue for coronavirus vaccines.

One of his collaborative projects involves Sean Joseph with Scripps Research, Sumit Chanda with Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and Adolfo García-Sastre with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The project has involved repurposing existing drugs that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating cancer, leprosy, Crohn's disease and other illnesses.

The researchers used a National Institutes of Health library of 12,000 drugs and tested them against COVID-19 in cell cultures to see if they inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication. They have narrowed the list of drugs down to about 20 potentially effective drugs. Richt is now testing these potential antiviral drugs in preclinical models.

Another collaborative project with Nevan Krogan with University of California San Francisco and Adolfo García-Sastre with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai focuses on repurposing drugs based on coronavirus protein--host protein interaction studies.

"We are on the front end of studying whether these drugs, which look very promising in cell culture assays, can be used in COVID patients," Richt said. "We hope that the work we are doing presently will save lives."

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Built with wheeled appendages that can be lifted, a new robot developed with U.S. Army funding has complex locomotion techniques robust enough to allow it to climb sand covered hills and avoid getting stuck. The robot has NASA interested for potential surveying of a planet or the Moon.

Using a move that researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology dubbed rear rotator pedaling, the robot, known as the Mini Rover, climbs a slope by using a design that combines paddling, walking, and wheel spinning motions. The rover's behaviors were modeled using a branch of physics known as terradynamics.

The journal Science Robotics published the research as a cover article. The Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and NASA, through the National Robotics Initiative, funded the research.

"This basic research is revealing exciting new approaches for locomotion in complex terrain," said Dr. Samuel Stanton, a program manager at ARO. "This could lead to platforms capable of intelligently transitioning between wheeled and legged modes of movement to maintain high operational tempo."

According to the scientists, when loose materials like sand flow, that can create problems for robots moving across it.

"This rover has enough degrees of freedom that it can get out of jams pretty effectively," said Dan Goldman, the Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "By avalanching materials from the front wheels, it creates a localized fluid hill for the back wheels that is not as steep as the real slope. The rover is always self-generating and self-organizing a good hill for itself."

A robot built by NASA's Johnson Space Center pioneered the ability to spin its wheels, sweep the surface with those wheels and lift each of its wheeled appendages where necessary, creating a broad range of potential motions. Using in-house 3-D printers, the Georgia Tech researchers collaborated with the Johnson Space Center to re-create those capabilities in a scaled-down vehicle with four wheeled appendages driven by 12 different motors.

"The rover was developed with a modular mechatronic architecture, commercially available components, and a minimal number of parts," said Siddharth Shrivastava, an undergraduate student in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. "This enabled our team to use our robot as a robust laboratory tool and focus our efforts on exploring creative and interesting experiments without worrying about damaging the rover, service downtime, or hitting performance limitations."

The rover's broad range of movements gave the research team an opportunity to test many variations that were studied using granular drag force measurements and modified Resistive Force Theory. The team began with the gaits explored by the NASA RP15 robot, and experimented with locomotion schemes that could not have been tested on a full-size rover.

The researchers also tested their experimental gaits on slopes designed to simulate planetary and lunar hills using a fluidized bed system known as SCATTER, or Systematic Creation of Arbitrary Terrain and Testing of Exploratory Robots, that could be tilted to evaluate the role of controlling the granular substrate.

In the experiments, the new gait allowed the rover to climb a steep slope with the front wheels stirring up the granular material - poppy seeds for the lab testing - and pushing them back toward the rear wheels. The rear wheels wiggled from side-to-side, lifting and spinning to create a motion that resembles paddling in water. The material pushed to the back wheels effectively changed the slope the rear wheels had to climb, allowing the rover to make steady progress up a hill that might have stopped a simple wheeled robot.

"In our previous studies of pure legged robots, modeled on animals, we had kind of figured out that the secret was to not make a mess," Goldman said. "If you end up making too much of a mess with most robots, you end up just paddling and digging into the granular material. If you want fast locomotion, we found that you should try to keep the material as solid as possible by tweaking the parameters of motion."

But simple motions had proved problematic for Mars rovers, which famously got stuck in granular materials. Goldman says this gait discovery might be able to help future rovers avoid that fate.

"This combination of lifting and wheeling and paddling, if used properly, provides the ability to maintain some forward progress even if it is slow," Goldman said. "Through our laboratory experiments, we have shown principles that could lead to improved robustness in planetary exploration - and even in challenging surfaces on our own planet."

