Tech

Fuel cells that work with the enzyme hydrogenase are, in principle, just as efficient as those that contain the expensive precious metal platinum as a catalyst. However, the enzymes need an aqueous environment, which makes it difficult for the starting material for the reaction - hydrogen - to reach the enzyme-loaded electrode. Researchers solved this problem by combining previously developed concepts for packaging the enzymes with gas diffusion electrode technology. The system developed in this way achieved significantly higher current densities than previously achieved with hydrogenase fuel cells.

In the journal Nature Communications, a team from the Center for Electrochemical Sciences at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr and the University of Lisbon, describes how they developed and tested the electrodes. The article was published on 9 November 2018.

Advantages and disadvantages of gas diffusion electrodes

Gas diffusion electrodes can efficiently transport gaseous raw materials for a chemical reaction to the electrode surface with the catalyst. They have already been tested in various systems, but the catalyst was electrically wired directly to the electrode surface. "In this type of system, only a single layer of enzyme can be applied to the electrode, which limits the flow of current," says Bochum chemist Dr. Adrian Ruff, describing a disadvantage. In addition, the enzymes were not protected from harmful environmental influences. In the case of hydrogenase, however, this is necessary because it is unstable in the presence of oxygen.

Redox polymer as an oxygen protection shield

In recent years, the chemists from the Center for Electrochemical Sciences in Bochum have developed a redox polymer in which they can embed hydrogenases and protect them from oxygen. Previously, however, they had only tested this polymer matrix on flat electrodes, not on porous three-dimensional structures such as those employed in gas diffusion electrodes.

"The porous structures offer a large surface area and thus enable a high enzyme load," says Professor Wolfgang Schuhmann, Head of the Center for Electrochemical Sciences. "But it was not clear whether the oxygen protection shield on these structures would work and whether the system would then still be gas-permeable."

Applying enzymes to electrodes

One of the problems with the manufacturing process is that the electrodes are hydrophobic, i.e. water-repellent, while the enzymes are hydrophilic, i.e. water-friendly. The two surfaces therefore tend to repel each other. For this reason, the researchers first applied an adhesive yet electron transferring layer to the electrode surface, onto which they then applied the polymer matrix with the enzyme in a second step. "We specifically synthesised a polymer matrix with an optimal balance of hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties," explains Adrian Ruff. "This was the only way to achieve stable films with good catalyst loading."

The electrodes constructed in this way were still permeable to gas. The tests also showed that the polymer matrix also functions as an oxygen shield for porous three-dimensional electrodes. The scientists used the system to achieve a current density of eight milliamperes per square centimetre. Earlier bioanodes with polymer and hydrogenase only reached one milliampere per square centimetre.

Functional biofuel cell

The team combined the bioanode described above with a biocathode and showed that a functional fuel cell can be produced in this way. It achieved a power density of up to 3.6 milliwatts per square centimetre and an open circuit voltage of 1.13 volts, which is just below the theoretical maximum of 1.23 volts.

Representing a group of successful biocontrol agents for various pest fruit flies, a parasitic wasp genus remains largely overlooked. While its most recent identification key dates back to 1969, many new species have been added since then. As if to make matters worse, this group of visually identical species most likely contains many species yet to be described as new to science.

Having recently studied a species group of these wasps in Central Europe, scientists Fabian Klimmek and Hannes Baur of the Natural History Museum Bern, Switzerland, not only demonstrate the need for a knowledge update, but also showcase the advantages of modern taxonomic software able to analyse large amounts of descriptive and quantitative data.

Published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal, the team's taxonomic paper describes a new species - Pteromalus capito - and presents a discussion on the free-to-use Xper3, developed by the Laboratory of Informatics and Systematics of Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University. The software was used to create an openly available updated key for the species group Pteromalus albipennis.

The fully illustrated interactive database covers 27 species in the group and 18 related species, in addition to a complete diagnosis, a large set of body measurements and a total of 585 images, displaying most of the characteristic features for each species.

"Nowadays, advanced computer technology, measurement procedures and equipment allow more sophisticated ways to include quantitative characters, which greatly enhance the delimitation of cryptic species," explain the scientists.

"Recently developed software for the creation of biological identification keys like Xper3, Lucid or Delta could have the potential to replace traditional paper-based keys."

To put the statement into context, the authors give an example with one of the studied wasp species, whose identification would take 16 steps if the previously available identification key were used, whereas only 6 steps were needed with the interactive alternative.

One of the reasons tools like Xper3 are so fast and efficient is that the key's author can list all descriptive characters in a specific order and give them different weight in species delimitation. Thus, whenever an entomologist tries to identify a wasp specimen, the software will first run a check against the descriptors at the top, so that it can exclude non-matching taxons and provide a list of the remaining names. Whenever multiple names remain, a check further down the list is performed, until there is a single one left, which ought to be the one corresponding to the specimen. At any point, the researcher can access the chronology, in order to check for any potential mismatches without interrupting the process.

