How do female whale sharks meet their perfect mates and go on to create offspring? While little is known about the reproductive behavior of those ocean-roaming giants, a newly published analysis led by University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Jennifer Schmidt reveals new information about the mating habits of this elusive, difficult-to-study fish.

The pregnant shark carried a amazingly many embryos — 304 — still in the uterus and representing a spectrum of age and development phases ranging from being still egg-encased to developed, near-term animals.

“These differently aged embryos — itself unusual across animal species — had the same father,” Schmidt said. “We have to be very cautious in drawing conclusions from a single litter, but the data suggest female whale sharks store sperm after a single mating event, and subsequently fertilize their own eggs as they are produced.”

Whale shark. UIC researcher Jennifer Schmidt, associate professor of biological sciences, studies the large mammals.

In case the finding can be supported from examination of other whale shark litters, Schmidt said, “it would suggest that there is no whale shark breeding ground where large numbers of animals meet to mate, but rather that mating occurs as an isolated event.”

“Protections for whale sharks have increased in many parts around the globe, yet shark numbers appear to be declining, and the average size is getting smaller,” said Mark Meekan, principal research scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences.

The findings are reported in the journal Endangered Species Research, published online Aug. 4. Other authors include Meekan; Joung and Chien-Chi Chen of the National Taiwan Ocean University; Saad I. Sheikh, formerly of UIC; and Bradley Norman of ECOCEAN Inc.

The findings support increasing evidence that migraine, particularly with aura, is associated with death from heart disease. The researchers stress, however, that the individual risk for a migraine sufferer remains low.

The authors, led by Larus Gudmundsson from the University of Iceland, assessed the impact of mid-life migraine episodes in 18,725 men and women born between 1907 and 1935 who took part in the Reykjavik Study (set up in 1967 by the Icelandic Heart Association to study heart disease in Iceland). In total the research team explored over 470,000 person-years of data with a follow-up of 26 years.

Gudmundsson and colleagues used questionnaires to assess migraine with and without aura.

The results concluded that men and women who suffered from migraine with aura were at an increased risk of dying from all causes, as well as heart disease and stroke, while those with migraine without aura were not at increased risk.

Furthermore, the study says that women who experience migraine with aura are also at a higher risk of dying from causes other than cardiovascular disease or cancer. “However, it remains to be seen which diseases drive the risk increase seen for women with migraine,” say the researchers.

The researchers conclude that the individual risk faced by migraine sufferers is low, and efforts to reduce heart disease deaths should focus on conventional risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking and high cholesterol, regardless of migraine status.

They call for more research on the association between migraine and death from cardiovascular disease and all other causes. “Finally, studies are needed to determine if reducing the frequency of attacks with migraine preventive treatment might reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease,” they add.

A second paper, also published on bmj.com today, finds that female sufferers of migraines with aura are also at a higher risk of haemorrhagic stroke (where bleeding occurs in the brain). These account for around 20% of all strokes. However, lead author, Dr Tobias Kurth, Director of Research at INSERM, argues that the risk remains low and further research is required to confirm these findings.

Dr Klaus Berger from the University of Muenster in Germany has written an editorial to accompany the first study and questions whether doctors should inform patients about the risks associated with migraine with aura. Berger argues that “for many people the information will cause an unwarranted amount of anxiety, although others may use the opportunity to modify their lifestyle and risk factors accordingly” and that “clinicians must carefully weigh the decision whether or not to discuss the risks related to this condition.”

Source: BMJ-British Medical Journal

Dr Asselin-Labat, a senior postdoctoral fellow in the institute’s Stem Cells and Cancer division in Melbourne, Australia, is rapidly establishing an international profile for her studies of how breast stem cells develop and how these cells are influenced by oestrogen and other steroids.

In March this year she was the first author on a Nature paper revealing that oestrogen and other steroids can control the function of breast stem cells.

“We found out how oestrogen and other steroids can influence mammary stem cells. It’s via an indirect mechanism important in understanding how stem cells proliferate, and it can lead to new treatments for breast cancer,” she said.

Dr Asselin-Labat said she would use the $20,000 L’Oreal Fellowship to fund some technical help in the laboratory and pay her two young sons’ childcare expenses. “The fellowship is a good honour and will help me maintain my work-life balance with my two boys,” Dr Asselin-Labat said. “It will let me employ a laboratory assistant to maintain the team’s productivity, it will help with childcare costs, and will support my participation in leadership training.”

The workshop, titled “Get Smart, Get Efficient,” will be offered on Thursday, August 26 at the Lowe Hotel in Point Pleasant, on Thursday, September 2 at the Lincoln County School Board Building in Hamlin, and on Tuesday, September 14 at Huntington’s Kitchen in Huntington. Each will be held from 5:30 p.m. though 7:30 p.m. Admission costs nothing, and anyone who manages buildings is invited.

“A lot of people are talking about energy efficiency, but few are talking directly to small businesses, and even fewer offer real, practical information to small enterprises who grapple daily with rising costs,” says Sarah Halstead Boland, executive director of the nonprofit WVGreenWorks.com, and a small business owner.

“I’ve never spoken to anyone who didn’t want to cut energy costs,” Halstead Boland said, “but it’s really tough for our people in West Virginia to find useful information quickly, and nearly impossible to learn how to finance energy efficiency projects.

“We’ve created a two-hour energy efficiency workshop that focuses on no-cost, low-cost, and incentivized energy efficiency practices. We’ll interact with energy assessment and management tools and resources as well as learn how it all can refresh a business’s marketing message and attract customers.”

