Elon Musk's Neuralink may have illegally transported pathogens, animal advocates say

Rachael Levy
Thu, February 9, 2023 

FILE PHOTO: Illustration shows Neuralink logo and Elon Musk photo


By Rachael Levy

(Reuters) - An animal-welfare organization said it plans to ask a U.S. government agency on Thursday to investigate Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink over records it said show potentially illegal movement of hazardous pathogens.

The Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM) said in a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation, which was shared with Reuters, that it has obtained emails and other documents that suggest unsafe packaging and movement of implants removed from the brains of monkeys. These implants may have carried infectious diseases in violation of federal law, PCRM said.

The letter said records that the group obtained showed instances of pathogens, such as antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus and herpes B virus, that may have been transported without proper containment measures.

PCRM's letter adds to the scrutiny facing Neuralink, which is developing a brain implant it hopes will help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments.

In December, Reuters reported that Neuralink has been under a federal investigation over potential animal welfare violations and that some of its staff made internal complaints about experiments being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths.

The incidents that involved potential breaches of hazardous material transportation regulations happened in 2019, when Neuralink relied on University of California, Davis to help carry out its experiments on primates, according to the documents cited by PCRM.

While Neuralink's partnership with UC Davis ended in 2020, PCRM said the company continues to employ the neurosurgeon who oversaw the experiments and other staff involved may also still be employed.

Reuters reviewed the UC Davis records cited by PCRM in its letter. It is unclear whether further records exist that provide a different or fuller account of what happened. PCRM obtained the records from UC Davis through public information requests. Neuralink messages and records not shared with UC Davis are not subject to such information requests.

Representatives for Neuralink, including Musk, and the Department of Transportation did not respond to comment requests. A UC Davis spokesperson would only say that the university abides by all biohazard and lab safety regulations.

PCRM's letter said pathogens were carried on removed implants from monkeys after improper sanitization and packaging. The group said those pathogens could cause serious health issues in infected humans, such as bloodstream infections, pneumonia and severe brain damage, among other problems.

PCRM, which opposes the use of animals in medical research, did not identify any harm as a result of these incidents, but said Neuralink's actions "may pose a serious and ongoing public health risk."

"The company's documented track record of sloppy, unsafe laboratory practices compel DOT to investigate and levy appropriate fines," PCRM said in the letter.

PCRM said it also found instances that appear to describe UC Davis employees urging immediate biohazard training for Neuralink employees following incidents that had caused contamination concerns. On one occasion in April 2019, a UC Davis employee wrote in an email that the university’s primate center is “at risk” for “monkey contaminated hardware.”

"This is an exposure to anyone coming in contact with the contaminated explanted hardware and we are making a big deal about this because we are concerned for human safety," wrote the employee, whose name was redacted from the records.

PCRM has raised concerns about Neuralink in the past. Last year, it wrote to federal officials about alleged animal-welfare issues during Neuralink’s research partnership with UC Davis, citing another set of records it obtained. A federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California referred PCRM's complaint to the USDA Inspector General, which later launched the federal probe into Neuralink, Reuters previously reported.

During its partnership with UC Davis, Neuralink grew frustrated with what it regarded as the slow pace of testing on primates, current and former company employees told Reuters, and has since built out extensive in-house animal testing facilities. The company has missed deadlines set by Musk to proceed to human trials, however. His pressure on Neuralink’s staff to make progress contributed to mistakes plaguing some experiments, Reuters reported.

(Reporting by Rachael Levy in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Greg Roumeliotis and David Gregorio)

Fungi and bacteria are binging on burned soil

Can microbes revive megafire dead zones?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: SIGNS OF MICROBIAL LIFE IN THE HOLY FIRE BURN SCAR. view more 

CREDIT: SYDNEY GLASSMAN/UCR

UC Riverside researchers have identified tiny organisms that not only survive but thrive during the first year after a wildfire. The findings could help bring land back to life after fires that are increasing in both size and severity.

The Holy Fire burned more than 23,000 acres across Orange and Riverside counties in 2018. Wanting to understand how the blaze affected bacteria and fungi over time, UCR mycologist Sydney Glassman led a team of researchers into the burn scar. 

“When we first came into fire territory, there was ash up to my shins. It was a very severe fire,” Glassman said. 

The researchers visited the scar nine times over the course of the next year, comparing the charred earth with samples from nearby, unburned soil. Their findings, now published in the journal Molecular Ecology, show that the overall mass of microbes dropped between 50 and 80% after the fire, and did not recover during that first year.

However, some things lived. “Certain species increased in abundance, and in fact there were really rapid changes in abundance over time in the burned soils,” Glassman said. “There were no changes at all in the unburned soils.”