The researchers hope next to scale up the unusual gaits to larger robots, and to explore the idea of studying robots and their localized environments together.

Though the Mini Rover was designed to study lunar and planetary exploration, the lessons learned could also be applicable to terrestrial locomotion - an area of interest to the Army.

In a study published today in Current Biology, Arne Meyer, John O'Keefe and Jasper Poort used a lightweight eye-tracking system composed of miniature video cameras and motion sensors to record head and eye movements in mice without restricting movement or behaviour. Measurements were made while the animals performed naturalistic visual behaviours including social interactions with other mice and visual object tracking. While the eyes in humans typically move together in the same direction, those in mice often moved in opposite directions. Although humans also make eye movement without head movement, for example when reading a book, the study found that mouse eye movements were always linked to head movement.

The researchers identified two types of mouse eye movement coupled to head movement with different functions: 'head tilt compensation' and 'saccade and fixate' eye movements. 'Head tilt compensation' allows mice to maintain a consistent view of the world by compensating for slow changes in head tilt, and results in the two eyes moving in opposite directions, which is typically not observed in humans. 'Saccade and fixate' eye movements allow animals to stabilise their view during fast head rotations and shift their gaze in the direction of the head rotation. These 'saccade and fixate' movements are similar to those seen in humans and monkeys, which often sample their environment by a sequence of stable images (fixations) and result in the two eyes moving in the same direction. 'Fixate' eye movements keep the flow of visual information steady while 'saccade' movements allow the animal to select relevant visual information to focus on.

The mouse is an important species to help understand how the human brain functions. First, the organisation and function of the mouse and human brain is similar in many ways, although there are also important differences. Second, scientists can use unique genetic research tools in mice to study brain circuits at a level of detail not possible in other mammals. Third, scientists use genetic tools in mice to model human brain disorders.

The traditional approach to studying vision in humans, monkeys and mice involves restraining head movement. While this facilitates the interpretation of data and allows researchers to use a wider range of experimental measuring methods, it has been unclear whether the results can be generalised to naturalistic behaviours where both head and eyes are free to move. Understanding how mice visually sample their surroundings is also crucial to further close the gap between vision and navigation which has traditionally been studied in freely moving rodents.

This research validates using mice to study important aspects of how humans select visual features that are most important for navigation and decision-making. This visual process is impaired in multiple neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease and stroke. These impairments are currently difficult to treat, and using mice to model these conditions will allow scientists to study the underlying brain mechanisms to help identify and develop new treatments.

University of Alberta biologists have invented a new way for sequencing circular DNA, according to a new study. The tool--called CIDER-Seq--will give other scientists rich, accurate data on circular DNA in any type of cell.

While our own DNA is linear,, circular DNA is common in the genomes of bacteria and viruses. Scientists have also discovered circular DNA within the nuclei of human and plant cells, called extrachromosomal circular DNA (eccDNA). Recently, research has begun to investigate the role of eccDNA in human cancer--but progress has been hampered due to the lack of effective methods for studying and sequencing eccDNA.

"Our key advance is that, through our method, scientists can finally gain an unbiased, high-resolution understanding of circular DNA in any type of cell," explained Devang Mehta, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences and lead author. "With our invention of CIDER-Seq, we can start to begin to understand the function of these mysterious circular DNAs in human and plant cells."

CIDER-Seq uses DNA sequencing technology called PacBio. The method includes a web-lab protocol, as well as a new computational pipeline. It is optimized to examine both viral genomes and eccDNA and is made accessible to other scientists online.

"We devised a new molecular biology method and a new bioinformatics algorithm to finally obtain full length sequences of eccDNA," explained Mehta. "Our method finally allows us to sequence these molecules completely and gives us and other researchers a tool to better understand what they actually do in the cell."

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Crop modeling is essential for understanding how to secure the food supply as the planet adapts to climate change. Many current crop models focus on simulating crop growth and yield at the field scale, but lack genetic and physiological data, which may hamper accurate production and environmental impact assessment at larger scales.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Plants, researchers identify a series of multiscale and multidisciplinary components - from crop genetics up to global factors - that are critical for finding environmentally sustainable solutions to food security.