According to Halstead Boland, sustainability is driving innovation in at least two ways: it’s forcing business owners to re-examine how they manage their resources, and it provides a timely marketing thrust.

“Owners have to know that customers and everyone don’t want to pay more for negligent and wasteful energy consumption,” she says. “This is not a cost you can just pass on. It’s important to learn what to do.”

The workshops are sponsored by Southwestern Community Action Council, and CEGAS, Marshall’s Center for Environmental, Geotechnical, and Applied Sciences, with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

For specific information on each workshop and to register, go to www.WVGreenWorks.com or call 304.343.2880.

Human pluripotent stem cells, which can become any other kind of body cell, hold great potential to treat a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injuries. However, scientists who work with such cells have had trouble growing large enough quantities to perform experiments — in particular, for use in human studies. Furthermore, most materials now used to grow human stem cells include cells or proteins that come from mice embryos, which help stimulate stem-cell growth but would likely cause an immune reaction if injected into a human patient.

To overcome those issues, MIT chemical engineers, materials scientists and biologists have devised a synthetic surface that includes no foreign animal material and allows stem cells to stay alive and continue reproducing themselves for at least three months. It’s also the first synthetic material that allows single cells to form colonies of identical cells, which is necessary to identify cells with desired traits and has been difficult to achieve with existing materials.

The research team, led by Professors Robert Langer, Rudolf Jaenisch and Daniel G. Anderson, describes the new material in the Aug. 22 issue of Nature Materials. First authors of the paper are postdoctoral associates Ying Mei and Krishanu Saha.

Human stem cells can come from two sources — embryonic cells or body cells that have been reprogrammed to an immature state. That state, known as pluripotency, allows the cells to develop into any type of specialized body cells.

It also allows the possibility of treating nearly any kind of disease that involves injuries to cells. Scientists could grow new neurons for patients with spinal cord injuries, for example, or new insulin-producing cells for those who have type 1 diabetes.

To engineer such treatments, scientists would need to be able to grow stem cells in the lab for an extended time frame, manipulate their genes, and grow colonies of identical cells after they’ve been genetically modified. Current growth surfaces, consisting of a plastic dish coated with a layer of gelatin and then a layer of mouse cells or proteins, are notoriously inefficient, says Saha, who works in Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

This image shows human embryonic stem cells grown on a synthetic surface developed by MIT researchers. The cells at top (blue) are stained to reveal their nuclei, while the cells in the middle and bottom are stained for proteins that are known to be present when cells are pluripotent. Green cells are stained for Oct4 (using green fluorescent protein) and red cells are stained for SSEA-4.

“For therapeutics, you need millions and millions of cells,” says Saha. “If we can make it easier for the cells to divide and grow, that will really help to find the number of cells you must do all the disease studies that people are excited about.”

Previous studies had suggested that several chemical and physical properties of surfaces — including roughness, stiffness and affinity for water — might are likely involved in stem-cell growth. The researchers created about 500 polymers (long chains of repeating molecules) that varied in those traits, grew stem cells on them and analyzed each polymer’s performance. After correlating surface characteristics with performance, they found that there was an optimal range of surface hydrophobicity (water-repelling behavior), but varying roughness and stiffness did not have much effect on cell growth.

They also adjusted the composition of the materials, including proteins embedded in the polymer. They found that the best polymers contained a high percentage of acrylates, a common ingredient in plastics, and were coated with a protein called vitronectin, which encourages cells to attach to surfaces.

Using their best-performing material, the researchers got stem cells (both embryonic and induced pluripotent) to continue growing and dividing for three months. They were also able to generate large quantities of cells — in the millions.

The MIT researchers hope to refine their knowledge to help them build materials suited to other types of cells, says Anderson, from the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “We want to better understand the interactions between the cell, the surface and the proteins, and define more clearly what must be done to get the cells to grow,” he says.

Other MIT authors of the paper are Said Bogatyrev, Z. Ilke Kalcioglu, Maisam Mitalipova, Neena Pyzocha, Fredrick Rojas and Krystyn Van Vliet. Jing Yang, Andrew Hook, Martyn Davies and Morgan Alexander of the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom) and Seung-Woo Cho of Yonsei University (Korea) are also authors of the paper.

In “The Sign of the Four” Sherlock Holmes tells Watson he has written a monograph on 140 forms of cigar-, cigarette-, and pipe-tobacco, “with colored plates illustrating the difference in the ash.” He finds the ash invaluable for the identification of miscreants who happen to smoke during the commission of a crime.

But Sherlock Holmes and his cigarette ash and pipe dottle don’t have a patch on geologists and the “redox proxies” from which they deduce chemical conditions early in Earth’s history.

Redox proxies, such as the ratio of chromium isotopes in banded iron formations or the number of isotopes in sulfide particles trapped in diamonds, tell geologists indirectly whether the Earth’ s atmosphere and oceans were reducing (inclined to give away electrons to other atoms) or oxidizing (inclined to glom onto them).

It makes all the difference: the bacterium that causes botulism, and the methanogens that make swamp gas are anaerobes, and thrive in reducing conditions. Badgers and butterflies, however, are aerobes, and require oxygen to keep going.

In the July issue of Nature Geoscience, Washington University in St. Louis geochemist David Fike gives an unusually candid account of the difficulties his community faces in correctly interpreting redox proxies, issuing a call for denser sampling and more judicious reading of rock samples.

The world ocean

Fike, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, focuses on the dramatic change from anoxic to oxygenated conditions in the world’s oceans that preceded the Ediacaran period (from 635 to 542 million years ago) when the first multicellular animals appeared.

