Culture

Findings from a study published today [6 July] in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) have prompted new World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations to use interleukin-6 antagonists in patients with severe or critical COVID-19 along with corticosteroids.

A new analysis of 27 randomised trials involving nearly 11,000 patients found that treating hospitalised COVID-19 patients with drugs that block the effects of interleukin-6 (the interleukin-6 antagonists tocilizumab and sarilumab) reduces the risk of death and the need for mechanical ventilation.

The study, which was coordinated by WHO in partnership with King's College London, University of Bristol, University College London and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, found that interleukin-6 antagonists were most effective when administered with corticosteroids. In hospitalised patients, administering one of these drugs in addition to corticosteroids reduces the risk of death by 17%, compared to the use of corticosteroids alone. In patients not on mechanical ventilation, the risk of mechanical ventilation or death is reduced by 21%, compared to the use of corticosteroids alone.

In severely ill COVID-19 patients, the immune system overreacts, generating cytokines such as interleukin-6. Clinical trials have been testing whether drugs that inhibit the effects of interleukin-6, such as tocilizumab and sarilumab, benefit hospitalised patients with COVID-19. These trials have variously reported benefit, no effect and harm.

This prompted researchers from WHO's Rapid Evidence Appraisal for COVID-19 Therapies [REACT] Working Group, to examine the clinical benefit of treating hospitalised COVID-19 patients with interleukin-6 antagonists, compared with either a placebo or usual care. They combined data from 27 randomised trials that were conducted in 28 countries.

This analysis included information on 10,930 patients, of whom 6,449 were randomly assigned to receive interleukin-6 antagonists and 4,481 to receive usual care or placebo.

Results showed that the risk of dying within 28 days is lower in patients receiving interleukin-6 antagonists. In this group, the risk of death is 22% compared with an assumed risk of 25% in those receiving only usual care.

Importantly, improvements in outcomes were greater in patients who also received corticosteroids. In these patients, the risk of dying within 28 days is 21% in patients receiving interleukin-6 antagonists compared with an assumed 25% in patients receiving usual care. This means that for every 100 such patients, four more will survive.

The study also looked at the effect of these drugs on whether patients progressed to mechanical ventilation or death. Among patients also treated with corticosteroids, the risk was found to be 26% for those receiving interleukin-6 antagonists compared with an assumed 33% in those receiving usual care. This means that for every 100 such patients, 7 more will survive and avoid mechanical ventilation.

Commenting on the results of the analysis Dr Janet Diaz, Lead for Clinical management, WHO Health Emergencies, said: "Bringing together the results of trials conducted around the world is one of the best ways to find treatments that will help more people survive COVID-19. We have updated our clinical care treatment guidance to reflect this latest development. While science has delivered, we must now turn our attention to access. Given the extent of global vaccine inequity, people in the lowest income countries will be the ones most at risk of severe and critical COVID-19. Those are the people these drugs need to reach."

Prof Manu Shankar-Hari, Critical Care Consultant at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Professor of Critical Care Medicine at King's College London and a NIHR Clinician Scientist, said: "COVID-19 is a serious illness. Our research shows that interleukin-6 antagonists reduce deaths from COVID-19, i.e. save lives, and prevent progression to severe illness necessitating breathing support with a ventilator. Further, interleukin-6 antagonists appear even more effective when used alongside corticosteroids. Our research findings reflect the incredible research effort from scientists worldwide since the start of the pandemic. On a personal note, I am grateful to the patients and their families for their willingness to participate in research during these challenging times."

Jonathan Sterne, Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology, University of Bristol, Deputy Director of the National Institute for Health Research Bristol Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR Bristol BRC) and Director of Health Data Research UK South West, said: "Clinical trials assessing the efficacy of monoclonal antibodies that block interleukin-6 in hospitalised patients with COVID-19 have variously reported benefit, no effect and harm. By rapidly combining 95 per cent of the worldwide data from these trials, we have shown that these drugs work consistently in reducing death and severe COVID-19 disease across countries and health care settings, and that they work better among patients who are also receiving corticosteroids."

Claire Vale, Principal Research Fellow at the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL (University College London), said: "These results, which will lead to better outcomes for patients hospitalized with COVID-19, reflect a huge global effort. Bringing together this information in such a short space of time has only been possible thanks to the overwhelming commitment of all the doctors and teams who ran the trials, and of course, the patients who took part in them."

Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for ways to better our world.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field with promise for improving our ability to manufacture chemicals, develop therapeutic medicines such as biopharmaceuticals and vaccines, and enhance agricultural production, among other things. It relies on taking natural or engineered pieces of DNA and combining them in new ways in biological systems, such as microbes, bacteria or other organisms.

According to University of Delaware's Aditya Kunjapur, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, as these sophisticated microbial technologies are advanced, scientists need to explore ways to keep these organisms from ending up in the wrong environment.

For example, a bacterium that is good at making large amounts of chemicals is great in a bioreactor, but it isn't necessarily what we would want in the environment or in our food. Similarly, a specialized bacterium developed to help a plant be more productive is useful in agriculture, but we might not want that same bacterium to end up in our bodies.

Engineering traits directly into the microbe to create built-in safeguards to control where it can grow, known as biological containment, is one promising solution.

"Having the ability to control where microbes grow will help create technologies to treat disease and clean up the environment more safely," said Kunjapur, an emerging leader in biosecurity with expertise in teaching cells to create and harness chemical building blocks not found in nature.

Now, Kunjapur is the lead author of a new paper published in Science Advances on Friday, July 2 that describes progress on the stability of a biocontainment strategy, first reported in 2015, that uses a microbe's dependence on a synthetic nutrient to keep it contained. The work was done in collaboration with Harvard Medical School (HMS) and includes co-authors now at HMS, UD, Johns Hopkins University and industry.

Under lock and key

In the paper, the research team studied a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) that was made to depend on a synthetic nutrient for its survival, a method known as synthetic auxotrophy. They found that the strain remained stable and maintained this dependence when grown for 100 days.

"You can take enzymes that the bacteria need to grow and make them depend on a man made building block, something it will never see in nature," said Kunjapur.

The work builds on previous research in the Church lab at Harvard Medical School, where most of this research was conducted and where Kunjapur completed postdoctoral work. In that study, the research team showed that if one enzyme required this synthetic building block, bacteria would quickly find a way out. But if three enzymes required the synthetic building block, the bacteria couldn't "unlock the cell door" within a 24-hour period to make a quick getaway.

