(31 Jul 2023) The biomedical industry is adopting new standards to protect horseshoe crabs, vital in the production of vital medicines. But conservationists say that doesn't go far enough to protect food for a declining bird species.
(AP Video by Rodrique Ngowi)
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BU commentary: Including sexual and gender minority populations in medical research guarantees the health and well-being of all
(Boston)—In the face of ongoing political threats to the rights and well-being of sexual and gender minority (SGM) populations, public health and health care institutions and practitioners must explicitly address the needs of marginalized populations while ensuring that those with multiple marginalized identities are well represented in research, according to a commentary in JAMA Network Open.
“If we continue to exclude SGM in research, we will remain oblivious to the troubles they face in achieving health and well-being,” said lead author Carl G. Streed, Jr., MD, MPH, FACP, FAHA, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.
Streed believes current population data does not give an accurate accounting of SGM populations in the U.S. and globally. This oversight persists despite numerous surveys and surveillance systems designed to understand the well-being of this group. He points out that a step forward in addressing this gap is the National Institutes of Health “All of Us” program.
Started in 2015, the “All of Us Research Program” is a national, community-engaged program that aims to improve health and health care practices by partnering with one million volunteer participants, mostly from communities historically underrepresented in biomedical research across the US. “By including self-reported information, such as sexual orientation, gender identity and sex assigned at birth from all participants, researchers can explore, with objective measures of health, the current state of SGM communities,” explains Streed, who also is the research lead for the GenderCare Center at Boston Medical Center.
In an article (“Prevalence of 12 Common Health Conditions in Sexual and Gender Minority Participants in the All of Us Research Program”) published in JAMA Network Open, Tran et al use data from “All of Us,” to describe the sociodemographic and health conditions of 30,812 SGM adults compared to 316,056 non-SGM persons. They found that SGM adults experience a higher prevalence of anxiety, depression, and HIV diagnosis. Even when accounting for age, income, employment, enrollment year and U.S. census division, SGM groups remained at higher odds of having anxiety, depression, HIV diagnosis, and tobacco use disorder. “These conditions are consistently linked to the experience of minority stress. Although all persons experience individual and social stress, groups of persons who are marginalized in society experience a unique type of stress directly correlated to their minoritized status,” says Streed.
Streed points out that much of the work in the SGM literature has been based on convenience samples or probability samples with poor representation and sampling methodology. “All of Us” affords the opportunity to triangulate the findings from these additional data sources and provide vital comparisons in the expanding field of SGM population health,” he said.
Note to editor:
Streed reports consulting fees from EverlyWell (2020-present), L’Oreal (2023-present), and The Texas Health Institute (2022-present).
Restar is supported by The Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS) Program at Yale University School of Public Health, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R25MH087217), and amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. Restar is also an inaugural participant of the PrideNet Researcher Basecamp for the Pride Study.
JAMA Network Open
Commentary/editorial
People
Assessing the health status of sexual and gender minority adults:what we can learn when we include all of us
31-Jul-2023
Streed reports consulting fees from EverlyWell (2020-present), L’Oreal (2023-present), and The Texas Health Institute (2022-present). Restar is supported by The Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS) Program at Yale University School of Public Health, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R25MH087217), and amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. Restar is also an inaugural participant of the PrideNet Researcher Basecamp for the Pride Study.
A group of international researchers has achieved a breakthrough in computer security with the development of a new and highly efficient cipher for cache randomization. The innovative cipher, designed by Assistant Professor Rei Ueno from the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University, addresses the threat of cache side-channel attacks, offering enhanced security and exceptional performance.
Cache side-channel attacks pose a significant threat to modern computer systems, as they can stealthily extract sensitive information, including secret keys and passwords, from unsuspecting victims. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the operating principles of contemporary computers, making their countermeasures extremely challenging. Cache randomization has emerged as a promising countermeasure; however, identifying a secure and effective mathematical function for this purpose has been a lingering challenge.
To overcome this, Ueno and his colleagues created SCARF. SCARF is based on a comprehensive mathematical formulation and modeling of cache side-channel attacks, offering robust security. Moreover, SCARF exhibits remarkable performance, completing the randomization process with only half the latency of existing cryptographic techniques. The cipher's practicality and performance were thoroughly validated through rigorous hardware evaluations and system-level simulations.
The team comprised members from Tohoku University, CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, and NTT Social Informatics Laboratories at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation.
"We are thrilled to announce SCARF, a powerful tool in enhancing computer security," said Ueno. "Our innovative cipher is engineered to be compatible with various modern computer architectures, ensuring its widespread applicability and potential to bolster computer security significantly."
SCARF's potential impact extends beyond individual computers, as its implementation has the capacity to contribute to building a more secure information society. By mitigating cache side-channel attack vulnerabilities, SCARF takes a critical step towards safeguarding sensitive data and user privacy.
