Tech

Patricia Bernal, a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Department of Microbiology of the University of Seville's Faculty of Biology, is working with the bacterium Pseudomonas putida, a biological control agent found in the soil and in plant roots and which, as such, has the ability to protect plants from pathogen attacks (organisms that cause diseases) also known as phytopathogens. Specifically, the US researcher is studying a molecular weapon that bacteria use (Type VI Secretion System or T6SS) to eliminate their competitors.

The T6SS could be compared to a harpoon with a poisonous tip that bacteria throw at their enemies to annihilate them. In a recent paper, which has just been published in the scientific journal PNAS and for which Patricia Bernalworked with researchers from Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Texas at Austin (USA), the authors describe a new assembly model of this bacterial machinery that allows it to be articulated very quickly and triggered instantaneously.

Knowledge of this protection mechanism at the molecular level is essential to optimise the biocontrol processes that will enable us to transition towards more sustainable agriculture. "Microorganisms have the answer to reconcile humans with nature. Among other things, biocontrol agents will allow us to move towards a form of agriculture that respects the environment and the health of animals and people," says Bernal.

In a previous study, the US researcher already described the T6SS as one of the key mechanisms used by P. putida to eliminate phytopathogens and for crop protection.

WASHINGTON, March 22, 2021 -- What's better at finding a hidden bomb -- a dog or an electronic chemical detector? In this episode, the Reactions team travels to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to find out: https://youtu.be/TRwqOFHOjac.

Study taken throughout the pandemic shows those who feel government should be less controlling believe COVID-19 poses less risk, which in turn was associated with the adoption of fewer protective behaviours

"A fearful population is not necessarily desirable... people may be underestimating or overestimating the actual risk at different times."

People's politics and values are exerting a bigger influence on how much of a threat they feel from COVID-19 compared to objective indicators such as the number of confirmed cases.

That's the finding of a new University of Cambridge survey which measured how attitudes to the coronavirus have varied over the course of 10 months of the pandemic for more than 6,000 UK residents.

Published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Risk Research, the results show that throughout 2020, UK inhabitants' perception of the risk from COVID-19 moved up and down as the pandemic waxed and waned.

However, what remained consistent was that beliefs and other psychological factors - rather than numbers of cases - had the greatest effect on the perceived risk, which in turn was associated with people's willingness to adopt protective health behaviours.

People with a lower perception of the risk of the virus included:

more politically right-wing or conservative individuals

those who thought the government should interfere less.

However, people with a higher trust in government and greater confidence in the country's actions to limit its spread, also had a lower risk perception of COVID-19.

People with a higher risk perception of the virus included:

those who place greater importance on doing things for the benefit of others and society

people who have greater confidence in how an individual's actions can limit the spread

citizens who have higher trust in scientists and medical professionals

On average, women were more concerned. Naturally, those who reported to have had an experience with the virus were also more worried about its risks too.

Of these factors, the three most important determinants were the extent to which people thought the government should intervene in society, their feelings of personal ability to stop the spread, and their tendencies to do things for the benefits of others. Trust in science ranked fourth and gender fifth.

Lead researchers, Dr Claudia R. Schneider and Professor Sander van der Linden state the findings should impact upon how the UK public is communicated to about the risk of the coronavirus.

"Although risk communicators may be tempted to try to increase perception of the risk of COVID-19 as a means of ramping up greater protective behaviour in the population, we caution that a fearful population is not necessarily a desirable endpoint. Risk is a feeling and changes over time - public perception may be underestimating or overestimating the actual risk at different times," Dr Schneider, from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, explains.

"Risk communicators can benefit from these insights about the key factors that drive people's psychological reactions to the pandemic in their development of risk communication strategies."

The team at Cambridge surveyed UK occupants about their risk perception of the virus and the health protective measures they adopted, such as wearing face masks or social distancing.

The samples, taken in March, May, July and September 2020, and January 2021, were balanced for age, gender and ethnicity.

The researchers found that although risk perception varied over time, it was consistently and positively correlated with the adoption of health protective behaviours.

Such behaviours increased between March 2020 and January 2021, and the association between risk perception and behaviour was stronger in January 2021 than in March and May 2020.

Professor van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, says: "Our results suggest that people's values, worldviews and sense of personal efficacy, play a larger role for risk perception compared to more 'objective' and cognitive factors, such as personal knowledge and COVID-19 case reports. Importantly, these conclusions remain robust over time for the UK."