"Asking the microbe to mutate its genome in precisely three different ways at the same time is too much, and it won't find that solution," said Kunjapur. "So, while the same 'key' might open all of the doors, the microbe can't be at all three doors at once to open them, so it remains contained."

The question was whether they would find a way out if given more time to grow.

In this new work, as the research team extended the study and grew the E. coli strain, nicknamed DEP, continuously for 100 days, they also applied extra stress by shrinking the amount of synthetic nutrient the bacteria received over time.

In three parallel experiments, the researchers found that the DEP E. coli was unable to find a way to "escape" or grow outside the cell. It did, however, adapt to a lower concentration -- 10 times less -- of the synthetic nutrient it needed to survive. Further, the research team found that proteins on the host cell's surface changed, which had not been seen before.

"We think that as we were decreasing the amount of the nutrients, the DEP E. coli modified the proteins on the surface of the cell that regulate how much synthetic nutrient is allowed inside in order to retain more nutrients inside and keep growing," said Kunjapur. "We were surprised because at first we didn't expect them to adapt, and then we didn't expect them to adapt in this way."

To validate their results, the team went back and engineered those same genetic traits into the original ancestor E. coli strain and discovered it was able to grow at the lower synthetic nutrient concentration from the start. This information could prove useful for scaling the experiment in the future, Kunjapur said.

In a follow-up experiment, Kunjapur's colleague Eriona Hysolli, a postdoctoral fellow in the Church lab, added the bacteria directly to mammalian cells. The results were intriguing. While the bacteria grew tremendously in the first few days, over the course of a week the bacteria just faded away, without the need for antibiotics.

"Our data show the first use of recoded bacterial strains with controllable growth in a mammalian cellular model. We are excited about the promising applications in human health like the gut microbiome," said Hysolli, a co-author on the paper.

Building on this work, Michaela Jones, a UD doctoral student in Kunjapur's lab and paper co-author, conducted additional experiments that showed the bacteria stopped growing when the synthetic nutrient was taken away, then resumed growth when the nutrient was added back. Kunjapur said these findings equip researchers with new tools to control how and when bacteria grow by regulating the nutrients they need to survive.

"Now, if you need bacteria to grow at a certain rate or time, we have a synthetic building block as a lever or knob to control that," he said.

In future work, Kunjapur plans to study the biocontained DEP E. coli strain, as well as other microbe designs, under a broader set of conditions to determine if the approach will hold up in the environment. Additionally, he is working on biomedical applications for live bacterial strains, which could be used as therapeutics, probiotics and vaccines.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus's growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.

"In our experiments, we show that the wild-type [disease-causing] SARS-CoV-2 virus actually enables the replication and spread of our synthetic virus, thereby effectively promoting its own decline," said Marco Archetti, associate professor of biology, Penn State. "A version of this synthetic construct could be used as a self-promoting antiviral therapy for COVID-19."

Archetti explained that when a virus attacks a cell, it attaches to the cell's surface and injects its genetic material into the cell. The cell is then tricked into replicating the virus's genetic material and packaging it into virions, which burst from the cell and go off to infect other cells.

'Defective interfering (DI)' viruses, which are common in nature, contain large deletions in their genomes that often affect their ability to replicate their genetic material and package it into virions. However, DI genomes can perform these functions if the cell they've infected also harbors genetic material from a wild-type virus. In this case, a DI genome can hijack a wild-type genome's replication and packaging machinery.

"These defective genomes are like parasites of the wild-type virus," said Archetti, explaining that when a DI genome utilizes of a wild-type genome's machinery, it also can impair the wild-type genome growth.

In addition, he said, "given the shorter length of their genomes as a result of the deletions, DI genomes can replicate faster than wild-type genomes in coinfected cells and quickly outcompete the wild-type."

Indeed, in their new study, which published today (July 1) in the journal PeerJ, Archetti and his colleagues found that their synthetic DI genome can replicate three times faster than the wild-type genome, resulting in a reduction of the wild-type viral load by half in 24 hours.

To conduct their study, the researchers engineered short synthetic DI genomes from parts of the wild-type SARS-CoV-2 genome and introduced them into African green monkey cells that were already infected with the wild-type SARS-CoV-2 virus. Next, they quantified the relative amounts of the DI and WT genomes in the cells over time points, which gave an indication of the amount of interference of the DI genome with the wild-type genome.

The team found that within 24 hours of infection, the DI genome reduced the amount of SARS-CoV-2 by approximately half compared to the amount of wild-type virus in control experiments. They also found that the the DI genome increases in quantity 3.3 times as fast than the wild-type virus.

Archetti said that while the 50% reduction in virus load that they observed over 24 hours is not enough for therapeutic purposes, presumably, as the DI genomes increase in frequency in the cell, the decline in the amount of wild-type virus would lead to the demise of both the virus and the DI genome, as the DI genome cannot persist once it has driven the wild-type virus to extinction.

He added that further experiments are needed to verify the potential of SARS-CoV-2 DIs as an antiviral treatment, suggesting that the experiments could be repeated in human lung cell lines, and against some of the newer variants of SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, he said, an efficient delivery method should be devised. In further work that is still unpublished, the team has now used nanoparticles as a delivery vector and observed that the virus declines by more than 95% in 12 hours.

"With some additional research and finetuning, a version of this synthetic DI could be used as a self-sustaining therapeutic for COVID-19."

The UK public is likely to take the COVID-19 pandemic less seriously once restrictions are lifted, according to new research led by Cardiff University.

Psychologists found lockdown in itself was a primary reason why so many people were willing to abide by the rules from the start - believing the threat must be severe if the government imposes such drastic measures.

The team from Cardiff and the universities of Bath and Essex examined the reasons behind headline polling support for COVID-19 measures. They carried out two UK surveys*, six months apart, during 2020. Their findings are published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Lead author Dr Colin Foad said: "Surprisingly, we found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown - in other words, they thought 'it must be bad if government's taking such drastic measures'.

"We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown. This suggests that if and when 'Freedom Day' comes and restrictions are lifted, people may downplay the threat of COVID."

The research also found:
- Raising people's personal threat was unlikely to enhance their support for restrictive measures;
- People supported lockdown yet thought many of its side effects were "unacceptable" in a cost-benefit analysis.