It wasn’t just one type of bacteria or fungi that survived. Rather, it was a parade of microbes that took turns dominating the burned soil in that first post-fire year. “There were interesting, distinct shifts in the microbes over time. As one species went down, another came up,” Glassman said.

In the early days, they found microbes with high tolerance for fire and high heat. Later, fast-growing organisms with a lot of spores — able to take advantage of space with little microbial competition — seemed to dominate. Toward the end of the year, organisms able to consume charcoal and other post-fire debris high in nitrogen tended to dominate.

Certain microbes called methanotrophs regulate the breakdown of methane, a greenhouse gas. Fabiola Pulido-Chavez, UCR plant pathology PhD candidate and first author of the study, noticed that genes involved in methane metabolism doubled in post-fire microbes. 

“This exciting finding suggests post-fire microbes can “eat” methane to gain carbon and energy, and can potentially help us reduce greenhouses gases,” Pulido-Chavez said.

The researchers continue to test whether the fungi and bacteria they found were able to thrive at different points in time as a result of their unique and varied traits, or whether there is another reason for the shifts they saw in the soil.

“We think one organism can’t be good at all the skills necessary to thrive in a burn scar,” Glassman said. “If you’re good at tolerating heat, you’re probably not as good at growing fast.”

What the researchers saw in the soil bears some resemblance to the human body’s response to a major stress. People suffer an illness and take antibiotics. The medicine destroys bacteria in a person’s gut, and new organisms begin to show up that either weren’t there before or did not previously have a large presence. 

Eventually, a person’s gut bacteria might return to something like its pre-infection state, but there is no guarantee. 

“We are also trying to understand what gets the land back to where it was before the disturbance, which in this case was an enormous fire,” Glassman said. “A lot of what we’re studying could be transferrable to a human microbiome setting.”

For a century, scientists have known about ways that plants are able to adapt to wildfires, and eventually re-colonize a burn scar. As this new research shows, fungi and bacteria may have developed similar coping strategies. 

“It’s exciting because we’ve only developed the technology in the last couple of decades to really understand what microbes are doing in the soil, and how they contribute to regeneration,” Glassman said. 

What is now being learned about post-fire microbe behavior could change older theories about plant behavior, since microbes were not factored into them. “To me, this is exciting, as microbes have long been overlooked, yet they are essential for ecosystem health,” Pulido-Chavez said.

One open question that remains is whether adaptations that plants and microbes have developed in response to wildfires will adapt again to megafires or recurrent fires. Whereas there might have been a period of several decades before a plot of land burned more than once, it is increasingly common for the same soil to burn again in fewer than 10 years. 

Particularly in the West, climate change is causing rising temperatures and earlier snow melt, extending the dry season when forests are most vulnerable to burning. What does the increase in size, severity, and frequency of fires do for natural burn recovery?

“Things can recover, but it takes time, and whether or not the land recovers after super-frequent megafires is another story. Can recovery time keep pace with megafires? We don’t know yet,” Glassman said.

UCR researcher sampling soil in the Holy Fire burn scar.

CREDIT

Sydney Glassman/UCR

USAGE RESTRICTIONS

---

JOURNAL

Molecular Ecology

DOI

10.1111/mec.16835 

ARTICLE TITLE

Rapid bacterial and fungal successional dynamics in first year after chaparral wildfire

SWEDEN

The coastal cod population is not extinct

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

 

IMAGE: IN THE FJORDS, QUITE A NUMBER OF JUVENILE COD OF THE COASTAL ECOTYPE WERE CAUGHT. HOWEVER, ONLY A FEW SPECIMENS OVER 40 CENTIMETRES LONG WERE FOUND IN THE NETS. view more 

CREDIT: HÅKAN WENNHAGE

The rumour that the coastal cod is extinct is not true. Through DNA analyses, researchers at the University of Gothenburg have identified that there are still juvenile coastal cod off the west coast of Sweden. However, it is still difficult to find any mature adult cod in the area.

By genetically analysing cod collected by test fishing, researchers from the University of Gothenburg and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) have found that there are two distinct types of cod living in the waters along Sweden’s west coast. These types of cod belong to the same species – the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) – but they are different ‘ecotypes’, genetically adapted to different environments or lifestyles. The two types of cod found off the west coast are known as ‘offshore cod’ and ‘coastal cod’, because one has its origins far out to sea, while the other resides close to the coast throughout its life. These two types of cod rarely mate with each other.

Coastal cod remain in the fjords

Many people have long believed that the west coast’s coastal cod have been completely fished out. But this new study, published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, shows that there is still a cod population that spends all its life off the west coast of Sweden.

"Our analyses show that a high proportion of juvenile cod in the fjords and near the west coast of Sweden are coastal cod. That shows that there is still something left to save. But in the test fishing, you get very, very few adult cod. In test fishing near the coast, only a handful of cod over 40 centimetres in length were found,” says Simon Henriksson, researcher at the University of Gothenburg.

