Using environmental DNA for to survey the populations of endangered species

Scientists surveyed ’bitterling fish,' an endangered freshwater species, using a new semi-quantitative system that uses environmental DNA

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OKAYAMA UNIVERSI

 

IMAGE: R. A . SUIGENSIS IS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES FACING LOCAL EXTINCTION IN THEIR NATURAL HABITATS IN JAPAN. SCIENTISTS AT OKAYAMA UNIVERSITY HAVE DEVELOPED A NOVEL ENVIRONMENTAL DNA SURVEY METHOD THAT CAN AID CONSERVATION EFFORTS FOR THIS SPECIES. view more 

CREDIT: KAZUYOSHI NAKATA

Changes in river systems, overfishing and the appearance of new, invasive species can lead to a drastic decline in the number of native fish inhabiting aquatic ecosystems. In the Ashida river basin in Japan, the bitterling fish (Rhodeus atremius suigensis), which was previously found in abundance, is now facing local extinction. This is concerning, considering that it is recognized as an indicator species for the conservation of fish diversity in freshwater ecosystems. Conservation efforts to protect native aquatic fauna require field studies of large areas to understand the habitat needs and population density of different species. This is a challenging task, requiring substantial time and effort. To overcome this obstacle, scientists usually focus on small areas and trace the DNA discarded by living organisms into their environment. This environmental DNA (or eDNA) can be analyzed to identify species that recently visited the area, in a non-invasive and time-efficient manner.

 

Recently, scientists from the Okayama University in Japan used eDNA to survey not only the presence but also the distribution and population density of R. a. suigensis in the Ashida river basin in Fukuyama, Japan. They employed a semi-quantitative eDNA analysis method using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. They developed DNA primers that detected a stretch of the mitochondrial DNA of R. a. suigensis, which made their analysis highly specific to only this particular species. Their findings were published in the Journal of Landscape and Ecological Engineering on 23 November 2022.

 

“We first confirmed the utility of this analysis in aquarium experiments, before performing field surveys.” says Prof. Kazuyoshi Nakata from Okayama University, who led the study. “We set fish traps at 48 points in an agricultural channel in the Ashida river basin and examined the relationship between fish presence and eDNA concentration.” The research team also included Ms. Kanoko Otsuki, Dr. Mayuko Hamada, and Prof. Tatsuya Sakamoto from Okayama University, and Dr. Noriyuki Koizumi from the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization.

 

The researchers found that eDNA concentrations vary according to the downstream channel distance from the point where specimens of R. a. suigensis were captured—the greater the distance, the lower the eDNA concentration. “Our results serve as a reference to how far and how much downstream eDNA can be detected, which will be useful to guide future conservation surveys,” says Prof. Nakata.

 

Thus, the researchers could verify that the concentrations of eDNA were indicative of the distribution and abundance of R. a. suigensis. Since this technique requires only the sampling of water in the field, even local residents can help carry out ecological surveys. Future conservation efforts can apply the information obtained from these surveys to design appropriate strategies.

 

This technique is highly scalable and can be replicated for larger areas. Further, with the development of corresponding molecular tools, such as specific primers, this technique can be modified to survey other endangered species as well. This will help in not only the promotion of the conservation of endangered species, but also contribute invaluably towards awareness regarding the importance of biodiversity conservation with the involvement of local communities.

 

About Okayama University, Japan

As one of the leading universities in Japan, Okayama University aims to create and establish a new paradigm for the sustainable development of the world. Okayama University offers a wide range of academic fields, which become the basis of the integrated graduate schools. This not only allows us to conduct the most advanced and up-to-date research, but also provides an enriching educational experience.

Website: https://www.okayama-u.ac.jp/index_e.html

 

About Professor Kazuyoshi Nakata

Dr. Kazuyoshi Nakata is a Professor at the Graduate School of Environmental and Life Science at Okayama University, Japan. His areas of interest include conservation, ecology, and civil engineering, with a focus on endangered or invasive freshwater animals including fish, crustaceans and frogs etc. He has published articles on various topics across these subjects. Prof. Nakata was previously associated with Hokkaido University.