If you look in a textbook, you’ll find a story that goes something like this: Four billion years ago the earth’s atmosphere was a deadly mixture of gases spewed forth by volcanoes, such as nitrogen and its oxides, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

The oceans that formed from condensing water vapor (or incoming comets) were reservoirs of dissolved iron, pumped through hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

Then about 2.7 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, which have been called the most self-sufficient organisms in the world because they can both photosynthesize and fix nitrogen, began bubbling oxygen into the atmosphere and shallow waters.

At first oxygen built up gradually in the atmosphere, but about 2.5 billion years ago there was a sudden spike upward, traditionally called the Great Oxygenation Event.

The oxygen killed off anerobes that didn’t find refuge in sediments, the deep ocean and other airless environments and led to the evolution of aerobes that could use oxygen to spark their metabolism.

At roughly the same time iron began to precipitate out of the oceans, forming rocks peculiar to this period called banded iron formations that consist of alternating layers of gray and red rock.

Banded iron formations were created episodically from about 3 billion years ago until 1.8 billion years ago and almost never again.

The usual story is that iron was being swept from the oceans by increasing levels of dissolved oxygen.

Lava from Kilauea, Hawaii flows into the steaming Pacific Ocean. The primitive atmosphere of the Earth was probably made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water, laced with methane, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and hydrochloric acid. What was missing? Oxygen.

And then, another two billion years after the Great Oxygenation Event, multicellular lifeforms finally put in an appearance. The first metazoans, as they are called, were the bizarre Edicaran fauna, sometimes unflatteringly compared to sacks of mud and quilted mattresses.

The assumption was oxygen levels were now high enough to support something more than a single cell in lonely solitude.

Of course, this story has holes you could drive a truck through.

Why did oxygen levels spike 2.5 billion years ago, and how much oxygen was there in the atmosphere really? Why are banded iron formations made of layers only a few centimeters thick, and why did they stop forming so abruptly? If the oceans were oxygenated 2.5 billion years ago, why did multicellular life delay its appearance for another 2 billion years? And did all these changes really take place at pretty much the same time everywhere on Earth?

The problems arise, says Fike, because scientists don’t have dense enough data to recognize spatial variations in Earth’s geochemical past and because the geochemical proxies are so devilishly hard to interpret.

The world beach

The story started to fall apart in 1998, says Fike, when Don Canfield of Odense University in Denmark suggested that sulfur compounds had also played a role in the transformation of Earth’s chemistry.

Canfield argued that that the Great Oxygenation Event actually took place in two steps and that it was sulfides rather than oxygen that removed the iron from deep ocean water.

The first rise in oxygen caused oxidative weathering of rocks on land that delivered sulfates to the ocean through rivers and streams. In the ocean, sulfate-reducing bacteria converted the sulfates to sulfide to gain the energy they needed for daily housekeeping. The dissolved iron combined with the sulfides to form iron sulfide minerals such as pyrite that dropped out of solution.

During the second, much later stage, enough oxygen was generated to sweep the deep ocean of the toxic sulfides, ushering in the era of biological innovation, a.k.a. the mud sacks and quilted mattresses.

These transitions were still discussed as changes in bulk ocean chemistry — just from one anoxic chemistry to another anoxic chemistry.

However, in the July issue of Nature Geoscience, Simon Poulton of the University of Newcastle in England showed that sulfidic water protruded into the ocean only in a narrow wedge along the shorelines of ancient continents. This meant that the water column, instead of being homogeneous, was stratified, with different chemistries in different layers.

So much for the world ocean.

It’s Complicated

“Recent geochemical evidence indicates that, at least locally, ferruginous (iron rich) or even sulphidic (sulfur rich) conditions persisted through the Ediacaran period, long after the Great Oxygenation Event,” Fike says.

“Things are much more complicated than we had supposed.”

“As a community, we don’t have a good sense of the spatial variation of these zones within different bodies of water, ” says Fike.

“What’s more, different assessments can arise from the interpretation of different geochemical proxies, from physical separation between different ocean basins, or from the reworking of sediments after deposition,” he continues.

The underlying problem is a low sampling rate. “As we try to unravel these changes in Earth’s history, ” Fike says, “we often don’t have 100 different places where we can measure rocks of the identical age. We’re stuck with a few samples, and the natural tendency is to take your rocks and extrapolate.”

The only method “to wring order from the chaos,” Fike says, is to develop a full three-dimensional model of the world that has enough spatial resolution to wash out bad data.

A Cautionary Tale

Simultaneously Fike acknowledges that spatial variability in redox proxies may make many geologists feel ill at ease because it might instead reflect an unusual depositional context or the reworking of the proxy after deposition instead of a signficant change in geochemistry.

By means of illustration, he describes a study of Amazonian mud belts, published this year by Robert Aller of Stony Brook University and colleagues in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

“The Amazon dumps mud rich in organic material into the Atlantic,” Fike says. “The mud is deposited and the oxygen in it is consumed by biological activity, but then a storm churns it up, it gets reoxygenated, and redeposited. And this process happens again and again.”

When the muds become sediments, their chemistry is very different from what it was when they were first deposited.

“The redox indicators for the Amazonian sediments suggest that they were deposited under anoxic, sulfate-poor conditions, but we know they were deposited in well-oxygenated, sulfate-rich marine waters,” Fike writes.

It is as if the murderer had deliberately removed cigar ash and substituted cigarette ash at the crime scene.

