Wild barley from Jordan holds key to stem rust resistance

AMERICAN PHYTOPATHOLOGICAL SOCIETY

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IMAGE: EVA HENNINGSEN WITH WILD BARLEY POPULATIONS. view more 

CREDIT: EVA HENNINGSEN

Stem rust is a devastating disease of cereal crops, including barley, one of the first domesticated crops in agriculture and the fourth most widely grown crop in the world. Barley is unique because it is one of only a few crops that can be cultivated in almost any climate and across a range of elevations, making it economically and nutritionally important.

Stem rust is one of the biggest threats to barley production and capable of causing complete crop loss during severe epidemics. And since barley is also used as malt for beer and spirits and feed for animals in addition to food for humans, many industries have a vested interest in making sure barley is protected from stem rust outbreaks.

One of the most important variants of the stem rust pathogen is Ug99, which first emerged in Uganda in the late 1990s and has since spread across Africa and into the Middle East. Races in the Ug99 lineage pose a great threat to cereal production worldwide and with respect to barley are virulent on more than 95% of the cultivars worldwide. Few studies have been done to identify resistance in barley to Ug99 races, but a recent study from the University of Minnesota has made advances in this area.

Led by Eva Henningsen, who was an undergraduate student at the time of this research, plant pathologists at the university turned to a diverse collection of wild barley and discovered several accessions from Jordan that exhibited a high level of stem rust resistance. They then hybridized these wild accessions and, in a significant discovery, found that a single dominant gene, which they designated Rpg7, was responsible for this resistance.

"This gene will be a valuable addition to breeding programs," explained Brian Steffenson, one of the plant pathologists involved with this research. "Given that the resistant wild barley accessions were discovered in Jordan, this research will also provide clues as to where one might possibly identify additional sources of stem rust resistance."

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For more information about this discovery and the process behind it, read "Rpg7: A New Gene for Stem Rust Resistance from Hordeum vulgare ssp. Spontaneum" published in the March issue of Phytopatholog

 

Is combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder unique to industrialized warfare?

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: MATT ZEFFERMAN IN THE FIELD OBSERVING AN INTERVIEW WITH TURKANA COMMUNITY MEMBERS. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE COURTESY MATTHEW ZEFFERMAN.

Thirty years ago, clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay drew attention to similarities between the trauma experienced by the Greek warriors, as documented in the epic poem "The Iliad," and Vietnam veterans in America. Could the experience of war impact people in similar ways in vastly different cultural milieus?

Research published this week by ASU researcher Sarah Mathew and former ASU postdoctoral researcher Matthew Zefferman in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that Turkana pastoralist warriors from Kenya also experience PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms, even though their lifestyles and combat experiences are markedly different from that of Western soldiers. However, these pastoralists experience less of the PTSD symptoms associated with depression relative to American service members. This difference may be due to aspects of Turkana military organization and practice.

Combat stress is considered to be a major part of the human cost of industrialized warfare. It is estimated that 10 to 20% of American combat veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffer from PTSD.

The roots of PTSD are controversial. Some think that PTSD is largely a syndrome of military service members of industrialized societies who do not have social support systems typical in small-scale societies. Others expect it to be a universal phenomenon caused by adaptive responses to acute life-threatening events.

"Distinguishing between these theories has been challenging because PTSD in combatants has been studied almost exclusively in large-scale industrialized societies," said Zefferman, who is a US Air Force veteran and an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Zefferman was a postdoctoral researcher with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University at the time he began this project.

Zefferman spent six months interviewing warriors in a remote part of Kenya near the border of South Sudan, where Mathew has been running a field research site since 2007. Mathew is an associate professor at ASU in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research affiliate of the Institute of Human Origins. She was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2015 that allowed her to undertake this study.

Lethal interethnic cattle raiding, once common in several pastoralist societies, continues unabated in this part of Kenya, with semi-automatic rifles replacing spears starting in the late 1970s.