For the study, the researchers collected juvenile, decimetre-long, cod from over 100 different sites in the Skagerrak, the Kattegat and the Sound (Öresund), and analysed them genetically. Their results show that the cod stock in the area is not just made up of offshore cod, but is a mixture of both ecotypes. Offshore cod are found mainly far off the coast and the coastal cod closer to the shore. In the fjords of West Sweden, the proportion of coastal cod is very high, which is a little unexpected given the theory that they were virtually extinct.

"In some places both offshore and coastal cod are found in the same fjord, but they appear to live at different depths. Offshore cod live at slightly greater depths, while coastal cod are more common in shallow waters,” says Simon Henriksson.

Uncertain where the coastal cod go after reaching adulthood

Adult offshore cod spawn in the North Sea or the Outer Skagerrak, and then strong ocean currents carry their eggs and larvae into Swedish waters. Sweden’s west coast acts as a nursery for offshore cod, which at the age of two to four migrate back to the offshore banks to spawn.  

Where the coastal cod go after reaching adulthood remains an unanswered question, given that no spawning coastal cod are found in the fjords, despite the presence of juvenile cod there. Because coastal cod are also found in the Kattegat, the Sound and the Danish Straits, one theory is that their eggs and larvae drift with the currents from there and into the fjords of the Swedish west coast. This could explain the relatively large proportion of juvenile coastal cod found in the test fishing, despite a lack of adult coastal cod.

"In another study from 2019, cod eggs were found in the fjords, which seems to indicate that adult coastal cod do actually spawn in the fjords. But since we cannot see any genetic difference among coastal cod from different areas, we do not know for sure whether there are local spawning populations,” says Simon Henriksson.

The new study shows that the ecotypes display several differences in genes involved in environmental adaptation. This indicates that the differences in where they live may be because they are genetically adapted to different environments. For example, the ecotypes appear to be adapted to different physical conditions such as oxygen concentrations, salinity, and temperature. There are also genetic differences suggesting that the ecotypes differ in terms of foraging, as well as migratory and social behaviours.

Cod populations continuing to decline in Swedish seas

Unfortunately, the results of the genetic analysis do not mean that cod populations are recovering. On the contrary, the numbers of adult and juvenile cod are continuing to decline in all Swedish seas. However, the new results show that we need to account for the fact that there are two different types of cod, that differ genetically and geographically, if we are going to try to rebuild cod stocks along the west coast.

Map over test fishing results

The proportion of cod from each stock differs in different marine areas. The coastal cod (orange) is most common in the Sound and in the fjords of West Sweden. Further away from the coast, virtually only offshore cod (blue) are found.

CREDIT

Simon Henriksson

The sampling was carried out at over 100 different sites along the Swedish coast and in the fjords, from the Sound in the south to the Koster Islands in the north. Sampling was done both near the coast and further out to sea, in the Skagerrak and the Kattegat.

CREDIT

Håkan Wennhage

---

JOURNAL

ICES Journal of Marine Science

DOI

10.1093/icesjms/fsac220 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Mixed origin of juvenile Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) along the Swedish west coast

Latin American and Caribbean researchers detail colonialism in ornithology

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA

A new paper in Ornithological Applications, published by Oxford University Press, reviews multiple ways in which the field of ornithology systemically excludes researchers and research from Latin America and the Caribbean, despite this region harboring the most bird species on Earth. The paper, signed by 124 ornithologists (including professional scientists, naturalists, park rangers, and technicians) from 19 countries, also explains what the field might do to start addressing the problems identified.

A major barrier to advancing ornithology, says the paper, is the marginalization of researchers from the Global South, meaning Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and most of Asia. Latin America and the Caribbean is home to 3700 bird species, across habitats from lowland tropical rainforest to the High Andes. It also includes more than 40 countries and a human population comparable to that of Europe. Yet of the 10 papers published in a recent special feature about the region (in Advances in Neotropical Ornithology), only three included authors affiliated with an institution within the region. Such discrepancies are widespread in peer-reviewed scientific journals and, the authors argue, result from a long history of colonialism that scientists continue to sweep under the proverbial rug.

The paper explains that language hegemony, publication costs, and North-biased views of what is novel exclude many excellent ornithologists from publishing in global-scope journals and dramatically reduce the extent to which their work is cited.

The authors noted that reviewers and editors rarely ask scholars from Europe, Canada, or the United States to translate, learn, or cite theory and case studies from Latin America or Africa, but they routinely expect scholars from the Global South to frame their work in the context of research from Europe or North America.