Many crop models focus on understanding how plant characteristics such as leaf size play into the crop yield at the field scale, the researchers said. "Modeling at this scale is critical, but we would like to incorporate information from gene-to-cell and regional-to-global scale data into our modeling framework," said Bin Peng, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign postdoctoral researcher and co-lead author.

The study identifies components that could help generate a more informative modeling framework. "Multiscale modeling is the key to linking the design of climate change adaptation strategies for crop and field management with a large-scale assessment of adaptation impact on crop production, environment, climate and economy," Peng said.

The study calls for a better representation of the physiological responses of crops to climate and environmental stressors - like drought, extreme rainfall and ozone damage. "Many physiological processes would be important to simulate the crop growth under stressed conditions accurately," Peng said. Examples include water moving from soil to plant to atmosphere driven by canopy energy balance, he said.

"We should also include a better representation of crop management," Peng said. "That would be extremely important for assessing both crop production and environmental sustainability, as well as their tradeoffs."

The researchers said there are opportunities to close a variety of data gaps, as well. "Integration of remote-sensing data, such as the work performed in our lab, will be extremely valuable for reducing data gaps and uncertainties," said natural resources and environmental sciences professor and project investigator Kaiyu Guan. "One of the advantages of remote sensing is its vast spatial coverage - we can use remote sensing to constrain crop models over every field on the planet."

The authors also propose a model-data integration pathway forward. "Doing the right simulation of crop responses to climate change factors is critically important," Guan said. "The most challenging part is whether crop models can capture those emergent relationships, which can be derived from empirical observations."

"No single scientist or research lab can produce these models on their own," said study co-author and plant biology professor Amy Marshall-Colón. "This type of effort will require patience and collaboration across many disciplines."

With primary and general elections on the horizon across the U.S., the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) today released a series of high-priority questions for candidates. The AGS candidate question guide is aimed at helping Americans keep all political leaders--including and perhaps especially those running for president--committed to a clear, articulated vision how they will support us all as Americans age.

"How candidates answer a question gives us a sense of what policies they would put forward to support us all as we age," explains AGS Chief Executive Officer Nancy Lundebjerg, MPA. "The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights how important federal and state leadership are to having policies in place that support the health of us all through a comprehensive approach informed by how geriatrics approaches our care: Team-based, person-centered, and focused on the whole person, with the goal of each of us remaining active and engaged in our communities."

The AGS question guide--published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (DOI: 10.1111/jgs.16515) and in an easy-to-use, tweetable format at the AGS #Decision2020 Hub, AmericanGeriatrics.org/Decision2020--focuses on eight policy issues important to older adults, caregivers, and the health professionals who help promote their well-being:

1. Ensuring Access to Geriatrics Health Professionals: What policies and programs would you champion that would increase access to geriatrics health professionals for older Americans?

2. Expanding Title VII Geriatrics Training Programs: How would you work to expand the reach of federal training programs so that all older people have access to health professionals who are competent to meet our needs as we age?

3. Ensuring Our Workforce is Competent to Care for Older Americans: How would you reform graduate medical education to address the gap between training requirements and our nation's need for a workforce to care for us as we age?

4. Reducing the Toll and Impact of Chronic Diseases: How would you prioritize aging research across federal agencies and institutions so that we can address the human and economic toll of chronic diseases on older Americans?

5. Ensuring Access to Adequate Pain Relief for Older Americans Living with Advanced Illness: What policies would you champion to ensure frail older Americans living with advanced illness (typically those 85 years old or older, with multiple chronic conditions) have access to adequate pain relief?

6. Supporting American Women:

What will you do to ensure women receive equal pay for equal work?

What are your plans for ensuring women and other traditionally underrepresented groups are vibrant parts of your Administration?

7. Supporting American Families: How would you ensure that all Americans, including all those employed by the federal government, have access to paid family leave?

8. Addressing Complexity in Caring for Older Americans:

How would you work to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivered to the increasing number of Medicare beneficiaries with multiple chronic and complex conditions?

How would you improve care and care coordination across healthcare settings important to individuals who have dual eligibility for both Medicare and Medicaid?

Each issue included in the guide features background on its importance, as well as potential policy solutions to help guide voter evaluations of candidate responses. To make its recommendations as actionable as possible, the AGS also included contact information for presidential candidates, as well as tools for determining state and local contenders by district, on its #Decision2020 Hub. Visit AmericanGeriatrics.org/Decision2020 to learn more.