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)
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Veteran PTSD fishing treatment project nets $1.3m in funding
A “game-changing” $1.3m cash injection has been awarded to researchers exploring if doctors can prescribe fishing to treat PTSD.
The vital funding will allow the University of Essex’s Dr Nick Cooper and collaborator Dr Mark Wheeler to expand their influential work which has helped hundreds of military veterans.
Now the Department of Psychology’s Dr Cooper will explore if casting a rod from the bankside can aid police officers, paramedics, firefighters, and the coast guard deal with trauma.
Taking place over the course of three and a half years the National Institute for Health and Care Research-funded project (NIHR) is one of only three being explored across the UK.
It is hoped Casting Away Trauma will develop innovative nature-based treatments for mental health conditions on the NHS.
Watch a YouTube documentary on the project's life-changing work here.
Dr Cooper said: “This is a game-changing funding for our research, which will help us show definitively if fishing can make a real difference to the people who have given so much to keep us all safe.
“We are incredibly proud to receive NIHR funding to expand our project, which we have proved has a real impact on servicemen and women.
“We have shown that a weekend of angling has demonstrable and real impact on vulnerable veterans and can help them back into society.
“We are incredibly excited and honoured to receive the funding to expand our research.”
PTSD -Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - sees sufferers relive traumatic and can lead to debilitating depression, anxiety and even suicide.
The Casting Away Trauma project has found a way to break barriers stopping veterans and other sufferers from engaging with traditional therapy.
By emphasising learning a new recreational skill rather than traditional therapy they use peer support and sessions led by a qualified recreation coach to ease the symptoms.
Dr Wheeler added: “This is a tremendous piece of news for all concerned.
“As joint CEO of iCARP CIC, alongside Dr Cooper, I can state that, as an organisation, we are immensely proud to have played our part in this ground-breaking research project.
“From our first research design and trip, 10 years ago now, we have worked tirelessly to reach this point and could not be more pleased for all our supporters, collaborators and volunteers who have all played an integral part in the programme.
“We look forward to the next part of the journey with excitement and anticipation.
Dr Cooper and Dr Wheeler will conduct the research through their community interest company iCARP CIC, which runs picturesque lakes nestled near Harwich, Essex.”
Their previous research took servicemen with PTSD, who had an average of 12 years military experience on a weekend fishing retreat – focussing on relaxation, socialisation and learning new skills.
The innovative intervention sparked significant clinical change in 60% of participants that also reduced depression and anxiety for a month after the trip – with wellbeing scores soaring.
It also confirmed the 30-hour, 2-day peer-support intervention can now be expanded to deliver a large-scale trial using the same methods.
The project has been praised by the Ministry of Defence (receiving a gold award in 2022), recognised by The Angling Trust and recently received a contract to deliver community mental health treatment for the NHS Essex Partnership University Trust via local volunteering bodies.
Veteran Brian Haycock fishing
The who's who of bacteria: A reliable way to define species and strains
THE SALTERN SITE IN SPAIN WHERE A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF THE RESEARCH WAS DONE. A SALTERN IS USED TO PRODUCE SALT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION AND IS A NATURAL ENVIRONMENT FOR SALINIBACTER RUBER BACTERIUM.
CREDIT: TOMEU VIVER, MEDITERRANEAN INSTITUTES FOR ADVANCED STUDIES AND THE MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE
What’s in a name? A lot, actually.
For the scientific community, names and labels help organize the world’s organisms so they can be identified, studied, and regulated. But for bacteria, there has never been a reliable method to cohesively organize them into species and strains. It’s a problem, because bacteria are one of the most prevalent life forms, making up roughly 75% of all living species on Earth.
An international research team sought to overcome this challenge, which has long plagued scientists who study bacteria. Kostas Konstantinidis, Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, co-led a study to investigate natural divisions in bacteria with a goal of determining a scientifically viable method for organizing them into species and strains. To do this, the researchers let the data show them the way.
Their research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“While there is a working definition for species and strains, this is far from widely accepted in the scientific community,” Konstantinidis said. “This is because those classifications are based on humans’ standards that do not necessarily translate well to the patterns we see in the natural environment.”