“Much work remains ahead of us before we can have a true sense of the three-dimensional redox structure of the oceans and how it varied through time,” Fike concludes.

Researchers have developed technology for large-scale solar power installations to self-clean.

Find dusting those tables and dressers a chore or a bore? Dread washing the windows? Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That’s the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists have now presented the development of one solution — self-dusting solar panels ― based on technology developed for space missions to Mars.

In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on August 22, they described how a self-cleaning coating at first glance of solar cells could increase the efficiency of producing electricity from sunlight and reduce maintenance costs for large-scale solar installations.

“We think our self-cleaning panels used in areas of high dust and particulate pollutant concentrations will highly benefit the systems’ solar energy output,” study leader Malay K. Mazumder, Ph.D. said. “Our technology may be used in both small- and large-scale photovoltaic systems. To our knowledge, this is the only technology for automatic dust cleaning that doesn’t require water or mechanical movement.”

Mazumder, who is with Boston University, said the requirement for that technology is growing with the popularity of solar energy. Use of solar, or photovoltaic, panels increased by 50 percent from 2003 to 2008, and forecasts suggest a growth rate with a minimum of 25 percent annually into the future. Fostering the growth, he said, is emphasis on alternative energy sources and society-wide concerns about sustainability (using resources today in ways that do not jeopardize the ability of future generations to meet their needs).

Large-scale solar installations already exist in the united states, Spain, Germany, the Middle East, Australia, and India. These installations usually are located in sun-drenched desert areas where dry weather and winds sweep dust into the air and deposit it onto the surface of solar panel. Just like grime on a household window, that dust reduces the quantity of light that can enter the business part of the solar panel, decreasing the quantity of electricity produced. Clean water is commonly scarce in these areas, making it expensive to clean the solar panels.

“A dust layer of one-seventh of an ounce per square yard decreases solar power conversion by 40 percent,” Mazumder explains. “In Arizona, dust is deposited each month at about 4 times that amount. Deposition rates are even higher in the middle East, Australia, and India.”

Working with NASA, Mazumder and colleagues initially developed the self-cleaning solar panel technology for use in lunar and Mars missions. “Mars of course is a dusty and dry environment,” Mazumder said, “and solar panels powering rovers and future manned and robotic missions must not succumb to dust deposition. But neither should the solar panels here on Earth.”

The self-cleaning technology involves deposition of a transparent, electrically sensitive material deposited on glass or a transparent plastic sheet covering the panels. Sensors monitor dust levels on the surface of the panel and energize the material when dust concentration reaches a critical level. The electric charge sends a dust-repelling wave cascading over the surface of the material, lifting away the dust and transporting it from the screen’s edges.

Mazumder said that within two minutes, the process removes about 90 percent of the dust deposited on a solar panel and requires only a tiny bit of the electricity generated by the panel for cleaning operations.

The current market size for solar panels is about $24 billion, Mazumder said. “Less than .04 percent of global energy production is derived from solar panels, but if only four percent of the world’s deserts were dedicated to solar power harvesting, our energy needs could be completely met worldwide. This self-cleaning technology can play an important role.”

The inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee first mentioned the concept of a semantic web, a web with inbuilt meaning, long before the advent of social sites, but it is yet to become reality. This is despite the ongoing efforts of web engineers, academics, search engine companies, and the web industry itself. There is, researchers writing in the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, a semantic web bottleneck.

Nikolaos Konstantinou of Athens Information Technology (AIT) and colleagues at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in Greece, state that after almost a decade of research, the fundamental concepts that would underpin a semantic web have matured, yet the average web user cannot yet make the most of their full potential. They suggest that there are three main issues to be overcome before Web 3. emerges and they present a roadmap in their paper to explain how these must be addressed.

In Berners-Lee’s original vision for the semantic web, machine-readable information embedded in a digital object, whether a web page, an image, a video or some other file, so-called meta data, would allow software to potentially understand the meaning and context of the digital object. Although some software currently has a limited understanding of simple meta data, it mostly lies in prototypes and lab environments.

However, the potential of the semantic web is to have software agents that can perform tasks automatically based perhaps on a user’s behaviour or preference settings, and to locate pertinent information far more efficiently than an individual searching the web manually might do. The software might also be able to infer additional knowledge based on previously existing information process the information it finds into a usefully organised format. Such a process would be useful to scholars, doctors, engineers, scientists, musicians, designers, artists, indeed anyone who works with data.

Konstantinou and colleagues point out that three issues are preventing this from happening: deficiencies in simplicity, integration with existing technologies and practices, and adoption by the web industry.

They suggest that ways to automatically add meta data to digital objects are now needed to really make it possible to publish semantically rich content without manual intervention whether or not the “publisher” is a large corporation or an individual content creator. They also say that semantic technologies do not offer a substitute for current practices, rather a complement to them and that web engineers need not abandon experience but should build on it. Finally, the driving forces of the web industry should adopt semantic web technologies since their adoption entails a series of benefits both for the companies themselves as well as to the end users. “This appears to be the most promising solution for the chicken-and-egg problem of the semantic web,” the team says. “Much still needs to be done so that you can effectively publish and exploit large-scale semantic information. Following the approach suggested in this paper, we are confident that the semantic web bottleneck will be shortly circumvented and the semantic web vision will be at last realised,” the team concludes.

“We found that long-term dietary consumption of capsaicin, one of the most abundant components in chili peppers, could reduce blood pressure in genetically hypertensive rats,” said Zhiming Zhu of Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China.

Chili peppers.