Limitations of the research includes not being able to assess whether risk perception drives behaviour or vice versa (or both) due to the correlational nature of the studies, and the team did not repeatedly survey the same individuals.

The authors stress the importance for future research to paint a more complete picture of why some people take up public health advice and others don't to help devise evidence-based communication strategies.

Crystals inherently possess imperfections. Vacancies, as the simplest form of point defects, significantly alter the optical, thermal, and electrical properties of materials. Well-known examples include colour centres in many gemstones, the nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond, vacancy migration in solid-state batteries, and the metal-insulator transition in phase-change materials. The vacancies in these cases are in frame-works with no or weak interactions. However, the role of vacancies in strongly correlated materials is thus far unclear due to the lack of an ideal prototype.

Strongly correlated vacancy ordering has long been anticipated to harbour exotic physics, such as superconductivity. The K-Fe-Se superconductor has been a hot research subject in recent studies for an important reason, viz., the existence of an insulating iron-vacancy-ordering phase. However, this vacancy-ordering phase has been proven to coexist with the superconducting phase at the nanoscale, and is not responsible for the superconductivity. Whether correlated vacancies could become a new type of superconducting parent phase is an unanswered question. Iridates, with comparable and competing energy scales of the on-site Coulomb repulsion, crystal field and spin-orbit coupling, are a platform of rich structures and physical properties.

Recently, a joint research team from Yanpeng Qi group from ShaihaiTech University and Hosono group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, discover an unprecedented vacancy state in Ir16Sb18, forming an extended buckled-honeycomb-vacancy (BHV) ordering. Superconductivity emerges by suppressing the BHV ordering through squeezing of extra Ir atoms into the vacancies or isovalent Rh substitution. The phase diagram reveals the superconductivity competes with the BHV ordering, which ranks it as the first superconducting parent phase with correlated vacancies. Further theoretical calculations suggest that this ordering originates from a synergistic effect of the vacancy-formation energy and Fermi surface nesting with a wave vector of (1/3, 1/3, 0). The buckled structure breaks the crystal inversion symmetry and can mostly suppress the density of states near the Fermi level. This study suggests that the ordered vacancy can be a new degree of freedom for the manipulation and study of quantum materials. Further investigation of how the vacancy intertwines with other conventional degrees of freedom like lattice, spin and orbital, and their influence towards the properties of the materials will be fascinating and hold promise for novel discoveries in physics.

El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a recurring climate phenomenon involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. It is one of the most important climate perturbations on Earth because it can change the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn, influences temperature and precipitation across the globe. Scientists have found ENSO has an impact on hydroclimate over the Tibetan Plateau but how it works, or its physical mechanism, remains unclear.

In a recently published research article in Journal of Climate, Shuai Hu, Tianjun Zhou and Bo Wu from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, explored the dynamical processes that cause the year-to-year variation of summer rainfall over the Tibetan Plateau during the developing ENSO events.

They found that the summer rainfall over the southwestern Tibetan Plateau is more sensitive to the ENSO forcing. During a developing El Nino event occurred on the tropical eastern Pacific, the southwestern Tibetan Plateau located at the Inner Eurasia usually suffer a serious drought, despite a vast distance between the two regions (about 18000 km).

According to data from different sources and the process-based analysis, the authors revealed that the anomalous advection of climatological moist enthalpy (mainly dry advection) by anomalous zonal wind induced by ENSO is responsible for the anomalous descending motions, and the suppressed rainfall over the southwestern Tibetan Plateau. In this process, the suppressed Indian summer monsoon precipitation and the tropical tropospheric Kelvin wave play a key role of intermediate bridge.

"I hope our study may help improve the prediction of rainfall changes on the Tibetan Plateau, and understand the complicated ENSO-related air-sea interaction responsible for the hydroclimate of the Tibetan Plateau." said HU.

WASHINGTON--Two-thirds of patients with chronic endocrine health problems who need close monitoring say they would like to continue with telemedicine follow-up visits after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, according to a survey that will be presented virtually at ENDO 2021, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting. Three-quarters of providers also said they want to continue with telehealth after the pandemic.