Being the product of digitally available software, interactive identification keys are not only easy, quick and inexpensive to publish, but they are also simple to edit and build on in a collaborative manner. Experts from all around the world could update the key, as long as the author grants them specific user rights. However, regardless of how many times the database is updated, a permanent URL link will continue to provide access to the latest version at all times.

To future-proof their key and its underlying data, the scientists have deposited all raw data files, R-scripts, photographs, files listing and prepared specimens at the research data Zenodo, created by OpenAIRE and CERN.

The Atacama Desert, the driest and oldest desert on Earth, located in northern Chile, hides a hyper-arid core in which no rain has been recorded during the past 500 years. But this situation has changed in the last three years: for the first time, rainfall has been documented in the hyper-arid core of the Atacama and, contrary to what was expected, the water supply has caused a great devastation among local life. This is the main conclusion of an international study, published today in Scientific Reports and entitled "Unprecedented rains decimate surface microbial communities in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert", and directed by researchers from the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), a mixed center of the Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA). These recent rains are attributed to changing climate over the Pacific Ocean.

"Our group has discovered that, contrary to what could be expected intuitively, the never-before-seen rainfall has not triggered a flowering of life in Atacama, but instead the rains have caused enormous devastation in the microbial species that inhabited the region before the heavy precipitations", explains Dr. Alberto G. Fairén.

"Our work shows that high rainfall has caused the massive extinction of most indigenous microbial species. The extinction range reaches 85%, as a result of the osmotic stress that has caused the sudden abundance of water: the autochthonous microorganisms, which were perfectly adapted to thrive under conditions of extreme dryness and had strategies optimized for the extraction of the scarce humidity of their environment, have been unable to adapt to the new conditions of sudden flooding and have died from excess water", adds Fairén.

From Atacama to Mars

This study represents a great advance to understand the microbiology of extremely arid environments. It also presents a new paradigm to decode the evolutionary path of a hypothetical early microbiota of Mars, since Mars is a hyper-arid planet that experienced catastrophic floods in ancient times.

"Mars had a first period, the Noachian (between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago), in which there was a lot of water on its surface," says Fairén. "We know this from the enormous amount of hydrogeological evidence still present in the Martian surface, in the form of ubiquitous hydrated minerals, traces of dried rivers and lakes, deltas, and perhaps a hemispheric ocean in the northern plains," explains Fairén.

Mars eventually lost its atmosphere and its hydrosphere, and became the dry and arid world we know today. "But at times during the Hesperian period (from 3.5 to 3 billion years ago), large volumes of water carved its surface in the form of outflow channels, the largest channels in the Solar System. If there were still microbial communities withstanding the process of extreme drying, they would have been subjected to processes of osmotic stress similar to those we have studied in Atacama", Fairén details.

"Therefore, our Atacama study suggests that the recurrence of liquid water on Mars could have contributed to the disappearance of Martian life, if it ever existed, instead of representing an opportunity for resilient microbiota to bloom again", adds Fairén.

In addition, this new study notes that large deposits of nitrates at the Atacama Desert offer evidence of long periods of extreme dryness in the past. The nitrates were concentrated at valley bottoms and former lakes by sporadic rains about 13 million years ago, and can be food for microbes. The Atacama nitrates may represent a convincing analog to the nitrate deposits recently discovered on Mars by the rover Curiosity (and reported in a 2015 study entitled "Evidence for indigenous martian nitrogen in solid samples from the Curiosity rover investigations at Gale crater", in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Earlier this year, Fairén and colleagues discovered that short-term wetter environments in early Mars, occurring sporadically in a generally hyperdry early planet, explains the observed martian mineralogy.

This study, entitled "Surface clay formation during short-term warmer and wetter conditions on a largely cold ancient Mars", was published in February in Nature Astronomy. "These long periods of dryness, followed by short-term wetter conditions, may also be in the origin of the nitrate deposits on Mars", concludes Fairén.

A balanced production of pro and anti-inflammatory cytokines at two years of age protects against clinical malaria in early childhood, according to a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by "la Caixa" Foundation. The results also indicated that early exposure to the parasite does not affect the risk of developing the disease, although it could affect the parasite-specific immune response later in life.

Malaria particularly affects children under five years of age, who need to develop effective immunity against the most severe forms of the disease. Certain parasite-specific antibodies are known to protect, but little is known about the protective role of mediators (cytokines) produced by cells of the immune system. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the timing of first parasite exposure during infancy affects the secretion of such cytokines.

In this study, Carlota Dobaño and her team evaluated whether the cytokines produced in the first two years after birth affect the risk of subsequent malaria. They also analysed whether the timing of parasite exposure alters the cytokine response. The study included over 300 newborns from Magrara, a village in Southern Mozambique, who received - or not- preventive malaria treatment during their first year of life. Cytokine production by blood cells was measured at different time-points during the first two years, and the participants were followed up for clinical malaria until four years of age.

The results show that a pro-inflammatory signature (IL-1, IL-6 and TNF cytokines) followed by an anti-inflammatory (IL-10 cytokine) signature between the first and second year of life is associated with a lower risk of clinical malaria between ages 3 and 4. "This makes sense, since IL-10 suppresses excessive inflammation," explains Dobaño.