"The Turkana communities in this area see cattle raiding as integral to their livelihood - without going on raids, they cannot recover livestock they lost when they were attacked, and they would get pushed out of critical dry season pastures and water wells," said Mathew.

Turkana in this area have a high degree of combat exposure with about half of adult male mortality due to combat. Twenty-eight percent of the 218 warriors interviewed for the study reported PTSD symptom severity scores that would qualify for a provisional PTSD diagnosis.

To delve further, they compared Turkana symptoms with those of treatment-seeking American combat veterans. They found that the Turkana, compared to American service members, have similarly high levels of symptoms that Zefferman and Mathew hypothesized facilitate learning from and reacting to future combat-related dangers. However, they have lower rates of depressive PTSD symptoms. The researchers suggest that depressive symptoms have different evolutionary origins than other PTSD symptoms and may be related to moral injury -- trauma from witnessing or participating in acts that violate one's moral beliefs.

The researchers also believe that the lack of hierarchical coercive leadership in the Turkana helps them avoid morally questionable actions relative to members of militaries in industrial societies. Because combat is so pervasive in the Turkana, there is not as strong a separation between military and civilian life. The Turkana employ numerous rituals after killing in combat that may help relieve these symptoms.

To see if PTSD symptomology among the Turkana supported their proposition, they statistically modeled which aspects of Turkana combat experiences are associated with depressive (negative beliefs/feelings, low concentration, and irritability/agreesion) versus "learning-and-reacting" (hypervigilance, nightmares, flashbacks) PTSD symptoms. They found that predictors measuring exposure to the dangers of combat like being ambushed, shooting at or being shot by the enemy, hand-to-hand combat, and suffering bullet wounds were more strongly associated with learning-and-reacting than depressive symptoms of PTSD. Conversely, predictors measuring exposure to combat-related moral violations like failing to save the life of another Turkana, seeing people get shot or die, killing an enemy, or being socially sanctioned for combat-related actions were more strongly associated with depressive than learning-and-reacting symptoms.

"The findings provide an evolutionarily and cross-culturally informed framework to further probe the origins and causes of moral injury and its connection to combat-related PTSD," said Zefferman.

In 2018, sponsored by the ASU Center for Evolution and Medicine, the researchers co-organized a workshop with the center's founding director Randy Nesse, M.D. The workshop brought together anthropologists, clinical psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists to ASU to discuss avenues for future interdisciplinary research.

"Establishing which aspects of PTSD are dependent on social and moral forces, and which will tend to be universal, can help focus clinical research on ways to prevent or treat combat stress," added Mathew.

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This research was published as "Combat stress in a small-scale society suggest divergent evolutionary roots for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptons," Matthew R. Zerrerman and Sarah Mathew, Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienc

Eucalyptus trees can be genetically modified not to invade native ecosystems

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: IMAGE OF A MODIFIED SET OF EUCALYPT FLORAL BUDS THAT DO NOT DEVELOP FURTHER TO MAKE VIABLE POLLEN OR SEEDS (MAIN IMAGE AND LOWER RIGHT), COMPARED TO WILD TYPE FLOWER... view more 

CREDIT: OSU COLLEGE OF FORESTRY

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Eucalyptus, a pest-resistant evergreen valued for its hardy lumber and wellness-promoting oil, can be genetically modified not to reproduce sexually, a key step toward preventing the global tree plantation staple from invading native ecosystems.

Oregon State University's Steve Strauss led an international collaboration that showed the CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technique could be used with nearly 100% efficiency to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation.

"The flowers never developed to the point where ovules, pollen or fertile seeds were observed," Strauss said. "And there was no detectable negative effect on tree growth or form. A field study should be the next step to take a more careful look at stability of the vegetative and floral sterility traits, but with physical gene mutation we expect high reliability over the life of the trees."

Findings were published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

Strauss, Ph.D. student Estefania Elorriaga and research assistant Cathleen Ma teamed up with scientists at the University of Colorado, Beijing Forestry University and the University of Pretoria on the research. The greenhouse study involved a hybrid of two species, Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla, that is widely planted in the Southern Hemisphere; there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, most of them native to Australia.