Those effects depend on the chronic activation of something called the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel found in the lining of blood vessels. Activation of the channel leads to an increase in production of nitric oxide, a gaseous molecule known to protect blood vessels against inflammation and dysfunction, Zhu explained.

The study isn’t the first to look for a molecular link between capsaicin and lower blood pressure. However, earlier studies were based on acute or short-term exposure to the chemical, with some conflicting results. Zhu says their study is the first to examine the effects of long-term treatment with capsaicin in rats with high blood pressure.

The findings in rats should be confirmed in humans through epidemiological analysis, the researchers said. In fact, there were already some clues: the prevalence of hypertension is over 20% in Northeastern China compared to 10-14% in Southwestern China, including Sichuan, Guozhuo, Yunnan, Hunan, and Chongqing, where Zhu is from.

“People in these regions like to eat hot and spicy foods with a lot of chili peppers,” Zhu says. “For example, a very famous local food in my hometown, Chongqing, is the spicy hot pot.”

It isn’t yet clear just how many capsaicin-containing chili peppers a day you’d have to eat to “keep the doctor away,” although that’s a question that should now be examined in greater detail, Zhu says.

For those who can’t tolerate spicy foods, there might still be hope. Zhu notes the existence of a mild Japanese pepper, which contains a compound called capsinoid that is closely related to capsaicin.

“Limited studies show that these capsinoids produce effects similar to capsaicin,” Zhu says. “I believe that some people can adopt this sweet pepper.”

The new technique, developed by a research team led by University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor of chemistry Lawrence Miller, provides the clearest, most dynamic view yet of protein-protein interactions in cells when viewed through a specially modified microscope.

The finding is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (advanced online July 19.)

Knowing where and when particular proteins interact within the cell is key to understanding life processes at the molecular level.

In a technique called luminescence resonance energy transfer, two proteins in a cell are labeled with differently colored, luminescent molecules that absorb light of one color and give it off as another color. By taking several pictures of the cell and mathematically analyzing the pictures, researchers gain information about the proteins’ precise location and whether they are interacting.

Miller and his team used a novel type of luminescent molecule for labeling, making it possible to get the same information using fewer pictures. This simplifies the analysis and allows for five-fold faster data acquisition. Images show a 50-fold improvement in sensitivity.

Working with Jerrold Turner, professor and associate head of pathology at the University of Chicago, Miller used a hybrid chemical/genetic approach to tag the proteins of interest. One of the proteins was genetically modified so that it would bind to a terbium complex. The terbium complex has an unusually long time between light absorption and emission. The second target protein was genetically modified to link to a fluorescent tag with a short emission lifetime. When the two proteins interact, the luminescent tags are brought very close together, generating a unique luminescent signal that can be seen under a microscope.

Miller and his colleagues modified a conventional microscope to exploit the long lifetime of the terbium protein tags. Pulsed light is used to trigger the terbium luminescence, detected after the other luminescent species within cells have gone dark, allowing unwanted background to be removed from the image.

The new technique “increases sensitivity and makes the whole process faster,” Miller said. “This increases the time-resolution of the experiment, allowing you to see how interactions change on a faster time scale, which can help to better figure out how certain biological phenomena work.”

The technique required a reliable way to deliver the luminescent terbium probe through a living cell membrane without contaminating or damaging the cell. The researchers developed a way to co-opt pinocytosis, the process by which cells drink in small amounts of surrounding fluid.

“With this new tool, we hope cell biologists and others will be able to study things they haven’t seen before, such as interactions that couldn’t be visualized in live cells in real time,” Miller said. “Hopefully the method will yield information that makes it easier to deduce biological mechanisms.”

Other authors include UIC graduate students Harsha Rajapakse (the lead author), Nivriti Gahlaut and Shabnam Mohandessi and University of Chicago graduate student Dan Yu. The terbium tag was developed in collaboration with Richmond, Calif.-based Lumiphore, Inc. Major funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health and the Chicago Biomedical Consortium.

Researchers at the University of Iowa found the odds of developing primary breast abscess were six times higher in smokers than in nonsmokers, and smokers were 11 times more likely to develop subareolar abscess. Breast abscesses were 15 times more likely to recur in smokers than in nonsmokers. In addition, this study is one of the first to provide clinical evidence that nipple piercing is also a risk factor for subareolar breast abscess, with the onset of abscess occurring from one month to seven years from the time of piercing.

Breast abscesses, inflammatory lesions of the breast that are painful and difficult to treat, tend to recur at rates as high as 40 to 50 percent, according to previous retrospective studies. Until now, there has been a lack of research on the risk factors associated with this condition.

“Nearly 60 percent of patients with a recurrence of breast abscess were heavy smokers,” said Vinod Gollapalli, MD, a post-doctoral fellow in the department of surgery at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City. “Since smoking appears to be a strong risk factor for both causing breast abscess and its recurrence, we recommend patients should be counseled to quit smoking as an integral part of treatment.”

Using the surgical and radiologic databases at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, researchers identified 68 patients from January 1, 2004, to November 1, 2009, with a diagnosis of breast abscess who did not have a current or previous history of breast cancer, breast radiation therapy, or breast surgery within the past 12 months. Patients were considered to have recurrence of their breast abscess if they required a repeat drainage procedure in the same breast quadrant within six months. All breast abscesses were confirmed by ultrasound and/or drainage of purulent material. Of the 68 cases evaluated, 53 patients were identified as Caucasian, 43 were smokers and nine had a history of nipple piercing. Thirty-seven patients (53 percent) needed multiple surgical treatments, and of these, 22 were current heavy smokers (smoking more than 10 cigarettes per day). Five patients had developed mammary fistulas; all of these patients were heavy smokers. Age, smoking and the need for surgical treatment were found to be associated with increased risk of recurrence.