In contrast, timing of parasite exposure did not have a clinical effect: children who received preventive treatment - and were therefore exposed later to the parasite - had an altered cytokine profile, but this did not reduce the risk of developing malaria in the following two years. "Preventive malaria treatment during the first year after birth does not decrease the risk of malaria in early childhood, but it could be relevant later in life by influencing the development of parasite-specific immunity," adds the ISGlobal researcher.

Scientists from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), developed a way to objectively evaluate the novelty and impact of plethora of microbiomes in the vast universe of microbiome big-data, based on an innovative tool called Microbiome Search Engine (MSE). These inventions, published in mBio, are the compasses guiding mankind's exploration in the vast universe of microbiome big-data.

Microbiomes, microbial societies that colonize almost every corner of our planet, are pivotal to human health, indoor environment, air, soil, as well as the ocean, and shape these ecosystems' past, today and destiny.

To unravel their secret in benefiting our body and biosphere, a series of large, globally coordinated microbiome sequencing projects have been launched since 2010, such as the Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) and the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). These have led to an ongoing explosion of microbiome sequences (the metagenome data), which describe the structure and function of these microbial societies.

Despite the immense volume of these data, few computational approaches are available to process and integrate them. In particular, it is difficult to relate a new microbiome sample to the huge number of existing microbiome samples.

"MSE to microbiome big-data is like Google or Baidu to webpage big-data. By searching for the most structurally or functionally similar microbiomes in a super-fast manner, MSE offers the first opportunity to relate each microbiome ever published to the microbiome big-data known to mankind so far," said SU Xiaoquan, Lead of the Bioinformatics Group at Single-Cell Center, QIBEBT.

In databases of 100 thousand to 1 million microbiomes, MSE is up to three orders of magnitude faster in searching for the closest neighbors of a microbiome in terms of structure, compared with existing strategies (pairwise comparisons).

"MSE makes comparison of microbiome at the global scale possible, enabling a bird's eye view of microbiome data universe," said SU Xiaoquan.

Taking advantage of MSE, a search-based approach for in-depth mining of microbiome big-data was established. Two innovative evaluation indices including Microbiome Novelty Score (MNS) and Microbiome Attention Score (MAS) were proposed.

MNS evaluates the compositional uniqueness of a microbiome sample at the time of its birth. MAS quantifies the scientific attention devoted to the microbiome by counting the number of close neighbors of the microbiome. Microbiome Focus Index, or MFI, which is derived from MNS and MAS, can measure the impact and contribution of a microbiome sample to mankind's exploration for novel microbiomes.

"Microbiome samples with extraordinary MFI are samples that were born with high novelty and then attracted a lot of follow-up scientific investigation," said XU Jian, director of the Single-Cell Center, QIEBET.

"Therefore, MNS, MAS and MFI serve as one objective way to measure the novelty and impact of a sample, a project, a scientist or a research area; these so called 'alt-metrics', which are based on the 'data' themselves, are fundamentally different from the conventional ways of assessing research impact such as the citation numbers or the Impact Factor, which are subject to human judgments and thus can be biased or skewed."

Using MSE, the team predicts the "sleeping beauty" microbiomes, i.e., published microbiome samples that are still very novel in structure at present yet are destined to attract a lot of scientific attention in the next several years, based on temporal growth of their MAS.

These "sleeping beauties" are mainly from marine environments and mother-baby interactions. Thus, data mining, made possible by MSE, can help the scientific community and the funding agencies decide the research areas with the highest potential in generating high-novelty and high-impact microbiome data.

"We envision that such search against the microbiome database will be an important first step for data analysis at various scales in microbiome studies, just as a BLAST search is essential and universal in sequence analysis studies today," said Rob Knight, Director of Center for Microbiome Innovation, University of California at San Diego.

"This work is of great interest to the microbiome research community and is broadly useful to explore available amplicon datasets," commented by Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh from DOE Joint Genome Institute, who is not related to this study.

As one of the first big-data mining tools introduced by Chinese scientists in the Earth Microbiome Project, MSE will support ongoing mining of the immense datasets being generated by EMP as well as the CAS Microbiome Project.

Higher resolution display electronic devices increasingly needs ultra-fine pitch assemblies. On that account, display driver interconnection technology has become a major challenge for upscaling display electronics.

Researchers have moved to one step closer to realizing ultra-fine resolution for displays with a novel thermoplastic anchoring polymer layer structure. This new structure can significantly improve the ultra-fine pitch interconnection by effectively suppressing the movement of conductive particles. This film is expected to be applied to various mobile devices, large-sized OLED panels, and VR, among others.

A research team under Professor Kyung-Wook Paik in the Department of Materials developed an anchoring polymer layer structure that can effectively suppress the movement of conductive particles during the bonding process of the anisotropic conductive films (ACFs). The new structure will significantly improve the conductive particle capture rate, addressing electrical short problems in the ultra-fine pitch assembly process.

