It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, April 15, 2022
Woman with no left temporal lobe developed a language network in the right side of her brain
A team of researchers with members affiliated with MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA and Harvard University has found that a woman without a left temporal lobe developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally. The group published their study of her brain in the journal Neuropsychologia.
In 2016, a woman in her fifties who has chosen to be known only as EG, contacted brain scientists at MIT regarding what she described as her "interesting brain." She had no left temporal lobe. The team at MIT referred her to cognitive neuroscientist, Evelina Fedorenko at Harvard University who welcomed the opportunity to study such an "interesting brain."
EG told Fedorenko and her team that she only came to realize she had an unusual brain by accident—her brain was scanned in 1987 for an unrelated reason. Prior to the scan she had no idea she was different. By all accounts she behaved normally and had even earned an advanced degree. She also excelled in languages—she speaks fluent Russian—which is all the more surprising considering the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain most often associated with language processing.
Eager to learn more about the woman and her brain, the researchers accepted her into a study that involved capturing images of her brain using an fMRI machine while she was engaged in various activities, such as language processing and math. In so doing, they found no evidence of language processing happening in the left part of her brain; it was all happening in the right. They found that it was likely the woman had lost her left temporal lobe as a child, probably due to a stroke. The area where it had been had become filled with cerebrospinal fluid. To compensate, her brain had developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally. The researchers also learned that EG had a sister who was missing her right temporal lobe, and who also had no symptoms of brain dysfunction—an indication, the researchers suggest, that there is a genetic component to the stroke and recovery process in the two women.
More information:Greta Tuckute et al, Frontal language areas do not emerge in the absence of temporal language areas: A case study of an individual born without a left temporal lobe,Neuropsychologia(2022).DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108184
Scientists discover 'missing link' in a severe form of asthma, paving the way to new therapy
by Delthia Ricks , Medical Xpress
LPS triggers common and distinct responses in human and murine lung tissues and drives systemic responses. (A) Common OSM-dependent, LPS-induced differentially expressed genes (DEG) are shown in human PCLS after 4 hours and mouse lung after 4 hours. (B) Serum cytokines and chemokines were measured in recipient C57BL/6 Osm–/– or C57BL/6 WT mice given WT or Osm–/– bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDM) treated with LPS or PBS, as indicated. n=5 mice per group with 1 of 2 experiments shown. Data are presented as mean ± SEM. Data were analyzed using Mann-Whitney tests. *p<0.05. Credit: Science Translational Medicine (2022). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abf8188
Scientists have identified a single molecule that may explain how bacteria can trigger one of the most severe types of asthma, a discovery that for the first time identifies the "missing link" between exposure to bacterial components and extreme inflammation of the lungs' airways.
The new research not only clarifies how a severe form of asthma affects patients, but further underscores how bacterial dysbiosis—disruptions in beneficial bacteria amid exposure to pathogenic forms—affects vulnerable lungs. Going into the research, scientists already knew that bacterial molecules can trigger inflammatory activity in the lungs' airways because patients with severe asthma often have changes in their bacterial populations. Yet the exact mechanisms by which bacteria exacerbate asthma remained unclear.
Seeking answers, Dr. Sarah Headland and colleagues in the immunology division of Genentech in south San Francisco, zeroed in on a form of asthma known as non-type-2 to find out why it is one of the severest forms of inflammatory respiratory disease. She and her team have also begun the arduous task of developing a customized therapy.
Writing in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes the research that allowed a better understanding of this form of asthma and the first steps toward a therapy geared specifically for patients with non-type-2 disease. They began by analyzing the cells and tissues from patients encumbered by severe bacteria-associated asthma and comparing those findings to the cells and tissues of people with mild to moderate forms of asthma as well as to those who don't have asthma at all.
Headland and colleagues studied airway biopsies from 57 patients with severe asthma, 28 patients with mild or moderate asthma, and 16 healthy individuals. The key discovery was abnormally high activity of oncostatin M, a protein associated with inflammation and an aggressive immune response, that was unique among patients with severe asthma. Additionally, exposure to lipopolysacharride—LPS, a component of bacterial cell walls—triggered the activity of oncostatin M.