Univariate analysis indicated that smoking (odds ratio [OR] 8.0 [95 percent CI 3.4 to 19.4]), obesity (OR 3.6 [95 percent CI 1.5 to 9.2]), diabetes mellitus (OR 5.7 [95 percent CI 1.1 to 54.9]), and nipple piercing (OR 10.2 [95 percent CI 1.3 to 454.4]) were significant risk factors for development of primary breast abscess. Multivariate logistic regression analysis confirmed smoking as a significant risk factor for the development of primary breast abscess (OR 6.15 [95 percent CI 2.65 to 14.29]), and in the subtype of subareolar breast abscess, nipple piercing was identified as a risk factor (OR 20.26 [95 percent CI 2.01 to 204.28]) in addition to smoking (OR 11.49 [95 percent CI 4.41 to 29.94]). Multivariate logistic regression identified significant OR for an increase in recurrence related to age (OR 1.08 [95 percent CI 1.01 to 1.15] per year), smoking (OR 14.73 [95 percent CI 3.18 to 68.22]), surgical treatment (11.94 [95 percent CI 1.08 to 131.72]), and a decrease in recurrence after MRSA infections (OR 0.02 [95 percent CI 0.00 to 0.72]).

Throughout embryonic development, proteins known as Polycomb group complexes turn genes off when and where their activity should not be present, preventing specialised tissues and organs from forming within the wrong places. They also play a huge role in processes like stem cell differentiation and cancer.

In a study published online in Nature, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, identified a new Polycomb group complex, and were surprised by how it acts.

Another Polycomb group complex was already recognized to silence genes by placing a chemical tag near them. Juerg Mueller and his group at EMBL found that the new Polycomb complex they discovered, PR-DUB, removes that same tag.

These microscopy images show the region of the embryo larva that will develop into the adult fruit fly’s wing. In cells genetically manipulated so that PR-DUB cannot remove the gene-silencing tag (left), a gene which would normally be silenced becomes turned on (red) - a situation which is corrected when PR-DUB’s activity is restored (right).

“Surprisingly, this new complex which takes the tag off seems to act in the same tissues and at the same developmental stages as the one which puts the tag on,” says Mueller, “and both opposing activities must occur to keep the gene silenced in our model organism, the fruit fly Drosophila.”

The reason behind this unexpected behaviour is not experimentally confirmed, but it might be a case of fine-tuning, with the newly-found complex ensuring that the chemical tagging is kept at its optimal level.

The human equivalent of PR-DUB is proven to be a tumour-suppressor, and Mueller and colleagues discovered that, in test-tubes at least, it behaves exactly the same way as the fruit fly complex, removing that same gene-silencing tag. Knowing how the complex acts within the fruit fly could assist scientists uncover its function within the cells of mammals for example ourselves, and thus begin to simplify its relation to cancer.

Source: European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

The investigation also notes that consistent more than lengthy sleeping (more than 9 hours a night) can be a reason to be concerned. Although, unlike short sleeping, over long sleeping does not in itself improve the risk of death, it could be very a significant marker of an underlying serious and potentially fatal illnesses.

The study looked at the relationship between the amount of habitual duration of sleep and mortality by reviewing 16 prospective studies from the UK, USA, European and East Asian countries.

The study included more than 1.3 million participants, followed up for up to 25 years, with more than 100,000 deaths recorded.

The study provides unequivocal evidence from the direct link between both short (less than 6 several hours sleep a night) and long (9 several hours or a lot more) duration of sleep and an increased chance of dying prematurely, compared to those who sleep 6-8 several hours a night on average.

Professor Francesco Cappuccio, leader of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the University of Warwick and Consultant Physician at the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, said “whilst short sleep may represent a cause of ill-health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill-health”.

He said: “Modern society has seen a gradual reduction in the average amount of sleep people take, and this pattern is more common amongst full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to societal pressures for longer working hours and more shift-work. On the other hand, the deterioration of our health status is often accompanied by an extension of our sleeping time.

“Consistently sleeping six to eight hours per night may be optimal for health. The duration of sleep should be regarded as an additional behavioural risk factor, or risk marker, influenced by the environment and possibly amenable to change through both education and counselling in addition to through measures of public health aimed at favourable modifications of the physical and working environments ” Professor Cappuccio added.

Source: University of Warwick

The interest in oats for human nutrition is growing because of its exceptional nutritional quality. In fact, the health effects of oats rely mainly on the total dietary fibre and β-glucan content, which reduce postprandial blood glucose and insulin responses and lower blood lipids, especially serum total and LDL-cholesterol. Besides β-glucan, oats also contain high amounts of other valuable nutrients such as proteins, unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Moreover, recent studies have shown that oats can be tolerated by most people suffering from celiac disease.

Bread, mostly made from wheat, is an essential constituent of the human diet and the nearly ubiquitous consumption places it ready of global importance. Thus, the introduction of 100% oat bread could enhance the selection suitable for people affected by celiac disease and satisfy the consumer demand for diverse and healthy foods. Yet, oat proteins do not possess the unique visco-elastic properties characteristic for wheat gluten, thus oat doughs resemble cake batters rather than bread doughs. Furthermore, most studies investigating the effect of oats on bread quality were previously conducted on composite breads, containing quite a lot of wheat which masked bread making properties of oats.