"Endocrinology clinics have significant number of patients who need long-term close follow-up for medication adjustments, symptom checks and counseling," said lead researcher Maryam Nemati, M.D., of San Joaquin General Hospital in French Camp, Calif. "Our survey found most patients felt that quality of telehealth visits both via video and phone were like in-person visits, and telemedicine is less expensive and timesaving. However, our providers felt that phone visits lack a physical examination component and therefore preferred video visits to phone visits. Given these survey results, telemedicine--particularly video visits--can be incorporated as part of follow-up visits after the COVID crisis ends."

Nemati wanted to evaluate patient and provider satisfaction with telehealth visits, which were initiated in 2020 to decrease COVID-19 transmission. The survey included 109 patients who had a telehealth endocrinology visit via video or phone call from January 2020 to May 2020. They were asked about the benefits and limitations of telehealth visits compared with in-person visits. Providers were also surveyed, and the researchers analyzed the patient no-show rate for six weeks before and after telehealth visits were implemented.

Among the patients surveyed:

65% said they would like to continue with telemedicine after the pandemic

77% stated the quality of care with telemedicine, both video and phone visits, are almost the same as an in-person visit.

45% said they liked spending less time with a telehealth visit

54% said the duration of the visit itself was about the same

54% believed they spent less money with telemedicine

90% said all their questions and concerns were addressed

37% reported no connectivity issues

25% reported technical difficulty

Among providers:

75% wanted to continue with telehealth after the pandemic

50% reported patient satisfaction as a benefit of the telemedicine

25% reported that telemedicine saves time

46% of the providers mentioned lack of physical exam

40% mentioned connection issues as the limitation for video visit

60% believed lack of physical exam is the limitation of phone visit

75% believed the quality of care is similar in video and in person visits

87% of the providers believe the quality of care is better with in-person visits than phone visits

The no-show rate decreased from 30% to 27% after the implementation of telehealth visits, the researchers found.

"Telehealth can be more efficient for both patients and providers, but there are challenges with connectivity issues, particularly for patients and community hospitals in rural areas like our hospital." Nemati said. "These issues need to be addressed, possibly through collaborations with local government and insurance companies."

WASHINGTON--An industry-supported study of an oral testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), testosterone undecanoate (TU, brand name Jatenzo) finds it is an effective, long-term treatment for men with low testosterone levels, with no evidence of liver toxicity. The findings are being presented virtually at ENDO 2021, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting.

TST is currently available in multiple modes of administration, including implantable pellets, transdermal gels and intramuscular injections.

"For many men with low testosterone levels, an oral option is preferred to avoid issues associated with other modes of administration, such as injection site pain or transference to partners and children," said lead researcher Ronald S. Swerdloff, M.D., of the Lundquist Research Institute in Torrance, California. "Before TU was approved, the only orally approved TST in the United States was methyl-testosterone, which was known to be associated with significant chemical-driven liver damage."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved TU in March 2019, and the medication was made commercially available in February 2020.

Swerdloff conducted a safety and efficacy analysis following two years of TU oral capsule administration in men with low testosterone levels. There were two parts of the study. The first study included men ages 18 to 75 with low testosterone levels who were followed for 12 months. After the first year, 86 men enrolled in the second study, which lasted for another year.

Over two years, TU kept total testosterone levels in the normal range, with a safety profile relatively consistent with other approved testosterone products. There was no evidence of liver toxicity. There were small but statistically significant increases in prostate specific antigen (PSA), a protein produced by the prostate, and hematocrit (HCT), which measures red blood cell levels. Swerdloff noted these increases are observed with other forms of TST, regardless of modes of administration. The drug had minimal effects on LDL "bad" cholesterol, while lowering HDL "good" cholesterol, as is common with other TRT formulations.

"Our study finds TU is an effective oral therapy for men with low testosterone levels and has a safety profile consistent with other approved testosterone products, without the drawbacks of non-oral modes of administration," Swerdloff said.

WASHINGTON--Children with achondroplasia, the most common form of disproportionate short stature, grow taller with trends in improved body proportions after two years of daily vosoritide treatment, a new study analysis finds. Results of the industry-sponsored study will be presented at ENDO 2021, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting.

"This is the first robust evidence of a precision therapy for achondroplasia," said the lead investigator, Ravi Savarirayan, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at Murdoch Children's Research Institute at Royal Children's Hospital in Parkville, Australia.

Achondroplasia is a genetic bone growth disorder whose characteristics include short arms and legs and an adult height typically below 4 feet, 6 inches. Medical complications of achondroplasia include spinal stenosis (narrowing of the spinal column) and spinal cord compression, bowed legs, permanently swayed lower back and sleep apnea. Treatment focuses on relieving symptoms and is often surgical. There is currently no effective treatment to increase height in these patients.