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JOURNAL

Landscape and Ecological Engineering

DOI

10.1007/s11355-022-00531-9 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Quantitative PCR method to detect an extremely endangered bitterling fish (<span style="font-style:italic">Rhodeus atremius suigensis</span>) using environmental DNA

New insecticidal compounds remain effective against target species while reducing bee toxicity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

 

IMAGE: A BEE AND THE MOLECULAR STRUCTURE OF THE COMPOUND RESEARCHED. view more 

CREDIT: CHEN ZHAO/SOUTH CHINA AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY

Researchers at South China Agricultural University have developed new insecticidal compounds that show significantly reduced bee toxicity without reducing effectiveness against target pests – in this case, the diamondback moth and red imported fire ant. 

Arylpyrazole insecticides such as fipronil display broad-spectrum insecticidal activity against insect pests, but their high toxicity to honeybees prohibits their agronomic use. In this study, published on 7 February in the SCI journal Pest Management Science, the researchers designed and synthesised a series of new spiro-pyrazolo quinazoline derivatives intended to reduce the toxicity of arylpyrazole analogs to bees.

Spiro motifs are compounds that have at least two molecular rings with only one common atom. They are ubiquitous in natural products and bioactive molecules, but despite their wide application in other fields, between 2010 and 2021 there were fewer than 140 reports of their pesticidal activity. Speaking to SCI, Professor Hanhong Xu, Professor Chen Zhao, and Dr Guankai Yao explained:

‘With high specificity and diversity in structures, spiro motifs have been widely used in pharmaceuticals, asymmetric catalysis, optical materials, flame-retardant materials, polymeric adhesives, etc. However, only a few spiro-containing compounds have become representative pesticides on the market at present, such as spirodiclofen and spirotetramat by Bayer. 

‘The reasons include the difficulty of synthesis and relatively limited pest species that they are effective against, which bring about high cost for production and field application. Meanwhile, many spiro compounds possess chiral isomerism. Thus, when assessing their efficacy and safety, it is necessary to fully consider the different bioactivities, toxicities, and environmental behaviors of isomers, leading to long R&D cycles.’

The team employed scaffold hopping techniques – an agrochemical discovery strategy widely used to find novel candidates to improve activity levels and/or avoid adverse toxicity. This technique has been successfully used in herbicide research, for example, leading to discovery of the cellulose-biosynthesis inhibitor indaziflam. 

Asked about their choice of the diamondback moth (P. xylostella) and imported red fire ant (S. invicta) as target pests in this study, the researchers noted:

‘The diamondback moth is among the world’s top-ten pests that severely damage cruciferous vegetables and reduce the yield. The red fire ant is one of the world’s worst invasive alien species, threatening human health and the ecosystem. Respectively, being representative of Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera pests, insecticidal activity against the diamondback moth and red imported fire ant usually indicates similar results for other pests with similar species. In fact, further studies in our lab have revealed excellent insecticidal activity of our compounds against the fall armyworm and the Asian citrus psylla.’

Results showed that most of the compounds displayed good insecticidal activity – and some comparable with that of fipronil – against the target pests, making them promising insecticide candidates. Remarkably, the bee toxicity study confirmed that one new compound, “5f” showed much lower acute oral toxicity with an LD50 value (1.15 μg bee−1) that was three to four 3–4 orders of magnitude that of fipronil (0.0012 μg bee−1). 

‘Fipronil is a landmark product in the field of insecticides but has been banned for usage due to its high toxicity to non-target organisms, especially honeybees. During the past twenty years, a series of studies have been conducted in our group on the structural modification of fipronil, aiming for enhanced bioavailability and reduced toxicity. The combination of the spiro motif, as reported in this research paper, is one of our new attempts, and the significance of reduction on bee toxicity is within our expectation. There will be follow-up results on the relevant mechanism’, Professor Zhao explained.

In order to meet the requirements of industrial production, the researchers will need to further improve the yields and scalability of the molecules. The team is currently working on the optimisation of the synthesis process and the screening of isomers with enhanced bioactivity to reduce the cost of production.

‘We will keep working on the structural optimisation of our molecules, as well as the development of simple and efficient strategies for constructing spiro motifs. We hope that more compounds with excellent pesticidal activity could be discovered in the future, and similar spiro structures could occupy a larger share of the pesticide market’, the researchers said. 