"Bacterial dysbiosis and opportunistic bacterial infections have been observed in, and may contribute to, more severe asthma," wrote Headland in Science Translational Medicine. "However, the molecular mechanisms driving these exacerbations remain unclear. We show here that bacterial lipopolysaccharide induces oncostatin M and that airway biopsies from patients with severe asthma present with an OSM-driven transcriptional profile.
"This profile correlates with activation of inflammatory and mucus-producing pathways," Headland added, noting that using "primary human lung tissue or human epithelial and mesenchymal cells, we demonstrate that oncostatin M is necessary and sufficient to drive pathophysiological features observed in severe asthma after exposure to LPS."
While the new analysis helped scientists gain a keener understanding of the underlying drivers of severe bacteria-associated asthma, there were also suggestions in their research that a monoclonal antibody may one day block oncostatin M. Both lines of research—discovering the missing link in severe bacteria-associated asthma and pinpointing a potential form of treatment—provide a ray of hope for patients with the form of the disease broadly known as non-type-2.
Asthma was once thought to be a single disorder, but doctors now understand it to be several complex but related conditions with varying underlying triggers. There are two key categories of severe asthma: Type 2 inflammation and non-type 2 inflammation. Each of the two categories is based on the biological mechanisms that drive the disease. Type 2 inflammation, for example, includes allergic asthma and eosinophilic asthma.
The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America defines allergic asthma as an inflammatory disease caused by an allergen, such as exposure to cockroaches, pollen, dust mites, mold or pet dander, to name a few triggers. The immune system responds by producing an overabundance of the immunoglobulin (antibody) known as Immunoglobulin E, or IgE. Extremely high levels of IgE can cause inflammation of the lungs' airways.
Another form of Type 2 is eosinophilic asthma, which is characterized by high levels of white blood cells known as eosinophils. A hallmark of this type of asthma is generalized swelling throughout the entire respiratory tract, from the nasal region to the tiniest airways in the lungs. People with this form of asthma experience wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness and lung-function abnormalities, among other symptoms.
Non-type 2 inflammation in severe asthma has been defined as the absence of eosinophils. However, doctors say there is much more to this form of asthma, which is characterized by a constellation of problems, ranging from an extreme inflammatory condition in the lungs airways to shortness of breath and difficulty controlling the condition. In terms of treatment, medical experts also have long known that non-type 2 inflammation doesn't respond to inhaled corticosteroids, a standard of care that works well in other forms of asthma. Thus, the discovery of a bacterial dysbiosis associated with oncostatin M, opens a new window of understanding into a debilitating form of the disease, Headland and colleagues reported.
Indeed, there is a glaring unmet need for patients with this form of asthma because a specific therapy—something targeted—to address the unique manifestations of this form doesn't exist.
Headland and her collaborators found that oncostatin M drives the core asthma features, such as inflammatory signaling and excessive mucus production, when exposed either to LPS or a common bacterial pathogen, Klebsiella pneumoniae. And because of the unique role played by oncostatin M, the Genentech scientists are developing a potent monoclonal antibody that can block the protein, staving off airway inflammation.
So far, the tests, which appear promising, have been conducted in a mouse model. The hope is to develop a treatment that can be tested in a human clinical trial. "Together, these results provide a scientific rationale supporting the clinical development of therapeutics targeting [oncostatin M] to prevent asthma progression," the authors concluded.Researchers discover new therapeutic target for severe asthma
More information:Sarah E. Headland et al, Oncostatin M expression induced by bacterial triggers drives airway inflammatory and mucus secretion in severe asthma,Science Translational Medicine(2022).DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abf8188
Study suggests Larsen A and B ice shelves collapsed due to atmospheric rivers
Satellite imagery from an atmospheric river landfall on January 25th, 2008 that triggered the disintegration of the land-fast ice in the Larsen A and Larsen B embayments that were visible five days later. MODIS-Terra Aqua images were acquired at worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov. Credit: Jonathan Wille
A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions across Europe has found evidence that suggests the collapse of the Larsen A and B ice shelves was due to the arrival of atmospheric rivers. In their paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, the group describes how they tracked the movement of atmospheric rivers during the time period when the ice shelves collapsed and what their work reveals about likely scenarios unfolding in Antarctica as global warming continues.
