Broadly neutralizing antibodies against pandemic flu point to new vaccine targets

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Research News

 

A new study reveals that B cells can produce antibodies against the H1N1 influenza virus that also neutralize various other influenza strains, marking a development that could inform research into potential universal flu vaccines. The findings showed that the antibodies targeted two conserved regions of the virus - the cause of the 2009 swine flu pandemic - and that transfers of the antibodies protected mice from lethal infection. The work suggests that vaccines that target the two sites might be able to protect against a broader array of flu strains. Influenza is one of humanity's greatest microbial foes, being responsible for both seasonal flu and more severe flu pandemics that pose major threats to global health. Current vaccines for seasonal flu induce antibodies against the "head" region of hemagglutinin, the major surface antigen on influenza viruses. However, this strategy only protects against a few strains of influenza, and these antigen sites mutate frequently enough that a new vaccine is needed each year. Searching for better vaccine targets, Jenna Guthmiller and colleagues studied the properties of antibodies from memory B cells exposed to the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus. They saw that the B cells produced antibodies that targeted the receptor-binding site or lateral patch epitopes, two regions of the hemagglutinin head that are conserved across many strains of influenza. As a result, these antibodies neutralized most H1 influenza viruses the researchers tested, and antibodies against the lateral patch also reacted to the H3N2 strain and to influenza B viruses. Furthermore, transfers of the antibodies protected mice from lethal doses of H1N1 influenza, and some of the lateral patch antibodies also neutralized a natural, recent flu strain with mutations in a major antigen site.

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Covid-19 pandemic led to increased screen time, more sleep problems

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

Research New

  

 

A new stuy in the journal Sleep finds that increased evening screen time during the Covid-19 lockdown negatively affects sleep quality.

During the lockdown period in Italy, daily internet traffic volume almost doubled compared to the same time in the previous year. Researchers here conducted a web-based survey of 2,123 Italian residents during the third and seventh week of Italy's first national lockdown. The survey ran in the third week of lockdown (March 25th - 28th, 2020) and evaluated sleep quality and insomnia symptoms, using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Insomnia Severity Index as means of measurement. The second assessment survey, in the seventh week of lockdown (April 21st - 27th, 2020), inquired about usage of electronic devices in the two hours before falling asleep, in addition to repeating the sleep questionnaires.

Of the participants surveyed, 92.9% reported an increase in their electronic device usage between the first and second surveys. These participants showed decreased sleep quality, an increase in insomnia symptoms, shorter total sleep times, and later bedtimes and rising times. Researchers found an increased prevalence of poor sleepers and respondents with moderate to severe insomnia symptoms only within this group of respondents.

Some 7.1% of participants reported a decrease in evening screen time between the first and second survey, and conversely reported improved sleep quality and fewer symptoms of insomnia. This subgroup also demonstrated a decrease in the prevalence of poor sleepers and moderate/severe insomnia symptoms. These respondents went to bed consistently earlier after four weeks of home confinement.

Survey respondents who reported no change in their screen time exposure likewise showed no variations in their sleep habits. Notably, this group of responders had the best sleep quality and fewest insomnia symptoms in the first survey results, suggesting that the lockdown exacerbated negative sleep conditions for people already suffering from poor sleep quality.

Dr. Federico Salfi, Ph.D. student and first author of the paper, says "The overuse of electronic devices in the hours before sleep was a deeply rooted habit in our society already before the pandemic emergency, in particular among young people. In our opinion, the current period of social distancing added fuel to the fire."

Prof. Michele Ferrara, Director of the Laboratory of Sleep Psychophysiology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of L'Aquila, says "The evidence of a strong relationship between screen habits and the time course of sleep disturbances during the lockdown period suggests that, now, more than never, raising public awareness about the risks of evening exposure to electronic devices could be crucial to preserve general sleep health. This applies to both the ongoing pandemic and the future, as electronic technologies will find more and more space in our daily routine."

To request a copy of the study, please contact:

Emily Tobin
Emily.tobin@oup.com

 

R&D exploration or exploitation? How firms respond to import competition

Strategic Management Journal studies competition created by import penetration

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT SOCIETY

Research News

 

Do firms respond to tougher competition by searching for completely new technological solutions (exploration), or do they work to defend their position by improving current technologies (exploitation)?