For instance, he said, “If we were to classify primates using the same standards that are used to classify E. coli, then all primates — from lemurs to humans to chimpanzees — would belong to a single species.”
There are many reasons why a comprehensive organizing system has been hard to devise, but it often comes down to who gets the most attention and why. More scientific attention generally leads to those bacteria becoming more narrowly defined. For example, bacteria species that contain toxic strains have been extensively studied because of their associations with disease and health. This has been out of the necessity to differentiate harmful strains from harmless ones. Recent discoveries have shown, however, that even defining types of bacteria by their toxicity is unreliable.
“Despite the obvious, cornerstone importance of the concepts of species and strains for microbiology, these remain, nonetheless, ill-defined and confusing,” Konstantinidis said.
The research team collected bacteria from two salterns in Spain. Salterns are built structures in which seawater evaporates to form salt for consumption. They harbor diverse communities of microorganisms and are ideal locations to study bacteria in their natural environment. This is important for understanding diversity in populations because bacteria often undergo genetic changes when exposed in lab environments.
The team recovered and sequenced 138 random isolates of Salinibacter ruber bacteria from these salterns. To identify natural gaps in genetic diversity, the researchers then compared the isolates against themselves using a measurement known as average nucleotide identity (ANI) — a concept Konstantinidis developed early in his career. ANI is a robust measure of relatedness between any two genomes and is used to study relatedness among microorganisms and viruses, as well as animals. For instance, the ANI between humans and chimpanzees is about 98.7%.
The analysis confirmed the team’s previous observations that microbial species do exist and could be reliably described using ANI. They found that members of the same species of bacteria showed genetic relatedness typically ranging from 96 to 100% on the ANI scale, and generally less than 85% relatedness with members of other species.
The data revealed a natural gap in ANI values around 99.5% ANI within the Salinibacter ruber species that could be used to differentiate the species into its various strains. In a companion paper published in mBio, the flagship journal of the American Society for Microbiology, the team examined about 300 additional bacterial species based on 18,000 genomes that had been recently sequenced and become available in public databases. They observed similar diversity patterns in more than 95% of the species.
“We think this work expands the molecular toolbox for accurately describing important units of diversity at the species level and within species, and we believe it will benefit future microdiversity studies across clinical and environmental settings,” Konstantinidis said.
The team expects their research will be of interest to any professional working with bacteria, including evolutionary biologists, taxonomists, ecologists, environmental engineers, clinicians, bioinformaticians, regulatory agencies, and others. It is available online through Konstantinidis’ website and GitHub to facilitate access and use by scientific and regulatory communities.
“We hope that these communities will embrace the new results and methodologies for the more robust and reliable identification of species and strains they offer, compared to the current practice,” Konstantinidis said.
A microscopy photo of Salinibacter ruber, a bacterium that thrives in salterns.
CREDIT
Tomeu Viver, Mediterranean Institutes for Advanced Studies and the Max Planck Institute
Note: Tomeu Viver (Mediterranean Institutes for Advanced Studies and Max Planck Institute) and Ramon Rossello-Mora (Mediterranean Institutes for Advanced Studies) also led the research. Additional researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Innsbruck, University of Pretoria, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, University of the Balearic Islands, and the Max Planck Institute also contributed.
Citation: Viver, T., Conrad, R.E., Rodriguez-R, L.M. et al. Towards estimating the number of strains that make up a natural bacterial population. Nat Commun15, 544 (2024).
The Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) established a scientific expedition team for the water vapor channel of the Yarlung Tsangbo Grand Canyon in the southeast of the Tibetan Plateau. In the past five years, the expedition team has conducted observations and research on water vapor transport and heavy precipitation around the Yarlung Tsangbo Grand Canyon.
The expedition team has used the observational data to achieve a series of important scientific achievements. Recently, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters published a review article on the research progress of the Yarlung Zsangbo Grand Canyon water vapor channel. Specifically, the article reports the research progress on heavy rainfall processes related to water vapor transport in the Grand Canyon.
The first author of the article, Prof. Chen Xuelong from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, explains that the rainfall observation network established by his team in the Grand Canyon can represent the spatial impact of the terrain on hourly precipitation in the region. The microphysical characteristics of precipitation in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau are significantly different from those in low-altitude areas, further confirming the unsuitability of cloud microphysical parameterizations in current precipitation numerical models for the Tibetan Plateau region.