Vosoritide is an investigational drug targeting the overactive signal in the growth plate that prevents bone growth in children with achondroplasia, Savarirayan said. The goal of treatment, he added, is better medical, functional and psychosocial outcomes.

"We hope that improved height and body proportion will increase independence and alleviate some of the long-term issues, such as spinal stenosis," Savarirayan said.

A prior study in children ages 5 to 17 with achondroplasia showed that one year of daily injections of vosoritide significantly improved the participants' annualized growth velocity (AGV), which is the annual height gain, compared with a placebo, or dummy drug. The new study extends the data analysis after an additional year of continuous vosoritide treatment.

In the extension study, 61 children who had received the placebo the first year switched to vosoritide therapy, and 58 children continued vosoritide treatment for another 52 weeks. Final follow-up data were available for 108 of the 119 children.

Children who received two years' vosoritide therapy had a baseline mean AGV of 4.28 cm/year. After one year of treatment, mean AGV was 5.71 cm/year and after the second year mean AGV was 5.65 cm/year. After the second year of treatment, they also had a better height z-score, which is a measure of height relative to that of a similar population of average height.

Additionally, the children showed trends towards a better ratio of upper to lower body segments. Savarirayan said an improved body proportion often means the children can now more easily reach objects and perform self-care, such as toileting. Longer term follow-up is ongoing where additional data on quality of life, functional measures and final adult height will help to confirm the clinical relevance of these improvements in growth and proportionality.

These findings, Savarirayan said, indicate that vosoritide has persistent two-year beneficial effects on growth in children with achondroplasia.

Furthermore, the data showed that in children who received one year of vosoritide therapy after stopping placebo, growth also improved.

Vosoritide is under study in children whose growth plates are still open. They can receive the drug until they are near final adult height, which is 16 to 18 years old, according to Savarirayan. While these data are encouraging at showing a durable treatment effect up to 2 years, the long-term clinical benefits of vosoritide will likely require many more years of evaluation, and we will continue to investigate these important questions as part of the long-term follow-up portion of this study, he said.

Achondroplasia occurs in one in every 15,000 to 35,000 births, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders.

Philadelphia, March 19, 2021 - In recent years, fermented dairy foods have been gaining attention for their health benefits, and a new review published in the Journal of Dairy Science indicates these foods could help reduce conditions like hypertension (high blood pressure). A team of investigators from the Center for Food Research and Development in Sonora, Mexico, and the National Technological Institute of Mexico in Veracruz reports on numerous studies of fermented milks as antihypertensive treatments and in relation to gut microbiota modulation. They also examine the potential mechanistic pathways of gut modulation through antihypertensive fermented milks.

In addition to the impact of genetics and the environment, there is growing evidence that gut microbiota may also have an effect on the development of hypertension. In this sense, gut dysbiosis (a marked decrease in richness and diversity of the gut microbiota) has been linked to different metabolic diseases, including hypertension.

"Several studies have indicated that fermented milks may positively affect gut microbiota or provide antihypertensive effects," explained investigator Belinda Vallejo-Córdoba, PhD, of the Center for Food Research and Development. "However, few studies have shown a link between the antihypertensive effect of fermented milks and induced microbial balance (or eubiosis). Remarkably, the antihypertensive effect has been attributed mainly to ACEI peptides, and few studies have attributed this effect to gut modulation."

"New evidence suggests that antihypertensive fermented milks, including probiotics, bioactive peptides, and exopolysaccharides obtained from milk fermented with specific lactic acid bacteria, may modulate gut microbiota. Therefore, there is potential for the development of tailor-made fermented milks with gut microbiota modulation and blood pressure-lowering effects," added Vallejo-Córdoba.

The authors say that future studies are needed to help understand the antihypertensive effects of fermented milks.

Hypertension is a risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and is one of the leading causes of death globally. Gut microbiota have been found to influence intestinal development, barrier integrity and function, body metabolism, the immune system and the central nervous system. A microbial imbalance affects metabolism, which may lead to metabolic diseases like hypertension, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

A study of Japanese university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory.

"Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall," said Professor Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo and corresponding author of the research recently published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. The research was completed with collaborators from the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting.

Contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, volunteers who used paper completed the note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones.