"Roughly 7% of the world's forests are plantations, and 25% of that plantation area contains nonnative species and hybrids," said Elorriaga, now a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State. "Eucalyptus is one of the most widely planted genera of forest trees, particularly the 5.7 million hectares of eucalyptus in Brazil, the 4.5 million hectares in China and 3.9 million hectares in India."

Those plantings, the scientists note, can lead to undesirable mingling with native ecosystems. Thus eliminating those trees' ability to sexually reproduce without affecting other characteristics would be an effective way to greatly reduce the potential for invasive spreading in areas where that is considered an important ecological or economic problem.

"This was the first successful application of CRISPR to solve a commercial problem in forest trees," Elorriaga said. "Research with CRISPR in forest trees to modify different traits is ongoing in many laboratories around the world. Global warming is having large impacts on forests of all kinds, and gene editing may be an important new breeding tool to supplement conventional methods."

Strauss points out that despite the promising findings, trees genetically modified as they were in this research could not legally be planted in Brazil, a nation with some of the largest economic value from eucalyptus tree farming.

"The trait could not be used there due to laws against modifying plant reproduction with recombinant DNA methods," he said. "It would also be disallowed for field research or commercial use under sustainable forest management certification in many parts of the world - something scientists have come together to severely criticize in recent years."

A little more than two years ago, Strauss was part of a coalition of forestry researchers to call for a review of what they see as overly restrictive policies regarding biotech research.

"Hopefully, studies like this one, that show how precise and safe the technology can be in modifying traits, and that help to promote ecological safety, will help to change regulations and certification rules," he said. "Happily, such discussions are well underway in many nations."

Aquatic ecosystems source of half of global methane emissions

YALE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT

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Direct human alterations to natural aquatic ecosystems can increase methane emissions, a new study has found.

Atmospheric methane has tripled since pre-industrial times. It traps heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide and accounts for 25% of atmospheric warming to date. And much of that methane is coming from aquatic ecosystems, with human activities contributing to the emissions levels, a new paper published in Nature Geoscience has found.

The global contribution and importance of aquatic ecosystems as methane emitters has been underestimated, says Judith Rosentreter, postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) who led the study with a team of 14 researchers worldwide.

The study authors reviewed methane fluxes from 15 major natural, human-made, and human-impacted aquatic ecosystems and wetlands, including inland, coastal, and oceanic systems. They found that when methane emissions are combined from these aquatic ecosystems, they are potentially a larger source of methane than direct anthropogenic methane sources, such as agriculture or fossil fuel combustion. Aquatic ecosystems and wetlands contribute at least as much as half of the total methane emissions budget.

"An accurate accounting of the sources of methane from aquatic ecosystems, and if they are impacted by human activities, is important to understanding atmospheric methane concentrations,'' says Peter Raymond, professor of ecosystem ecology who co-authored the study.

One issue that stood out is how humans have impacted methane emissions from aquatic sources.

"Anything human-driven or human-impacted had much higher fluxes than more natural sites,'' says Rosentreter, a Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies Hutchinson Fellow.

Globally, rice cultivation releases more methane per year than all coastal wetlands, the continental shelf and open ocean combined. Fertilizer runoff causes nutrient-rich lakes and reservoirs to release methane. Coastal aquaculture farms have methane fluxes per area that are 7-430 times higher than from non-converted coastal habitats, such as mangrove forests, salt marshes or seagrasses.

But the study notes that there are opportunities to reduce human-impacted emissions with the right management techniques.

"The intense methane emissions from aquatic ecosystems offers opportunities for intervention providing potential quick wins in reducing greenhouse emissions, provided the much large role per molecule emitted of methane compared to carbon dioxide,'' says study co-author Carlos M. Duarte, professor at King Abdullah University of Science and?Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Fluctuating between flooded and non-flooded conditions in aquaculture farms and rice paddies; restoring tidal flow in degraded coastal wetlands; and reducing nutrient and organic matter in freshwater lakes, reservoirs, and rivers can all help reduce emissions, the study notes.