Consequently, the objective was to establish the properties of oats required for the production of high quality oat bread by exploiting a mix of baking, rheological and analytical chemistry techniques. The bread making properties of commercial oat flours in addition to oat varieties were investigated on simple flour/water mixtures without addition of wheat or structure forming agents to prevent synergistic effects with functional ingredients. Moreover, sourdough fermentation and Hydrostatic Pressure (HP) processing were investigated for their potential to improve oat bread quality.

The results showed significant differences in the bread making performance of commercial oat flours. Overall, it was established that so that you can achieve high quality oat bread wholegrain oat flours should present low batter viscosity, low flour water hydration capacity, starch content of above 65%, protein content of about 12%, low starch damage and coarse particle size. In addition, it was assessed whether certain oat varieties yield better quality bread than others by investigating their bread making properties under optimised conditions, which allowed the evaluation of oat constituents affecting oat bread quality.

Considerable differences were observed in the bread crumb structure which could be attributed to protein and fat content, starch properties in addition to α-amylase activity. Hence, selection of oat varieties with regards to their composition is essential so that you can obtain superior oat bread quality.

In addition, the effect of sourdough on oat bread quality was investigated. Oat sourdoughs were produced by spontaneous fermentation and subsequent back-slopping until a stable microbiota was obtained. Identification of the lactic acid bacteria showed dominance of strains which are not commonly found in wheat or rye sourdoughs. Yet, application of these strains as starter cultures for oat sourdoughs used for oat bread production revealed positive effects on loaf volume due to gas production by heterofermentative LAB, softening of the doughs and changes in the starch pasting properties.

Furthermore, the impact of HP was investigated on the major oat components, starch and protein which revealed starch gelatinisation and protein network formation at pressures ≥ 350 MPa while a weakening of protein structures was observed at lower pressures. Addition of HP-treated oat batters to oat bread resulted in improved volume and decreased staling at 200 MPa, while higher pressures did not improve oat bread quality.

The work formed part of the European Union project HEALTHGRAIN, and was conducted by the research team of Professor Elke Arendt, University College Cork, Ireland. Part of the microscopical analysis of the oat flours and breads was conducted by the team of Professor Kaisa Poutanen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

Source: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

The immune system plays a critical role in identifying and destroying tumor cells. Many tumors overcome this surveillance by inhibiting local immune responses, often leading to metastasis.

One potential method of tumor-mediated immune suppression is secretion of exosomes — small, membrane-enclosed sacs you can use for storage or transport. Researchers led by Dr. Huang-Ge Zhang and colleagues at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Louisville, KY therefore examined the effect of tumor-secreted exosomes in lung metastasis. They found that treatment with tumor exosomes increased how many myeloid-derived suppressor cells, which inhibited immune activation and accelerated tumor metastasis in the lung. This effect was mediated by the molecule MyD88, which plays a key role in the innate immune response.

In this study, Liu et al “identified the role of tumor exosomes in the enhancement of tumor metastasis through the expansion of myeloid-derived suppressor cells. A tremendous amount of information remains to be discovered about the mechanisms of cellular machinery that regulates the sorting of immune suppressor molecules into tumor exosomes. [Their[]|] goal will now be to develop not only strategies to interfere with these pathways, but to transform tumor exosomes from immune suppressors to immune stimuli with the aim to ultimately use these modified exosomes as a tumor vaccine.”

NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites are helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) keep tabs on the extent of the recent Gulf oil spill with satellite images ever so often. NOAA is the lead agency on oil spills and uses airplane fly-overs to assess oil spill extent.

A semisubmersible drilling platform called the Deepwater Horizon located about 50 miles southeast of the Mississippi Delta experienced a fire and explosion at approximately 11 p.m. CDT on April 20. Subsequently, oil began spilling out into the Gulf coast of florida and efforts to contain the spill continue today. NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellite imagery has captured the spill in between cloudy days.

NOAA used data from the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument from the Terra satellite on April 26, 27 and 29 to capture the extent of the oil spill, which measured 600-square-miles. The MODIS instrument flies aboard both the Terra and Aqua satellites.

On April 29, the MODIS image on the Terra satellite captured a wide-view natural-color image of the oil slick (outlined in white) just off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick appears as dull gray interlocking comma shapes, one opaque and the other nearly transparent. Sunglint -- the mirror-like reflection of the sun off the water -- enhances the oil slick’s visibility. The northwestern tip of the oil slick almost touches the Mississippi Delta.

In the satellite image from April 27 at 12:05 p.m. CDT the MODIS image showed that the oil slick was continuing to emanate from the spill location. Individual slicks lay just north of 29 degrees and zero minutes north, where they have been noted mothers and fathers before. Oil had spread further east and the edge of the slick passed 87 degrees and 30 minutes west than the MODIS image taken on April 26. The April 26 satellite image came from NASA’s Aqua satellite.

On April 29, the MODIS image on the Terra satellite captured a natural-color image of the oil slick just off the Louisiana coast. The oil slick appeared as dull gray interlocking comma shapes, one opaque and the other nearly transparent. The northwestern tip of the oil slick almost touches the Mississippi Delta.

Deepwater Horizon had more than120 crew aboard and contained an estimated to 17,000 barrels of oil (700,000 gallons) of number two fuel oil or marine diesel fuel.