During the ultra-fine pitch bonding process, the conductive particles of conventional ACFs agglomerate between bumps and cause electrical short circuits. To overcome the electrical shortage problem caused by the free movement of conductive particles, higher tensile strength anchoring polymer layers incorporated with conductive particles were introduced into the ACFs to effectively prevent conductive particle movement.

The team used nylon to produce a single layer film with well-distributed and incorporated conductive particles. The higher tensile strength of nylon completely suppressed the movement of conductive particles, raising the capture rate of conductive particles from 33% of the conventional ACFs to 90%. The nylon films showed no short circuit problem during the Chip on Glass assembly. Even more, they obtained excellent electrical conductivity, high reliability, and low cost ACFs during the ultra-fine pitch applications.

Professor Paik believes this new type of ACFs can further be applied not only to VR, 4K and 8K UHD display products, but also to large-size OLED panels and mobile devices.

His team completed a prototype of the film supported by the 'H&S High-Tech,' a domestic company and the 'Innopolis Foundation.' The study, whose first author is PhD candidate Dal-Jin Yoon, is described in the October issue of IEEE TCPMT.

A team of scientists from the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and Korea University (Republic of Korea) obtained cobalt and cobalt-iron nanosprings with unique combined magnetic properties and long-lasting elasticity that may be used to develop nanorobots, nanosensors, new types of memory, and targeted drug delivery agents (specifically, for anticancer therapy). The article was published in Nanoscale.

Nanosprings are unusual objects that were discovered several years ago. Their magnetic properties have not been studied before, partially because it is difficult to obtain the structures of such a small scale. The nanospring wire is around 50 nm in diameter, which corresponds to a chain of only 200 atoms.

"In the course of our experiments we obtained cobalt and cobal-iron nanosprings and studied their magnetic properties in detail for the first time," says Alexander Samardak, Associate professor of the Department of Computer Systems, School of Natural Sciences, FEFU.

"Apparently, these chiral nano-objects show different magnetisation reversal processes comparing to cylinder-shaped nanowires under the action of an external magnetic fields. This property may be used for their efficient control including magnetic field-driven movement."

According to the scientists, the mechanical properties of nanosprings are practically identical to those of macro-springs, which opens a range of possibilities for their use in nanotechnologies.

"Nanosprings are unique objects with peculiar physical properties. This provides for their possible use in new data storage devices, nanoelectromechanical systems, and in biomedicine. Materials like this can be used to create nanomotors, protein molecules express testing systems, transportation capsules for molecular compounds, and many other useful devices," comments Alexey Ognev, Head of the Laboratory of Film Technologies at the Department of Physics of Low-Dimensional Structures, School of Natural Sciences, FEFU.

The work was carried out within the framework of the 'Materials' priority science project implemented by FEFU. The team worked on the basis of the Laboratory of Film Technologies in collaboration with the Prof. Young Keun Kim's group from Korea University, as well as young scientists from the School of Natural Sciences, FEFU - postgraduate student Aleksei Samardak and Associate professor Alexander Davydenko.

The 'Materials' priority science project of the Far Eastern Federal University unites gifted young physicists, chemists, biologists, and specialists in material studies. They have already developed a new type of optical ceramics for ground and space optical connection, a heat-resisting material with record-setting melting temperature, and a number of other prospective projects.

It has been almost a decade since the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill. Described as the worst environmental disaster in the United States, nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil oozed into the Gulf of Mexico, severely degrading the marine ecosystem immediately surrounding the spill site and directly impacting coastal habitats along 1,773 kilometers of shoreline. About 10 million gallons remain in the sediment at the bottom of the Gulf and may continue to cause severe physiological damages to marine life, including impairment of sensory systems.

Marine fishes rely on the effective functioning of their sensory systems to survive. Despite the obvious importance of their olfactory (sense of smell) system, the impact of crude oil exposure on sensory function remains largely unexplored.

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University are the first to quantify the physiological effects of whole crude oil on the olfactory function of a marine vertebrate - the Atlantic stingray, Hypanus sabinus, an elasmobranch fish. Results of the study, published in Scientific Reports, confirm that exposure to crude oil, at concentrations mimicking those measured in coastal areas following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, significantly impaired olfactory function in the Atlantic stingray after just 48 hours of exposure. These findings suggest that exposure to crude oil could detrimentally impact fitness, lead to premature death, and cause additional cascading effects through lower trophic levels.

"Elasmobranchs are renowned for their well-developed sensory systems, which are critical to alert them of the presence of predators, prey, mates, and unfavorable environmental conditions. Any impairment of these sensory systems could have a damaging effect on their survival and fitness," said Stephen M. Kajiura, Ph.D., co- author, a professor of biological sciences in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science and director of the Elasmobranch Research Laboratory at FAU.

The work was conducted by Eloise J. Cave, as part of her master's degree in Kajiura's lab. Cave, who is now a Ph.D. student at the Florida Institute of Technology, employed an electro-physiological assay to test olfactory responses from stingrays held under clean water and oil-treated water. She found the oil exposed animals exhibited a smaller response, with a slower onset and longer duration.