Although volunteers wrote by hand both with pen and paper or stylus and digital tablet, researchers say paper notebooks contain more complex spatial information than digital paper. Physical paper allows for tangible permanence, irregular strokes, and uneven shape, like folded corners. In contrast, digital paper is uniform, has no fixed position when scrolling, and disappears when you close the app.

"Our take-home message is to use paper notebooks for information we need to learn or memorize," said Sakai.

In the study, a total of 48 volunteers read a fictional conversation between characters discussing their plans for two months in the near future, including 14 different class times, assignment due dates and personal appointments. Researchers performed pre-test analyses to ensure that the volunteers, all 18-29 years old and recruited from university campuses or NTT offices, were equally sorted into three groups based on memory skills, personal preference for digital or analog methods, gender, age and other aspects.

Volunteers then recorded the fictional schedule using a paper datebook and pen, a calendar app on a digital tablet and a stylus, or a calendar app on a large smartphone and a touch-screen keyboard. There was no time limit and volunteers were asked to record the fictional events in the same way as they would for their real-life schedules, without spending extra time to memorize the schedule.

After one hour, including a break and an interference task to distract them from thinking about the calendar, volunteers answered a range of simple (When is the assignment due?) and complex (Which is the earlier due date for the assignments?) multiple choice questions to test their memory of the schedule. While they completed the test, volunteers were inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which measures blood flow around the brain. This is a technique called functional MRI (fMRI), and increased blood flow observed in a specific region of the brain is a sign of increased neuronal activity in that area.

Participants who used a paper datebook filled in the calendar within about 11 minutes. Tablet users took 14 minutes and smartphone users took about 16 minutes. Volunteers who used analog methods in their personal life were just as slow at using the devices as volunteers who regularly use digital tools, so researchers are confident that the difference in speed was related to memorization or associated encoding in the brain, not just differences in the habitual use of the tools.

Volunteers who used analog methods scored better than other volunteers only on simple test questions. However, researchers say that the brain activation data revealed significant differences.

Volunteers who used paper had more brain activity in areas associated with language, imaginary visualization, and in the hippocampus -- an area known to be important for memory and navigation. Researchers say that the activation of the hippocampus indicates that analog methods contain richer spatial details that can be recalled and navigated in the mind's eye.

"Digital tools have uniform scrolling up and down and standardized arrangement of text and picture size, like on a webpage. But if you remember a physical textbook printed on paper, you can close your eyes and visualize the photo one-third of the way down on the left-side page, as well as the notes you added in the bottom margin," Sakai explained.

Researchers say that personalizing digital documents by highlighting, underlining, circling, drawing arrows, handwriting color-coded notes in the margins, adding virtual sticky notes, or other types of unique mark-ups can mimic analog-style spatial enrichment that may enhance memory.

Although they have no data from younger volunteers, researchers suspect that the difference in brain activation between analog and digital methods is likely to be stronger in younger people.

"High school students' brains are still developing and are so much more sensitive than adult brains," said Sakai.

Although the current research focused on learning and memorization, the researchers encourage using paper for creative pursuits as well.

"It is reasonable that one's creativity will likely become more fruitful if prior knowledge is stored with stronger learning and more precisely retrieved from memory. For art, composing music, or other creative works, I would emphasize the use of paper instead of digital methods," said Sakai.

A more energy-efficient method improves how an industrial gas is purified by reversing the traditional process. The concept was developed and successfully tested by scientists at Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) in Japan and colleagues. The findings were reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Acetylene is a gas used in many industries, including as a fuel in welding and a chemical building block for materials like plastics, paints, glass and resins. To produce acetylene, it first needs to be purified from carbon dioxide. Traditionally, this is done by passing the acetylene/carbon dioxide gaseous mixture through a material. Carbon dioxide weakly interacts with the material and so passes through, while acetylene reacts strongly and becomes attached to it. The problem is that the subsequent removal of acetylene from the material takes several energy-consuming steps.

Scientists have been looking for ways to reverse this process, so that acetylene becomes the gas that passes through the material and carbon dioxide is held back. But so far, this has been very challenging.

"A problem is that both gases have similar molecular size, shape and boiling points," explains iCeMS chemist Susumu Kitagawa, who led the study. "Adsorbents that favour carbon dioxide over acetylene do exist but are rare, especially those that work at room temperature."