"Reducing methane emissions from aquatic systems will be an important part of stabilizing the Earth's temperature,'' says co-author Bradley Eyre Director, Centre for Coastal Biogeochemistry at Southern Cross University in Australia.

Bringing awareness to the amount of methane emissions coming from aquaculture and other water systems can help inform new monitoring and measurements that identify where and how methane emissions are being produced and change over time.

"With this awareness is also the possibility of helping to keep our waters cleaner,'' Rosentreter says.

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Scientists harness chaos to protect devices from hackers

New tech packs computer chips with "uncountable" secrets

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Researchers have found a way to use chaos to help develop digital fingerprints for electronic devices that may be unique enough to foil even the most sophisticated hackers.

Just how unique are these fingerprints? The researchers believe it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to test for every possible combination available.

"In our system, chaos is very, very good," said Daniel Gauthier, senior author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

The study was recently published online in the journal IEEE Access.

The researchers created a new version of an emerging technology called physically unclonable functions, or PUFs, that are built into computer chips.

Gauthier said these new PUFs could potentially be used to create secure ID cards, to track goods in supply chains and as part of authentication applications, where it is vital to know that you're not communicating with an impostor.

"The SolarWinds hack that targeted the U.S. government really got people thinking about how we're going to be doing authentication and cryptography," Gauthier said.

"We're hopeful that this could be part of the solution."

The new solution makes use of PUFs, which take advantage of tiny manufacturing variations found in each computer chip - variations so small that they aren't noticeable to the end user, said Noeloikeau Charlot, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in physics at Ohio State.

"There's a wealth of information in even the smallest differences found on computers chips that we can exploit to create PUFs," Charlot said.

These slight variations - sometimes seen only at the atomic level - are used to create unique sequences of 0s and 1s that researchers in the field call, appropriately enough, "secrets."

Other groups have developed what they thought were strong PUFs, but research showed that hackers could successfully attack them. The problem is that current PUFs contain only a limited number of secrets, Gauthier said.

"If you have a PUF where this number is 1,000 or 10,000 or even a million, a hacker with the right technology and enough time can learn all the secrets on the chip," Gauthier said.

"We believe we have found a way to produce an uncountably large number of secrets to use that will make it next to impossible for hackers to figure them out, even if they had direct access to the computer chip."

The key to creating the improved PUF is chaos, a topic that Gauthier has studied for decades. No other PUFs have used chaos in the way demonstrated in this study, he said.

The researchers created a complex network in their PUFs using a web of randomly interconnected logic gates. Logic gates take two electric signals and use them to create a new signal.

"We are using the gates in a non-standard way that creates unreliable behavior. But that's what we want. We are exploiting that unreliable behavior to create a type of deterministic chaos," Gauthier said.

The chaos amplifies the small manufacturing variations found on the chip. Even the smallest differences, when amplified by chaos, can change the entire class of possible outcomes - in this case, the secrets that are being produced, according to Charlot.

"Chaos really expands the number of secrets that are available on a chip. This will likely confuse any attempts at predicting the secrets," Charlot said.

One key to the process is letting the chaos run just long enough on the chip, according to Gauthier. If you let it run too long, it becomes - well, too chaotic.

"We want the process to run long enough to create patterns that are too complex for hackers to attack and guess. But the pattern must be reproducible so we can use it for authentication tasks," Gauthier said.

The researchers calculated that their PUF could create 1077 secrets. How big is that number? Imagine if a hacker could guess one secret every microsecond - 1 million secrets per second. It would take the hacker longer than the life of the universe, about 20 billion years, to guess every secret available in that microchip, Gauthier said.

As part of the study, the researchers attacked their PUF to see if it could be successfully hacked. They attempted machine learning attacks, including deep learning-based methods and model-based attacks - all of which failed. They are now offering their data to other research groups to see if they can find a way to hack it.

Gauthier said the hope is that PUFs like this could help beef up security against even state-sponsored hacker attacks, which are generally very sophisticated and backed up with a lot of computer resources.