Dr Foad said: "The pandemic has been characterised by strong public support for lockdowns, but our research suggests that people have actually been much more conflicted than the headline polls suggest.

"For example, we found that when people think about the costs of this policy, such as detriment to mental health and reduced access to treatment for non-COVID health problems, these can outweigh its benefits."

On the finding around personal threat, he said: "In order to try and keep public support for lockdowns high, various strategies have been tried by the government, including reminding people that they and their loved ones are at risk from COVID-19.

"However, we find that most people's personal sense of threat does not relate to their support for restrictions. Instead, people judged the threat at a much more general level, such as towards the country as a whole. So, any messaging that targets their personal sense of threat is unlikely to actually raise support for any further restrictions."

The researchers warned there was a risk of public opinion and government policy "forming a symbiotic relationship", which could affect how policies are implemented now and in future.

Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist from the University of Bath, said: "This has important implications for how we deal with other risks, like climate change - the public will be more likely to believe it's a serious problem if governments implement bold policies to tackle it."

Professor Whitmarsh suggested bold actions might include stopping all road building (as has happened recently in Wales) or blocking airport expansions.

The researchers are calling for more nuanced use of polling data during the pandemic to accurately gauge the diversity and complexity of public opinion.

Dr Paul Hanel, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex, said: "Polling data from large samples are important in understanding what people think. Our study, however, shows that it is crucial to ask the right questions because otherwise we are only getting a limited and potentially even misleading picture of how diverse and even conflicting public opinions truly are."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The fast-moving decline and extinction of many species of detritivores -- organisms that break down and remove dead plant and animal matter -- may have dire consequences, an international team of scientists suggests in a new study.

The researchers observed a close relationship between detritivore diversity and plant litter decomposition in streams, noting that decomposition was highest in waters with the most species of detritivores -- including aquatic insects such as stoneflies, caddisflies, mayflies and craneflies, and crustaceans such as scuds and freshwater shrimp and crabs.

Decomposition is a biological process that's vital to life, explained study co-author Bradley Cardinale, professor and head of the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State.

"The plant matter that doesn't get eaten by animals ultimately dies and must be recycled so that biologically essential nutrients are rereleased into the environment where they can be used again by plants," he said. "If that process of decomposition doesn't occur, or slows significantly, then life comes to a screeching halt. Phosphorus, nitrogen and other nutrients that we need as humans don't even exist in a biologically available form unless they get decomposed and recycled."

But all over the world, detritivore populations are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate -- a grim reality that spurred the study. There is good evidence that the rate of extinction for these organisms is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than has occurred through the historic record, Cardinale pointed out.

"There has been a huge question about whether or not the diversity of these aquatic insects and crustaceans is crucial," Cardinale said. "If they go extinct, is this biological process of decomposition going to slow or not? We didn't have a good answer prior to this study. We didn't know if the extinction of these animals will greatly affect the ability of ecosystems to sustain life, or if other organisms such as bacteria and fungi will fill the ecological niche and accomplish a similar level of decomposition."

There are a number of causes of extinction, Cardinale said. In order of importance, they are habitat loss, overharvesting (which doesn't apply to this study), competition from invasive species, disease, pollution and climate change -- which he called "the big unknown at this point."

The study was global and uncommonly robust, involving 75 scientists analyzing decomposition in 38 headwater streams that were similar in size, depth and physical habitat across 23 countries on six continents. Most of the streams selected by the researchers had rocky substrate and were shaded by dense riparian vegetation.

At each site, the researchers incubated identical plant litter mixtures comprised of nine species collected at different locations around the world and distributed among study partners. Litter mixtures were enclosed within paired coarse-mesh and fine-mesh litterbags containing the same amount and type of litter.

"The two types of litterbags allowed us to quantify the amount of decomposition done by detritivores and by microbial organisms in the streams," Cardinale said. "We saw that in the litter enclosed by fine mesh bags that couldn't be accessed by aquatic insects or crustaceans, much less decomposition took place."

That indicates that bacteria and fungi alone likely can't accomplish the amount of decomposition needed in stream ecosystems, he added.

"When we excluded these animals, we saw a huge drop in decomposition rates, which means other organisms didn't compensate for them," Cardinale said. "When the detritivores were excluded, simulating extinction, we lost way more than 50% of the decomposition in the streams."

In findings recently published in Nature Communications, the researchers noted that streams with an abundance of detritivores had the highest rates of decomposition. They reported that the relationship between detritivore diversity and decomposition was stronger in tropical areas than in temperate areas and absent in boreal areas, and that abundance and biomass were important in temperate and boreal areas, but not in tropical areas.

According to the research team, the study results suggest that litter decomposition likely is being altered by detritivore extinctions and that these effects are particularly strong in tropical areas, where detritivore diversity already is relatively low and some environmental stressors are particularly prevalent.

Some of the study results are not surprising, Cardinale suggested. The abundance and size of detritivores are known to have a very strong impact on decomposition. So, streams that have more of them -- or that have larger invertebrates, such as big crabs and shrimp -- have more decomposition.

"But what was a surprise is that we also found that the diversity, the number of different species that were in streams, was one of the most dominant predictors of decomposition," he said. "And between abundance, body size and diversity, we could explain 82% of all of the global variation in decomposition. That means as these animals go extinct, we're going to lose the ability to decompose and recycle biologically essential materials that other organisms require for survival and growth."

ABINGTON, Pa. -- Counterfeit dominance decreases Anglo-American, but not Asian, consumers' quality perception and purchase intention of authentic brands, according to a team of researchers.

"Counterfeit dominance is the perception that counterfeit products possess more than 50% of market share," Lei Song, assistant professor of marketing at Penn State Abington, said. "Counterfeit dominance is a phenomenon especially concerning for the luxury fashion industry as counterfeit luxury fashion brands account for 60% to 70% of the $4.5 trillion in total counterfeit trade and one-quarter of total sales in luxury fashion goods."

Lei and his team conducted four behavioral experiments with 149 participants on Mturk to test their hypotheses.

The results show that counterfeit dominance negatively affects the quality perception of authentic luxury fashion brands for Anglo-American, but not for Asian, consumers.

