Why plants worldwide became woody

Unravelling the evolutionary puzzle

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NATURALIS BIODIVERSITY CENTER

 

IMAGE: A) THE NUMBER OF INSULAR WOODY SPECIES ACROSS ALL ISLANDS. B,C) PROPORTION OF INSULAR WOODY SPECIES OF THE TOTAL FLORA ON THE CANARY ISLANDS AND HAWAII. THE INLET PICTURES SHOW THREE ICONIC EXAMPLES OF INSULAR WOODINESS: ECHIUM VIRESCENS ON THE CANARIES (PICTURE F. LENS), ARGYROXIPHIUM SANDWICENSE, AND DUBAUTIA WAIALEALAE ON HAWAII (SILVERSWORDS, PICTURES BY SEANA WALSH AND KEN WOOD, COURTESY OF NATIONAL TROPICAL BOTANICAL GARDEN, HAWAII). view more 

CREDIT: F. LENS AND SEANA WALSH AND KEN WOOD, COURTESY OF NATIONAL TROPICAL BOTANICAL GARDEN, HAWAII.

Why do some plants grow into large woody shrubs or colossal trees, while others remain small and never produce wood in their stems? It’s an evolutionary puzzle that already baffled Charles Darwin more than 160 year ago. Now, scientists from the Netherlands and Germany present the first global overview of woodiness evolution on islands, which will finally help solve the puzzle.

“The first woody trees evolved on Earth some 400 million years ago, but still we know so little about why they developed wood in the first place”, Frederic Lens tells, researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University. All these early woody trees are now extinct and originated in unknown climatic conditions, so it is impossible to understand the evolution of woodiness based on their fossils, but Islands may offer the solution.

The evolution of woodiness is still happening today, particularly in these areas that are known as natural laboratories of evolution: islands. One of the striking aspects of insular floras is that they are proportionally more woody than those of adjacent continents. Charles Darwin described this phenomenon as insular woodiness. It occurs when a non-woody continental coloniser reaches an island, and subsequently evolves into a woody shrub or even tree on the same island after tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

Insular woodiness is only known from a few iconic lineages, like the Hawaiian silverswords (Fig. 2). To better understand why plants became woody during evolutionary history, the Dutch-German research team compiled a new database comprising over a thousand insular woody species and their distribution (Fig. 2), which allowed them for the first time to rigorously test a number of existing hypotheses. And with promising results; “We identified a link between increased drought and increased wood formation in plant stems on islands. I am convinced that the link between drought and woodiness will be even much stronger on continents”, Lens tells. This is something the team wants to test soon when  analysing their complete database, including also about 6000 additional woody species that evolved their woodiness on continents.

Hotspots

The researchers identified not only all insular woody species in the world, they also globally mapped their distribution and number of transitions (Fig. 3), and tested which of the evolutionary hypotheses are most likely. “It was really crazy to compile such a dataset in the first place”, Frederic Lens says. “It took me more than 10 years to finalise the database, but fortunately, it all paid off in the end”.

The new woodiness database found more than three times as many insular woody species known so far. These 1000+ species are the result of at least 175 independent transitions. “This clearly emphasises that islands are remarkable  biodiversity hotspots in the world, with a unique flora that urgently needs protection”, first author Alexander Zizka, of University of Marburg in Germany, states. The extensive research also offers an interesting glimpse into the future. “With the dry European summer of 2022 in mind, the fact that drought pops up as one of most likely drivers of wood formation, offers promising research avenues in agriculture to help safeguard our food production,” Frederic Lens clarifies. “Suppose we would be able to turn every non-woody crop into a woody crop, we will not only have larger crops with a higher yield per plant, but more importantly, we will also be able to increase the drought tolerance of these woodier crops. In a world facing climate change and a growing global human population, this is simply essential.”