 

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JOURNAL

Pest Management Science

DOI

10.1002/ps.7287 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

Design, synthesis, and biological activity of novel spiro-pyrazolo[1,5-a]quinazolines derivatives as potential insecticides

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023

 Surprises in sea turtle genes could help them adapt to a rapidly changing world

Collaborative, international research effort led by UMass Amherst unveils the highest quality map of sea turtles’ genomes, giving scientists a head-start on conservation

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

 

IMAGE: GREEN TURTLES, SUCH AS THIS ONE, HAVE EVOLVED TO HAVE MORE GENES DEDICATED TO IMMUNITY. view more 

CREDIT: RALPH PACE

February 7, 2023

Surprises in Sea Turtle Genes Could Help Them Adapt to a Rapidly Changing World

Collaborative, international research effort led by UMass Amherst unveils the highest quality map of sea turtles’ genomes, giving scientists a head-start on conservation

AMHERST, Mass. – Around 100 million years ago, a group of land-dwelling turtles took to the oceans, eventually evolving into the sea turtles that we know today. However, the genetic foundations that have enabled them to thrive in oceans throughout the world have remained largely unknown. In research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of 48 researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and the Vertebrate Genome Project revealed an incredibly detailed genetic map of two species—green and leatherback turtles—which is packed with surprises that might hold the key to their survival in a rapidly changing world.

A single species’ genome contains the genetic set of instructions used to build that species, and sequencing any species’ genome is an enormous amount of work. This is akin to translating an entire library into a language that scientists can read and has only been possible in the last few decades. For green sea turtles, a “draft” genome, including approximately 100,000 pieces of genetic information, has been available since 2013, “but” says Blair Bentley, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental conservation at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the new research, “these pieces of genetic information weren’t precisely mapped out. It was as if you walked into a library and found 100,000 pages lying on the floor.”

To more precisely catalogue the turtles’ genomes, the international team turned to new technologies including long read sequencing—a technique recently named 2022 Method of the Year by the journal Nature. This has made it possible to sequence genomes from virtually any living species and to do so with far more accuracy than was previously possible. Sequencing of the turtles’ genomes was performed both at Rockefeller University, in the Vertebrate Genome Laboratory (VGL), led by Erich Jarvis, who chairs the VGP, and Olivier Fedrigo who is director of the VGL, and at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics by Eugene Myers—all coauthors on the new study. “These advances allowed us to do the equivalent of shelving everything according to the Dewey Decimal System so that we can begin to understand how everything fits together,” says Bentley.

Once Bentley and his co-authors had correctly organized and annotated the genetic data, they started finding surprises. The first is that, though greens and leatherbacks diverged from a common ancestor about 60 million years ago, their genomes are remarkably similar.

Similar, but not the same. “It’s those differences that make them unique,” says Lisa Komoroske, professor of environmental conservation at UMass and one of the paper’s two senior authors. And it’s those differences that may hold the key to each species’ long-term survival, especially considering that populations of both greens and leatherbacks have seen precipitous declines due to human activity.

It turns out that green turtles have evolved more genes dedicated to immunity, suggesting an immune system that is better prepared for new pathogens, as well as more olfactory receptors—they have better senses of smell. The leatherback genome also shows that they lower genetic diversity and have historically had lower population levels. “This is both a blessing and a curse,” says Komoroske, “because it means that, while leatherbacks are a resilient species, there isn’t much genetic diversity for them to evolve to meet the challenges of their rapidly changing environment.” Insights such as these will help conservation biologists make more informed decisions about how best to protect these animals as they face the challenges of adapting to our rapidly changing planet.

Furthermore, the more time Bentley and Komoroske spent in the turtles’ genomes, the more it became clear that much of the genetic differences between the two species is to be found, not on the macrochromosomes, but on what was once considered to be “genetic junk”: microchromosomes, or small genetic bits that seem not to exist in mammals but are characteristic of avian and reptilian genomes. “We found most of the divergences between the green and the leatherbacks on these microchromosomes,” says Camila Mazzoni, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and the study’s other senior author, “and our work feeds into the growing scholarship on the importance of microchromosomes in vertebrate evolution.”