"Unlike other sensory systems in which the receptor cells are not in immediate contact with the environment such as the eye, inner ear, lateral line, and electroreceptors, the chemo-sensory cells of the olfactory organ are directly exposed, through the mucus, to the seawater," said Kajiura. "As a result, environmental pollutants have the ability to directly damage the receptor cells and affect olfactory function."

Although this study focused on a shallow water, coastal species, deep-water elasmobranch species may be highly susceptible to crude oil exposure. The researchers caution that deep-sea benthic species like skates - a type of cartilaginous fish that develop for prolonged periods in egg cases on the seafloor - in particular, could be continuously exposed to high concentrations of crude oil in the sediment throughout sensitive developmental periods. Also, because the metabolic rate of marine organisms declines significantly with temperature, and hence depth, deep-sea elasmobranch species have a much slower metabolic rate than shallow water species and therefore might metabolize crude oil much more slowly. This prolonged exposure could manifest as different or more severe results.

"Under field conditions, animals are likely to encounter variable exposure concentrations, which may be higher or lower than the concentration used in our study," said Kajiura. "This acute exposure has the potential to induce other physiological responses, potentially compounding the adverse effects of the altered olfactory function. Even if the oil does not cause immediate or direct death, sub-lethal effects could still reduce fitness or contribute to premature death."

Crude oil contains many complex organic and inorganic compounds including heavy metals such as aluminum, manganese, cobalt, copper, zinc, and mercury. Heavy metals can block sodium and calcium ion channels in the olfactory systems of teleosts - a diverse group of ray-finned fishes - resulting in reduced olfactory responses. In addition, water-soluble fractions of crude oil have caused hyperplasia, necrosis, and lesions on the olfactory epithelium. All of these physical insults may result in reduced olfactory sensitivity to chemical stimuli.

PHILADELPHIA -- Intensive behavioral therapy (IBT), which provides diet and physical activity counseling, is proven to help adults with obesity achieve meaningful weight loss in six to 12 months. A new Penn Medicine study, published today in Obesity, the journal of the Obesity Society, is the first randomized controlled evaluation of the efficacy of IBT when implemented under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage guidelines. The trial, led by Tom Wadden, PhD, a professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, and Jena Tronieri, PhD, an assistant professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, both in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that patients who received IBT lost an average of 6.1 percent of their initial body weight at one year.

Nearly 40 percent of adults in the United States were obese in 2015 and 2016, according to recently released figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Medicare beneficiaries with obesity - defined by a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or greater - are eligible to receive IBT from a qualified health professional in a primary care setting. CMS covers weekly counseling visits for the first month, and then sessions every other week for the next five months. Patients who lose 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) or more are eligible for six additional monthly sessions. Most private health insurers offer more limited coverage - if any at all - of IBT for obesity.

"Intensive behavioral counseling is a proven method for helping people modify their eating and physical activity habits and achieve significant weight loss," Wadden said. "We hope the findings from our study will encourage broader use of behavioral weight loss counseling under the CMS benefit and in other primary care settings."

In the study, 150 participants with obesity were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups - each provided distinct, one-year intervention regimens. Participants in each group received 21, individual IBT counseling sessions, as provided under the CMS coverage guidelines. In group one, participants were counseled by a physician, nurse practitioner or registered dietitian, and were instructed to consume a diet of 1200 to 1800 calories a day (based on their body weight) and to gradually increase their physical activity to 225 minutes per week. In addition to the IBT, participants in the second group received liraglutide 3.0 mg, a medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for chronic weight management. Participants in the third group received the IBT counseling, liraglutide, and a prescription for 12 weeks of daily meal replacements.

The study showed that 44 percent of the participants in the first group - those who received IBT alone - lost 5 percent or more of baseline body weight, a measure of clinically meaningful weight loss. More than 70 percent of the participants in both the second and third groups lost 5 percent or more of their baseline body weight, with an average loss of 11.5 percent and 11.8 percent of baseline weight, respectively. The significant weight loss experienced by participants who received liraglutide, in addition to IBT, is consistent with previous studies of existing weight loss medications. All three interventions also were associated with improvements in average systolic and diastolic blood pressure, waist circumference, triglycerides, symptoms of depression and other cardiovascular risk factors.

Liraglutide appears to induce weight loss, in part, by decreasing hunger and increasing the feeling of fullness after eating, according to additional data presented by Tronieri at Obesity Week, an international conference held in Nashville, Tennessee, this week. Tronieri studied a subset of patients in the larger trial and found that participants who received IBT-liraglutide, compared with IBT-alone, reported significantly greater reductions in hunger and preoccupation with food during the first 24 weeks. Tronieri's study found no significant differences between the two groups in reported appetite control at weeks 40 or 52, though IBT-liraglutide participants still maintained nearly double the weight loss.

The IBT study also revealed that participants treated by a physician or nurse practitioner lost comparable amounts of weight to the participants treated by a registered dietitian, underscoring the feasibility of educating primary care practitioners to provide this kind of therapy.