Competition from increased import penetration generally results in tight profit margins, low prices, and strong efficiency pressures, immediately affecting firms' bottom lines in the form of reduced profits and increased bankruptcy risk.

A firm's R&D strategy is one of the fundamental determinants of success or failure when responding to competitive threats. To ensure both short-term performance and long-term survival, firms have two basic R&D options: explore new knowledge or exploit existing knowledge bases.

A new study published in the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ) examines how firms change the knowledge sources used in their R&D efforts in response to substantial increases in import penetration in their domestic market. The study was conducted by Raffale Morandi Stagni, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, Andrea Fosfuri, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy and Juan Santaló, IE University, Madrid, Spain. They studied a sample of U.S. manufacturing firms over the years 1989-2006.

"Our focus on technology reflects both its increasing importance for firm survival and competitive advantage," write the authors. "Specifically, we study competition created by import penetration, which has increased steadily in recent years to become a central concern for companies, for example, dealing with imports from China.

"We find that in the years that immediately follow an increase in import penetration, firms tend to rely more on familiar knowledge in the development of innovations and less on knowledge sources that were not previously used. This switch in R&D strategy also appears to be temporary (reversed in later years), and it is positively associated with an increased likelihood of survival."

The researchers argue that while exploration is riskier and costlier than exploitation, it also requires a longer time horizon to produce results due to its slower learning pattern.

They also tested the effects of import penetration according to the type of competition and the type of industry affected. They separated imports from low-technology countries from imports from high-technology countries.

"If technological competition has a different effect on search strategies than price-based competition, we might expect the results to differ," write the researchers. "Instead, the effects of the two types of import penetration are qualitatively similar.

"We also performed a sample split of industries in which the primary customers are other businesses (B2B) or those in which the primary customers are final consumers (B2C). Consistent with the intuition that import penetration issues a greater threat to firm survival in B2B industries, we find that the effect of import penetration on technological exploration and exploitation is stronger for that group than for B2C industries."

The final variable they researched was whether technology search strategies are moderated by factors that might alleviate or increase concerns about firm survival.

"The findings show that the negative relationship between competition and exploration is magnified for firms that are relatively more vulnerable, because they have greater degrees of operating leverage and lower degrees of product diversification," the researchers write.

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The SMJ is published by the Strategic Management Society (SMS), comprised of 3,000 academics, business practitioners, and consultants from 80 countries, focuses on the development and dissemination of insights on the strategic management process, as well as on fostering contacts and intercnges around the world.

Strategic Management Society

http://www.strategicmanagement.net

 

Major advance in fabrication of low-cost solar cells also locks up greenhouse gases

A team led by investigators at NYU Tandon created a means of vastly increasing the speed and efficiency of a key doping process for perovskite solar cells, one that also sequesters CO2

NYU TANDON SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Research News

 

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, June 2, 2021 - Perovskite solar cells have progressed in recent years with rapid increases in power conversion efficiency (from 3% in 2006 to 25.5% today), making them more competitive with silicon-based photovoltaic cells. However, a number of challenges remain before they can become a competitive commercial technology.

Now a team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering has developed a process to solve one of them, a bottleneck in a critical step involving p-type doping of organic hole-transporting materials within the photovoltaic cells. The research, "CO2 doping of organic interlayers for perovskite solar cells," appears in Nature.

Currently, the p-doping process, achieved by the ingress and diffusion of oxygen into the hole transporting layer, is time intensive (several hours to a day), making commercial mass production of perovskite solar cells impractical.

The Tandon team, led by André D. Taylor, an associate professor, and Jaemin Kong, a post-doctoral associate, along with Miguel Modestino, assistant professor -- all in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering -- discovered a method of vastly increasing the speed of this key step through the use of carbon dioxide (CO2) instead of oxygen.