For example, Russia is suspected of backing the SolarWinds hack that was uncovered in December. That hack reportedly gained access to email accounts of officials in the Department of Homeland Security and the department's cybersecurity staff.

"It is a constant battle to come up with technology that can stay ahead of hackers. We are trying to come up with technology that no hacker - no matter your resources, no matter what supercomputer you use - will be able to crack."

The researchers have applied for an international patent for their PUF device.

The goal of the team is to move beyond research and to move quickly to commercialize the technology. Gauthier and two partners recently founded Verilock, with a goal of bringing a product to market within a year.

"We see this technology as a real game changer in cybersecurity. This novel approach to a strong PUF could prove to be virtually un-hackable," said Jim Northup, CEO of Verilock.

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The work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of the Army with Potomac Research, LLC, through the project Physically Unclonable Functions on FPGAs, and by the Ohio Federal Research Network with Asymmetric Technologies, LLC and Ohio University, through the project Resilient and Enhanced Security UAS Flight Control.

Other co-authors on the study were Daniel Canaday and Andrew Pomerance of Potomac Research in Alexandria, Virginia.

 

A study by UPF analyses for the first time in Spain the effect of sexual orientation on wages

The research, led by María José González and İbrahim Sönmez, studies the relationship between wages and type of partner (homosexual and heterosexual) for men and women between 2006 and 2018

UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA - BARCELONA

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Spain is among the five countries in the world with the highest levels of social acceptance of LGBTIQ+ people and rights, and was the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages, in 2005. In 2019, 3.1% of marriages were between same-sex couples (INE 2020). In this context, it would seem consistent that sexual orientation should not determine wage inequalities. But is this really so? What is the relationship between sexual orientation and wages?

The study, recently published in Journal of Family Issues, found a significant correlation between sexual orientation -measured on the basis of type of partner- and wages.

A study led by María José González, a professor at the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and a researcher with the Sociodemography Research Group (DemoSoc), together with ?brahim Sönmez, a predoctoral researcher and member of the same group, has analysed for the first time in Spain whether sexual orientation leads to salary differences between men and women who live with a partner.

The study, recently published in Journal of Family Issues, finds a significant correlation between sexual orientation -measured on the basis of type of partner- and wages, despite the degree of tolerance of LGBTIQ+ rights.

The labour market discriminates against partnered homosexual men

M. José González asserts that "our results show that partnered gay men suffer a wage disadvantage compared to partnered heterosexuals under this model. And this disadvantage remains present even after taking sociodemographic differences into account such as the presence of children, educational attainment, occupational level, work experience or sector of employment (public and private)".

According to the authors, statistical analyses indicate that the wage gap due to men's sexual orientation can largely be attributed to unobservable variables, which would indicate the presence of discrimination against homosexuals in the labour market.

Partnered lesbians earn more money, due to their socio-occupational profile

Moreover, with regard to partnered women, the research finds that lesbians have a wage advantage compared to heterosexual women. However, this advantage disappears after controlling for differences in labour trends of women according to sexual orientation.

"Lesbians are less likely to undertake the bulk of household tasks and home care and, therefore, are also less susceptible to inactivity and part-time work than heterosexual women", M. José González explains. And she adds: "If, however, we take working hours into account, both lesbians and heterosexuals receive wages according to their training and work experience, regardless of their sexual orientation".

Analysis of data between 2006 and 2018 from the EPA labour force survey, the social security and tax agencies

The work is the first in its field in Spain, as for the first time a database is available that combines individual income and household make-up (EPA labour force survey with a sample of nearly 190,000 people) with wage data records from the social security and tax agencies. These data allow analysing the association between wages and type of partner (homosexual or heterosexual) for men and women in Spain between 2006 and 2018.

The authors identify people living with a same-sex partner (homosexual) and opposite sex partners (heterosexual).

The authors identify people living with a same-sex partner (homosexual) and opposite sex partners (heterosexual). In fact, they do not have a perfect indicator of sexual orientation of the population (these data are not usually available in official surveys) but an approximate or indirect variable obtained from the make-up by sex of couples (from questions such as whether they live with a partner and the sex of the partner).