Satellite-measured precipitation data may provide new insights into the spatial distribution of mountain precipitation, but the results of the investigation team have shown that there is a problem in the form of a dry bias in GPM satellite precipitation data in the Grand Canyon region, and calibration is required before use. The Yarlung Zsangbo Grand Canyon, as an important water vapor source for the Tibetan Plateau, has not been fully understood in previous studies regarding its impact on the precipitation of the Tibetan Plateau. Thus, the article also provides a quantitative analysis of the impact of meridional water vapor transport passing through the Grand Canyon on the precipitation of the Tibetan Plateau. On this basis, it is found that the decrease in precipitation over the southeastern Tibetan Plateau may be due to the decrease in meridional water vapor flux passing through the Grand Canyon.
The simulation of mountainous heavy precipitation has always been a difficult task in the precipitation forecasting community. As such, researchers in the expedition team used a numerical model and the established observational network data to test the advantages and disadvantages of different cloud precipitation schemes.
“The results showed that only when a 1-km resolution numerical model using specific cloud precipitation and terrain drag parameterization schemes is used can the wind field and water vapor transport in the Grand Canyon be captured. The model can make accurate predictions of nighttime heavy precipitation in the region, and this work provides an important reference for precipitation forecasting in mountainous regions,” explains the corresponding author, Prof. Xuelong Chen.
ARTIST'S IMPRESSION OF THE STRUCTURE OF COLLAGEN, CONSISTING OF SINGLE PROTEINS THAT ASSEMBLE INTO FIBRILS, WHICH BUNDLE INTO NETWORKS THAT FORM THE SCAFFOLDS FOR OUR TISSUES. IMAGE: HIMS / LAURA CANIL, GIULIA GIUBERTONI.
Water determines life: humans are three-quarters water. An international research team led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has now discovered how water also determines the structure of the material that holds us together: collagen. In a paper recently published in PNAS, the researchers elucidate the role of water in the molecular self-assembly of collagen. They show that by replacing water with its ‘twin molecule’ heavy water (D2O), one can ‘tune’ the interaction between collagen molecules, and thus influence the process of collagen self-assembly. The findings will help to better understand the tissue failures resulting from heritable collagen-related diseases, such as brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta).
As lead author Dr Giulia Giubertoni of the UvA’s Van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS)puts it: ‘In studying these and other collagen diseases, many researchers, including myself, myself have always missed an important part of the puzzle, and the possibility that tissue failure might be partly due to water-collagen interaction was not taken very seriously. We now show that perturbing the water layer around the protein, even very slightly, has dramatic effects on collagen assembly.’
Giubertoni wants to make researchers in the collagen-disease community aware that very subtle changes in the water-collagen interaction might contribute to collagen diseases. These changes can potentially arise, for instance, from mutations in the collagen protein which occur in genetic diseases. The researchers also suggest that altered interactions between water and collagen are a contributing factor in various age-related diseases involving tissue dysfunction.
The stuff we're made of
Collagen is to a large extent ‘the stuff we're made of’- around a third of all protein in our body is collagen which ensures the mechanical integrity of all human connective tissue. For instance, our skin and arteries stretch without tearing and our bones can resist high stress without breaking. Collagen is produced by our cells as single proteins that assemble into larger structures called fibrils. These fibrils further assemble into networks that form the scaffolds for our tissues.
Since collagen is formed in the aqueous environment of human cells, water plays a crucial role in its assembly. The interaction of water molecules with proteins results in collagen that is best suited for its function. But what exactly is behind this collagen-optimising role of water? How does water do it? And will understanding this mechanism offer insights into conditions where something is wrong with collagen, such as osteogenesis imperfecta? These were the central questions of the research now published in PNAS.
Introducing heavy water
To investigate the role of water in collagen formation, Giubertoni - together with her UvA colleague Prof. Sander Woutersen and their collaborator Prof. Gijsje Koenderink (Delft University of Technology) - decided to replace water with its heavier ‘twin molecule’ D2O. Initially discovered by the Nobel prize winner Harold Urey in 1931, in D2O the hydrogen atoms (H) of water are replaced with the isotope deuterium (D) that has an added neutron in its nucleus. D2O or ‘heavy water’ thus is the ‘closest replacement’ to ordinary water in nature.