"We encourage CMS to expand the scope of practitioners who are eligible to provide IBT independently, which is currently limited to physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and nurse specialists," Tronieri said. "Registered dietitians, health counselors and nursing assistants can be trained to effectively deliver IBT, which would help expand access to this critical intervention and, ultimately, help the many Americans who struggle with obesity and its associated health complications."

Wadden and Tronieri, along with their colleagues at Penn's Center for Weight and Eating Disorders, where the study was conducted, believe their findings need to be replicated in a larger sample of participants who are treated in primary care practices - rather than in a specialized weight management clinic like Penn's.

"As we move forward, we need to assess the effectiveness and cost of providing IBT in person, versus delivering it via a digital platform - like a mobile app or online patient portal," Wadden said. "Millions of Americans could benefit from IBT, and we need to find low-cost, effective ways of getting it to them."

Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) have now found a cause for the frequent catastrophic events in the genetic material of cancer cells that have only been known for a few years: If an important DNA repair system of the cells has failed, this promotes fragmentation and defective assembly of the genetic material. Cancer cells with such a repair defect can now possibly be treated by a specific group of drugs.

Only a few years ago, scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), among others, described a new damage pattern in the genetic material of cancer cells: In a particularly aggressive type of childhood brain tumors, they discovered an unprecedented chaos in the cell nucleus: Sections of individual chromosomes were broken at innumerable points and reassembled incorrectly, so that whole parts were missing, while others were duplicated or incorporated in a wrong orientation. This chromosome catastrophe differed from all previously known genetic defects in tumors.

Scientists use the term chromothripsis to describe such a genetic disaster, which occurs in about twenty to thirty percent of all cancers. The trigger for this has so far been largely unknown. Aurelie Ernst and her team at the German Cancer Research Center have now been able to show that the failure of certain genetic repair systems is one of the causes of chromosomal chaos.

Many environmental influences, such as UV rays, damage the DNA. Cells have an arsenal of mechanisms in place to repair such defects. What happens if one of these repair systems fails? Aurelie Ernst's team tested this on genetically modified mice. In these animals, the tools used by the cell to repair broken DNA double strands were genetically switched off - specifically only in the neural precursor cells.

These mice developed malignant brain tumors (medulloblastomas and high-grade gliomas), which exhibited chromothripsis at a high frequency. The researchers noticed that this is almost always accompanied by extra copies of the Myc oncogene, which is known to be a strong driver of cell growth. "If the DNA repair is defective and Myc nevertheless stimulates the division of these damaged cells, the risk of chaos in the genome is particularly high," explains the DKFZ researcher.

Does this connection between defective genome repair and chromosome chaos also apply to human cancers? Aurelie Ernst and her team can confirm this for brain tumors, melanomas and breast cancer. The researchers also found the involvement of the cancer-promoting Myc in human tumors.

"The chromosome chaos caused by repair defects is frightening at first sight," explains Aurelie Ernst. "However, there are ways to specifically combat cancer cells harboring such defects: We can use drugs to switch off additionally another important DNA repair system. This leads to so much genetic damage that the cell is unable to survive. Healthy cells, on the other hand, which have all their repair systems, don't mind these drugs."

PARP inhibitors are already approved drugs that block a central DNA repair system. It may also be possible to develop other substances that attach to other DNA repair enzymes. "If the analysis of a patient's tumor genome reveals evidence of chromothripsis, treatment with PARP inhibitors could be a new therapeutic option in the future," explains the DKFZ researcher Ernst. "Of course, this has to be confirmed in preclinical and clinical tests.

Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan have discovered how mutations related to a group of movement disorders produce their effects. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the study found three ways in which mutations affecting the IP3R1 protein can affect the chemical balance of neurons in the brain, ultimately leading to the degeneration of motor control.

Among the many types of degenerative movements disorders, spinocerebellar ataxias are a group that result from dysfunction in the part of the brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum allows smooth and coordinated movements such as walking and speaking. Spinocerebellar ataxias come in many types with different genetic origins. Recently, a spinocerebellar ataxia with very early infantile onset (SCA29) was shown to be associated with mutations that affect the protein receptor IP3R1, which is especially common in neurons of the cerebellum. Led by Katsuhiko Mikoshiba, the group at RIKEN CBS conducted a series of experiments to determine exactly how the many different mutations related to SCA29 affect IP3R1 function within cells.

Studying mutations in IP3Rs turns out to be difficult because nearly all cells have one or more of the three types. Although other researchers have made cells lines in which all three types have been deleted, the process of introducing mutant genes into them is inefficient and time consuming. Mikoshiba and his group used CRISPR genome-editing technology to create cells in which all three IP3R genes were disrupted. Introducing mutant or wildtype IP3Rs into these cells could be done very efficiently, which allowed them to complete the study much more quickly than could have been achieved otherwise.

The team looked at over 10 different mutations related to SCA29. "Surprisingly," notes first author Hideaki Ando, "all of the SCA29 pathological mutations identified within or near the place that IP3 attaches to IP3R1 completely (not partially) blocked the calcium-releasing activity of IP3R1."