The study finds that Anglo-Americans are weaker in social-adjustive attitude, meaning that they are more likely to rely on outgroups such as people on the street to form their opinions. This is the reason for the unveiled cultural difference in perceived quality and purchase intention.

"Being aware of counterfeit dominance raises brand owners' concern that outgroups may consider their authentic brands as low-quality counterfeits, thus lowering their quality perception of authentic brands," Song said.

This research demonstrates that counterfeit dominance negatively affects the perceived quality and purchase intention of luxury fashion brands across product categories for Anglo-American, but not for Asian, consumers with a social-adjustive attitude underlying this difference. Therefore, counterfeit dominance has stronger negative impacts on luxury fashion brand owners' perceptions of their brands for those with a weak (Anglo-Americans), but not for those with a strong (Asians), social-adjustive attitude.

The team found that Asian consumers are stronger in social-adjustive attitude, suggesting that they are more likely to form opinions based on ingroups, such as friends, rather than outgroups. As a result, Asian brand owners' quality perception of authentic brands was less affected by counterfeit dominance.

Because quality perception strongly affects purchase intention, Song said the researchers also found that counterfeit dominance negatively affects the purchase intention of authentic luxury fashion brands for Anglo-American, but not for Asian, consumers.

To examine whether social-adjustive attitude is indeed the reason behind the unveiled cultural difference, the authors included a study about the moderating role of social-adjustive attitude. They found that the impact of counterfeit dominance on purchase intention was marginally significant among participants with a low social-adjustive attitude, but not for those with a high social-adjustive attitude towards luxury fashion brands. This suggests that a social-adjustive attitude underlies the effect of counterfeit dominance on different cultural groups' luxury fashion brand owners' purchase intention.

Counterfeit dominance effects spill over to other product categories of the same brand. The studies not only found that counterfeit dominance affects quality perception and purchase intention for the same product category -- for example, counterfeit Burberry sunglasses affect authentic Burberry sunglasses -- but also for a different product category of the same brand -- for example, counterfeit Burberry sunglasses affect authentic Burberry scarves. This indicates that the detrimental effect of counterfeit dominance in the Anglo-American culture is exponential.

The researchers made several recommendations to support luxury goods producers including reducing news of counterfeit dominance in Anglo-American culture and adopting word of mouth in Asian culture. Previous research indicates that acknowledgment of counterfeit dominance is more adverse for Anglo-American than Asian fashion brand owners.

"Luxury fashion brand manufacturers should collaborate with news and social media websites to reduce the amount of information related to counterfeiting of their luxury fashion brands and cooperate with government agencies to prevent counterfeit dominance in the Anglo-American culture. However, because Asian brand owners' perceptions of luxury fashion brands are strongly affected by their peers, luxury fashion brand manufacturers should focus increasingly on strategies such as word of mouth to influence these consumers' peers to augment the purchase of those brands," Song said.

"Thus, luxury fashion brand managers should segment their consumers by culture and develop different marketing strategies to remedy the loss of sales from counterfeit dominance," he continued.

Another area would be to focus on enhancing the quality of luxury products in Anglo-American culture and providing group discounts in Asian culture. Group discounts or buying refers to offering products and services at significantly reduced prices on the condition that a minimum number of buyers would make the purchase.

According to the researchers, luxury fashion brand manufacturers should deploy strategies such as creating advertisements that specifically focus on quality to maintain customers with an Anglo-American cultural identity. However, for customers with an Asian cultural background, providing a group discount may increase influence from these consumers' peers to purchase luxury fashion brands.

Increased labour mobility seems to have stopped the racial wage discrimination of black English football players. A new study in economics from Stockholm university and Université Paris-Saclay used data from the English Premier League to investigate the impact of the so-called "Bosman ruling", and found that racial discrimination against English football players disappeared - but not for non-EU players. The study was recently published in the journal European Economic Review.

In 1995, the so-called Bosman ruling turned the labour market for European footballers upside down, introducing a free transfer market and greatly reducing the power of the football clubs. This ruling, named after the Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman, lifted restrictions on the players' mobility based on the principle of free mobility of labour, as set out in the European Community Treaty. This decision was perceived as a fundamental shock to the system. Players in the EU were suddenly allowed to move to another club at the end of their contract without a transfer fee being paid, among other changes in the regulations for foreign football players in European leagues.

Could this abrupt change in conditions tell us something about racial discrimination on the labour market? Researchers in Economics Pierre Deschamps and José de Sousa thought so, and used the Bosman ruling to study how a change in the labour market power of firms could affect wage discrimination against black football players in the English Premier League.

"We find that wage discrimination against black English players was substantial before the Bosman ruling and then almost disappeared afterwards. Increasing labour mobility seemed to stop the clubs from being able to wage discriminate", said Pierre Deschamps, PhD in Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University.

To be able to link the wage of a football player to his performance, the researchers used a method to identify discrimination, a so-called "market-test", on data from the English Premier League. This test detects wage discrimination by comparing teams with similar wage bills, but different shares of black players in the teams. By comparing the difference in performance between these clubs before and after the Bosman ruling, they could investigate how racial wage discrimination was affected.

Before the Bosman ruling, clubs had to pay transfer fees to recruit players who were out-of-contract. The situation was similar to the non-compete clauses often found in executive contracts, and increasingly in other types of jobs. As an example, Jean-Marc Bosman refused his club's (Liege) offer of a contract extension at only 25% of his old wage, and accepted a contract from the French club Dunkirk instead. Liege set a transfer fee that was high in order to prevent the transfer and force the player to sign the contract extension.

"This was a clear case of monopsony power - a situation where firms can limit labour market competition. After the ruling, players were free to leave for other clubs once their contracts had expired." said Pierre Deschamps.

Groups with less labor mobility still face wage discrimination

This change in labour market power for football players affected the possibility of discriminating black players, according to the researchers. After the ruling, the wages were more likely to reflect the talent of the black English players. But some groups still face mobility constraints however, non-EU players who have to obtain a work permit in front of a tribunal before they are allowed to play in England.

"When we look at the post-Bosman period, we find that the only players who face wage discrimination are black non-EU players. These players are the only ones who have to face both prejudice from clubs and restrictive contracting rules. This strengthens the case that contracting rules and labour mobility are key to limiting wage discrimination" says Pierre Deschamps.

The conclusion from the study is according to the researchers, that with the right labour market conditions, wage discrimination can be counteracted - even if employers are prejudiced.