The paper detailing the development will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium on August 9, 2023.
A schematic outlining how the new SCARF system operates.
Rei Ueno
Genome data rewrite the story of oat domestication in China
Genome analysis of 100 oat plants from around the world reveal that different oat varieties were developed in two different domestication events, challenging current plant research assumptions
IMAGE: OAT, AVENA SATIVA, IS ONE OF THE TOP TEN CEREALS CROPS IN TERMS OF GLOBAL PRODUCTION view more
CREDIT: PHOTO BY F. WELTER-SCHULTES
Oat is among the top ten cereal crop species in terms of global production. It can adapt to different climates, and farmers can grow it successfully even in harsh environments where other crops such as rice and corn fail. However, not all oat plants are the same. Based on their grains, two major oak varieties can easily be distinguished: hulled, grains that are covered in a non-edible husk, and naked, grains that have a soft outer casing that easily separates from the edible grain during threshing. To gain information on the origins of these different varieties, researchers in China have sequenced the genomes of over 100 oat plants from around the world. Their analyses indicate that, unlike what is the current belief — that the two varieties came from one domestication event, the hulled and naked oat were domesticated independently. The work is published in the Open Science journal GigaScience.
It is believed that the common oat (Avena sativa), which today is grown all over the world, was domesticated in Europe around 3,000 years ago. In contrast, the origins of naked oat, which today is grown mainly in China, remain unclear. Many researchers regard naked oat as a variant of hulled oat, speculating that a mutation occurred after hulled oat was introduced into China. However, new population genomic data generated and analyzed by the laboratory of Prof. Bing Han at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (IMAU) tell a different story.
Rather than being a variant of common oat that separated relatively recently, the authors estimate that hulled oat and naked oat diverged around 51,000 years ago. They therefore speculate that the two varieties were domesticated independently a long time ago, rather than one being a recent derivative of the other. The analyses in the study include a set of whole genome sequences, including 89 naked oat and 22 hulled oat plants, as well as four other closely related hexaploid species from around the world.
Additional findings in this study arising from a deeper analysis of this large data set support this view. For example, if naked oat split recently from hulled oat, geneticists expected to see traces of a population bottleneck in the naked oat, which would have reduced the genetic diversity in the naked oat population. However, the scientists found the opposite: in their data, the genetic diversity of naked oat is higher than that of hulled oat, not the other way around.
The overall picture emerging from the data still remains rather complex, Prof. Bing Han explains: “The breeding of naked oat in China has gone through phases, including the direct collection and utilization of landraces, cross-breeding between naked oat varieties, and cross-breeding of naked oat with hulled oat.” All of this can increase the intricacy of the findings, leaving a great deal more to discover about the genetic history of naked oat.
The findings in this work demonstrate the power of large-scale genome sequencing to better understand the domestication history of one of the major crop species that is feeding the world today.
Further Reading:
Nan J; Ling Y; An J; Wang T; Chai M; Fu J; Wang G; Yang C; Yang Y; Han: B (2023): "Genome resequencing reveals independent domestication and breeding improvement of naked oat" GigaScience; https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giad061
Article URL: https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/gigascience/giad061
Data Availability:
Nan J; Ling Y; An J; Wang T; Chai M; Fu J; Wang G; Yang C; Yang Y; Han: B (2023): Supporting data for "Genome resequencing reveals independent domestication and breeding improvement of naked oat" GigaScience Database. http://dx.doi.org/10.5524/102412
About GigaScience
GigaScience is co-published by GigaScience Press and Oxford University Press. Winner of the 2018 PROSE award for Innovation in Journal Publishing (Multidisciplinary), the journal covers research that uses or produces 'big data' from the full spectrum of the biological and biomedical sciences. It also serves as a forum for discussing the difficulties of and unique needs for handling large-scale data from all areas of the life and medical sciences. The journal has a completely novel publication format -- one that integrates manuscript publication with complete data hosting, and analyses tool incorporation. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research as well as enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to GigaScience that all supporting data and source code be made available in the GigaScience database, GigaDB, as well as in publicly available repositories. GigaScience will provide users access to associated online tools and workflows, and has integrated a data analysis platform, maximizing the potential utility and re-use of data.
About GigaScience Press
GigaScience Press is BGI's Open Access Publishing division, which publishes scientific journals and data. Its publishing projects are carried out with international publishing partners and infrastructure providers, including Oxford University Press and River Valley Technologies. It currently publishes two award-winning data-centric journals: its premier journal GigaScience (launched in 2012), which won the 2018 American Publishers PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing, and its new journal GigaByte (launched 2020), which won the 2022 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. The press also publishes data, software, and other research objects via its GigaDB.org database. To encourage transparent reporting of scientific research and to enable future access and analyses, it is a requirement of manuscript submission to all GigaScience Press journals that all supporting data and source code be made openly available in GigaDB or in a community approved, publicly available repository.