In perovskite solar cells, doped organic semiconductors are normally required as charge-extraction interlayers situated between the photoactive perovskite layer and the electrodes. The conventional means of doping these interlayers involves the addition of lithium bis(trifluoromethane)sulfonimide (LiTFSI), a lithium salt, to spiro-OMeTAD, a π-conjugated organic semiconductor widely used for a hole-transporting material in perovskite solar cells. The doping process is then initiated by exposing spiro-OMeTAD:LiTFSI blend films to air and light.

Not only is this method time consuming, it largely depends on ambient conditions. By contrast, Taylor and his team reported a fast and reproducible doping method that involves bubbling a spiro-OMeTAD:LiTFSI solution with CO2 under ultraviolet light. They found that their process rapidly enhanced electrical conductivity of the interlayer by 100 times compared to that of a pristine blend film, which is also approximately 10 times higher than that obtained from an oxygen bubbling process. The CO2 treated film also resulted in stable, high-efficiency perovskite solar cells without any post-treatments.

"Besides shortening the device fabrication and processing time, application of the pre-doped spiro-OMeTAD in perovskite solar cells makes the cells much more stable," explained Kong, the lead author. "That's partly because most of the detrimental lithium ions in the spiro-OMeTAD:LiTFSI solution were stabilized as lithium carbonates during the CO2 bubbling process."

He added that the lithium carbonates end up being filtered out when the investigators spincast the pre-doped solution onto the perovskite layer. "Thus, we can obtain fairly pure doped organic materials for efficient hole transporting layers."

The team, which included researchers from Samsung, Yale University, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, The Graduate Center of the City University, Wonkwang University, and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology also found that the CO2 doping method can be used for p-type doping of other π-conjugated polymers, such as PTAA, MEH-PPV, P3HT, and PBDB-T. According to Taylor the researchers are looking to push the boundary beyond typical organic semiconductors used for solar cells.

"We believe that wide applicability of CO2 doping to various π-conjugated organic molecules stimulates research ranging from organic solar cells to organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic field effect transistors (OFETs) even to thermoelectric devices that all require controlled doping of organic semiconductors," Taylor explained, adding that since this process consumes quite a large amount of CO2 gas, it can be also considered for CO2 capture and sequestration studies in the future.

"At a time when governments and companies alike are now looking to reduce CO2 emissions if not de-carbonize, this research offers an avenue for reacting large amounts of CO2 in lithium carbonate to improve next generation solar cells, while removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere," he explained, adding that the idea for this novel approach was a counterintuitive insight from the team's battery research.

"From our long history of working with lithium oxygen/air batteries we know that lithium carbonate formation from exposure of oxygen electrodes to air is a big challenge because it depletes the battery of lithium ions, which destroys battery capacity. In this Spiro doping reaction, however, we are actually exploiting lithium carbonate formation, which binds lithium and prevents it from becoming mobile ions detrimental to the long term stability of the Perovskite solar cell. We are hoping that this CO2 doping technique could be a stepping stone for overcoming existing challenges in organic electronics and beyond."

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The U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the China Scholarship Council, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory provided support for this research.

The full study, "CO2 doping of organic interlayers for perovskite solar cells," can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03518-y.

About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute. A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences as part of a global university, with close connections to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. NYU Tandon is rooted in a vibrant tradition of entrepreneurship, intellectual curiosity, and innovative solutions to humanity's most pressing global challenges. Research at Tandon focuses on vital intersections between communications/IT, cybersecurity, and data science/AI/robotics systems and tools and critical areas of society that they influence, including emerging media, health, sustainability, and urban living. We believe diversity is integral to excellence, and are creating a vibrant, inclusive, and equitable environment for all of our students, faculty and staff. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.

WAIT, WHAT?

Why short selling is good for the capital markets

SINGAPORE MANAGMENT UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT SHORT SELLING HAS A DISCIPLINARY EFFECT ON OPPORTUNISTIC INSIDER SALES. view more 

CREDIT: SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - Short selling often gets a bad rap because it is a type of trade that bets against the success of a firm. In essence, short selling allows investors to borrow stock from a broker to sell into the market with the hope of buying the stock back at a cheaper price, thus, profiting on the difference between the sell and buy prices. Because of this practice, short selling is sometimes seen as a controversial tactic.