However, in interaction with proteins, D2O is less potent than H2O. This is because bonds between D2O molecules (so-called hydrogen-bonds) are stronger than those between H2O molecules. This affects the interaction with proteins such as collagen.
Giubertoni, Woutersen and Koenderink were keen to study the effect this would have on collagen assembly. Together with a multi-disciplinary collaborative research network, they were able to establish that the use of heavy water results in ten times faster collagen formation, and ultimately a less homogeneous, softer and less stable collagen-fibre network.
A very effective moderator
The explanation is that the reduced interaction of the heavy water with the collagen protein makes it easier for the protein to ‘shake off’ the D2O molecules and reorganise itself.
This boosts the formation of the collagen network, but also results in a sloppier, less optimal collagen network. Water thus acts as a mediator between collagen molecules, slowing down the assembly to guarantee the functional properties of living tissues.
This discovery offers fresh perspectives on how water influences the characteristics of collagen, allowing for precise adjustments in the mechanical properties of living tissues. It also creates novel avenues for creating collagen-based materials where macroscopic properties can be controlled and fine-tuned by subtle variations in the composition of the solvent, rather than making significant changes to the chemical structure of the molecular building blocks.
A similar “investigative” approach might be also used in the future to elucidate the role of water in driving and guiding the assembly of other proteins capable of assembling in larger structures. Giubertoni . Giubertoni will move on to study how defects in collagen affect its interaction with water, and what role this plays in the failure of tissue in collagen diseases.
These images, taken using an electron microscope, provide an insight into the difference between networks of collagen fibres assembled in H2O (above) or D2O (below). In H2O a more rigid network of sturdy fibres is formed, in D2O the fibres are thinner and the network less robust. Image: HIMS.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE
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TRAVELING WAVE PROPAGATION DIRECTIONS IN THE MEMORY TASK REVEAL HOW THE BRAIN QUICKLY COORDINATES ACTIVITY AND SHARES INFORMATION ACROSS MULTIPLE REGIONS
In the space of just a few seconds, a person walking down a city block might check their phone, yawn, worry about making rent, and adjust their path to avoid a puddle. The smell from a food cart could suddenly conjure a memory from childhood, or they could notice a rat eating a slice of pizza and store the image as a new memory.
For most people, shifting through behaviors quickly and seamlessly is a mundane part of everyday life.
For neuroscientists, it’s one of the brain’s most remarkable capabilities. That’s because different activities require the brain to use different combinations of its many regions and billions of neurons. How it manages to do this so rapidly has been an open question for decades.
The Study
In a paper published March 8 in Nature Human Behaviour, a team of researchers, led by Joshua Jacobs, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, shed new light on this question. By carefully monitoring neural activity of people who were recalling memories or forming new ones, the researchers managed to detect how a newly appreciated type of brainwave — traveling waves — influences the storage and retrieval of memories.
“Broadly, we found that waves tended to move from the back of the brain to the front while patients were putting something into their memory,” said the paper’s co-author Uma R. Mohan, a postdoctoral researcher at NIH and former postdoctoral researcher in the Electrophysiology, Memory, and Navigation Laboratory at Columbia Engineering. “When patients were later searching to recall the same information, those waves moved in the opposite direction, from the front towards the back of the brain,” she said.
In the brains of some of the study’s 93 participants, waves traveled in other directions.
“There was a lot of diversity across patients, so we implemented a framework based on the direction an individual’s oscillations ‘preferred’ to travel,” Mohan said.
The researchers say these findings advance fundamental neuroscience research and point toward diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for memory-related disorders.
“We think the work may lead to new approaches for interfacing with the brain. By measuring the direction that a person’s brain waves move, we may be able to predict their behavior,” Jacobs said.
The Challenge
Brain waves are patterns of electrical oscillations that reflect the state of hundreds or thousands of individual neurons at a particular moment. One major question, which remains unsettled, is whether brain waves drive activity or simply occur as a byproduct of neural activity that was already happening. Researchers who study brain waves have tended to treat them as a stationary phenomenon that occurs in a particular region, noting when oscillations in multiple regions seem synchronized.