Ice shelves form when ice from glaciers meet the sea, and instead of breaking, they float on top of the ocean. Prior research has suggested that as global warming continues, ice shelves have begun to breakup. And while such breakups do not contribute to a rise in ocean levels, their loss does allow the glaciers that spawned them to flow unimpeded into the sea, which does raise sea levels. Prior research has also shown that one of the major reasons for ice shelf break up is the flow of warmer water beneath them. In this new effort, the researchers have found that atmospheric rivers are also very likely a contributing factor.
Atmospheric rivers, as their name suggests, are currents of air that have different properties than the air around them. In most cases, they are warmer and thus carry more moisture. To learn more about the possible impact of atmospheric rivers when they flow into the Antarctic region, the researchers used a variety of tools, including a computer algorithm developed specifically to detect atmospheric rivers, and climate models and imagery captured by satellites. By identifying and following the paths of atmospheric rivers as they arrived at Antarctica, they found that one arrived in 1995 just before the collapse of Larsen A, and another arrived in 2002 just before the collapse of Larsen B.
An illustration of a typical intense atmospheric river over the northern Antarctic Peninsula and the associated observed meteorological features and impacts consequential to ice-shelf stability. Also, an example of a detected AR landfall on Feb. 6th, 2020, with the corresponding IVT values. The yellow, red, and green outlines are the shape of the AR as determined by the vIVT AR detection scheme, IWV AR detection scheme, and the original Antarctic AR detection algorithm, respectively. Credit: Communications Earth & Environment (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00422-9
Further study of the two events showed that the warm moist air from the atmospheric rivers led to melting of the surface ice, which seeped into cracks and refroze, widening the cracks. That led both of the shelves to be exposed to ocean swells that tore them apart. They also found that atmospheric rivers played a role in triggering 13 of 21 iceberg calving events between 2000 and 2020.Researchers identify biggest threats to Larsen C ice shelf
More information:Jonathan D. Wille et al, Intense atmospheric rivers can weaken ice shelf stability at the Antarctic Peninsula,Communications Earth & Environment(2022).DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00422-9
DALIAN INSTITUTE OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY SCIENCES
A research team led by Prof. PAN Xiulian and Prof. BAO Xinhe from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized the direct synthesis of isoparaffin-rich gasoline from syngas using ZnAlOx-SAPO-11 oxide-zeolite (OXZEO) catalysts.
They elucidated the active sites of isoparaffin formation, which provided guidance for the one-step synthesis of high-quality gasoline from syngas.
Previously, the DICP team proposed a new catalyst concept based on metal OXZEO bi-functional catalysts, and it enabled the direct conversion of syngas to a variety of chemicals and fuels with high selectivity, such as light olefins, ethylene, gasoline, aromatics and oxygenates. The OXZEO concept provided a new technology platform for the highly efficient utilization of coal and other carbon resources.
In this study, they achieved 34% CO conversion and 82% gasoline selectivity by modulating the acid sites distribution of zeolite, in which the iso/n-paraffins ratio was as high as 38. By optimizing the reaction conditions, they increased the ratio of iso/n-paraffins as high as 48, which was the highest value of the iso/n-paraffins ratio reported so far.
Moreover, a 150-hour on stream test of the catalyst indicated rather stable activity in syngas-to-gasoline.
Further studies showed that the external acid sites of the zeolite could be the active sites for the formation of branched, especially the multi-branched isoparaffins.
"This study provided important guidance for the one-step synthesis of high-quality gasoline from syngas and even CO2," said Prof. PAN.
The above work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Dalian High-level Talent Innovation Program, and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS.
For the past 10 years, the Medicare system has tried to improve the quality of health care that millions of older Americans receive, while slowing the growth in costs to the federal budget, by encouraging health care providers to join Accountable Care Organizations.
Today, ACOs coordinate the care of 11 million people, most of them with traditional Medicare coverage. The better the ACOs do, the more they’re rewarded.
But the improvements haven’t reached all older Americans equally. ACOs that include a higher percentage of patients who are Black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian have lagged behind those with higher percentage of white patients in providing preventive care and keeping patients out of the hospital.
In the new issue of JAMA Health Forum, a team from the University of Michigan shows that ACOs with higher percentages of members of racial and ethnic minority groups also tended to have higher percentages of out-of-network primary care. That meant the patient’s routine care was delivered by a provider with no connection to the ACO, and therefore no potential financial benefit if they hit the quality benchmarks.