Furthermore, speculative short selling attacks are concerning as it can put downward pressure on the entire stock market. It is for this reason that governments and regulators have stepped in to curtail or ban short selling during times of market stress such as the Global Financial Crisis or more recently, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contrary to the negativity surrounding short selling, SMU Associate Professor Rencheng Wang told the Office of Research and Tech Transfer: "Quite honestly, there are many benefits of short selling. Short selling can drive market liquidity, price stocks more efficiently, mitigate market bubbles, as well as provide a check on upward market manipulations."

"Because of monetary gains, short sellers are motivated to detect and expose negative news such as poor firm performance that investors have yet to be informed, or unethical and opportunistic behaviours taken by managers at the cost of investors. In other words, short sellers are like detectives of the capital markets," Professor Wang adds.

Given that there are still so many unanswered questions about the positive benefits of short selling, Professor Wang and his collaborators decided to probe deeper into the issue. Specifically, Professor Wang wanted to understand how short selling affects the behaviours of the firm's managers and large shareholders.

Short sale regulation

The regulation on short selling had remained relatively intact since its introduction over 60 years ago. It was believed that the short sale rule had become increasingly susceptible to abuse and was inconsistent with market developments, which led the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) to adopt a modified version of the proposed Rule 202T in 2005.

As part of the review of the short sale rule, the SEC introduced a pilot programme for a select group of securities, of which represented a third of the securities listed on the Russell 3000 index. Rule 202T referred to a temporary exemption from Rule 202 of Regulation SHO (short selling regulation) that suspended any short sale price test for the select group of securities.

The purpose of this pilot programme was to enable the SEC to study the effects of unrestricted short selling on, among other things, market volatility, price efficiency, and market liquidity.

The research

Given this scenario, Professor Wang was able to take advantage of this temporary rule exemption by designing a quasi-experiment to compare the performance and behaviours of the designated group of securities (pilot firms) with the rest of the securities (control firms) on the Russell 3000 index.

Professor Wang elaborated: "Our intent of conducting this research was not merely to observe the impact of Rule 202T on short selling. Rather, we expect the firm's managers, whom we call insiders, to adjust their behaviours to reflect the increased threat of short selling."

The sample included 974 pilot firms and 1,935 control firms listed on the Russell 300 index. The research included a total of 55,002 firm quarters in the pre-period of Rule 202T (January 2002 - April 2005) to post-period of Rule 202T (May 2005 - July 2007).

In conveying the research findings, Professor Wang was pleased to inform the Office of Research and Tech Transfer: "We saw a reduction of 11 percent in opportunistic insider sales in the pilot firms, which means that short selling has a disciplinary effect on the behaviours of the insiders. And the threat of short selling was more pronounced in deterring insiders whose firms have higher litigation risks, greater reputation concerns and have more insiders with large stock-related holdings."

He added: "When we extended our research to the securities listed on the Chinese (Shanghai and Shenzhen) and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges, we also saw a similar pattern - short sellers can deter unethical insiders from engaging in high volume opportunistic sell offs in stock exchanges that differ in culture, market development, and legal environments - from the New York Stock Exchange to other exchanges in Asia. Thus, we provide new evidence to highlight the importance of short sellers in capital market development and governance reforms across different institutional environments."

Professor Wang's paper on short selling can be found here.

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 CARING CAPITALI$M

The uneven benefits of CSR efforts

SINGAPORE MANAGMENT UNIVERSITY

Research News

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IMAGE: WHEN REAPING BENEFITS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES, NOT ALL FIRMS ARE CREATED EQUAL. TANGIBLE ASSET-INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES DO BETTER THAN INTANGIBLES-HEAVY ONES, SMU RESEARCH HAS FOUND. view more 

CREDIT: SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - Whether they are in the technology or oil sector, selling shoes or healthcare products, for many companies, green is the new black. While maximising profit might have been the sole priority for most businesses a decade ago, these days it is common for mission-oriented companies to pursue the 'triple bottom line' of people, planet and profit, particularly through corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts.