In this study, Mohan and her colleagues contribute to a growing understanding of these oscillations differently, as “traveling waves” that spread across the brain’s cortex, the outermost layer that supports higher cognitive processing. Mohan compares the traveling waves to the ripples that would spread outward after a pebble was thrown into a pond.
“We're looking at neural oscillations not as independent stationary things but as things that are constantly and spontaneously moving across the brain in a dynamic way,” Mohan said.
This relatively new way of understanding brain waves is an exciting step in neuroscience because it offers a pathway to explaining how the brain quickly coordinates activity and shares information across multiple regions.
The Experiments and Results
This study drew on data from participants who were being treated for drug-resistant epilepsy at hospitals across the United States. The experiments occurred while the participants had grids or strips of electrodes temporarily implanted on the surface of the brain, beneath the skull, to determine where the patients’ seizures arise. For the researchers, these electrodes offer the chance to perform experiments that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible.
“It’s a rare opportunity to be able to see what's going on directly from the brain while the participants are engaged in different cognitive behaviors,” Mohan said.
During the experiments, researchers recorded the participants’ brain activity while they performed tasks that required memorizing and recalling lists of words or letters.
After the experiments, the researchers analyzed the brain activity from each participant in the context of what they were doing in the memory task and how well they performed.
“I implemented a method to label waves traveling in one direction as basically ‘good for putting something into memory.’ Then we could see how the direction switched over the course of the task,” Mohan said. This method builds on previous research from the Jacobs lab by expanding the mathematical framework used to make sense of the vast quantities of data these experiments produced.
“The waves tended to go in the participant’s encoding direction when that participant was putting something into memory and in the opposite direction right before they recalled the word,” she said. “ Overall, this new work links traveling waves to behavior by demonstrating that traveling waves propagate in different directions across the cortex for separate memory processes.”
The data also showed that participants tended to perform the memory task more accurately when the traveling waves were moving in the appropriate direction for memory storage and recall.
“These findings shed light on the mechanisms that underlie memory processing. More broadly, they help us better understand how the brain supports a wide range of behaviors that involve precisely coordinated interactions between brain regions,” Mohan said.
Potential Impact and Future Directions
As traveling waves are increasingly well understood, they could be the basis for a new class of diagnostic tools that recognize abnormal patterns in brain activity.
There is also significant therapeutic potential.
“If someone’s waves are moving in the wrong direction when they're about to try to remember something, that might put them in a poor memory state,” Mohan explained. “If you could apply stimulation in the right way, you could maybe push those waves to move in a different direction, bringing about a fundamentally different memory state.”
Advances in understanding traveling waves offer significant potential for human-computer interaction.
In terms of both research and application, Mohan notes that memory is just the starting point.
“I am interested in how characteristics of cortical traveling waves change to support a wide range of cognitive functions, including attention and associative memory,” she said.
“The direction of traveling wave propagation may tell us where information is moving across the brain at each moment, showing us how different parts of the brain transfer information during behavior,” Jacobs said.
JOURNAL
Nature Human Behaviour
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
8-Mar-2024
Innovative open research publisher PeerJ joins Taylor & Francis
Leading research publisher Taylor & Francis has announced the addition of PeerJ, a pioneer in broad-scope open access (OA) journals.
PeerJ is best known for its multidisciplinary flagship title PeerJ Life & Environment serving the Biological, Medical and Environmental Sciences and PeerJ Computer Science (covering all areas of computer science, including AI, quantum, and robotics). In addition, PeerJ offers five titles in the Chemical Sciences, meaning that in total Taylor & Francis will welcome seven new journals to its open research program.
All PeerJ journals offer high-quality peer review and rapid publication, supported by PeerJ’s own submission and peer review platform, and dedicated contributor support. Articles are selected on scientific value and methodological soundness, providing a forum for world-class research addressing many of the globe’s current challenges. PeerJ also hosts a digital hub for the International Association for Biological Oceanography, promoting the advancement of knowledge of the biology of the sea.