"The important take-away from the article is that prejudice does not necessarily lead to wage discrimination. Acting against prejudice, although certainly desirable, is a longer-run endeavour with uncertain results. Limiting monopsony power and increasing labour market mobility can be done right away however, and in our dataset leads to an immediate decrease in wage discrimination." said Pierre Deschamps.

More about the study

The dataset was compiled by the authors, combining detailed team sheet data from the English Premier League from 1981 to 2008 with club wage bills from audited annual accounts. This dataset was then matched to data on the skin colour of football players, determined by visual inspection of players' photographs. Since the method is based on the players' appearance, it is suitable for determining the potential basis for discrimination, because discriminators prejudge an individual based on appearances.

The market-test method involves calculating the performance of a team from its wage bill and its share of black players. The main idea behind the test is that the racial composition of the team should have no effect on performance once we take the wage bills of clubs into account, unless there is racial discrimination. The researchers apply the market-test to data from the football matches, in this case the goal difference in a match. Having more black players in a team has a significant effect on performance in the 5 years before the Bosman ruling, but none afterwards, indicating that wage discrimination has disappeared

Necessity is the father of invention, but where is its mother? According to a new study published in Science, fewer women hold biomedical patents, leading to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems affecting women.

While there are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology, the consequences extend beyond the gender gap in the labour market, say researchers from McGill University, Harvard Business School, and the Universidad de Navarra in Barcelona. Demographic inequities in who gets to invent lead to demographic inequities in who benefits from invention.

"Although the percentage of biomedical patents held by women has risen from 6.3% to 16.2% over the last three decades, men continue to significantly outnumber women as patent holders. As a result, health inventions have tended to focus more on the needs of men than women," says co-author John-Paul Ferguson, an Associate Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University.

The inventor gender gap

To determine which inventions are female-focused, male-focused, or neutral, researchers analyzed 441,504 medical patents filed from 1976 through 2010 using machine learning. They show that patented biomedical inventions created by women are up to 35% more likely to benefit women's health than biomedical inventions created by men. These patents are more likely to address conditions like breast cancer and postpartum preeclampsia, as well as diseases that disproportionately affect women, like fibromyalgia and lupus.

While inventions by women are more likely to be female-focused, such patents have been less common because so few inventors were women. In total, women were listed as co-inventors on just a quarter of all patents filed during the period.

The researchers note that female scientists are 40% less likely to commercialize their research ideas than male scientists. The causes of this gender gap are myriad, from differences in mentoring to biases in the early-stage feedback that women receive when trying to commercialize female-focused ideas.

"Our findings suggest that the inventor gender gap is partially responsible for thousands of missing female-focused inventions since 1976. Our calculations suggest that had male and female inventors been equally represented over this period, there would have been an additional 6,500 more female-focused inventions," says say co-author Rembrand Koning, an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School.

Gender bias in biomedical innovation

The results reveal that inventions by research teams primarily or completely composed of men are more likely to focus on the medical needs of men. In 34 of the 35 years from 1976 to 2010, male-majority teams produced hundreds more inventions focused on the needs of men than those focused on the needs of women.

Male inventors also tended to target diseases and conditions like Parkinson's and sleep apnea, which disproportionately affect men. Overall, the researchers found that across inventor teams of all gender mixes, biomedical invention from 1976 to 2010 focused more on the needs of men than women.

Benefits of more women inventing

The researchers also found more subtle benefits when more women invent. Female inventors are more likely to identify how existing treatments for non-sex-specific diseases like heart attacks, diabetes, and stroke can be improved and adapted for the needs of women. They are also more likely to test whether their ideas and inventions affect men and women differently: for example, if a drug has more adverse side effects in women than in men.

"Our results suggest that increasing representation should address these invisible biases," says Koning.

Researchers from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) have analysed the way citizen science is practised in Spain. The paper, produced by Carolina Llorente and Gema Revuelta, from UPF's Science, Communication and Society Studies Centre (CCS-UPF) and Mar Carrió, from the University's Health Sciences Educational Research Group (GRECS), has been published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM).

Based on the study, a series of recommendations have been put forward to improve how citizen participation in science is carried out. Firstly, they suggest efforts be stepped up regarding the training given for assessing these initiatives or the creation of multi-disciplinary teams with a broad range of knowledge areas to organise this kind of assessment. They also highlight the importance of keeping in mind the activities' reproducibility.

The aims of the study were to identify citizen science participants in Spain, define what role communication plays and analyse to what extent the key requirements for undertaking citizen science are integrated in its practice. This is the first time this aspect has been studied in Spain.

In this qualitative study researchers analysed 16 interviews with coordinators of science activities in which citizens participate, which included the active participation of individuals in different phases of a research project. This participation could consist in providing opinions, collaborating with data collection, interpreting results and/or evidence-based decision-making.

The results indicate a largely strategic participation of groups of people with traits that make them ideal for participating in certain projects (such as neighbours, patients, public administration staff, etc.). The authors also highlight captive audiences - those who participate in activities without having volunteered for them and who have no choice but to take part, such as school students, for example.

The researchers underline communication as a key tool for successful practice. Gema Revuelta explains that "efforts must be spent in the conceptualisation phase to identify the participants, the best strategies for ensuring their participation and the expected level of commitment for the project".

The selection of a strategic public is essential for an activity of this nature to work properly. Although most interviewees made reference to this, there are some who continue to view the public as a single entity. Carolina Llorente stresses that: "it makes no sense to identify the public as "general public" in this kind of activity. Efforts need to be made when designing the activity to identify which specific groups should participate".

They also analysed the level of integration of five essential key elements that form part of a citizen science activity: the findings, the level of participant contribution, participation assessment, the reproducibility of the activity and the training of the participants and facilitators. Of particular importance here is training in specific skills based on the level of citizen participation and the need to train the teams responsible for organising the activities.

Researcher Carolina Llorente explains that the resulting insight into how citizen science is being performed "gives us a starting point for proposing improvement strategies to incentivise this way of doing research".

Researchers have shown how worms learn to optimise their foraging activity by switching their response to pheromones in the environment, according to a report published today in eLife.

The findings are an important advance in the field of animal behaviour, providing new insights on how sensory cues are integrated to facilitate foraging and navigation.

Foraging food is one of the most critical yet challenging activities for animals, with food often patchily distributed and other animals trying to find and consume the same resources.