The study used data from nearly 4 million Medicare participants whose providers belong to 538 ACOs in the Shared Savings Program. The percentage of patients who got their primary care outside the ACO was nearly 13% in the ACOs that had the highest percentage of participants from racial or ethnic minorities, compared with about 10% of the patients in the other ACOs.
But even when the researchers left out the ACOs that had the highest percentage of out-of-network primary care, they still saw differences in quality of care. Older adults in ACOs with the highest percentages of minority participants were less likely to get diabetes and cholesterol checks, and those who had been hospitalized were more likely to end up back in the hospital within a month.
On the other hand, in the ACOs that had the lowest percentage of patients who got their primary care out of the ACO network, there were no differences in quality performance between ACOs with different percentages of members from minority groups.
“These findings suggest that efforts by ACOs to encourage use of in-network primary care may reduce health care disparities among racial and ethnic minority patients, which has policy implications for the Shared Savings Program that includes most ACOs,” says John Hollingsworth, M.D., M.S., the U-M physician and health care researcher who led the analysis with Shivani Bakre, a former research associate at U-M.
Hollingsworth and several co-authors are members of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation; Hollingsworth and his team are part of the Dow Division of Health Services Research in the Department of Urology at Michigan Medicine.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees Medicare and the ACO program, recently announced a new kind of ACO that will launch in 2023, called ACO REACH. It specifically focuses on health equity and bringing the benefits of the ACO model to underserved communities.
CITATION: Association Between Organizational Quality and Out-of-Network Primary Care Among Accountable Care Organizations That Care for High vs Low Proportions of Patients of Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups JAMA Health Forum. 2022;3(4):e220575. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.0575
Association between organizational quality and out-of-network primary care among accountable care organizations that care for high vs low proportions of patients of racial and ethnic minority groups
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
15-Apr-2022
PSYCHOLOGY OF CLASS WAR
University of Cincinnati study: Socioeconomic factors affect response to depression treatment
Cross-college collaboration highlights importance of patients’ home environments
IMAGE: JEFFREY MILLS, LEFT, AND JEFFREY STRAWN, RIGHT, HAVE BECOME CLOSE COLLABORATORS TAKING A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO RESEARCH.view more
CREDIT: PHOTO/UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Patients seeking treatment for depression who have lower income and education and those who are members of minority populations tend to have worse treatment outcomes even when receiving equal access to treatment, according to new research from the University of Cincinnati.
Led by Jeffrey Mills, PhD, and Jeffrey Strawn, MD, the UC cross-college collaborative research was recently published in the journal Psychiatric Services.
Strawn, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience in UC’s College of Medicine and a UC Health adolescent psychiatrist, said that previous research has concluded that people seeking treatment for depression with lower income and less education have worse outcomes because of a lack of access to quality health care, but it is hard to isolate socioeconomic factors as they are often intertwined.
The research team analyzed data from a very large clinical trial known as CO-MED that enrolled 665 patients seeking treatment for depression. In the randomized trial, all patients had the same access to treatment without differences due to health insurance or income.
Study results
After controlling for sex, age and treatment type following 12 weeks of antidepressant medication treatment in the study, the team’s analysis found patients who were non-white improved 11.3% less compared to white patients. Those who were unemployed saw 6.6% less improvement compared to employed patients. Compared to patients in the 75th percentile of income distribution, patients having income at the 25th percentile reduced improvement by 4.8%.
Strawn noted the findings are still preliminary, but he was particularly interested to find that patients without a college degree had 9.6% less improvement compared to college graduates.
“We think about these things in terms of access, we think about them in terms of income inequality, and I realize that education does track with those, but just having a college degree while controlling for all of these other factors still had a significant impact,” said Strawn.
The researchers also examined the effect of the combination of socioeconomic factors, since the individual factors are often correlated, Mills said. Patients who were non-white, unemployed with no degree and had income in the 25th percentile had 26% less improvement compared to patients who were white, employed with a college degree and had income in the 75th percentile.
Mills said that the findings do not negate the fact that a lack of access makes an impact on treatment outcomes, but it does show the importance of including a patients’ home environment when analyzing the effectiveness of treatment.
“If you’re going home to a wealthy neighborhood with highly educated parents or spouse, then you’re arguably in a much better environment for the treatment to be effective than if you’re going to a poor neighborhood with other problems,” said Mills, professor of economics in UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business.