Calcium is crucial for many cell functions, including signaling between neurons. When not being used, it is stored within cells. When IP3 attaches to IP3R1, it allows calcium to pass through so it can be released from storage when needed. By blocking calcium release, the SCA29 mutations prevent calcium from being able to do its job.

The team did further tests to determine how the different mutations disrupted calcium release. They found that in 9 of 12 mutations near the binding region, IP3 was prevented from binding to the receptor.

Two other mutants indirectly affected IP3R1 activity through mutations affecting the binding site of another protein--CA8. Normally when CA8 binds to the receptor, calcium release is suppressed. However, in the mutants, calcium release was higher than normal. CA8 mutations have also been identified in people with congenital ataxia and mental retardation. The team of scientists investigated how these mutations affected calcium flow through IP3R1, and found that they also prevented normal suppression of calcium release.

Understanding these molecular details mutations in IP3R1 is important for developing effective treatments. Ando explains, "Now we know that spinocerebellar ataxias can result from both suppressed or enhanced calcium release though the IP3 type 1 receptor. Therefore, drug development that enhances or inhibits IP3R1 activity may lead to effective treatments for these disorders. In fact, development of IP3R1 agonists or antagonists should benefit from our previous research in which we revealed the crystal structure of IP3R1."

Aurora, Colo. (Nov. 12, 2018) - Children's Hospital Colorado (Children's Colorado) pediatric gastroenterologist, Michael Narkewicz, MD, recently shared results of the Prospective Study of Ultrasound to Predict Hepatic Cirrhosis in Cystic Fibrosis (PUSH), which sought to determine if liver ultrasounds could identify children and adolescents with cystic fibrosis who are at greater risk of developing advanced liver disease. The Cystic Fibrosis Liver Disease Network PUSH study is a multicenter prospective observational clinical trial that tested the hypothesis that a heterogeneous pattern (i.e., not totally uniform) on a liver ultrasound predicts the subsequent development of cirrhosis, late advanced stage of scarring (fibrosis) of the liver. Dr. Narkewicz presented the study results at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference after four years of research that was funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Advanced liver disease is a complication that affects about seven percent of all individuals with cystic fibrosis and is the third leading cause of death in cystic fibrosis. Primarily, this is a complication that affects children and adolescents, with 10 years of age marking the average age of diagnosis. To date, there is no test that can identify children at risk for developing advanced liver disease.

The team enrolled 744 children and adolescents with cystic fibrosis who did not have known advanced liver disease. All subjects underwent a research ultrasound of the liver that was scored by four independent study radiologists. Those with a heterogeneous ultrasound pattern of the liver and two matched controls with a normal pattern received follow-up ultrasounds every other year.

At the end of four years of follow-up, the team found that individuals with heterogeneous ultrasound patterns had a 9.3 times increased risk of developing advanced liver disease. 25% of the individuals with a heterogeneous pattern developed advanced liver disease within four years.

"This is the first study to identify a tool to classify a group of children and adolescents with cystic fibrosis who are at high risk for developing advanced liver disease," said Dr. Narkewicz. "This is an important discovery that provides an opportunity to continue testing interventions that might slow or stop that progression. This also might have relevance for screening in routine clinical care."

Dr. Narkewicz and his team are further refining the prediction model using lab tests and other innovative diagnostic tests that are part of the ongoing network studies. This sets up the possibility of designing trials for interventions to try to prevent the development of advanced liver disease in more cystic fibrosis patients.

Researchers at the Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) achieved a major breakthrough in shielding the quantum properties of single atoms on a surface. The scientists used the magnetism of single atoms, known as spin, as a basic building block for quantum information processing. The researchers could show that by packing two atoms closely together they could protect their fragile quantum properties much better than for just one atom.

The spin is a fundamental quantum mechanical object and governs magnetic properties of materials. In a classical picture, the spin often can be considered like the needle of a compass. North or south pole of the needle, for example, can represent spin up or down. However, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the spin can also point in both directions at the same time. This superposition state is very fragile since the interaction of the spin with the local environment causes dephasing of the superposition. Understanding the dephasing mechanism and enhancing the quantum coherence are one of the key ingredients toward spin-based quantum information processing.

In this study, published in the journal Science Advances in November 9, 2018, QNS scientists tried to suppress the decoherence of single atoms by assembling them closely together. The spins, for which they used single titanium atoms, were studied by using a sharp metal tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and the atoms' spin states were detected using electron spin resonance. The researchers found that by bringing the atoms very close together (one million times closer than a millimeter), they could protect the superposition states of these two magnetically-coupled atoms 20 times longer compared to an individual atom. "Like a phalanx, the two atoms were able to protect each other from external influences, better than on their own." said Dr. Yujeong Bae, researcher at QNS and first author of the study. "In that way the entangled quantum states we created were not affected by environmental disruptions such as magnetic field noise".

"This is a significant development that shows how we can engineer and sense the states of atoms. This allows us to explore their possibility to be used as quantum bits for future quantum information processing.", added Prof. Andreas Heinrich, director of QNS. In future experiments, the researchers plan to build even more sophisticated structures in order to explore and improve the quantum properties of single atoms and nanostructures.