An important consideration is how long to stay and exploit a food patch before moving on to find another. Leaving incurs the cost of exploring a new territory, whereas staying put means feeding in a patch where resources are depleting. So how do animals know when to leave?

Natural habitats are usually full of chemical cues, such as pheromones from other individuals, and it is thought that pheromones help animals orientate their search for food. This means they need to know whether pheromones point to an abundant food resource, or an already exploited one. To acquire this knowledge, they need to learn from experience.

"It has been shown that bumblebees learn from the positive or negative association with pheromones acquired from their most recent feeding experience, but whether this is the case for other animals is unclear," explains first author Martina Dal Bello, Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, US. "We wanted to investigate the foraging behaviours of Caenorhabditis elegans worms because we know that they can evaluate population density inside food patches using pheromones, and that both pheromones and food availability control when the worms decide to move on to a new food resource."

The team started with a test to assess the worms' patch-leaving behaviour. Worms fed on a small patch of bacteria for about five hours, at equal distance from two spots: one a blend of pheromones and the other a non-pheromone control. The worms left the original patch at very different times; those that left early were more likely to go to the pheromone spot, whereas those that left late avoided the pheromones.

Next, they wanted to test whether these behaviours provided any survival benefits, so they developed a mathematical model to calculate the benefit to the worms of changing their preference for pheromones in a patchy environment. In the model, worms in an already occupied food patch have three choices: remain in their food patch, switch to another occupied food patch, or disperse away to an unoccupied patch. The model showed that the strategy that maximises the food eaten by a worm aligns with what they observed in the previous experiment. A fraction of worms switch at the beginning, leaving the food patch before it is depleted and following pheromones to reach another occupied patch. Then, once the food patches are depleted, all worms will disperse to find other food sources. These late leavers avoid other depleted patches by reversing their preference for pheromones, because they now associate pheromones with a depleted food patch.

So how do the worms know to reverse their preference for pheromones? To find out, the researchers kept worms in four sets of conditions: one with food and pheromones; one with pheromones but without food; one with food but without pheromones; and one without any food or pheromones. They then monitored how the worms reacted to a blend of pheromones. As anticipated, worms that spent time in the presence of both food and pheromones moved towards the pheromone blend, whereas they avoided it if they were used to the environment with pheromones but without food. As with bumblebees, the worms learn to prefer pheromones based on their recent positive or negative experience with foraging.

"Our study explains why worms tend to leave food patches at different times," explains senior author Jeff Gore, Professor of Physics at MIT. "Those that leave early are exposed to pheromones when food is abundant and have a positive association with these cues, which leads them to seek them out again. By contrast, worms that leave later when food is sparse associate pheromones with being famished, and avoid pheromones when they move away from the patch. Taken together, these results show that worms learn to adapt to sensory cues in their environment to optimise food intake during foraging."

DURHAM, N.C. -- Plant-based meat substitutes taste and chew remarkably similar to real beef, and the 13 items listed on their nutrition labels - vitamins, fats and protein -- make them seem essentially equivalent.

But a Duke University research team's deeper examination of the nutritional content of plant-based meat alternatives, using a sophisticated tool of the science known as 'metabolomics,' shows they're as different as plants and animals.

Meat-substitute manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make the plant-based product as meaty as possible, including adding leghemoglobin, an iron-carrying molecule from soy, and red beet, berries and carrot extracts to simulate bloodiness. The texture of near-meat is thickened by adding indigestible fibers like methyl cellulose. And to bring the plant-based meat alternatives up to the protein levels of meat, they use isolated plant proteins from soy, peas, and other plant sources. Some meat-substitutes also add vitamin B12 and zinc to further replicate meat's nutrition.

However, many other components of nutrition do not appear on the labels, and that's where the products differ widely from meat, according to the study, which appears this week in Scientific Reports.

The metabolites that the scientists measured are building blocks of the body's biochemistry, crucial to the conversion of energy, signaling between cells, building structures and tearing them down, and a host of other functions. There are expected to be more than 100,000 of these molecules in biology and about half of the metabolites circulating in human blood are estimated to be derived from our diets.

"To consumers reading nutritional labels, they may appear nutritionally interchangeable," said Stephan van Vliet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Molecular Physiology Institute who led the research. "But if you peek behind the curtain using metabolomics and look at expanded nutritional profiles, we found that there are large differences between meat and a plant-based meat alternative."

The Duke Molecular Physiology Institute's metabolomics core lab compared 18 samples of a popular plant-based meat alternative to 18 grass-fed ground beef samples from a ranch in Idaho. The analysis of 36 carefully cooked patties found that 171 out of the 190 metabolites they measured varied between beef and the plant-based meat substitute.

The beef contained 22 metabolites that the plant substitute did not. The plant-based substitute contained 31 metabolites that meat did not. The greatest distinctions occurred in amino acids, dipeptides, vitamins, phenols, and types of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids found in these products.

Several metabolites known to be important to human health were found either exclusively or in greater quantities in beef, including creatine, spermine, anserine, cysteamine, glucosamine, squalene, and the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. "These nutrients have potentially important physiological, anti-inflammatory, and or immunomodulatory roles," the authors said in the paper.

"These nutrients are important for our brain and other organs including our muscles" van Vliet said. "But some people on vegan diets (no animal products), can live healthy lives - that's very clear." Besides, the plant-based meat alternative contained several beneficial metabolites not found in beef such as phytosterols and phenols.

"It is important for consumers to understand that these products should not be viewed as nutritionally interchangeable, but that's not to say that one is better than the other," said van Vliet, a self-described omnivore who enjoys a plant-heavy diet but also eats meat. "Plant and animal foods can be complementary, because they provide different nutrients."

He said more research is needed to determine whether there are short-term or long-term effects of the presence or absence of particular metabolites in meat and plant-based meat alternatives.

BOSTON - A skin pigmentation mechanism that can darken the color of human skin as a natural defense against ultraviolet (UV)-associated cancers has been discovered by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Mediating the biological process is an enzyme, NNT, which plays a key role in the production of melanin (a pigment that protects the skin from harmful UV rays) and whose inhibition through a topical drug or ointment could potentially reduce the risk of skin cancers. The study was published online in Cell.