“The only way we could do this work at all was through an incredible collaborative network that brought scientists from different fields together with organizations like the Vertebrate Genome Project and NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center, supported by funders from around the world,” says Komoroske. Indeed, the research was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Vertebrate Genomes Project, Sanger Institute, São Paolo Research Foundation, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Generalitat de Catalunya, la Caixa Foundation, Vienna Science and Technology Fund, City of Vienna, Welsh Government Sêr Cymru II, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant, the Florida Sea Turtle Grants Program, and individual international donors.

 

Contacts: Lisa Komoroske, lkomoroske@umass.edu

                 Daegan Miller, drmiller@umass.edu

 

 

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2201076120 

ARTICLE TITLE

Divergent sensory and immune gene evolution in sea turtles with contrasting demographic and life histories

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023

THIRD WORLD U$A

Dental service use falls, oral health worsens after people become eligible for Medicare

For nearly 1 in 20 adults, Medicare eligibility was associated with the loss of all their teeth

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BRIGHAM AND WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

Half of all older adults in the U.S. lack dental insurance and, in 2018, nearly half of older adults received no dental care. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, examined changes in dental care and oral health after older adults become eligible for Medicare, the traditional version of which covers medical services, but not dental care. Among more than 97,000 people, the researchers found a dramatic drop in the percentage of people receiving restorative dental care and an almost 5 percentage point increase the number people who lost all their teeth after they turned 65 and became eligible for Medicare. Their results are published in Health Affairs.

“Older adults have the lowest rates of dental insurance in the U.S. and cost is a major barrier for many in seeking dental care,” said corresponding author Lisa Simon, MD, DMD, a resident in the Brigham’s Department of Medicine. “We know that Medicare, by covering medical services, improves health outcomes and reduces racial health inequities among older adults, but it has the exact opposite effect for dental care.”

With very limited exceptions, traditional Medicare does not cover dental services. Medicare Advantage plans can offer dental services, but the extent of coverage varies. Federal efforts to expand Medicare dental coverage have not passed and policy debates about dental benefits are ongoing.

Simon and colleagues analyzed national data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 2010 to 2019, examining changes in dental insurance and oral health care immediately after respondents became eligible for Medicare. The surveys included community-dwelling adults ages 50 to 85.

The team found that both traditional Medicare and Medical Advantage beneficiaries experienced immediate and long-term reductions in dental services use after Medicare enrollment. While the total number of annual dental visits did not change, the number of visits for restorative procedures, such as fillings or crowns, decreased by 8.7 percent. Adults also experienced an increase in complete edentulism—loss of all teeth—which puts people at higher risk of poor nutrition, lower quality of life and progression of cognitive impairment.

“Loss of teeth can have a number of negative downstream effects,” said Simon. “It’s associated with many geriatric conditions, including frailty and cognitive function.”

The authors note that the survey data used did not allow them to follow participants over long periods and the changes detected could be confounded by other life changes at age 65, such as retirement or receipt of Social Security income. Using other forms of survey data could help investigators focus on at-risk populations, such as adults living in long-term care facilities, and could help to identify and compare what dental benefit Medicare Advantage programs offer.

“Without dental coverage for adults who are eligible Medicare, we are seeing a rise in loss of teeth after age 65 among nearly 1 in 20 adults, which represents millions of Americans,” said Simon. “Our findings capture the magnitude of the problem but also point to the opportunity to improve oral health care access and outcomes, should policy makers expand Medicare coverage to include dental services.”

Disclosures: Simon received funding for consulting work with the CareQuest Foundation and the PrimaryCare Collaborative in 2020 and 2021.

Funding: This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Grant No. K23 AG058806), the Office of the Director, NIH (NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, DP5-OD024564).

Paper cited: Simon L et al. “Dental Services Use: Medicare Beneficiaries Experience Immediate And Long-Term Reductions After Enrollment” Health Affairs DOI: 10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01899

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JOURNAL

Health Affairs

DOI

10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01899 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Dental Services Use: Medicare Beneficiaries Experience Immediate And Long-Term Reductions After Enrollment

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Feb-2023

COI STATEMENT

Simon received funding for consulting work with the CareQuest Foundation and the PrimaryCare Collaborative in 2020 and 2021.