CAPTION

Minimum number of evolutionary shifts to insular woodiness and number of insular woody species on archipelagos worldwide. Only archipelagos with at least one evolutionary shift are shown for clarity. The * summarises multiple Southern Indian Ocean islands (Kerguelen, Crozet, Prince Edward Islands and Heard & MacDonald).

CREDIT

Kerguelen, Crozet, Prince Edward Islands and Heard & MacDonald

Note to editors

The publication:
Zizka A, Onstein RE, Rozzi R, Weigelt P, Kreft H, Steinbauer MJ, Bruelheide H, Lens F. Accepted. The evolution of insular woodiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

The leading researcher, Dr. Frederic Lens, can be reached at frederic.lens@naturalis.nl. General questions can go to the Naturalis press office: communicatie@naturalis.nl 

Additional images can be found in this press kit. Credits are indicated in the file names.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2208629119 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The evolution of insular woodiness

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Sep-2022

Improving body positivity during and after pregnancy could lead to healthier mothers and children

Body dissatisfaction can increase the risk of postpartum depression and eating disorders, with health consequences for mother and child.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

Pregnancy is often thought of as a time of excitement and anticipation.

But for some pregnant and postpartum individuals, the normal physical changes that occur with pregnancy can increase the risk of body dissatisfaction.

Defined as a negative subjective view of one’s body size or shape, body dissatisfaction can increase the risk of postpartum depression and eating disorders, both of which can have long term health consequences for mother and child.

A research team led by Rachel Vanderkruik, PhD, MSc, recently conducted a survey to learn more about the prevalence of body dissatisfaction in pregnancy and postpartum; identify the factors that contribute to these feelings; and what type of intervention could help.

What the Survey Found

In a survey of 161 pregnant and postpartum individuals between the ages of 18 and 45, 50% of respondents reported feelings of body dissatisfaction.

Over 40% of respondents said being pregnant or having a baby had made them self-conscious about their appearance. “It’s been really hard. I like to be thin. I have no control over my body gaining weight. It has caused anxiety and depression,” one respondent wrote.

More than 60% of respondents believed they should be thin or thinner than their current size, and over half said comments from others about their body or size had an impact on their body image.

Respondents said the downsides of pursuing an ideal body image included poor mental health, disordered eating and exercise habits, lost time and money, and negative self-talk.

Not all respondents reported negative feelings about their bodies, however. Some said pregnancy and childbirth led to a greater appreciation for what their bodies were capable of and helped them focus more on their own health and nutrition.

“During pregnancy I started to accept my appearance more and learn to appreciate my body for what it could do, not just how it could look,” said one respondent.

When it comes to possible solutions, 82% of respondents said they’d be interested in a program that focused on body acceptance during pregnancy and postpartum. Most would prefer the interventions to be virtual, facilitated by professionals and conducted in a group setting.  

“I would like to speak with other women about how to be healthy postpartum but also [how to be] accepting of the body changes and how we will not look like we used to pre-pregnancy.”

Next Steps and Future Research

There is currently a lack of intervention programs specifically targeted to pregnant and postpartum individuals, Vanderkruik says.

However there are existing evidence-based programs for body acceptance, such as The Body Project, that could be adapted to address the unique needs of pregnant and postpartum individuals.

Another existing intervention, Project Health, could be adapted to address the issue of excessive gestational weight in a way that is also sensitive to feelings of body dissatisfaction.

Notably, nearly half of survey respondents reported pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese categories.

While weight gain is normal during pregnancy, being overweight or obese pre-pregnancy or gaining excess weight while pregnant can also increase health risks for mother and baby.

“There’s a tension—we want to prevent any body-shaming or unrealistic expectations about returning to a certain body shape or size shortly after delivering,” Vanderkruik explains. “At the same time, we want to support healthy behaviors and a healthy lifestyle, too.”

More research will be needed to address the limitations of the survey and further detangle the complex relationship between weight, body image and healthy behaviors in pregnancy and postpartum.