The paper argues that such systemic barriers are not only unjust to researchers from the Global South; they are also detrimental to ornithological scholarship and bird conservation. Scientific rigor, the authors point out, is not simply the sum of individually rigorous research articles, but an emergent property of a collection of complementary studies from a diversity of regions and perspectives. For example, patterns of bird sexual behavior and nest orientation, initially purported to be global, turned out to hold only in the northern hemisphere when researchers included data from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The authors noted that the geographical and cultural richness of ornithological knowledge, and conceptualizations of birds, are inherent even in bird names. Indigenous Peoples and other communities in Latin America tend to name birds for their behavior (e.g., in Mupuzungun, “küchag”―which leaves waste after eating), vocalizations (“fio-fio”), or the time of year they are present, reflecting both knowledge of their ecology and an unambiguous method of species identification (calls and songs).

In contrast, their English names, and, increasingly, Spanish derivatives, reflect broad, often ambiguous taxonomic categories, a general geographic location (“Patagonian Sierra Finch”), or the appearance of museum specimens (“White-crested Elaenia”), which are not always useful and can even be misleading in field identification. The authors argue that ornithologists―in the Global North and South―have set back their own field by suppressing the rich and nuanced ornithological knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and other communities across Latin America and the Caribbean.

The authors of the paper recognize that there is no easy recipe to eliminate all of the injustices in science that arise from centuries of colonialism, but they encourage all scientists to notice, question, and interrupt the systems that perpetuate existing hierarchies of class, race, gender, and geography.

To begin addressing the long legacy of colonialism in science, they suggest that researchers worldwide ensure that they read and cite work from the Global South, especially work by Indigenous, Black, and Brown women. They propose that institutions should adopt new policies and assessment criteria that encourage researchers to step back from top-down positions and support collective leadership that includes people outside academia.

The authors urge global-scope journals to maintain or create options for free or low-cost publication, to offer the option of a submission and review process in Spanish, and to ensure that papers about birds in Latin America and the Caribbean include the full participation of authors from the region, from the design of the study to the interpretation of the results. They also propose that global-scope ornithological journals should adjust their criteria for publication with the aim to publish all scientifically robust and ethically rigorous ornithology research submitted by first authors based in Latin America or the Caribbean, including negative results and articles on basic biology.

The groundwork for such change is already in place: ornithology in Latin America and the Caribbean is now underpinned by regional institutions, conservation programs, and a rapidly growing cadre of students, professionals, and non-academics based in this region, who creatively propel the discipline. Today locally driven and government-funded research, scientific societies, universities, scientific collections, non-governmental organizations, community-science projects, international collaborations, and contributions from independent naturalists, birding clubs, tour guides, environmental licensing studies, Indigenous communities, and park rangers make ornithological research in the Neotropics possible.

 “Colonialism still has profound impacts in our society, whether people feel comfortable with that or not, said Letícia Soares of Saint Louis University, one of the lead authors of the publication. “We (researchers in the Neotropics) often enforce the colonialist perspectives. Field biology has such a strong enforced stereotype of having been pioneered by white European males. Disrupting this narrative should be a commitment of everyone in the field. Then we can walk toward acknowledgment, justice, and reconciliation, both in ornithology and other field sciences.”

The paper, “Neotropical ornithology: Reckoning with historical assumptions, removing systemic barriers, and reimagining the future,” is available (at midnight on February 7th) at: https://academic.oup.com/condor/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/ornithapp/duac046.

Direct correspondence to: 
Ernesto Ruelas Inzunza
Universidad Veracruzana
Instituto de Biotecnología y Ecología Aplicada
Xalapa, Ver., México 91090
ruelas.uv@gmail.com

To request a copy of the study, please contact:
Daniel Luzer 
daniel.luzer@oup.com

---

JOURNAL

Ornithological Applications

DOI

10.1093/ornithapp/duac046 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Systematic review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Neotropical ornithology: Reckoning with historical assumptions, removing systemic barriers, and reimagining the future

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023

Using environmental DNA for to survey the populations of endangered species

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

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OKAYAMA UNIVERSI

 

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

CREDIT: KAZUYOSHI NAKATA

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

About Okayama University, Japan

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

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

 

About Professor Kazuyoshi Nakata

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

---

JOURNAL

Landscape and Ecological Engineering

DOI

10.1007/s11355-022-00531-9 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

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

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

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

 

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

CREDIT: CHEN ZHAO/SOUTH CHINA AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

---

JOURNAL

Pest Management Science

DOI

10.1002/ps.7287 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

ARTICLE TITLE

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

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023

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

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

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

 

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

CREDIT: RALPH PACE

February 7, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Contacts: Lisa Komoroske, lkomoroske@umass.edu

                 Daegan Miller, drmiller@umass.edu

 

 

---

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2201076120 

ARTICLE TITLE

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

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Feb-2023