WHY IT'S BECOME A BILLIONAIRES HIDE AWAY

NZ one of few island nations with potential to produce enough food in a nuclear winter

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

 

IMAGE: NICK WILSON view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

New Zealand is one of only a few island nations that could continue to produce enough food to feed its population in a nuclear winter, researchers have found.

In a new study Professor Nick Wilson, from the University of Otago and independent researcher Dr Matt Boyd, from Adapt Research in New Zealand, say five island nations, including New Zealand, could be well placed to continue to produce food despite the reduced sunlight and cooler temperatures caused by soot in the atmosphere following a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. Australia (an island continent), Iceland, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands were also likely to have robust food self-sufficiency, even in an extreme nuclear winter.

Their research is published in the international journal Risk Analysis.

Professor Wilson says while New Zealand was likely to continue to be able to produce enough food, its production and distribution was still threatened by the country’s extreme dependence on imported commodities, such as refined fuel.

The researchers investigated the impact of abrupt sunlight reducing scenarios caused by nuclear war, super volcano eruptions or asteroid impacts on agricultural production globally. They applied published crop models under ‘nuclear winter’ conditions to 38 island nations, combining this with other methods to estimate the food calorie supply. They also assessed a range of resilience factors that might protect countries from the impacts of a nuclear winter.

Dr Boyd says although some other nations would likely be able to produce enough food, other factors, such as the collapse of industry and social functioning placed their resilience in doubt.

Professor Wilson says the findings are consistent with a 1980s study on the impact of nuclear war on New Zealand, although the country’s resilience has declined since then as its dependence on  imported diesel and digital infrastructure has grown.

“Islands such as New Zealand are often very dependent on imports of refined liquid fuel, may lack energy self-sufficiency and are susceptible to breakdowns and shortages of critical commodities. While New Zealand could divert a high proportion of its dairy exports to supply the local market, it lacks the ability to manufacture many replacement parts for farm and food processing machinery.”

Dr Boyd says the findings of the study reinforce the precarious position many countries would find themselves in during a global catastrophe.

“New Zealand has the potential to preserve an industrial society through this kind of catastrophe, but it is not ‘plug-and-play’. A decent amount of strategic planning needs to happen and across a long period of time, but this planning would have benefits in dealing with a wide range of extreme risks.”

Dr Boyd says the findings show there is a need to analyse nuclear winter and other abrupt sunlight reducing scenarios as part of a comprehensive national risk assessment.

“We are not aware of any plan for this kind of global catastrophe, including whether priorities for rationing have been considered.

“With the Government expected to release New Zealand’s first National Security Strategy this year it is important that the catastrophic risks associated with abrupt sunlight reducing scenarios do not slip through the cracks.”

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JOURNAL

Risk Analysis

DOI

10.1111/risa.14072 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Island refuges for surviving nuclear winter and other abrupt sunlight-reducing catastrophes

Employing tradeoffs for more realistic COVID messaging

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Wash your hands. Wear a high-quality mask. Keep 6 feet between you and others. Meet outside when possible.

For nearly three years, the public has been inundated with rules, regulations and suggestions from public health officials on the best way to stay safe amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But with so many rules, and little direction about which matter more, people have been left to guesswork, which may have cost lives.

Economist Ori Heffetz, associate professor in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and a colleague conducted an experiment with nearly 700 people in three countries to gauge the public’s perception of relative risk factors.

Among the conclusions: Talking 14 minutes longer was thought to be as risky as standing a foot closer; being indoors was thought as risky as standing three feet closer outdoors; and removing a properly worn mask, by either party, was thought as risky as standing four to five feet closer.

“Estimating Perceptions of the Relative COVID risk of Different Social-Distancing Behaviors From Respondents’ Pairwise Assessments” published Feb. 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Heffetz’s co-author was Matthew Rabin, the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics at Harvard University.

Heffetz and Rabin wanted to investigate the idea of tradeoffs in the context of people making decisions regarding their health.

“We wondered whether doctors and health officials are too reticent to indicate the relative importance of different measures,” said Heffetz, who’s also a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Imagine someone talking to their dentist, where they ask if it’s more important to floss twice a day or brush more often,” he said.  “And the dentist always tells them, ‘Do both.’ But we want to understand what’s a big deal, what’s not so big, how do they compare?”

