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)
Tuesday, March 07, 2023
Bees follow linear landmarks to find their way home, just like the first pilots
Study suggests that honeybees search for linear landscape elements that match mental map of home area
Peer-Reviewed Publication
IMAGE: A HARMONIC RADAR TRANSPONDER ATTACHED TO THE THORAX OF A FORAGER HONEYBEE.view more
CREDIT: E BULLINGER, U GREGGERS, R MENZEL
In the earliest days of human flight, before the invention of the first radio beacons and ground-based electronic systems, and modern GPS, pilots commonly navigated by following roads and railways – striking linear landscape elements at ground level that guide towards a destination of interest.
Enter the honeybee. A century of research has shown that honeybees are navigators par excellence. They can navigate by their sense of smell, the sun, the sky’s pattern of polarized light, vertical landmarks that stand out from the panorama, and possibly the Earth’s magnetic field. They are also clever learners, able to recognize associations between disparate memories in order to generalize rules.
Now, scientists have shown that honeybees tend to search for their way home by orienting themselves in relation to the dominant linear landscape elements, just like the first pilots. The results are shown in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Dr Randolf Menzel, an emeritus professor at the Department of Neurobiology of the Free University of Berlin, and the study’s lead author, explained: “Here we show that honeybees use a ‘navigation memory’, a kind of mental map of the area that they know, to guide their search flights when they look for their hive starting in a new, unexplored area. Linear landscape elements, such as water channels, roads, and field edges, appear to be important components of this navigation memory.”
Tiny transponder
In late summer of 2010 and 2011 near the village of Klein Lüben in Brandenburg, Menzel and colleagues caught 50 experienced forager honeybees and glued a 10.5-mg transponder on their back. They then released them in a new test area, too distant to be familiar to the bees. In the the test area was a radar, which could detect the transponders at a distance of up to 900 meters. The most notable landmark in the test area was a pair of parallel irrigation channels, running southwest to northeast.
When honeybees find themselves in unfamiliar territory, they fly in exploratory loops in different directions and over different distances, centered on the release spot. With the radar, the researchers tracked the exact exploratory flight pattern of each bee for between 20 minutes and three hours. The bees flew at up to nine meters above the ground during the experiment.
The researchers had collected foragers from five hives: the home area around hives A and B resembled the test area in terms of the number, width, length, and angle of linear landscape elements, especially irrigation channels. The home range around hives D and E was highly dissimilar in this regard, while the home area around hive C was intermediate in similarity to the test area. Other landmarks by which honeybees are known to find their way, such as structured horizons or vertical elements that stand out, were absent in the test area.
Non-random search pattern
Menzel et al. first simulated two sets of random flight patterns, centered on the release spot, and generated with different algorithms. Since the observed flight patterns were highly different from these, the researchers concluded that the honeybees didn’t simply conduct random search flights.
The researchers then used advanced statistics to analyze the orientation of flights and their frequency of flying over of each 100 x 100 meter block within the test area. They showed that the honeybees spent a disproportionate amount of time flying alongside the irrigation channels. Analyses showed that these continued to guide the exploratory flights even when the bees were more than 30 meters away, the maximum distance from which honeybees are able to see such landscape elements. This implies that the bees kept them in their memory for prolonged periods.
“Our data show that similarities and differences in the layout of the linear landscape elements between their home area and the new area are used by the bees to explore where their hive might be,” said Menzel.
Navigational memory
Importantly, machine learning algorithms showed that the irrigation channels in the test area were most informative for predicting the exploratory flights of bees from hives A and B, less so for bees from hive C, and least for bees from hives D and E. This suggests that the bees retained a navigational memory of their home area, based on linear landscape elements, and tried to generalize what they saw in the test area to his memory to find their way home.
“Flying animals identify such extended ground structures in a map-like aerial view making them highly attractive as guiding structures. It is thus not surprising that both bats and birds use linear landmarks for navigation. Based on the data reported here we conclude that elongated ground structures are also salient components of the honeybees’ navigation memory,” concluded the authors.