While such efforts are commendable, some investors remain primarily concerned about whether firms can do well by doing good; in other words, whether CSR actually can increase a company's value. For instance, CSR activities could enhance brand image and improve customer loyalty, or even make it easier to attract and retain talent, leading to higher future stock returns. However, the wide-ranging and vague quality of these CSR efforts - which can encompass everything from donations to charities to promoting volunteerism among company staff - have typically presented a problem for academics trying to quantify their impact.

To determine the effect of sustainability-related activities on firm value, academics from SMU and INSEAD have embarked on a research project that effectively narrows the scope of CSR efforts to concrete and measurable environmental and social (E&S) activities; for example, redesigning factory processes to reuse water. By zooming in on observable improvements in future operating performance and stock returns, the researchers were able to quantify how E&S activities led to benefits for some - but not all - firms. Interestingly, the impact of E&S activities on future operating performance was largely dependent on company-specific factors such as the nature of assets owned by the business, SMU Assistant Professor of Accounting Grace Fan shared at the SMU/NUS/NTU Accounting Research Conference on April 17, 2021.

A tale of two firms

Crunching the data for more than 4,000 US public companies from 1995 to 2016 including corporate heavyweights such as Apple and Chevron, Professor Fan and team focused on E&S scores in five main categories: environment, community, diversity, employee relations and human rights. They found that in general, E&S activities are related to future improvements in operating performance, but only for firms in tangible asset-intensive industries such as manufacturing, utilities, energy and chemicals. For companies in sectors that are more intangible asset-intensive, which rely more heavily on assets such as intellectual property to derive profits, there was no such beneficial effect.

"For the tangible asset-intensive companies, they have a lot of fixed and heavy assets and processes. We imagine they would derive more benefits from improving their process efficiency and making their workers happier as a result of E&S activities," Professor Fan shared, citing case studies of such process improvements in China, India, the Czech Republic and more.

For instance, US-based conglomerate Honeywell redesigned its chemical cleaning process in a Czech Republic-based plant, which helped reduce its production of chemical waste and consumption of natural gas. Not only did worker safety improve due to reduced handling of toxic chemicals, production time was shortened and the plant saved the company an additional $15,000 a year. Similarly in India, workers at a Honeywell plant implemented an energy conservation programme that allowed it to save an extra 5,000 kilowatt-hours of energy a month, and almost $900,000 a year, Professor Fan explained.

Tracing correlation to causation

Further tracking the impact of E&S activities on stock returns, Professor Fan and team found that E&S activities did in fact correlate with positive stock returns. However, this relationship again occurred mainly in tangible asset-intensive industries. The significant boost in stock returns also disappeared once the researchers controlled for improvements in operating performance, suggesting the positive stock returns were likely due to better internal processes and increased operational efficiencies in these tangible asset-heavy firms.

"It's possible that the stock market does not value the E&S ratings of firms in intangibles-intensive industries such as technology and consumer nondurables as much," Professor Fan said. "Or, the stock market has already incorporated the E&S activities of these firms when determining their value, since their E&S activities may be more easily observable through consumer branding and advertisements compared with tangibles-intensive firms who may embark more on internal process innovations which are more difficult to observe."

Wrapping the virtual session up, Professor Fan delved into the limitations of the study, including the difficulty of claiming causality between E&S ratings and firm value instead of mere correlation. To further investigate this issue, the team will work on collecting more specific data on firm operations, such as the level of carbon emissions and waste production, in addition to E&S ratings.

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Early exposure to cannabis compounds reduces later neural activity in zebrafish: study

New U of A research has implications for prenatal development in humans.

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

Research News

 

Zebrafish exposed to the leading cannabinoids found in cannabis in the earliest stages of development suffer a significant drop in neural activity later in life, according to a University of Alberta study that has implications for prenatal development in humans.

Richard Kanyo, the lead author on the study and post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, said despite the popular narrative that the health benefits of cannabis are many, it turns out there is a surprisingly large knowledge gap.

"Once the legalization happened, people got really excited about it and there's a lot of bias in the media about positive effects, so we began wondering about the negative implications," said Kanyo.