Strawn said other research suggests patients in resource-poor environments may be affected by greater chronic variable stress, meaning high stress in a pattern that is intermittent and difficult to predict. Other studies suggest chronic variable stress has a worse effect on patients than chronic sustained stress that is more steady, he said.
“So this is, ‘I was able to pay my rent this month, but I’m not sure that I will be able to next month. And I have a job right now, but I don’t know that I will next month,’” Strawn said. “So it’s just the impact of all those things as well as maybe having relatives or kids who have fewer educational resources or other job-related stress, or potentially other health problems, and you’re still running into those same barriers in terms of access and cost and support there.”
Research application
The study findings have the potential to impact clinical trials by designing studies that pay better attention to socioeconomic variables that may have been previously overlooked, Strawn said.
“When we don’t control for these variables, which we often do not in our clinical trials because of differences in populations, we may miss detecting an effective treatment because its effect is obscured,” Strawn said. “So it can potentially jeopardize our treatment development by not accounting for these factors.”
Strawn said those treating patients every day can use the knowledge from the study in a more straightforward approach. While removing barriers of access to treatment is important, he said clinicians must also acknowledge that a patient’s socioeconomic environment may be affecting their ability to get better with treatment when measuring progress and crafting future treatment plans.
Mills said the research also has important implications when crafting and implementing economic policy, such as the recently passed infrastructure bill or ongoing discussions on the minimum wage. The impact of a policy on an individual’s socioeconomic environment, and subsequently their mental health, is not typically considered, he said.
“Someone employed at a higher wage has a chance to improve their socioeconomic status and environment, and so they’re definitely less likely to get mental health problems,” he said. “If people with higher socioeconomic status do get mental health problems, what we’re showing is they’re more likely to improve if they get treatment.”
Team science
In the past, two researchers with different specialties in different colleges within a university may have never worked together on research like this, but the collaboration shows the benefit of what is called team science, a transdisciplinary approach to research.
Strawn explained that traditional multidisciplinary research often looks like a psychiatrist, a neurologist and a psychologist all within the College of Medicine working together on a project. While that has its place, team science works across disciplines and involves completely separate sets of expertise, concepts and approaches.
“We think of multidisciplinary as being kind of the fruit salad where you have your grapes and your bananas, but everything is still distinct,” Strawn said. “And then you have your transdisciplinary, where things are really blended and it’s difficult to tell whose contributions are whose. That’s probably more like the fruit smoothie of disciplinary integration. I think that’s hopefully what we’ve achieved.”
Mills said he has previously seen colleagues expected to closely collaborate who never published a paper together because their skill sets were too similar and they did not need each other to move forward. Alternatively, Mills and Strawn have interest in each other’s field and bring varying, complementary skill sets to the research.
“It’s further than just multidisciplinary, because if I get together with my colleagues, we still have had very similar training. We use the same jargon, we have similar ideas,” Mills said. “There’s not the same cross pollination in stepping out of your field and thinking about other topics and giving each other ideas and concepts that you may not have thought about.”
Moving forward, the researchers want to continue the research by combining data from other depression trials to produce more powerful results with a larger dataset.
IMAGE: THE BRIGHT ORANGE FLOWERS OF THE ECUADORIAN CLOUD FOREST HERB GASTERANTHUS EXTINCTUS, LONG BELIEVED TO HAVE GONE EXTINCT, LIGHT UP THE FOREST UNDERSTORY AS IF BEGGING TO BE SEEN.view more
CREDIT: PHOTO BY RILEY FORTIER.
Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons-- they can honor an important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where it’s from. For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000, the scientific name “extinctus” was a warning. The orange wildflower had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since been largely destroyed; the scientists who named it suspected that by the time they named it, it was already extinct. But in a new paper in PhytoKeys, researchers report the first confirmed sightings of Gasteranthus extinctus in 40 years.
“Extinctus was given its striking name in light of the extensive deforestation in western Ecuador,” says Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and co-lead author of the paper. “But if you claim something's gone, then no one is really going to go out and look for it anymore. There are still a lot of important species that are still out there, even though overall, we're in this age of extinction.”
The rediscovered plant is a small forest floor-dweller with flamboyant neon-orange flowers. “The genus name, Gasteranthus, is Greek for ‘belly flower.’ Their flowers have a big pouch on the underside with a little opening top where pollinators can enter and exit,” says White.