A new study has shown that bumblebees pick up new “trends” in their behaviour by watching and learning from other bees, and that one form of a behaviour can spread rapidly through a colony even when a different version gets discovered.
The research, led by Queen Mary University of London and published in PLOS Biology, provides strong evidence that social learning drives the spread of bumblebee behaviour – in this case, precisely how they forage for food.
A variety of experiments were set up to establish this. The researchers designed a two-option puzzle box that could be opened either by pushing a red tab clockwise or a blue tab counter-clockwise to reveal a 50 per cent sucrose solution reward.
‘Demonstrator’ bees were trained to use either the red or blue tabs, with ‘observer’ bees watching. When it was the observers’ turn to tackle the puzzle, they overwhelmingly and repeatedly chose to use the same method that they had seen, even after discovering the alternative option. This preference for the taught option was maintained by whole colonies of bees, with a mean of 98.6% of box openings made using the taught method.
The importance of social learning to the acquisition of puzzle box solutions was also illustrated through the control group, which lacked a demonstrator. In this group, some bees managed to open the puzzle boxes, but did so far fewer times than those who benefitted from seeing another bee do it first. The median number of boxes opened in a day by the observer bees with a demonstrator was 28 boxes a day, whereas it was only 1 for the control colony.
In an additional experiment, the researchers put both ‘blue’ and ‘red’ demonstrators into the same populations of bees. In the first population, 97.3% of the 263 incidences of box-opening by observers by day 12 used the red method. In the second population, observers preferred the blue method over the red on all days except one. In both cases, this demonstrated how a behavioural trend might emerge in a population in the first place – for the most part, due to experienced bees retiring from foraging and new learners arising, rather than any bees changing their preferred behaviour.
Similar results from similar experiments have been used in species such as primates and birds to suggest that they, like humans, are capable of culture. If bumblebees are capable of this, too, this could potentially explain the evolutionary origin of many of the complex behaviours seen among social insects. It might be possible that what now appears instinctive could have been socially learnt, at least originally.
Dr Alice Bridges, the lead author from Queen Mary University of London, said: “Bumblebees – and, indeed, invertebrates in general - aren’t known to show culture-like phenomena in the wild. However, in our experiments, we saw the spread and maintenance of a behavioural “trend” in groups of bumblebees – similar to what has been seen in primates and birds. The behavioural repertoires of social insects like these bumblebees are some of the most intricate on the planet, yet most of this is still thought to be instinctive. Our research suggests that social learning may have had a greater influence on the evolution of this behaviour than previously imagined.”
Professor Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London and author of the book ‘The Mind of a Bee’, said: “The fact that bees can watch and learn, and then make a habit of that behaviour, adds to the ever-growing body of evidence that they are far smarter creatures than a lot of people give them credit for.
“We tend to overlook the “alien civilisations” formed by bees, ants and wasps on our planet – because they are small-bodied and their societies and architectural constructions seem governed by instinct at first glance. Our research shows, however, that new innovations can spread like social media memes through insect colonies, indicating that they can respond to wholly new environmental challenges much faster than by evolutionary changes, which would take many generations to manifest.”
JOURNAL
PLoS Biology
Puzzle-solving behavior spreads through bumblebee colonies
Bees that learned from others were more adept and preferred the learned solution over alternatives
IMAGE: BUMBLEBEES CAN LEARN BY WATCHING A TRAINED BEE DEMONSTRATING ONE OF TWO WAYS TO SOLVE PUZZLE FOR A SUGARY REWARD, THEN COPY THE BEE TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE IN THE SAME WAYview more
CREDIT: DIEGO PEREZ-LOPEZ, PLOS (CC-BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
Bumblebees learn to solve a puzzle by watching more experienced bees, and this behavioral preference then spreads through the colony, according to a study publishing March 7th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Alice Dorothy Bridges and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Social animals like primates are skilled at learning by watching others, and previous work has shown that individual bees can learn tasks in this way, but it remained unclear whether these new behaviors would then spread through the colony. To investigate, researchers tested six colonies of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) using a puzzle box that could be opened by rotating a lid to access a sugar solution. The bees could rotate the lid either clockwise or anticlockwise by pushing one of two different colored tabs.