Their goal in this work: Helping to transform messaging, regarding COVID and other health and nonhealth domains, to more closely resemble the way most people make decisions.

“Think about weight loss, and the tradeoffs people make,” Heffetz said. “Nobody says, ‘Don’t eat anything but leaves.’ They’ll say, ‘Have your cup of coffee without cream, you’ll save so many calories,’ or ‘Indulge, and then spend two hours at the gym.’ We have a metric – calories – and we can use it to price things. And then we make our decisions. We can make our tradeoffs.”

For their experiment, conducted during the spring and summer of 2021, Heffetz and Rabin showed 676 online respondents in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Israel 30 pairs of five-second videos of acquaintances meeting. Respondents were asked to judge, for one of the two people designated, which of the two scenarios in each pair was riskier.

From their responses, the researchers were able to estimate people’s perceptions of how risks changed by the features of the conversation. They used videos rather than verbal descriptions in order to let people judge each depiction on their own, without any prompting.

“We wanted to do something that looks to respondents as realistic as possible,” Heffetz said. “And then we don’t draw their attention to any specific thing, we just show them the scenario. And if they notice the mask, the distance between the subjects, the cough or the hug … we let them pick what they think is important and then see what emerges.”

Heffetz and Rabin wondered if the messaging from health officials could have benefitted from a more nuanced set of guidelines.

“We only saw the list of things – ‘Do all of these things,’” Heffetz said. “But which one is more important, and less important? It was hard to get an answer. That may have cost lives, because people may have made the wrong decisions.”

But like the dentist, Heffetz said, health officials don’t want to tell you that one behavior may be more important than another. In a perfect world, people do them all because they’re all important.

“I’m sure some people do them all, but most of us often have to make a decision between two imperfect bundles,” he said. “And we would really like to know which one the professionals consider is the better choice in this case.

“Our results may suggest a major health-risk public-communications failure in terms of how behaviors compare in relative risk,” Heffetz said. “We think this would be something that maybe policymakers would listen to.”

-30-

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2219599120 

Endocrine Society praises State of the Union attention to insulin affordability

Society calls on Congress to take urgent action to save lives, improve health

Business Announcement

THE ENDOCRINE SOCIETY

WASHINGTON—The Endocrine Society applauds President Biden’s call to rein in soaring insulin prices for those with private insurance and urges Congress to take immediate action.

Biden plans to highlight the need for insulin affordability during tonight’s State of the Union address. He will call on Congress to extend insulin price caps—“commonsense, life-saving protection”—to all Americans, according to an administration statement.

While Congress passed a provision to make insulin more affordable in the Inflation Reduction Act, the monthly $35 insulin price cap in the law applies only to people with Medicare. An attempt to extend the benefit to millions more with private insurance failed in August in the Senate by a mere three votes.

Limiting out-of-pocket insulin costs to $35 a month would be life-changing, particularly for the more than 1.8 million American children and adults with type 1 diabetes. Their bodies cannot produce the insulin needed to break down sugar and provide energy, so they depend on the medication to survive.

In 2021 alone, nearly one in five American adults with diabetes—about 1.3 million people—rationed their insulin to save money, according to a study. Rationing insulin causes people with diabetes to become sicker and, in some cases, even die.

“The Endocrine Society has championed measures to improve insulin access for years,” said Society President Ursula B. Kaiser, M.D. “As physicians and researchers, it is heartbreaking to see our patients struggle to afford the medication that keeps them alive.”

More than 7 million people nationwide rely on insulin to manage their diabetes. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 37.3 million people nationwide—about 11 percent of Americans—have diabetes.

While insulin was discovered more than 100 years ago, the price of insulin nearly tripled between 2002 and 2013, and the trend upward has continued over the past decade. This has created an unnecessary crisis in health care with many people with diabetes being forced to choose between insulin and other necessities.

The Society will continue to work with policymakers to ensure all people with diabetes who rely on insulin can benefit from lower out-of-pocket costs.

“Insulin affordability is a bipartisan issue,” Kaiser said. “Our patients cannot wait any longer for help.”