Joining Taylor & Francis will enable PeerJ to expand its offering to researchers, including participation in Taylor & Francis’ popular manuscript transfer service, and will give scope to extend into new disciplines. PeerJ and Taylor & Francis have complementary publishing programs, with shared commitments to prioritize research integrity, empower knowledge-makers and advance open research.
Leon Heward-Mills, Researcher Services Managing Director at Taylor & Francis, said: “Taylor & Francis has a strong track record of investing in well-respected open research publishers, such as F1000 and Dove Press, and supporting them to develop and innovate at greater scale.”
Heward-Mills added: “We’re delighted that PeerJ’s founders, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt, and their team will be joining us. We look forward to learning from their unique insights and experience in open research.”
“Becoming part of Taylor & Francis is an important step in PeerJ’s evolution,” explained Peter Binfield, PeerJ Co-Founder and Publisher. “This move will allow us to cement our original commitments to open research, equitable and inclusive publishing and rigorous peer review. Above all, our commitment to the communities that have supported our journey so far remains unchanged.”
Jason Hoyt, PeerJ Co-Founder and CEO added: “Our mission to make scientific research accessible to all whilst delivering 21st century technology aligns perfectly with Taylor & Francis’ vision. With their backing and global network, we can bring our ethos and approach to even more researchers and readers worldwide. We look forward to introducing new communities to PeerJ.”
ADVANCED INSTITUTE FOR MATERIALS RESEARCH (AIMR), TOHOKU UNIVERSITY
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THE STANDARD RESEARCH PARADIGM UNCOVERS THE STRUCTURE-PROPERTY-ACTIVITY RELATIONSHIPS FOR THE ELECTROCHEMICAL CO2 REDUCTION REACTION (CO2RR) OVER SNO2. THIS PICTURE ILLUSTRATES THE SURFACE RECONSTRUCTION INDUCED BY OXYGEN VACANCIES (1/1 ML COVERAGE) AND SURFACE-ACTIVE SPECIES (SN LAYER) ACCOUNTABLE FOR SELECTIVE HCOOH PRODUCTION.
In a new step towards combating climate change and transitioning to sustainable solutions, a group of researchers has developed a research paradigm that makes it easier to decipher the relationship between catalyst structures and their reactions.
Details of the researchers' breakthrough were published in the journal Angewandte Chemie on January 29, 2024.
Understanding how a catalyst's surface affects its activity can aid the design of efficient catalyst structures for specific reactivity requirements. However, grasping the mechanisms behind this relationship is no straightforward task given the complicated interface microenvironment of electrocatalysts.
"To decipher this, we honed in on the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) in Tin-Oxide-based (Sn-O) catalysts," points out Hao Li, associate professor at Tohoku University's Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR) and corresponding author of the paper. "In doing so, we not only uncovered the active surface species of SnO2-based catalysts during CO2RR but also established a clear correlation between surface speciation and CO2RR performance."
CO2RR is recognized as a promising method for reducing CO2 emissions and producing high-value fuels, with formic acid (HCOOH) being a noteworthy product because of its various applications in industries such as pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, and environmental remediation.
The proposed method helped identify the genuine surface states of SnO2 responsible for its performance in CO2 reduction reactions under specific electrocatalytic conditions. Moreover, the team corroborated their findings through experiments using various SnO2 shapes and advanced characterization techniques.
Li and his colleagues developed their methodology by combining theoretical studies with experimental electrochemical techniques.
"We bridged the gap between the theoretical and experimental, offering a comprehensive understanding of catalyst behavior under real-world conditions in the process," adds Li.
The research team is now focused on applying this methodology to a variety of electrochemical reactions. In doing those, they hope to uncover more about unique structure-activity correlations, accelerating the design of high-performance and scalable electrocatalysts.
About the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI)
The WPI program was launched in 2007 by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to foster globally visible research centers boasting the highest standards and outstanding research environments. Numbering more than a dozen and operating at institutions throughout the country, these centers are given a high degree of autonomy, allowing them to engage in innovative modes of management and research. The program is administered by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) Tohoku University Establish a World-Leading Research Center for Materials Science AIMR aims to contribute to society through its actions as a world-leading research center for materials science and push the boundaries of research frontiers. To this end, the institute gathers excellent researchers in the fields of physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, and mathematics and provides a world-class research environment.