Kitagawa, iCeMS materials chemist Ken-ichi Otake and their colleagues improved carbon dioxide adsorption of a crystalline material called porous coordination polymers by modifying its pores. The team anchored amino groups into the pore channels of two porous coordination polymers. This provided additional sites for carbon dioxide to interact with and attach to the material. The additional interaction site also changed the way acetylene bound to the material, leaving less space for acetylene molecule attachment. This meant that more carbon dioxide and less acetylene was adsorbed compared to the same material that did not have the amino group anchors.

These newly designed materials adsorbed more carbon dioxide and less acetylene compared to other currently available carbon dioxide adsorbents. They also functioned well around room temperature, and performed stably through several cycles.

"This 'opposite action' strategy could be applicable to other gas systems, offering a promising design principle for porous materials with high performance for challenging recognition and separation systems," says Kitagawa.

New York, NY--March 19, 2020--Columbia Engineering researchers, working with Brookhaven National Laboratory, report today that they have built designed nanoparticle-based 3D materials that can withstand a vacuum, high temperatures, high pressure, and high radiation. This new fabrication process results in robust and fully engineered nanoscale frameworks that not only can accommodate a variety of functional nanoparticle types but also can be quickly processed with conventional nanofabrication methods.

"These self-assembled nanoparticles-based materials are so resilient that they could fly in space," says Oleg Gang, professor of https://www.cheme.columbia.edu/chemical engineering and of applied physics and materials science, who led the study published today by Science Advances. "We were able to transition 3D DNA-nanoparticle architectures from liquid state--and from being a pliable material--to solid state, where silica re-enforces DNA struts. This new material fully maintains its original framework architecture of DNA-nanoparticle lattice, essentially creating a 3D inorganic replica. This allowed us to explore--for the first time--how these nanomaterials can battle harsh conditions, how they form, and what their properties are."

Material properties are different at the nanoscale and researchers have long been exploring how to use these tiny materials--1,000 to 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair--in all kinds of applications, from making sensors for phones to building faster chips for laptops. Fabrication techniques, however, have been challenging in realizing 3D nano-architectures. DNA nanotechnology enables the creation of complexly organized materials from nanoparticles through self-assembly, but given the soft and environment-dependent nature of DNA, such materials might be stable under only a narrow range of conditions. In contrast, the newly formed materials can now be used in a broad range of applications where these engineered structures are required. While conventional nanofabrication excels in creating planar structures, Gang's new method allows for fabrication of 3D nanomaterials that are becoming essential to so many electronic, optical, and energy applications.

Gang, who holds a joint appointment as group leader of the Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials, is at the forefront of DNA nanotechnology, which relies on folding DNA chain into desired two and three-dimensional nanostructures. These nanostructures become building blocks that can be programmed via Watson-Crick interactions to self-assemble into 3D architectures. His group designs and forms these DNA nanostructures, integrates them with nanoparticles and directs the assembly of targeted nanoparticle-based materials. And, now, with this new technique, the team can transition these materials from being soft and fragile to solid and robust.

This new study demonstrates an efficient method for converting 3D DNA-nanoparticle lattices into silica replicas, while maintaining the topology of the interparticle connections by DNA struts and the integrity of the nanoparticle organization. Silica works well because it helps retain the nanostructure of the parent DNA lattice, forms a robust cast of the underlying DNA and does not affect nanoparticles arrangements.

"The DNA in such lattices takes on the properties of silica," says Aaron Michelson, a PhD student from Gang's group. "It becomes stable in air and can be dried and allows for 3D nanoscale analysis of the material for the first time in real space. Moreover, silica provides strength and chemical stability, it's low-cost and can be modified as needed--it's a very convenient material."

To learn more about the properties of their nanostructures, the team exposed the converted to silica DNA-nanoparticles lattices to extreme conditions: high temperatures above 1,0000C and high mechanical stresses over 8GPa (about 80,000 times more than atmosphere pressure, or 80 times more than at the deepest ocean place, the Mariana trench), and studied these processes in-situ. To gauge the structures' viability for applications and further processing steps, the researchers also exposed them to high doses of radiation and focused ion beams.

"Our analysis of the applicability of these structures to couple with traditional nanofabrication techniques demonstrates a truly robust platform for generating resilient nanomaterials via DNA-based approaches for discovering their novel properties," Gang notes. "This is a big step forward, as these specific properties mean that we can use our 3D nanomaterial assembly and still access the full range of conventional materials processing steps. This integration of novel and conventional nanofabrication methods is needed to achieve advances in mechanics, electronics, plasmonics, photonics, superconductivity, and energy materials."