Legislation must eliminate stereotypes and discrimination, which still exist

The work, which highlights the need to implement policies that work to eliminate stereotypes and prejudices towards different sexual orientations, stresses that in a seemingly open, tolerant society as is Spain, sexual orientation is still important. "Our study has shown that the transgression of the mandate of heteronormativity has consequences in the labour market for men, but not for women", M. José González asserts.

"Our study has shown that the transgression of the mandate of heteronormativity has consequences for the labour market for men, but not for women".

Moreover, the authors warn of "statistical discrimination", which mostly affects heterosexual women (and not so much lesbians, with higher wages): they are offered lower wages in the labour market not due to their personal characteristics, but due to the widespread perception that they are less productive due to the specialization of gender roles and the corresponding overload of housework and care.

Finally, there are some "unobserved characteristics", such as value or expectations, which may affect wage inequality between men and women in same-sex couples and couples of the opposite sex. "If a gay man expects to be discriminated against, his labour market expectations may be reduced. In this case, it is not sexual orientation that is responsible for wage inequality, but differences in ambition and expectations", M. José González concludes.

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Reference article: M. José González, ?brahim Sönmez (March 2021). "Challenging Heteronormativity: An Analysis of the Effect of Sexual Orientation on Earnings in Spain". Journal of Family Issues

https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X21993184

For chronic kidney disease, an ounce of prevention can be economical

University of Tsukuba study identifies a cost-effective way of getting health-care professionals to better manage treatment of chronic kidney disease and extend patients' lives

UNIVERSITY OF TSUKUBA

Research News

 

Tsukuba, Japan - With a prevalence of about one in 10 people worldwide, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a global health problem. It also often goes undetected, leading to a range of negative health outcomes, including death. Catching it at an early stage and adjusting nutrition and lifestyle can improve and extend life, but only if there are economically feasible systems in place to promote and educate on this.

Amid finite health-care resources, any CKD intervention must be both practical and cost-effective. A team of researchers centered at the University of Tsukuba now believe they have found a CKD behavioral intervention that can be delivered at a reasonable cost. They published their findings in the Journal of Renal Nutrition.

Changing eating and lifestyle habits, and regularly visiting a doctor, are vital in managing CKD. Yet the CKD treatment guidelines under Japan's nationalized health-care system offer little economic incentive for general physicians (GPs) to recommend dietitians' valuable guidance for CKD patients.

"There's substantial evidence, including the Japanese Society of Nephrology's clinical guidelines, that dietitian-led patient education can slow the progression of CKD," study corresponding author Professor Masahide Kondo says. "But this sort of education seldom happens in Japan. We sought a way to justify such interventions and incentivize GPs to initiate them."

With a lack of economic assessments of these interventions, the researchers conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis using a Markov model, a mathematical method for finding patterns and making predictions. Based on results from the Frontier of Renal Outcome Modifications in Japan (FROM-J) study, which found success in dietitian-led education and lifestyle advice, along with periodic check-ups, they projected how such intervention would perform economically.

Naturally, a host of factors, such as disease progression and drug costs, play into this complex modeling. Key here was whether the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), which shows the unit cost of gaining 1 extra healthy life year among the patients via the intervention, gave sufficient worth for that amount. The estimated ICER of about US$1,324 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) was compared with the suggested social willingness to pay about US$45,455 for a 1-QALY gain. This demonstrates considerable cost-effectiveness.

"Diffusing such CKD interventions now seems justifiable, even with limited health-care resources," study first author Assistant Professor Reiko Okubo says. "We found that by adjusting the reimbursements and accessing the country's 5,000 registered dietitians, we could incentivize GPs to encourage practical behavioral interventions."

Behavior modification for CKD patients has the potential to be cost-effective within Japan's national health-care scheme. It can also improve and extend lives. Such findings could extend to other countries and encourage them to modify their guidelines. If policy can follow suit and GPs can comply with the advice, CKD can become a more manageable, and less fatal, disease.