The researchers trained bees to use one of these two solutions and then released these ‘demonstrator’ bees into a foraging arena alongside untrained bees and filmed them over a period of six to twelve days. Foraging bees with a demonstrator opened more puzzle boxes than control bees, and used the same puzzle solution that the demonstrator had been taught 98% of the time, suggesting that they learned the behavior socially rather than stumbling upon a solution themselves. In experiments where multiple demonstrators were each taught a different solution to the puzzle, untrained bees initially learned to use both methods, but over time they randomly developed a preference for one solution or the other, which then came to dominate in that colony.
The study is the first to document the spread of different behavioral approaches to solving the same problem in bees. The results provide strong evidence that social learning is important for the transmission of new behaviors through bumblebee colonies, as has previously been shown in primates and birds, the authors say.
Bridges adds, “These results in bumblebees, which are tiny-brained invertebrates, echo those previously found using similar experiments in primates and birds - which were used to demonstrate the capacity of those species for culture.”
Bees feeding from a puzzle box opened by pushing the blue tab
CREDIT
Alice Bridges (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Citation: Bridges AD, MaBouDi H, Procenko O, Lockwood C, Mohammed Y, Kowalewska A, et al. (2023) Bumblebees acquire alternative puzzle-box solutions via social learning. PLoS Biol 21(3): e3002019. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019
Author Countries: United Kingdom, China
Funding: This study was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council programme grant, “Brains on Board” (ref. no. EP/P006094/1 to L.C.) and a Queen Mary University of London PhD studentship (to A.B.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Pregnant and postpartum people with schizophrenia have a more than threefold increase in the risk of an emergency department visit for interpersonal violence, compared with those without schizophrenia, according to a new study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal)https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.220689.
Interpersonal violence can include physical, sexual and psychological abuse by a family member, intimate partner, acquaintance or stranger.
"Though we found a threefold increased risk for individuals with schizophrenia, we also found that the majority of people, both with and without schizophrenia, are screened for interpersonal violence during pregnancy," says lead author Kelly Leslie, a fourth-year psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto. "This suggests there are many opportunities for health care providers to intervene and prevent harm to these patients and their children."
About 1 in 5 (20.7%) women with schizophrenia experience physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, about 9 times the risk for those without serious mental illness. However, little is known about their risk during the perinatal period.
Led by researchers from ICES and Women's College Hospital, the study included more than 1.8 million pregnant people aged 15–49 years, of whom 4470 had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia were more likely to live in a lower-income neighbourhood, to have other psychiatric and chronic medical conditions, and to have had an emergency department (ED) visit for interpersonal violence in the 2 years before their pregnancy.
Key findings:
Overall, 3.1% of people with schizophrenia had an ED visit for interpersonal violence during pregnancy and the first year postpartum, versus 0.4% of those without schizophrenia.
Pregnant individuals with schizophrenia were equally likely to be screened for (74.3% v. 73.8%), yet more likely to self-report (10.2% v. 2.4%), interpersonal violence.
Among study participants who were screened and did not disclose interpersonal violence in pregnancy, schizophrenia was associated with a sixfold increase in the risk of experiencing an ED visit for interpersonal violence in both pregnancy and postpartum.
The study suggests "that routine violence screening in antenatal care settings is an important opportunity for intervention to prevent severe physical, psychological and social harm to these patients and their children," writes Dr. Simone Vigod, head of psychiatry, Women's College Hospital and a professor at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, with coauthors.