G. extinctus is found in the foothills of the Andes mountains, where the land flattens to a plane that was once covered in cloud forest. The region, called the Centinela Ridge, is notorious among biologists for being home to a unique set of plants that vanished when its forests were almost completely destroyed in the 1980s. The late biologist E. O. Wilson even named the phenomenon of organisms instantly going extinct when their small habitat is destroyed “Centinelan extinction.”
The story of Centinela was also an alarm to draw attention to the fact that over 97% of the forests in the western half of Ecuador have been felled and converted to farmland. What remains is a fine mosaic of tiny islands of forest within a sea of bananas and a handful of other crops.
“Centinela is a mythical place for tropical botanists,” says Pitman. “But because it was described by the top people in the field, no one really double-checked the science. No one went back to confirm that the forest was gone and those things were extinct.”
But around the time that Gasteranthus extinctus was first described in 2000, scientists were already showing that some victims of Centinelan extinction weren’t really extinct. Since 2009, a few scientists have mounted expeditions looking for G. extinctus was still around, but they weren’t successful. But when White and Pitman received funding from the Field Museum’s Women’s Board to visit the Centinela Ridge, the team had a chance to check for themselves.
Starting in the summer of 2021, they began combing through satellite images trying to identify primary rainforest that was still intact (which was difficult, White recalls, because most of the images of the region were obscured by clouds). They found a few contenders and assembled a team of ten botanists from six different institutions in Ecuador, the US, and France, including Juan Guevara, Thomas Couvreur, Nicolás Zapata, Xavier Cornejo, and Gonzalo Rivas. In November of 2021, they arrived at Centinela.
“It was my first time planning an expedition where we weren’t sure we’d even enter a forest,” says Pitman. “But as soon as we got on the ground we found remnants of intact cloud forest, and we spotted G. extinctus on the first day, within the first couple hours of searching. We didn’t have a photo to compare it to, we only had images of dried herbarium specimens, a line drawing, and a written description, but we were pretty sure that we’d found it based on its poky little hairs and showy “pot-bellied” flowers.”
Pitman recalls mixed emotions upon the team finding the flower. “We were really excited, but really tentative in our excitement-- we thought, ‘Was it really that easy?’” he says. “We knew we needed to check with a specialist.”
The researchers took photos and collected some fallen flowers, not wanting to harm the plants if they were the only ones remaining on Earth. They sent the photos to taxonomic expert John Clark, who confirmed that, yes, the flowers were the not-so-extinct G. extinctus. Thankfully, the team found many more individuals as they visited other forest fragments, and they collected museum specimens to voucher the discovery and leaves for DNA analysis. The team was also able to validate some unidentified photos posted on the community science app iNaturalist as also being G. extinctus.
The plant will keep its name, says Pitman, because biology’s code of nomenclature has very specific rules around renaming an organism, and G. extinctus’s resurrection doesn’t make the cut.
While the flower remains highly endangered, the expedition found plenty of reasons for hope, the researchers say.
“We walked into Centinela thinking it was going to break our heart, and instead we ended up falling in love,” says Pitman. “Finding G. extinctus was great, but what we’re even more excited about is finding some spectacular forest in a place where scientists had feared everything was gone.”
The team is now working with Ecuadorian conservationists to protect some of the remaining fragments where G. extinctus and the rest of the spectacular Centinelan flora lives on. “Rediscovering this flower shows that it’s not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there’s value in conserving even the smallest, most degraded areas,” says White. “It’s an important piece of evidence that it’s not too late to be exploring and inventorying plants and animals in the heavily degraded forests of western Ecuador. New species are still being found, and we can still save many things that are on the brink of extinction.”
CAPTION
Long believed to have gone extinct, Gasteranthus extinctus was found growing next to a waterfall at Bosque y Cascada Las Rocas, a private reserve in coastal Ecuador containing a large population of the endangered plant
CREDIT
Photo by Riley Fortier
CAPTION
Part of the team departs the field for the day with bags full of rare plant specimens, surrounded by the typical Centinelan landscape of tall, remnant trees scattered across pasture and farmland.
CREDIT
Photo by Dawson White.
CAPTION
The team presses and preserves the specimens collected during the day.