Kanyo teamed up with Declan Ali, a biological sciences researcher in the Faculty of Science, whose lab had an ongoing interest in how certain chemicals and compounds alter development in young animals "when their neurons are contacting each other and trying to communicate."

For the study, developing zebrafish embryos were left to incubate for 10 hours in a solution containing one of the two main active cannabinoids found in cannabis--tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or cannabidiol (CBD)--or a combination of these two compounds, immediately after fertilization.

Ali explained that 10 hours represents a period in animal development that includes a stage of development known as gastrulation, when the multiplying cells start to form multiple tissue layers. In zebrafish it happens between five and 10 hours after the egg has been fertilized; in humans it lasts about a week and occurs roughly three weeks after egg fertilization.

The amount of drug used would be equivalent to someone consuming cannabis or the active compounds every day for two to three weeks at the very start of a pregnancy.

On the fourth day of development, Kanyo looked at brain activity using cutting-edge fluorescing calcium sensors that measure calcium, which is increased in active neurons.

He found that neural activity decreased by 60 to 70 per cent in the group bathed in THC and by more than 70 per cent in the group immersed in CBD. The decrease was even more pronounced in zebrafish that developed in a solution containing both compounds.

"The interesting part is when combined, like how it is found in a cannabis edible or cigarette, we needed much less to get the same reduction in neural activity," said Kanyo.

Ali said the concentrations used in the experiment are a little bit on the high side for just a single cigarette, to make up for the fact that the compounds have to work their way through an outer egg casing to get to the embryo.

"By the time that happens, we don't know what the exact concentrations are, but they're definitely going to be much lower than what we put in the baths themselves."

Compared with one of the control compounds, MS222, a local anesthetic that blocks activity along nerves, the drop in neural activity on the high end of the concentrations tested was the equivalent to the drop in animals that have been anesthetized, Kanyo noted.

At five days after fertilization, when the larvae slowly begin to swim, the reduction in activity compared with normally developed zebrafish was about 20 per cent for CBD and THC individually, but 80 per cent or higher when in combination.

"This reduction in locomotion is consistent with earlier studies as well," said Ali.

Ali said the research follows earlier studies showing that exposure of young organisms to THC and CBD, either alone or in combination, could have a detrimental impact on overall brain and neural activity that could be manifested in different ways.

And though more work is needed to better understand the mechanism behind the effects on neural activity, Ali said people who are thinking of having children would certainly want to limit exposure to any of these compounds in the same way they would limit exposure to nicotine and alcohol.

"We're not saying that these compounds are bad for you," he said. "I think in some contexts--pain relief or reducing seizures--there's a great potential there.

"However, what we're seeing is cannabis is not all good for everyone all the time and probably should not be taken during pregnancy."

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The study, "Medium-throughput zebrafish optogenetic platform identifies deficits in subsequent neural activity following brief early exposure to cannabidiol and Δ?-tetrahydrocannabinol," was published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers make first-ever discovery of Zika virus RNA in free-ranging African bats

COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

 

IMAGE: CSU'S DR. ANNA FAGRE (RIGHT) SAID WHILE OTHER STUDIES HAVE SHOWN THAT BATS ARE SUSCEPTIBLE TO ZIKA VIRUS IN CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTAL SETTINGS, DETECTION OF NUCLEIC ACID IN BATS IN THE... view more 

CREDIT: RON BEND/CSUA team of Colorado State University scientists, led by veterinary postdoctoral fellow Dr. Anna Fagre, has detected Zika virus RNA in free-ranging African bats. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a molecule that plays a central role in the function of genes.

According to Fagre, the new research is a first-ever in science. It also marks the first time scientists have published a study on the detection of Zika virus RNA in any free-ranging bat.

The findings have ecological implications and raise questions about how bats are exposed to Zika virus in nature. The study was recently published in Scientific Reports, a journal published by Nature Research.

Fagre, a researcher at CSU's Center for Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, said while other studies have shown that bats are susceptible to Zika virus in controlled experimental settings, detection of nucleic acid in bats in the wild indicates that they are naturally infected or exposed through the bite of infected mosquitoes.