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The article, "Cost-Effectiveness of Behavior Modification Intervention for Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease in the FROM-J Study," was published in Journal of Renal Nutrition at https://doi.org/10.1053/j.jrn.2020.12.008

Japanese consumers more concerned about gene-editing of livestock than of vegetables, survey shows

RESEARCH ORGANIZATION OF INFORMATION AND SYSTEMS

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IMAGE: PIG FARMING IN NORTHERN JAPAN view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY HISASHI URASHIMA

A statistically rigorous survey of Japanese consumers has found that they have more negative opinions about the use of new gene-editing techniques on livestock than they do about use of the same technologies on vegetables.

The survey findings were reported in the journal BMC CABI Agriculture and Bioscience on March 31st, 2021.

Because humans tend to feel closer to animals than plants, and commonly express feelings regarding animal welfare but not plant welfare, the researchers, led by Naoko Kato-Nitta, a research scientist at Tokyo's Joint Support Center for Data Science Research and Institute of Statistical Mathematics, wanted to see if such moral or taxonomic distinctions would produce any difference in their attitudes towards use of emerging gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9.

Earlier surveys had shown subtle differences in consumer attitudes towards genetic modification, where foreign DNA is inserted into an organism's genome, compared to gene-editing, where an organism's genes are tweaked but no foreign DNA is introduced.

Via an online survey of just over 4,000 participants aged 20 to 69, the researchers found that there was indeed a significant difference. The participants were shown a visual diagram explaining how gene-editing works and then asked how they felt about it. The survey results showed that they were more likely to be worried about the use of gene-editing techniques on livestock than on plants.

But in a twist to the study design, the researchers split the participants into two groups. In the first, the explainer diagram included cartoon pictures of pigs, and in the second, the diagram included cartoon pictures of tomatoes.

The group that had been shown pictures of cartoon pigs were subsequently less likely to raise concerns about gene-editing of livestock than the group that had been shown pictures of cartoon tomatoes. The researchers believe that this may be because the pictures of the pigs "primed" the survey participants to be open to livestock gene-editing. "In contrast, the group shown the gene-editing of cartoon tomatoes had in effect been asked to infer how they would feel if the same thing was done on pigs" says Naoko Kato-Nitta, the lead author of the paper and a specialist in risk communication at ROIS and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo. "There was a higher emotional hurdle to be overcome in the second group."?"This means that public attitudes towards food can change as a result of just one small change to how information is provided," she adds. "And so experts really need to pay careful attention to the impact of how they contextualize their discussions of gene-editing."

The survey participants were also asked a series of questions assessing their level of scientific literacy. The researchers found that those with higher levels of scientific literacy were more supportive of using gene-editing to deliver improvements in vegetables, and more supportive of using gene-editing to make livestock more resistant to disease. Those with higher levels of scientific literacy thus may be more open to medical applications of biotechnology than agri-food applications.

In the 1990s, strong public opposition to genetically modified crops led to the Japanese government's introduction of strict regulations on such techniques, as well as the labeling of GM food items. Currently there is no commercial cultivation of GM crops in the country. And so the researchers now want to perform the study again in other countries in order to see if the plant-animal consumer distinction is culturally specific to Japan.

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About the Joint Support-Center for Data Science Research (ROIS-DS)

The Joint Support-Center for Data Science Research (ROIS-DS) is a part of Japan's Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS). Established in 2016, ROIS-DS is a joint research center for the advancement of interdisciplinary data science. The center's mission is to support wide range of researchers and students to conduct research in data-sciences in the hope of solving scientific and social problems. The center aims to cultivate and strengthen collaboration and cooperation among universities and other institutions by promoting data sharing and providing data analysis support across disciplines, as well as helping human resource development related to data science.