IMAGE: COVER OF "ACTIVATED SLUDGE: DEVELOPMENTS AND SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS"view more
CREDIT: WORLD SCIENTIFIC
Globally, activated sludge treats the majority of urban wastewaters; yet it is one of the most complex biological processes used. It is a sophisticated microbial process fraught with operational problems leading to occasional failures in achieving required effluent quality standards. With the increasing problem of partially treated and raw sewage entering rivers and estuaries, the pressure on the process to cope with ever increasing volumes of wastewater has never been so great.
With increasing volumes of dilute wastewater entering treatment plants the high variability in hydraulic and organic loadings cause significant problems to operators of activated sludge plants, often resulting in untreated wastewater entering rivers. There is a long delay between design, funding and construction of wastewater treatment plants, including retrofitting, and so the problem of surface water pollution is on the rise, This is exacerbated by rapid housing developments in areas where there is insufficient wastewater treatment capacity or where receiving waters are insufficient to cope with increased loadings requiring increasingly higher levels of treatment. The better the effluent quality the more costly wastewater becomes to treat in terms of capital cost, energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge for operators, designers, consultants and researchers is to find novel solutions that are reliable, sustainable and able to rapidly increase treatment capacity at minimum cost. This is a tall order and requires a firm understanding of the process and, in particular, how bacterial flocs are formed, develop and respond to different operating conditions.
Activated Sludge: Developments and Sustainable Solutions explores in detail the microbial basis of activated sludge, especially the fascinating process of floc formation and development, the role of the organisms, and how a new understanding of the biology of the process has led to the creation of many new innovative process designs. Developments in basin design have created multiple reactor stages allowing a range of anaerobic, anoxic and aerobic zones to capitalize on a wider range of organisms able to remove nitrogen and phosphorus as well as organic matter. The high energy intensive conventional systems are now replaced with highly controlled reactors operating at low dissolved oxygen concentrations using a new generation of aeration devices. Underlying all this are the increasing challenges of ever-increasing loadings, climate change, nanoparticles, microplastics, pathogen removal and antibiotic gene transfer. The development of membrane bioreactors has removed the problems of settleability thereby increasing process reliability and effluent quality, while integrated fixed-film activated-sludge processes are more efficient and compact. Activated sludge is over a hundred years old as a process and is being reimagined into a highly efficient, reliable, and increasingly sustainable treatment process. The book concludes by exploring how activated sludge can become even more sustainable, for example, by carbon harvesting and by product recovery.
Professor Nick Gray is a founding member and former Director of the Trinity Centre for the Environment, a hub for interdisciplinary research and teaching at Trinity College Dublin. He is an expert hydrobiologist specializing in biological wastewater treatment and water pollution control. He combines his research and experience as a consultant environmental engineer and scientist into his teaching and writing. He has written over 180 papers in 49 different journals and is the author of 15 books and numerous book chapters.
About World Scientific Publishing Co.
World Scientific Publishing is a leading international independent publisher of books and journals for the scholarly, research and professional communities. World Scientific collaborates with prestigious organisations like the Nobel Foundation and US National Academies Press to bring high quality academic and professional content to researchers and academics worldwide. The company publishes about 600 books and over 160 journals in various fields annually. To find out more about World Scientific, please visit www.worldscientific.com.
For more information, contact WSPC Communications at communications@wspc.com.
A total of 1,261,990 people will die from cancer in 2023 in the EU (EU-27). A further 172,314 people will die from the disease in the UK, according to new research published in the leading cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Monday).
Researchers led by Carlo La Vecchia (MD), a professor at the University of Milan (Italy), estimate there will be a 6.5% fall in cancer death rates in men and a 3.7% fall in women between 2018 and 2023.
They predict that death rates from the ten most common cancers will continue to fall in most European countries in 2023, although the numbers of people dying will go up due to aging populations. A greater proportion of elderly people in the population means there is a greater number at the age where they are more likely to develop and die from cancer.
Compared to a peak in cancer death rates in 1988, the researchers calculate that nearly 5.9 million deaths will have been avoided in the 35 years between 1989 and 2023 in the EU-27. In the UK, 1.24 million deaths will have been avoided.