# # #

Endocrinologists are at the core of solving the most pressing health problems of our time, from diabetes and obesity to infertility, bone health, and hormone-related cancers. The Endocrine Society is the world’s oldest and largest organization of scientists devoted to hormone research and physicians who care for people with hormone-related conditions.

The Society has more than 18,000 members, including scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in 122 countries. To learn more about the Society and the field of endocrinology, visit our site at www.endocrine.org. Follow us on Twitter at @TheEndoSociety and @EndoMedia.

Loss of tropical biomass due to climate change could lead to increased carbon emissions

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

A decrease in tropical forest biomass stemming from changes in climate may lead to increased carbon emissions that could accelerate global warming, according to a new study co-authored by YSE postdoctoral associate Maria del Rosario Uribe and Paulo Brando,associate professor of ecosystem carbon capture.

Tropical ecosystems store over half of the world’s above-ground carbon in their biomass, which includes vines, trunks, and leaves. A decrease in biomass reduces the capacity of these ecosystems to capture and store carbon. The research team said the decrease likely stems from prolonged and intense dry periods in the forests from climate change.

“Wetter regions have much more biomass, or carbon, than drier regions. If wetter tropical areas shrink due to climate change, then you’re likely to lose the massive amount of carbon they store as well,” says Uribe, who led the study.

The research team used maps from satellites to study above-ground biomass in the tropics of South America, Africa, and Asia. To make predictions about the future, researchers leveraged historical data reaching back to 1950 to build empirical statistical and machine learning models. They found a strong relationship between above-ground biomass and spatial climate variability.

Due to the empirical relationship between above-ground biomass and climate, factors such as fire, drought, and interactions with the soil are implicit in the model, the researchers note.

The  researchers found that if greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are higher, losses of stored carbon could nearly double by 2100.

Uribe says she is hoping this data will strengthen the case for current climate policy initiatives, such as the Paris Climate Agreement that seek to limit global warming to no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels and preserve tropical forests.

Brando notes that the findings can be looked at as “glass half full or a glass half empty.” The losses due to climate change are not massive but are concentrated in a key specific region of the Southeastern Amazon.

“The tropics hold a considerable amount of carbon, almost 20 years of global human emissions,” Brando says. “We show that tropical ecosystems can resist a lot of climatic change, but these ecosystems’ future will depend on how we protect these areas from deforestation, logging, and human-made fires.”

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JOURNAL

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-023-01600-z 

ARTICLE TITLE

Net loss of biomass predicted for tropical biomes in a changing climate

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Feb-2023

Study finds public opinion on ivory in China shifts over two decades

Peer-Reviewed Publication

YALE UNIVERSITY

When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, allowed a one-off chance for China to bid on a 108-ton stockpile of ivory amassed from natural African elephant deaths and culling in 2008, many conservationists around the world assumed Chinese public sentiment toward ivory would become more favorable. But new YSE-led research published in Conservation Biology, which employs machine learning techniques to analyze public opinion, reveals that the exact opposite happened.

“After CITES authorized the sale of ivory, our analysis shows that the macro-public opinion in China became more negative toward ivory,” says Yufang Gao ’14 MESc, a PhD student in conservation science and environmental anthropology. “Chinese mass media coverage of ivory became more framed as anti-ivory, with news stories more focused on ivory smuggling and the government’s efforts to tightly control the ivory trade.”

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed the African forest elephant as critically endangered, the savanna elephant as threatened, and the Asian elephant as endangered. Where once there were 10 million wild elephants in Africa, there are now only about 400,000 left on the continent. The Asian elephant population has declined  50% in the last three generations to about 50,000 and they are now at a high risk of extinction.

Gao has been dedicated to studying the elephant ivory trade for more than a decade. For this study, he teamed up with Yuntian Liu, a statistician at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research & Evaluation, and a team of international researchers to review Chinese media coverage of the elephant ivory between 2000 and 2021.

Using a machine learning technique known as latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, the researchers studied how media stories framed ivory in 6,394 pieces of coverage, looking for evidence of how wildlife policies impacted public opinion in China.

“LDA topic modeling [helps us identify and define] recurring topics. In this case, topics refer to collections of words that commonly appeared together throughout news stories on ivory, such as smuggling, customs, seized, Africa, endangered, and animal,’” Liu says.