"Skin pigmentation and its regulation are critically important because pigments confer major protection against UV-related cancers of the skin, which are the most common malignancies found in humans," says senior and co-corresponding author David Fisher, MD, PhD, chief of the Department of Dermatology at MGH. "Darker-pigmented individuals are better protected from cancer-causing UV radiation by the light-scattering and antioxidant properties of melanin, while people with the fairest and lightest skin are at highest risk of developing skin cancers."

Through their laboratory work with skin from humans and animal models, the MGH researchers mimicked the natural protection that exists in people with dark pigments. In the process, they gained a fuller understanding of the biochemical mechanism involved along with their drivers, and how they might be influenced by a topical agent independent of UV radiation, sun exposure, or genetics.

"We had assumed that the enzymes that make melanin by oxidizing the amino acid tyrosine in the melanosome (the synthesis and storage compartment of the cell) are largely regulated by gene expression," explains Fisher. They were surprised to learn, however, that the amount of melanin being produced is in large part regulated by a much different chemical mechanism, one that can ultimately be traced to an enzyme in the mitochondria, the inner chamber of the cell, with the ability to alter skin pigmentation.

That enzyme is nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenase, or NNT. Researchers found that topical application of small molecule inhibitors of NNT resulted in skin darkening in human skin, and that mice with decreased NNT function displayed increased fur pigmentation. To test their discovery, they challenged the skin with UV radiation and found that the skin with darker pigments was indeed protected from DNA damage inflicted by ultraviolet rays.

"We're excited by the discovery of a distinct pigmentation mechanism because it could pave the way, after additional studies and safety assessments, for a new approach to skin darkening and protection by targeting NNT," says Elisabeth Roider, MD, previously an investigator with MGH, and lead author and co-corresponding author of the study. "The overarching goal, of course, is to improve skin cancer prevention strategies and to offer effective new treatment options to the millions of people suffering from pigmentary disorders."

A transplant of healthy gut microbes followed by fibre supplements benefits patients with severe obesity and metabolic syndrome, according to University of Alberta clinical trial findings published today in Nature Medicine.

Patients who were given a single-dose oral fecal microbial transplant followed by a daily fibre supplement were found to have better insulin sensitivity and higher levels of beneficial microbes in their gut at the end of the six-week trial. Improved insulin sensitivity allows the body to use glucose more effectively, reducing blood sugar.

"They were much more metabolically healthy," said principal investigator Karen Madsen, professor of medicine in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and director of the Centre of Excellence for Gastrointestinal Inflammation and Immunity Research.

"These patients were on the best known medications (for metabolic syndrome) and we could improve them further, which shows us there is an avenue for improvement by targeting these different pathways in the microbiome."

Sixty-one patients with a body mass index of 40 or higher completed the double-blind, randomized trial. Recruited from the bariatric surgery waitlist in Edmonton, all had metabolic syndrome, a condition that includes insulin resistance, high blood glucose, high blood pressure and other complications. It can eventually lead to diabetes.

The microbiome is all of the bugs--micro-organisms, bacteria, viruses, protozoa and fungi--found in the gastrointestinal tract. People with various diseases are known to have altered microbial contents. It is not fully understood whether microbiome changes cause disease or whether disease causes changes in the gut, but it is likely a bit of both, Madsen said. It is known that replacing unhealthy bacteria with healthy bacteria can lead to improved health.

Fecal transplants, which contain microbes from healthy stool donors, are currently used extensively for treating Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, bacterial infections, and research is underway to test their usefulness in treating other illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, mental health and metabolic disorders.

"We know that the gut microbiome affects all of these processes--inflammation, metabolism, immune function," said Madsen, who is a member of the Women and Children's Health Research Institute and is one of the University of Alberta leads for the national Microbiome Research Core (IMPACTT).

"The potential for improving human health through the microbiome is immense," Madsen said. "We are only scratching the surface at the moment."

This is the first study to show that oral delivery of fecal transplantation is effective in patients with obesity-related metabolic syndrome.

A previous study done in Europe on a small number of male patients with obesity and metabolic syndrome had shown promising results, but the transplants in that study were given through an invasive endoscopy (a tube down the throat) and the patients had milder disease.

The fecal microbial transplants in this study were from four lean, healthy donors, and were taken by mouth in a single dose of about 20 capsules prepared in a U of A lab. The capsules have no taste or odour.

The fibre supplements following the transplant were key to the success, Madsen said.

"When you transplant beneficial microbes, you need to feed them to keep them around," Madsen explained. "If you give a new microbe and you don't feed it, if you continue to eat a diet of processed foods and no fibre, then that microbe will likely die."

Our bodies do not naturally produce the enzymes needed to break down fibre, but that's what healthy bacteria in the microbiome need to live, thus the supplements. The team experimented with fermentable fibre (the kind found in beans, which produce gas) and non-fermentable fibre (essentially cellulose, found in whole grains).

"Non-fermentable fibre can change gut motility--how fast things move through--as well as acting as a bulking and binding agent that can change levels of bile acids, which could help explain our results," Madsen explained.

Madsen said the next step will be to do a longer study with more participants in multiple centres to learn how the transplant/fibre combination works and to monitor for changes in medication requirements, weight loss and other indicators. If results continue to show benefit, she said the pills could be available as a potential therapy within five years.

While scientists continue to narrow down which bacteria are the most beneficial for us, Madsen recommends we support the health of our own gut microbiome by eating fewer processed foods and more foods that contain fibre, such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

Researchers from HSE University and Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have discovered how the theta rhythm of the brain and the gender differences in attitudes to risk are linked. In an article published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, the researchers addressed which processes can be explained by knowing this connection. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.608699/full

By transmitting signals, the brain's neurons generate electromagnetic fields. The multiplicity of neurons makes these fields strong enough to be recorded on the surface of the head using magneto- and electroencephalography techniques. The resulting recording of the brain's electrical activity is divided into frequency bands -- brain rhythms, which are designated by Greek letters. We know for each one in which parts of the brain it is generated, in what state the person is in (e.g., at rest or during tasks) and what processes it may be associated with.

Existing research suggests that many differences in behaviour, including attitudes toward risk, can beat least partly explained by individual characteristics of brain activity. On average, women are known to take risks less frequently than men, and experiments have shown a correlation between willingness to take risks and differences in the strength of right and left frontal lobe theta rhythms (frontal theta asymmetry). However, these studies either included only or mostly women, and it remains unclear whether the asymmetry of theta rhythms actually contributes to gender differences in risk-taking.