"This provides more information about the ecology of flaviviruses and suggests that there is still a lot left to learn surrounding the host range of flaviviruses, like Zika virus," she said. Flaviviruses include viruses such as West Nile and dengue and cause several diseases in humans.

CSU Assistant Professor Rebekah Kading, senior author of the study, said she, Fagre and the research team aimed to learn more about potential reservoirs of Zika virus through the project.

The team used 198 samples from bats gathered in the Zika Forest and surrounding areas in Uganda and confirmed Zika virus in four bats representing three species. Samples used in the study date back to 2009 from different parts of Uganda, years prior to the large outbreaks of Zika virus in 2015 to 2017 in North and South Americas.

"We knew that flaviviruses were circulating in bats, and we had serological evidence for that," said Kading. "We wondered: Were bats exposed to the virus or could they have some involvement in transmission of Zika virus?"

The virus detected by the team in the bats was most closely related to the Asian lineage Zika virus, the strain that caused the epidemic in the Americas following outbreaks in Micronesia and French Polynesia. The first detection of the Asian lineage Zika virus in Africa was in late 2016 in Angola and Cape Verde.

"Our positive samples, which are most closely related to the Asian lineage Zika virus, came from bats sampled from 2009 to 2013," said Fagre. "This could mean that the Asian lineage strain of the virus has been present on the African continent longer than we originally thought, or it could mean that there was a fair amount of viral evolution and genomic changes that occurred in African lineage Zika virus that we were not previously aware of."

Fagre said the relatively low prevalence of Zika virus in the bat samples indicates that bats may be incidental hosts of Zika virus infection, rather than amplifying hosts or reservoir hosts.

"Given that these results are from a single cross-sectional study, it would be risky and premature to draw any conclusions about the ecology and epidemiology of this pathogen, based on our study," she said. "Studies like this only tell one part of the story."

The research team also created a unique assay for the study, focusing on a specific molecular component that flaviviruses possess called subgenomic flavivirus RNA, sfRNA. Most scientists that search for evidence of Zika virus infection in humans or animals use PCR, polymerase chain reaction, to identify bits of genomic RNA, the nucleic acid that results in the production of protein, said Fagre.

Kading said her team will continue their research to try and learn more about how long these RNA fragments persist in tissues, which will allow them to approximate when these bats were infected with Zika virus.

"There is always a concern about zoonotic viruses," she said. "The potential for another outbreak is there and it could go quiet for a while. We know that in the Zika forest, where the virus was first found, the virus is in non-human primates. There are still some questions with that as well. I don't think Zika virus has gone away forever."

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Additional co-authors of the study include Juliette Lewis, Megan Miller, Brian Foy, Tony Schountz and John Anderson (Colorado State University); Eric Mossel (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, Colorado); Julius Lutwama, Luke Nyakarahuka and Teddy Nakayiki (Uganda Virus Research Institute); Robert Kityo, Betty Nalikka (Makerere University); Brian Amman, Jonathan Towner and Tara Sealy (CDC, Atlanta).

 

Global research team develops fine-scale risk maps to tackle malaria in Haiti

TELETHON KIDS INSTITUTE

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IMAGE: HEALTH WORKERS INVOLVED IN DATA COLLECTION FOR THE PROJECT TO MAP MALARIA OUTBREAKS IN HAITI. view more 

CREDIT: ALYSSA YOUNG

Researchers from Telethon Kids Institute and Curtin University in Perth and Tulane University in New Orleans have developed sophisticated data modelling that could help eradicate malaria in Haiti.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Caribbean - beset by natural disasters - and is one of the few countries in the region that have not mostly wiped out the mosquito-borne disease.

Telethon Kids Institute researcher Associate Professor Ewan Cameron led the team, using a range of different health data to create a complete picture of where malaria infections are taking place in Haiti. This information has been used to directly inform Haiti's national response to malaria.

The team's findings have been published in the journal eLife.

Director of the Malaria Risk Stratification at Telethon Kids Institute and an Associate Professor at Curtin University, Dr Cameron said the team used mathematical modelling to work out where people diagnosed with malaria were most likely to reside.

"Monthly counts of malaria cases arriving at local health facilities are routinely gathered by the Haitian health system, but these data don't record at a granular level where those patients live, or where they were most likely to be infected," he said.