The team was particularly interested in the impact of the 2008 decision by CITES —a 173-nation coalition that monitors international plant and animal trade — allowing the sale of African ivory stockpiles to China and a 2016 ban on domestic ivory trade announced by the Chinese government (a move by China to deter elephant poaching in Africa for illegal ivory trade).

Gao and Liu looked for clues on how these policies influenced Chinese public opinion on ivory arts and culture, elephant conservation, and ivory-related crimes. Their discovery that the CITES-approved sale of ivory negatively influenced public opinion on ivory was not the only surprising finding.

Many conservationists hypothesized that the 2016 domestic ivory ban would lead to more negative public opinions in China about ivory. But after the ban, media framing shows that macro-public opinion throughout China became more positive about elephant ivory.

Gao says the ban may have drawn more attention to the perceived value of ivory in art and culture, making ivory seem more desirable.

The research is important because it underscores the need for conservationists to take a more nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between mass media reports, policies, and public opinion, Gao notes.

“By monitoring mass media framing of wildlife and conservation issues, we might be able to sooner identify emerging problems or threats toward wildlife or the environment,” he says.

He recommends that conservation organizations work more closely with the media to share information and elevate the importance of wildlife conservation in mainstream public dialogue.

“Conservation is a social process that involves many different stakeholders, including the media industry, governments, general public, researchers, and more,” he says. “Topic modeling is a powerful tool for uncovering shifts in media framing, dynamics of the interplay between different perspectives, and gauging how policies are actually changing public opinions.”

 

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JOURNAL

Conservation Biology

DOI

10.1111/cobi.1407 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

ARTICLE TITLE

Tracking Chinese newspaper coverage of elephant ivory through topic modeling

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023

Study finds video game playing causes no harm to young children’s cognitive abilities

Research also saw no measurable benefits from video games that claim to help kids’ development

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTO

Parents: It might be time to rethink your family’s video-gaming rules.

New research findings challenge the fears parents have been hearing for years that children who spend hour after hour playing video games, or choose games of certain genres, would manifest unhealthy results in their cognitive ability.

“Our studies turned up no such links, regardless of how long the children played and what types of games they chose,” said Jie Zhang, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Houston College of Education and a member of the research team. The work is published in the Journal of Media Psychology.

In reaching the conclusions, researchers examined the video gaming habits of 160 diverse urban public-school preteen students (70% from lower income households), which represents an age group less studied in previous research. Participating students reported playing video games an average of 2.5 hours daily, with the group’s heaviest gamers putting in as much as 4.5 hours each day.

The team looked for association between the students’ video game play and their performance on the standardized Cognitive Ability Test 7, known as CogAT, which evaluates verbal, quantitative and nonverbal/spatial skills. CogAT was chosen as a standard measure, in contrast to the teacher-reported grades or self-reported learning assessments that previous research projects have relied on.

“Overall, neither duration of play nor choice of video game genres had significant correlations with the CogAT measures. That result shows no direct linkage between video game playing and cognitive performance, despite what had been assumed,” said May Jadalla, professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University and the study’s principal investigator.

But the study revealed another side of the issue, too. Certain types of games described as helping children build healthy cognitive skills also presented no measurable effects, in spite of the games’ marketing messages.

“The current study found results that are consistent with previous research showing that types of gameplay that seem to augment cognitive functions in young adults don’t have the same impact in much younger children,” said C. Shawn Green, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Does this mean the world can play on? Maybe, the research suggests. But the experts also caution that gaming time took the heaviest players’ away from other, more productive activities – homework, to be specific – in a process psychologists call displacement. But even in those cases, the differences were slight between those participants and their peers’ CogAT measures of cognitive abilities.

“The study results show parents probably don’t have to worry so much about cognitive setbacks among video game-loving children, up to fifth grade. Reasonable amounts of video gaming should be OK, which will be delightful news for the kids. Just keep an eye out for obsessive behavior,” said Zhang. “When it comes to video games, finding common ground between parents and young kids is tricky enough. At least now we understand that finding balance in childhood development is the key, and there’s no need for us to over-worry about video gaming.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Media Psychology

DOI

10.1027/1864-1105/a000364 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Video game play