For the first time, plastic microfibers have been discovered in wild animals' stool, from South American fur seals. The findings were made by a team of Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the University of Georgia, who suggest examining scat from pinnipeds can be an efficient way to monitor environmental levels of microfibers and microplastics in the environment. Their study was published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.

"It's no secret that plastic pollution is one of the major threats to marine ecosystems, but we're learning now just how widespread that problem is," said Dr. Mauricio Seguel, a research fellow at the University of Georgia. "These samples are invisible to the naked eye. We want to understand factors that are driving their distribution and what this means for animals in the Southern Hemisphere."

The team examined the scat of 51 female South American fur seals on the remote Guafo Island, in southwestern Chile, from December 2015 to March 2016. Each sample's inorganic material was dissolved in a solution in a lab, leaving only the microscopic, plastic particles to be analyzed. Researchers then found 67 percent of the samples showed a remarkable abundance of microfibers, which until now had only been reported in animals fed in captivity.

Microplastics are plastic fragments smaller than 5 millimeters. Microfibers are the least studied form of microplastic. They are small hairs of plastic, less than 1 millimeter in size, from materials such as polyester or nylon and can end up in the ocean through waste water after cleaning, no matter how thorough the treatment. They also can absorb a wide array of pollutants.

The researchers believe the microfibers arrived at Guafo Island through changing ocean currents, before being consumed by plankton and continuing up the food chain through fish and, finally, to the seals. There isn't enough evidence to determine if microfibers have any adverse effects on mammals, but some studies have indicated morphological changes in fish.

Scat analysis, the team noted, could be a good tool to monitor the exposure of marine mammals to plastics as it's effective and non-invasive, poses no danger to either the researcher or the animal, and it's easy to identify both fur seals and their feces. Dr. Seguel says his colleagues are conducting similar, follow-up tests in other parts of South America.

"It's not too late to act to heal our oceans, but one of the first steps is determining how much we have damaged the ecosystem through our activities, like producing and disposing of plastic," said Dr. Kelly Diehl, Morris Animal Foundation Interim Vice President of Scientific Programs. "Studies like these will help us learn those answers so we can begin to make better decisions for the health of marine life."

Morris Animal Foundation has funded other fur seal studies at Guafo Island with Dr. Seguel's team. One found that factors that contributed to a die-off of South American fur seal pups included mites, pneumonia and changing sea surface temperature. In another, researchers discovered hookworms feed at a constant rate on their seal pup hosts before they produce eggs and die, a strategy which also often kills the pups as well.

A team of more than 100 scientists has assessed the impact of global warming on thousands of tree species across the Amazon to discover the winners and losers from 30 years of climate change. Their analysis found the effects of climate change are altering the rainforest's composition of tree species but not quickly enough to keep up with the changing environment.

The team, led by University of Leeds in collaboration with more than 30 institutions around the world, used long-term records from more than a hundred plots as part of the Amazon Forest Inventory Network (RAINFOR) to track the lives of individual trees across the Amazon region. Their results found that since the 1980s, the effects of global environmental change - stronger droughts, increased temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - has slowly impacted specific tree species' growth and mortality.

In particular, the study found the most moisture-loving tree species are dying more frequently than other species and those suited to drier climates were unable to replace them.

Lead author Dr Adriane Esquivel Muelbert, from the School of Geography at Leeds, said: "The ecosystem's response is lagging behind the rate of climate change. The data showed us that the droughts that hit the Amazon basin in the last decades had serious consequences for the make-up of the forest, with higher mortality in tree species most vulnerable to droughts and not enough compensatory growth in species better equipped to survive drier conditions."

The team also found that bigger trees - predominantly canopy species in the upper levels of the forests - are outcompeting smaller plants. The team's observations confirms the belief that canopy species would be climate change "winners" as they benefit from increased carbon dioxide, which can allow them to grow more quickly. This further suggests that higher carbon dioxide concentrations also have a direct impact on rainforest composition and forest dynamics - the way forests grow, die and change.

In addition, the study shows that pioneer trees - trees that quickly spring up and grow in gaps left behind when trees die - are benefiting from the acceleration of forest dynamics.

Study co-author Oliver Phillips, Professor of Tropical Ecology at Leeds and founder of the RAINFOR network said: "The increase in some pioneer trees, such as the extremely fast growing Cecropia, is consistent with the observed changes in forest dynamics, which may also ultimately be driven by increased carbon dioxide levels."

Co-author Dr Kyle Dexter, from the University of Edinburgh, said: "The impact of climate change on forest communities has important consequences for rain forest biodiversity. The species most vulnerable to droughts are doubly at risk, as they are typically the ones restricted to fewer locations in the heart of the Amazon, which make them more likely to be extinct if this process continues.

"Our findings highlight the need for strict measures to protect existing intact rainforests. Deforestation for agriculture and livestock is known to intensify the droughts in this region, which is exacerbating the effects already being caused by global climate change."