Prof. La Vecchia said: “If the current trajectory of declining cancer death rates continues, then it is possible there could be a further 35% reduction by 2035. More smokers quitting contribute to these favourable trends. In addition, greater efforts need to be made to control the growing epidemic in overweight, obesity and diabetes, alcohol consumption and infections, together with improvements in screening, early diagnosis and treatments.
“The advances in tobacco control are reflected in the favourable lung cancer trends but more could be done in this respect, particularly among women, as lung cancer death rates continue to rise among them. No deaths from lung cancer have been avoided in women, both in the EU-27 and the UK, during the period between 1989 and 2023.
“Pancreatic cancer is also a cause for concern, as death rates from this disease will not fall among men and will rise by 3.4% in women in the EU and 3.2% in women in the UK. Smoking can explain between about a quarter to a third of these deaths, and women, particularly in the middle and older age groups, did not give up smoking as early as men.”
The researchers analysed cancer death rates in the EU 27 Member States [2] as a whole and separately in the UK. They also looked at the five most populous EU countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) and, individually, for stomach, intestines, pancreas, lung, breast, uterus (including cervix), ovary, prostate, bladder and leukaemias for men and women [3]. Prof La Vecchia and his colleagues collected data on deaths from the World Health Organization and Eurostat databases from 1970 to 2018 for most of the EU-27 and the UK. This is the thirteenth consecutive year the researchers have published these predictions.
In the EU-27 countries the researchers predict that will be an age standardised rate (ASR) [4] of 123.8 deaths per 100,000 men by the end of 2023. In women, the age standardised death rate will be 79.3 per 100,000. In the UK, the death rates will be 106.5 and 83.5 per 100,000 for men and women, respectively.
Cancer death rates will fall for all cancers in men in the EU-27 and the UK. They will also fall for women in the UK. Among EU women, death rates will rise by 3.4% to nearly six per 100,000 for pancreatic cancer, and to just over 1% to 13.6 per 100,00 for lung cancer. Although there will be a 13.8% drop in lung cancer death rates among women in the UK, the death rate of 16.2 per 100,000 is still higher than among EU women because more UK women started smoking earlier than those in the EU. Lung cancer now kills more women in the UK than breast cancer, which has a death rate of 13.5 per 100,000.
When the researchers looked specifically at lung cancer death rates in five EU countries as well as the UK, they found that, although death rates are predicted to fall in men for all six countries, for women they will rise by nearly 14% in France, 5.6% in Italy and 5% in Spain. Among women in different age groups, the researchers found a decrease in predicted death rates from lung cancer among those aged 25 to 64, but an increase in those aged 65 to over 75 years, and consequently an increase overall.
“This is because women now aged 45 to 65, born in the 1960s and 1970s, have smoked less and stopped earlier than those born in the 1950s, who were in their twenties in the 1970s when smoking among young women was most prevalent,” said Prof. Eva Negri from the University of Bologna (Italy), co-leader of the research.
Colorectal (bowel) cancer will be the third biggest killer for women in both the EU and the UK: eight and ten per 100,000, respectively. Prostate cancer will be the third biggest killer for men: 9.5 and 11.2 per 100,000 in the EU and UK, respectively.
The researchers say that organised screening programmes using low dose computed tomography (CT scans) could reduce deaths from lung cancer by up to 20%. However, there are no such organised programmes in Europe, and it is too early to evaluate the impact of screening in the UK, following the Lung Cancer Screening trial.
The researchers highlight the role that overweight and obesity plays in cancers such as post-menopausal breast, endometrial (womb) cancer, stomach and colorectal cancer. Although death rates from stomach cancer are falling overall, mainly because of improved methods of food preservation, healthier diets and a decline in Helicobacter pylori infection, approximately a third of stomach cancers now occur in the cardia, the entrance to the stomach, and are associated with overweight and obesity and, hence, reflux, which is a risk factor for the development of cancer at this site. For colorectal cancer, death rates are falling in the EU but the decline has slowed in the UK.