Collaborations based on Gang's work have already led to novel superconductivity and conversion of the silica to conductive and semiconductive media for further processing. These include an earlier study published by Nature Communications and one recently published by Nano Letters. The researchers are also planning to modify the structure to make a broad range of materials with highly desirable mechanical and optical properties.

"Computers have been made with silicon for over 40 years," Gang adds. "It took four decades to push the fabrication down to about 10 nm for planar structures and devices. Now we can make and assemble nanoobjects in a test tube in a couple of hours without expensive tools. Eight billion connections on a single lattice can now be orchestrated to self-assemble through nanoscale processes that we can engineer. Each connection could be a transistor, a sensor, or an optical emitter--each can be a bit of data stored. While Moore's law is slowing, the programmability of DNA assembly approaches is there to carry us forward for solving problems in novel materials and nanomanufacturing. While this has been extremely challenging for current methods, it is enormously important for emerging technologies."

To understand the fundamental properties of an industrial solvent, chemists with the University of Cincinnati turned to a supercomputer.

UC chemistry professor and department head Thomas Beck and UC graduate student Andrew Eisenhart ran quantum simulations to understand glycerol carbonate, a compound used in biodiesel and as a common solvent.

They found that the simulation provided detail about hydrogen bonding in determining the structural and dynamic properties of the liquid that was missing from classical models. The study was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B.

Glycerol carbonate could be a more environmentally friendly chemical solvent for things like batteries. But chemists have to know more about what's going on in these solutions. They studied the compounds potassium fluoride and potassium chloride.

"The study we did gives us a fundamental understanding of how small changes to a molecular structure can have larger consequences for the solvent as a whole," Eisenhart said. "And how these small changes make its interactions with very important things like ions and can have an effect on things like battery performance."

Water is a seemingly simple solvent, as anyone who has stirred sugar in their coffee can attest.

"People have studied water for hundreds of years -- Galileo studied the origin of flotation in water. Even with all that research, we don't have a complete understanding of the interactions in water," Beck said. "It's amazing because it's a simple molecule but the behavior is complex."

For the quantum simulation, the chemists turned to UC's Advanced Research Computing Center and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Quantum simulations provide a tool to help chemists better understand interactions on an atomic scale.

"Quantum simulations have been around for quite a while," Eisenhart said. "But the hardware that's been evolving recently -- things like graphics processing units and their acceleration when applied to these problems -- creates the ability to study larger systems than we could in the past."

"How do ions dissolve in this liquid compared to water? First we had to understand what the basic structure was of the liquid," Beck said.

The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. 

Every lithium ion battery contains a solvent. Finding a better one could improve energy storage and efficiency.

"The world is moving in a sustainability direction. It's pretty clear that wind and solar will be two major contributors along with other green energy," Beck said. "But the energy generated is intermittent. So you need methods for large-scale energy storage so that if it's cloudy for two days, a city can stay running."

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Low representation of minority groups in public genomic databases may affect therapy selection for Black patients with cancer, according to new Mayo Clinic research published in npj Precision Oncology.

The researchers investigated the use of genomic databases and found that tumor mutation burden was significantly inflated in Black patients compared to White patients.

As a result of the study, clinicians who are using public genomic databases need to be aware of the potential for inflated tumor mutation burden values and how that may affect therapy selection and outcomes, especially for patients from underrepresented groups.

Clinicians use biomarkers, which are indicators of a disease or condition, to determine whether patients might benefit from immunotherapy, a type of treatment used to treat cancer. One of those biomarkers is tumor mutation burden, the number of mutations within a tumor compared to normal cells. Most of the time that tumor mutation burden is calculated, normal cells are not used, and genomic databases of mutations or algorithms are used to filter results.

The research team collected data from 701 patients who were newly diagnosed with multiple myeloma, including 575 self-reported White patients and 126 self-reported Black patients. The team analyzed DNA from patients' tumor cells and healthy cells to determine the differences. The team paired tumor and germline exome sequencing data to analyze differences between the two sources of DNA. Then they used public databases to filter mutation variants from the tumor sequencing data.

"Currently, the FDA has approved a threshold of more than 10 mutations per megabase of DNA to select patients to receive immunotherapy," says Yan Asmann., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic bioinformatician and first author of the study.

Immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (a type of drug that blocks proteins called checkpoints) helps the body recognize and attack cancer cells and has dramatically improved patient survival with many types of cancer. However, since the autoimmune toxicities with these inhibitors can be severe, it is critical to have an accurate tumor mutational burden as a biomarker to improve the ability to predict the optimal treatment for patients. Tumor mutation burden is determined by counting the number of changes in the DNA of a patient's tumor.

"Determining tumor mutation burden becomes difficult when you do not have DNA from a patient's normal cells," says Aaron Mansfield, M.D., a Mayo Clinic medical oncologist and corresponding author of the paper. "For this reason, reference genomes are used for comparisons to tumors to estimate the burden."

Based on Dr. Mansfield's experiences with patients, he was concerned that this type of approach to determining tumor mutation burden was inaccurate, especially in patients with ancestral backgrounds that are not well-represented in the reference genome databases.

"At the level of an individual patient, our findings suggest that when we sequence tumors, it is also important to sequence paired normal tissues to accurately identify differences," says Dr. Mansfield. "At the level of the research community, we need to continue to improve the representation of patients with diverse ancestral backgrounds in reference genome databases."

According to Dr. Mansfield, accurate tumor mutational burden is particularly important in cancers currently treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, including breast, bladder, cervical, colon, head and neck, liver, lung, renal cell, stomach and rectal cancers, as well as Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma and any other solid tumor that is not able to repair errors during DNA replication.

"It needs to be recognized that we performed this proof-of-principle study in patients with multiple myeloma. However, the findings of racially disparate tumor mutation burden inflation might be generalizable to all cancer types," says Dr. Mansfield.

The lack of representation of diverse backgrounds in genomic research is well-known. Of more than 60,000 people genotyped and sequenced, only 8.6% are of African ancestry, while 54.9% are of non-Finnish European ancestry.

"Many investigators around the world are looking at ways to improve the ability to select patients to receive immunotherapy," says Dr. Mansfield. "We have identified a problem with one approach and have recommended a solution for it."

In light of recent extreme climate events--from wildfires blazing through the western US to snowstorms sweeping Texas into a blackout--climate scientists and media outlets have repeatedly called out the urgency of tackling the climate crisis. But in a new study published March 19 in the journal One Earth, researchers found that emphasizing urgency alone is not enough to kindle public support for climate change policies.

"We had the impression that policymakers shy away from enacting ambitious, stringent climate policy because they're afraid of public backlash. However, if climate change communicators emphasize the urgency of addressing climate change, citizens may become supportive of quick and bold policies," says co-author Adrian Rinscheid of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. "Then we thought, 'Why don't we do a study looking at the potential effect that the perceived urgency of climate change has on people's policy support?'

To find answers, the researchers surveyed 9,911 people in Germany and the United States. The team found that people who perceive climate change to be urgent also tend to support general mitigation plans, such as long-term temperature and mitigation targets. But when it comes to personal sacrifices, such as cutting meat consumption and reducing the use of fossil-fuel-powered cars, the sense of urgency doesn't convince people to support these "high-cost" plans.

However, the researchers did find some strategies that might help policymakers advocate for ambitious climate mitigation policies. They found that giving context and information about the purpose and importance of certain policy measures can increase people's support, even for mitigation approaches imposed on consumers that require behavioral change or are costly to individuals. The researchers noted that politicians can also communicate and link the urgency of climate change to corresponding effective near-term solutions to create "quick wins."

"If the governments are open, transparent, engaging, and authentic with climate policies, people actually are more likely to follow, and the risk of public backlash is way smaller," says co-author Lukas Fesenfeld of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. "Citizens are not the main hindrance."

The researchers also found that while 80% of Germans and 64% of Americans who participated in the survey agree that climate change is already a serious problem today and for future generations, these respondents are significantly less concerned about the consequences of climate change for themselves.

"Extracted information about urgency on its own is probably unlikely to change behaviors and support," says Fesenfeld. "But living in Texas and experiencing snowy days or sitting in a cold flat because your insulation is not made for snow--these real-world experiences and emotional reactions coupled with analytical information might help." One of the team's next steps is comparing and investigating how individuals who experienced extreme climate events react to personalized messages about the urgency of climate change and how they respond to near-term solutions.

"Policymakers can and should really act more ambitiously and quickly in order to prevent the public from feeling climate change too strongly in their own lives in the near future," says Rinscheid. "Some are already experiencing the impacts."