About the Institute of Statistical Mathematics

The Institute of Statistical Mathematics (ISM) is part of Japan's Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS). With more than 75 years of history, the institute is an internationally renowned facility for research on statistical mathematics including survey research and the Japanese national character survey. ISM comprises three different departments including the Department of Statistical Modeling, the Department of Statistical Data Science, and the Department of Statistical Inference and Mathematics, as well as several key data and research centers. Through the efforts of various research departments and centers, ISM aims to continuously facilitate cutting edge research collaboration with universities, research institutions, and industries both in Japan and other countries.

 

Sharing and enjoying meals with loved ones reduces obesity and improves the health of adolescents

The benefits of the Mediterranean diet come from both the food we eat and how we eat it

UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA (UOC)

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IMAGE: UOC RESEARCHER, ANNA BACH-FAIG, EXPERT IN NUTRITION view more 

CREDIT: UOC

Eating together as a family, maintaining the Mediterranean diet's traditional customs of conviviality, influences the eating habits of adolescents and prevents eating behaviour disorders, according to a new study prepared by scientists from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and published in the open access International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

"At a time when lockdown due to the pandemic has revived family meals, this study indicates one of the possible positive aspects of the situation that we have had to confront", explains the study's researcher Anna Bach-Faig from the Foodlab group, and a member of the Faculty of Health Sciences.

The research establishes that family meal routines, such as sharing food, sitting around a table without digital devices or having a pleasant conversation, are beneficial aspects for adolescents and contribute to their health. In line with other studies it notes that this conviviality, which favours conversation and slower eating, helps adolescents to recognize the feeling of fullness during meals and, indirectly, prevents obesity.

The study, conducted by means of in-depth interviews of families in Catalonia with adolescents from 12 to 16 years old, analyses one of the least studied aspects of the Mediterranean diet: socialization at mealtimes and how the way in which we eat also affects our health.

"A healthy diet is not just what we eat but also how we eat it", explains Bach-Faig. "The Mediterranean diet is much more than a list of foods. It is a cultural model which includes how these foods are selected, produced, processed and consumed."

The importance of conversation

To determine the degree of conviviality in the families studied, the researchers analysed the frequency and duration of family meals, the place where they took place, the use of digital devices, the preparation of the food and the type of communication established in these gatherings.

According to the study, the majority of families only ate the evening meal together and their habits varied depending on whether they ate alone or with their loved ones. The research ascertained that family meals were a place for communication and socialization, and that when families devoted less time to them, did not sit at the table, were distracted by digital devices or did not engage in pleasant conversation during these gatherings, they also followed the Mediterranean diet to a lesser extent.

For the majority of parents, family meals were especially important when they had adolescent children, since they favour conversation and closer family bonds. "It is easier when children are small, but in adolescence there is a disconnect between you and them and, thanks to these conversations, you can gain a little insight into their world", explained one of the mothers interviewed.

Moreover, the majority considered that, through these family gatherings, parents become role models and help to establish healthy patterns for their children. This impression is consistent with the results of other studies in which it is demonstrated that eating together as a family is related to a healthier diet, with more fruit and vegetables, and less sugary drinks.

The Western diet

For nutrition expert Bach-Faig, it is essential to preserve eating traditions in order to maintain the benefits of the Mediterranean diet and promote the health of the younger generations. However, for several decades now, the Mediterranean diet has been losing influence in the face of the so-called "Western diet", characterized by the predominance of processed foods and eating quickly, often in front of the television.

The study stresses that it is crucial to consider these aspects in order to promote a healthy diet among adolescents and to design public health campaigns. One example was the Implica't campaign, carried out in Catalonia with the participation of researchers from this study. "Just as we recommend 5 fruit and veg a day", explains Bach-Fair, "we could also propose at least one family meal a day".

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This UOC research contributes to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 (good health and well-being).

The study was supported by a Research Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RTI2018-099293-B-I00).

Reference article:

de la Torre-Moral, A.; Fàbregues, S.; Bach-Faig, A.; Fornieles-Deu, A.; Medina, F.X.; Aguilar-Martínez, A.; Sánchez-Carracedo, D. Family Meals, Conviviality, and the Mediterranean Diet among Families with Adolescents. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 2499. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18052499

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