“This is concerning as increases in both incidence and mortality from colorectal cancer in young women have been recorded in the UK. This can be partly explained by the prevalence of overweight and obesity, and alcohol and tobacco consumption,” said Prof. Negri.
The researchers caution that their estimates do not take account of the COVID pandemic, which occurred after the dates when data were available on cancer deaths. “The COVID-19 pandemic may have an effect on cancer mortality in 2023 as a result of delayed visits and procedures, influencing both secondary prevention and treatment, and disease management for cancer,” they write.
(ends)
Notes:
[1] “European cancer mortality predictions for the year 2023 with focus on lung cancer”, by M. Malvezzi et al. Annals of Oncology, doi: 10.1016/j.annonc.2023.01.010
[2] At the time of this analysis, the EU had 27 member states, with the UK leaving in 2020. Cyprus was excluded from the analysis due to excessive missing data.
[3] The paper contains individual tables of cancer death rates for each of the six countries.
[4] Age-standardised rates per 100,000 of the population reflect the annual probability of dying adjusted to reflect the age distribution of a population.
Promoting physical activity and other behavioural support can help people wanting to reduce their smoking to quit in the short-term.
However, after nine months, physical activity delivers no noticeable benefits – compared with offering no additional support – in the rates of people stopping smoking, according to the findings of a major national study.
The Trial of physical Activity and Reduction of Smoking (TARS) study, led by the University of Plymouth with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research, took place across four cities – Plymouth, Nottingham, Oxford and London – before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Its aim was to provide a definitive answer as to whether future NHS services should be adapted to provide additional support to smokers not ready to quit but who do wish to reduce their smoking, with the hope of increasing sustained abstinence from smoking and associated health benefits.
The study also sought to look into previous suggestions that behavioural support for these smokers can lead to smoking reduction and more attempts to quit.
To answer these questions, half the 915 smokers recruited into the study were offered up to eight, weekly face-to-face or phone motivational support sessions to reduce their smoking and increase moderate to vigorous physical activity. It was an approach which had previously shown encouraging signs in a Plymouth pilot study, and was contrasted against the other half of participants who were offered the usual NHS advice on quitting.
The study showed that engaging with the motivational support had some short-term benefits, with 19% of those receiving the additional support saying they had at least halved the number of cigarettes smoked by three months – 14% had still halved their smoking after nine months. By contrast, around 10% of those receiving the standard advice reported having halved their cigarette intake at both milestones.
However, just 2% of those who received the additional support had abstained from smoking between three and nine months. Less than 1% of those receiving the standard advice managed to abstain from smoking for those six months.
In addition, while after three months people receiving the additional support took part in 81 minutes more physical activity each week than those receiving no support, researchers did not find evidence of sustained differences in physical activity at nine months.
With the additional support costing health services in the region of £240 per person, the study’s authors say their findings show the approach is neither effective for long-term smoking cessation or cost-effective.
The research, published in the journal Addiction, also involved the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, St George’s University of London, University of Oxford, University of Nottingham, University of Exeter, and Plymouth City Council.
Adrian Taylor, Professor in Health Services Research within the University of Plymouth’s Peninsula Medical School, is the study’s lead author. He said: “Generally, the smokers in our study were enthusiastic about the support they received to help reduce their smoking and increase physical activity, which avoided pressuring them to quit. However, they were unable to maintain increases in physical activity and smoking reduction did not lead to more smokers giving up completely, which is the best thing for an individual’s health. Helping smokers to move from wanting to reduce to quitting completely is far more challenging than other less rigorous studies had suggested.”
“This is a further demonstration of the scale of the challenge facing society if we are to achieve the UK Government’s stated aim of being smoke free by 2030. However, it is potentially only through additional difficult national policy decisions such as even higher taxation on tobacco, the subsidised promotion of vaping, and increasing the legal age of tobacco purchasing, in line with other countries such as New Zealand, that the huge costs of smoking for our NHS Services will be reduced.”
Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of behavioural support for prolonged abstinence for smokers wishing to reduce but not quit: Randomised controlled trial of physical activity assisted reduction of smoking (TARS)
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
6-Mar-2023
Potential treatment of autoimmune diseases revealed in new study
Scientists have uncovered a chemical compound that holds potential as a therapeutical for various autoimmune diseases, and they’ve used it to treat mice.
OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (OIST) GRADUATE UNIVERSITY
IMAGE: MICE THAT HAVE NEUROINFLAMMATION CAUSED BY AUTOIMMUNITY WERE TREATED WITH PEP. THE RESULTS FOUND THAT PEP-TREATED MICE SHOWED IMPROVED SIGNS OF RECOVERY, IN COMPARISON TO MICE THAT WEREN’T TREATED WITH PEP.view more
CREDIT: TSUNG-YEN HUANG (OIST)
Scientists in Japan have revealed a chemical compound that could be used for the treatment of various autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. These diseases occur when the body’s immune response goes wiry. The immune system, which normally attacks pathogens and infections, instead attacks healthy cells and tissues. For the millions of people who suffer from autoimmune diseases worldwide, the result can be debilitating—rheumatoid arthritis causes excessive joint pain, while multiple sclerosis can disable one’s brain and spinal cord function.
“The key to the development of autoimmune diseases, and thus the way to inhibit this development, lies in our cells, but the underlying mechanism has always been unclear,” stated Prof. Hiroki Ishikawa, who leads the Immune Signal Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). “Now, our recent research has shed light on a compound that could suppress the development of these diseases.”
Prof. Ishikawa went on to explain that this research, published in Cell Reports, could lead to the development of treatments for autoimmune diseases.
The research focused on T helper 17 cells, or Th17 cells. Th17 cells are a type of T cell—a group of cells, which form major parts of the immune system. These cells, which exist in high numbers in our guts, evolved to help us fight invasive pathogens but, sometimes, they’re overactivated and mistake normal, healthy tissue as pathogens, resulting in autoimmunity. The generation of Th17 cells requires glycolysis, a metabolic process in which glucose is broken down and converted to energy to support the metabolic needs of cells. Glycolysis is essential for the growth of not only Th17 cells but also a variety of cells in our body.
“What’s interesting in that excessive glycolysis seems to suppress Th17 cell activity,” stated first author, Mr. Tsung-Yen Huang, a PhD candidate in the Immune Signal Unit. “So, we hypothesized that molecules produced during glycolysis may inhibit the cells.”
Enter phosphoenolpyruvate, or PEP for short. This chemical compound is a metabolite produced when glucose is converted to energy. Since it is part of such an important process, PEP is generated every day in our bodies. The researchers found that treatment with PEP can inhibit the maturation of TH17 cells, leading to resolution of inflammatory response.
Mr. Huang explained how this was, at first, a confusing result, as it went against all other research on the topic, but he decided to persevere and take a closer look at what could be occurring.
The research led them to a protein called JunB, which is essential for the maturation of Th17 cells. JunB promotes Th17 maturation by binding to a set of specific genes. The researchers found that PEP treatment inhibits the generation of Th17 cells by blocking JunB activity.
Armed with this knowledge, the researchers went on to treat mice that had neuroinflammation caused by autoimmunity with PEP. This disease is very similar to multiple sclerosis and these mice showed positive signs of recovery. The scientists have now filed a patent to continue with this research.
“Our results show the clinical potential of PEP,” explained Mr. Huang. “But first we need to increase its efficiency.”
In the past, researchers who were interested in developing a treatment for autoimmune diseases, often looked at inhibiting glycolysis and thus Th17 cells. But glycolysis is essential to various types of cells in the body and inhibiting it could have significant side-effects. PEP has the potential to be used as a treatment without resulting in such side-effects.