"Most people will be bitten in or around their homes, so the interventions we have to fight malaria aim to interrupt transmission there, whether that's spraying for mosquitos or delivering bed nets and anti-malarial medications.

"By using a wide range of data - from satellite images of the terrain to hand-written medical logs - we've been able to develop a fine-scale malaria risk map to help public health experts find these at-risk populations."

Almost 9,000 cases of malaria were reported in Haiti in 2019 and determining which areas are most at risk is a crucial line of defence against infection.

Dr Cameron said this fine-scale data could be the final piece of the puzzle that helps stamp out malaria in Haiti.

"Haiti is seen as a place where malaria eradication can be achieved," he said.

"Neighbouring countries like the Dominican Republic are much wealthier and have been able to reduce malaria to really negligible amounts but, working with fewer resources, Haiti has not yet been able to achieve the same results.

"We hope that this work can help the country to better target its interventions and work towards that goal."

Researcher Alyssa Young from Tulane University in New Orleans, working in Haiti, said accessing some of the more remote parts of the island to gather data was a significant challenge.

"During the rainy season, some of the health facilities we visited were out in really remote locations," she said.

"They'd often be a small building on a remote beach - that was the community health facility. But the people who work at those facilities were incredible, and very committed to the goal of eliminating malaria in Haiti."

Telethon Kids Institute epidemiologist and the Kerry Stokes Chair of Child Health at Curtin University, Professor Pete Gething, said the team hopes to be able to contribute to the goal of eliminating malaria in Haiti.

"Haiti is really the last bastion of malaria in the whole of Mesoamerica, just a stones-throw from the US, so it's a really interesting place," he said.

"We're making maps that are being used by Haiti's malaria control program to fundamentally change where they're targeting their interventions."

The research in Haiti is part of a collaboration that has been operating since 2017, funded by the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

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Social media influencing grows more precarious in digital age

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

 

ITHACA, N.Y. - Inflencing millions of people on social media and being paid handsomely is not as easy as it looks, according to new Cornell University research.

Algorithm vagaries are just one of several challenges social media content creators face, according to study author Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor of communication at Cornell.

"I think [our research] is a cautionary tale for aspiring creators as well as the broader public," Duffy said. "The people hoping to work as full-time YouTubers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers are led to believe it's easy and democratic. I disagree: if you look at who makes it as an influencer, for instance, they are not all that dissimilar to traditional celebrity exemplars, with a few exceptions. Social media celebrity remains lopsided."

Duffy and her collaborators interviewed 30 aspiring and professional content creators on a range of social media platforms - including Instagram YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Twitter - to learn about their experiences within and across platforms, including their pursuit of visibility and their understanding of the forces at play in their quest for metrics success.

In general, study participants all spoke the same language: They wished to have their content "seen," to "build an audience" and "get attention," to craft "posts that get more traction" and, in terms of metrics, "do well."

Relying on public sentiment and its taste for the flavor of the week is by no means a 21st century phenomenon. Content creators have for decades relied on opinion research - be it Nielsen ratings or newspaper subscription figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation - to help guide creative decision making.

But nowadays, Duffy said, the science of determining what an audience likes and wants comes with a new twist: The tenuous nature of the platforms themselves.

"These [influencers and creators], they don't know if Instagram is going to be there when they wake up," she said. "And they don't know if TikTok is going to be banned the next day in the U.S. It's a much more accelerated, intensified form of precarity in the era of Google and Facebook."

Duffy and her collaborators view the "nested" precarities akin to a Russian matryoshka doll, with the outermost doll being capitalism itself, followed by the markets, the platform ecology and algorithms as the innermost doll. The promise of being seen, and talked about, is what drives many to the world of social media influencing. But it's not all that it appears, Duffy said.

"Despite the romanticism of social media creative careers, they are structured by various levels of precarity," she said. "Some of these precarities well predate the rise of social media, but one of the most novel forms is the precarity of these algorithmic systems."

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The study, "The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media," published June 2 in Social Media & Society.

For more information, check out this Cornell Chronicle story.