The authors of the new article set three objectives:

The first was to determine whether there is a correlation between risk attitudes and frontal theta asymmetry in a sample with more or less equal numbers of male and female subjects.

The second was to test whether the combined strength of the theta rhythms of both frontal lobes is associated with behaviour under uncertainty (there is already evidence for this).

The third was to determine whether the neuronal oscillations generated in the anterior cingulate cortex (an area of the brain involved in error monitoring and possibly linked to gender differences in decision-making) correlate with risk-taking.

Thirty-five people took part in the experiment; of these, 15 participants were women. Each participant was asked to undergo a magnetoencephalography and three tests measuring risk-taking and impulsivity. The first test involved selecting a number of boxes (out of 100), each of which offered a monetary reward, but if one of the selected boxes contained a 'bomb', the participants lost all their earnings. Each participant was given 30 attempts. The second and third tests were questionnaires: the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale showed how a person assessed his or her own ability to plan and exhibit self-control, while the Domain-Speci?c Risk-Taking Scale (DOSPERT) showed how willingly a person agreed to a particular risk-taking action and how he or she assessed the possible gains and losses arising from it.

In the boxes test, men showed a higher risk appetite than women (an average of 48 boxes opened versus 40; participants chose fewer boxes on their first try -- 44 and 31 out of 100, respectively). Of the questionnaires, only the DOSPERT Benefits scale yielded a similar result (men are more optimistic about the positive outcome of a risky venture); the other tests showed no gender differences. The frontal theta asymmetry was not significantly related to the number of boxes selected in the sample -- a positive correlation was evident only among women. The strength of the frontal theta rhythms (and especially the oscillations localized in the anterior cingulate cortex) correlated with results of the game, as well as with subjective assessments of benefits and losses from risky behaviours.

Thus, the researchers suggest that individual variability in the strength of theta rhythms in the anterior cingulate cortex is related to gender differences in assessing the consequences of risky actions and, consequently, attitudes toward risk. It is likely that both the activity of this brain region and risk-taking are influenced by hormone levels such as testosterone.

'Gender differences in weighing of the potential consequences of decisions may not only affect risk-taking, but also reflect a more fundamental process of emotional responsiveness to environmental stimuli. We speculate that such differences related to hormonal regulation may also influence the prevalence of depression, anxiety and other clinical conditions among women, and we will continue to explore this topic,' concluded Maria Azanova, the lead author of the article.

"Plant a hundred kinds of crops"

Wangjinzhuang village is nestled amongst the steep slopes of the South Taihang Mountains in Hebei Province, China. To prosper in the northern climate, the villagers have developed a tried-and-true strategy: "using the land to plant a hundred kinds of crops and not rely on the sky". Their fields contain red millet, white sorghum, purple and green eyebrow beans, and yellow radishes. Having survived for over a thousand years, this agrobiodiversity is a vibrant cornerstone of the village's agricultural heritage that is too precious to lose.

In an effort to combat dwindling crop diversity across China (the Ministry of Agriculture found that of 11,590 grain crop varieties planted in the country in 1956, only 3,271 varieties remained in 2014), the government has bolstered its system of national genebanks, plus issued recent policy recommendations. These are making positive steps towards large-scale conservation; however, there has been relatively little attention given to the role of the country's 260 million farmers who have saved, used, and contributed to the evolution of diverse, local crops for centuries.

The services provided by China's community seedbanks have been documented for possibly the first time by an article recently published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. 27 seedbanks were surveyed to understand their ability to meet a wide range of needs, with positive implications for climate resilience, improved farmer livelihoods, and increased food security.

Seedbanks the Chinese way

The seedbank at Wangjinzhuang village, one of the case studies covered by the article, has quickly grown since its establishment in 2019 by a local farmers' association. Now run by 43 members, 26 of whom are women, the seedbank holds viable samples over a hundred crop varieties, including essential grains such as millets and 82 traditional varieties. Members have organized multiplication plots and stipulate that for 1 kg of seeds withdrawn, 1.5 kg must be returned. This, combined with the guidance of plant breeders and a farmer field school, ensures a future supply of seeds that continue to evolve to meet local environmental conditions.

Elsewhere, in Jiangsu Province (a region with 6,000 years of rice paddy culture), economic development and large-scale agriculture have depleted many aquatic crops. But, spurred by increased consumer demand for sustainable and healthy foods, farmers have begun to turn back towards more diverse traditional rice varieties such as Suyunuo, an aromatic sticky rice that had been abandoned for over two decades. This 'lost' crop diversity is being reintroduced at an organic farm backed up by community seed banking. The community seedbank facilitates farmer-to-farmer exchange of seed and brings new diversity to the area through samples obtained from a regional public genebank. However, farmers realized that they no longer knew how to cultivate Suyunuo for the best results. Only by collaborating with public research institutes is it possible for farmers to re-adapt the crop to match new environmental conditions and consumers' interests.

Article author Dr. Yiching Song from the Chinese Academy of Sciences spearheaded the Farmer Seeds Network, a national initiative that organized many seedbanks. She reflects: "Community seedbanks encourage seed and knowledge exchange within and among rural communities, between rural communities and the formal conservation and seed sectors; and add value to local crop diversity through new linkages with markets and cities."

Growing seedbanks across China and beyond

Researchers emphasize the need for policies to recognize the complementary role of community seedbanks within the national conservation system and standardize processes for seed storage and benefit-sharing. Dr. Song notes that a formal system of incentives and rewards would, "encourage farmer communities to establish community seedbanks and work together with plant breeders and other researchers to take care of our country's rich agrobiodiversity."

Further support to develop seedbanks can come through organized training. Ronnie Vernooy is a scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, which was part of the establishment of China's first-ever community seedbank in 2010. Since then, he says, "The Farmer Seeds Network, using our training handbooks developed for facilitators and farmers, has done remarkable work enabling farmers to open new community seedbanks across China. This is an important and exciting step in building more resilient seed systems."

Takeaways:
* China's wealth of crop biodiversity has been steadily disappearing.
* This can be addressed by community seedbanks, which build on a long tradition of farmer seed saving.
* Policy support and training can ensure that seedbanks are best equipped to conserve biodiversity and provide additional value for farmers.