GigaScience
Experimental study
Not applicable
Genome resequencing reveals independent domestication and breeding improvement of naked oat
1-Aug-2023
IMAGE: UCSB GEOGRAPHER DAVID LÓPEZ-CARR, CENTER LEFT, AND STANFORD UNIVERSITY HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENTIST ANDREA LUND, CENTER RIGHT, WORKING WITH SENEGALESE PARTNERS view more
CREDIT: COURTESY CREDIT
It’s an elegant solution: Remove the habitat of a parasite-carrying aquatic snail and reduce the level of infection in the local community; all while generating more feed and compost for local farmers.
A collaboration of scientists from the United States and Senegal focused on doing just that by removing overgrown aquatic vegetation from areas upstream of the Diama Dam in northeastern Senegal. In doing so, they generated positive impacts to the local communities’ health and economies.
“It is rare and gratifying when we can find a potential win-win solution to both human health and livelihoods,” said UC Santa Barbara geography professor David López-Carr, a co-author of a paper that appears in the journal Nature. In it, the researchers provide proof for a hypothesis that agricultural activities, including the use of fertilizers, contribute to parasitic infections by fueling the growth of aquatic vegetation. “The results suggest a simple solution to positively impact society at the intersections of health, society and economy of northern Senegal, with implications for the over 700 million people globally in schistosomiasis endemic areas.”
Since the construction of the Diama Dam in 1986, local farmers have had better access to fresh water to irrigate their fields. However, the presence of the new infrastructure also has increased the prevalence of the schistosoma parasite, a tiny freshwater flatworm commonly found in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Nearly 250 million people around the world are estimated to be infected with this parasite.
As far as tropical diseases go, schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia or snail fever) isn’t immediately fatal or even transmissible between people. But in the long term, the condition is debilitating.
“The disease is most prevalent in poor communities lacking potable water and adequate sanitation,” said López-Carr, an anthropogeographer who specializes in human-environment dynamics in the developing world. Adult worms take up residence in blood vessels and lay eggs in tissue, causing reactions and generally wreaking havoc on organs. Long-term effects include increased risk for cancer and infertility, and those infected are less able to work and go to school, keeping them in the cycle of poverty. “Poor farmers can lose up to half of their yields due to infection,” he said.
Health agencies and organizations have been fighting these infections with drugs that work well, however, the medicine does not prevent reinfection, which can happen as soon as the individual encounters contaminated water. Previous research has also focused on using the snails’ natural predators — prawns — which were cut off by the dam.
In their effort to get ahead of the disease, the collaboration took a close look at the habitat that supports the worms’ intermediate host, a small snail that lives in the Senegal River and its tributaries. They found that a common aquatic plant called Ceratophyllum demersum — also known as hornwort — can hold up to 99% of these snails, with which they have a mutualistic relationship.
Exacerbated by fertilizer runoff from agricultural operations farther upstream, c. demersum and other aquatic plants tend to proliferate in local waterways, which impedes access for daily activities such as cooking, irrigation and washing clothes.
For their experiment, the researchers conducted a three-year randomized control trial in 16 communities, to see if and how much nuisance vegetation removal in about half of the communities would affect the presence of the snails. They measured baseline infection rates, administered antiparasitic drugs, removed the vegetation and then measured reinfection rates in more than 1,400 schoolchildren. In total, the research teams took out an estimated 430 metric tons (wet) of aquatic vegetation from water access points.
“In our randomized controlled trial, control sites — places where we didn’t remove submerged vegetation from water access points — had 124% higher intestinal schistosoma reinfection rates,” López-Carr said. In addition to lowered infection rates where they removed the vegetation, the researchers found that the removed material could be used to feed livestock, or turned into compost for growing crops, lowering costs dramatically and increasing yields for local farmers. In this way, according to López-Carr “the approach yielded an economic incentive to remove nuisance vegetation from waterways and return nutrients from aquatic plants back to the soil and for livestock feed with the promise of severing poverty-disease traps while lowering infectious burden at the same time.”
“A broader benefit is the hope that this example can set for enhancing win-win planetary health research and solutions that improve livelihoods while also reducing infectious morbidity and mortality,” he added.
Having conducted these trials, the researchers hope that this study is implemented elsewhere in other similar regions to replicate the same kind of health and economic outcomes.
And, it might not be just a solution for developing countries. “Perhaps vegetation growth resulting from excess nutrients could also be used as livestock feed in more developed countries as well,” López-Carr said.
Nature
A planetary health innovation for disease, food and water challenges in Africa