On April 30, NOAA declared the Deepwater Horizon incident “a Spill of National Significance (SONS).” A SONS pertains to, “a spill that, because of its severity, size, location, actual or potential impact on the public health and welfare or the environment, or the necessary response effort, is so complex that it requires extraordinary coordination of federal, state, local, and responsible party resources to contain and clean up the discharge” and allows greater federal involvement. NOAA’s estimated release rate of oil spilling into the Gulf is estimated at 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day based on surface observations and reports of a newly discovered leak in the damaged piping on the sea floor.

NOAA reported on April 29 that dispersants continue to be aggressively applied to the oil spill and over 100,000 gallons have been applied. NOAA’s test burn late in the day of April 29 was successful and approximately 100 barrels of oil were burned in about 45 minutes. NOAA is flying planes over the area and using NASA satellite imagery from the Terra and Aqua satellites to monitor the spill.

In the new study, French researchers studied risking potential developing cancer of the lung in patients who received various kinds of solid organs. Theirs is the largest study as of yet exploring the development of cancer of the lung in transplant recipients.

The study followed a group of 2,831 patients who received organ transplants at Toulouse Hospital between February 1984 and September 2006. Overall, .85% of them developed a cancer of the lung after transplant.

“We observed that 10 lung cancers occurred after kidney transplantation (.5%), 8 after liver transplantation (1.3%) and 6 after cardiovascular system transplantation (2.8%). This difference is statistically significant,” said Dr Julien Mazieres, the research coordinator.

“The substantial incidence of cancer of the lung in cardiovascular system transplant and liver transplant recipients might be because more of those patients possess a heavy smoking history in comparison to kidney transplant recipients,” he said. The average quantity of packs per year was 75.2 for heart-transplant patients, 40 for liver-transplant recipients and 28.5 for kidney-transplant recipients.

The study say that transplant patients needs to be screened for expected cancers for which early detection and treatment methods are associated with a better prognosis. It is specifically true for skin cancers.

Doctors must also consider screening for cancer of the lung, they say. “We are able to reasonably think that a close follow-up including chest examination and X-ray is easy to do and useful,” Dr Mazieres said. “At least, physicians taking care of transplant recipients should are considering the raised risk of cancer and integrate this risk factor in their follow-up to increase the survival of those patients.”

Source: European Society for Medical Oncology

“Studies telling us how the health of our planet and also the health of individuals, especially our youngsters, are tied together,” said Dr. Balbus. “As the long-term health threats from future climate change might be severe, the immediate health benefits could possibly be substantial if we take effective actions to lessen the extent of climate change. Efforts to lessen climate pollution as an example, may also help provide healthier air for our kids to breathe.”

Board-certified in internal medicine and occupational medicine, Dr. Balbus received his AB degree in Biochemistry from Harvard University, his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MPH from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Dr. Balbus founded the Center for Risk Science and Public Health on the George Washington University School of Public Health. There he practiced clinical occupational and environmental medicine as an associate professor. Prior to joining NIEHS, Dr. Balbus was the chief health scientist for the non-profit organization Environmental Defense Fund.

Much better EPA Science Advisory Board, Dr. Balbus has served being a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research and Medicine, and also the EPA Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee.

Reporters needing to interview Dr. Balbus should call the PAS Press Office at 778-331-7694. Reporters who would like to attend the speech must first check in on the PAS Press Office in the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre to receive press credentials.

Source: American Academy of Pediatrics

Asthma is the major cause of admissions at Children’s Hospital Boston, particularly among minority patients from low socio-economic backgrounds. To improve asthma care in this high-risk group, researchers developed an “asthma medical home” within their first care clinic. They identified 1,900 asthmatic patients and initiated education sessions that included a review of asthma basics, appropriate medication utilize, how to recognize and manage an asthma attack, and common environmental asthma triggers.

Families also acquired assistance obtaining medications; referrals to allergy and pulmonary specialists; and support in reducing environmental triggers, which included access to dust mite covers and home visits for assessments and remediation of identified triggers (e.g., pests, mold).

Emergency department (ED) visits and inpatient hospitalization levels that year before the program was in place were compared with those two years after program initiation.

Results showed that ED visits for asthma-related reasons decreased 63 percent (from 26 percent in 2006 to 9.9 percent in 2009), while inpatient hospitalization levels decreased 62 percent (from 10.5 to 4 percent).

“With greater access to their basic care providers, greater knowledge about their child’s disease process and greater control over environmental triggers, families are better empowered to manage their children’s asthma symptoms,” said Faye F. Holder-Niles, MD, MPH, lead author of the study. “This comprehensive approach to asthma can have tremendous impact on the lives of asthmatic patients.”

“This study shows that temperature affects the abundance of this species, its reproduction and other characteristics of its life cycle”, Emili García-Berthou, lead author of the study and a researcher at the UG’s Institute of Aquatic Ecology, tells SINC.

“Over a latitudinal gradient greater than 5º, the abundance of this species in river mouths varies, as do its reproductive effect, its size at maturity and prevalence of parasites”, the Catalan researcher adds.

The research team sampled a total of 929 gambusias during the warm months of 2004 in the mouths (final 1,500 metres) of eight Mediterranean rivers from the south of France to Murcia.

Although this ecological impact has been “well documented” in america and Australia, other studies in Spain have used observational and experimental data to show that Gambusia holbrooki “competes with and displaces cyprinodontiform fish (small fish that live in fresh or brackish water), like the Spanish toothcarp (Aphanius iberus) and the Valencia toothcarp (Valencia hispanica), both of which are endemic to the Peninsula and have seen their distribution area greatly reduced, now being thought to be at risk of extinction”, explains García-Berthou.

Spain was the first European country in which Gambusia holbrooki was introduced, in 1921.