“We would need to do more research on these issues; there were limitations to our survey study, including that assessments participants’ BMI and mental health were self-reported, and that it was cross-sectional (it only captured data from one point in time),” Vanderkruik says.

“But judging by the response to the survey study, the issues of body image and eating seem to be something that many pregnant and postpartum individuals care about and are interested enough to take the time to complete the survey without compensation and provide thoughtful information.”

The results were recently published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health.

Vanderkruik, a Staff Psychologist and the Associate Director of Research and Cognitive Behavioral Sciences at the Ammon-Pinizzotto Center for Women’s Mental Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, has heard individual reports of body dissatisfaction from clients in her clinical practice.

With the survey, she wanted to gain a better sense of the scope of the problem and raise awareness of the challenges it creates.

“I think there can be some shame and discomfort talking about issues of body image in pregnancy and postpartum,” Vanderkruik says. “There is still a culture that emphasizes being so happy to be pregnant and such.”

“But women’s experience with their bodies changing is significant, and I think there is not always a lot of honest conversations about the impact of that.”

About the Mass General Research Institute

Research at Massachusetts General Hospital is interwoven through more than 30 different departments, centers and institutes. The Mass General Research Institute was established to guide, support and promote this research enterprise. Our research includes fundamental, lab-based science; clinical trials to test new drugs, devices and diagnostic tools; and community and population-based research to improve health outcomes across populations and eliminate disparities in care.

 

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DOI

10.1007/s00737-022-01236-6 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in the perinatal period: an underrecognized high-risk timeframe and the opportunity to intervene

What's the best way to combine sports and school?

As if school isn’t tough enough on its own, some students want to combine it with high-level sports. Here's how they do it.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Some youth go all in to excel at a sport. But having a backup plan is a smart move. One day your athletic career will probably end, no matter how good you are. You’ll have done yourself a favour by acquiring an education as well.

“We looked at how ambitious young Norwegian footballers experience the pros and cons of combining school and sports,” says Stig Arve Sæther, an associate professor of sports science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Sociology and Political Science.

Regardless of the option, you pay a price. The school you choose if you want to do school and sports makes a difference, and finding one that is positively inclined toward combining them is key.

“Elite sports schools and other schools that enable students to combine education with sports offer a balance. The programmes are intended to provide success both in the sport of choice and in academic work, although some prioritize the former over the latter,” says Sæther.

Easier to integrate elite sports at special schools

The researchers from NTNU and the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH) spoke with eight football players and five coaches from two schools with elite sports programmes and two regular secondary schools with a sports focus.

They then analysed the student-athletes’ responses to find out how the programmes at the elite sports schools and at public sport schools compared.

They found some differences.

“The elite sports programmes closely integrate school and sports clubs, and enable the coaches and athletes to plan and manage the total workload more easily. This arrangement can lead to better development in both areas,” says Sæther.

Students who attend the elite sports schools seem to have an easier schedule than those who go to public sport schools. But attending a sports-friendly regular school does not only have disadvantages.

More independence outside the special schools

“Athletes who attend the less structured, but still sports-friendly regular secondary programmes are more concerned about the total workload of this option. But they also have more responsibility for their own decision making,” says Sæther.

The different environments offer different advantages, risks and development opportunities for students who want to combine studies and sports at a high level.

The increased responsibility offers more self-determination for those who want it. At the same time, the risk of injury due to overtraining increases.

“Our results show how the different environments offer different advantages, risks and development opportunities for those who want to combine studies with sports at a high level,” says Sæther.

Admission linked to early achievements

The basis for admission to elite sport programmes is often linked to sporting achievements and club affiliation. The athletes' achievements at a relatively young age can thus affect the degree of support they receive in upper secondary school.

However, research shows that strong performance at a young age is not necessarily a good indicator of achievement at the senior level.

“This situation can quickly become an additional challenge. Certain athletes may receive less support compared to others, even though their difference in skill level, and the basis for programme admission, is not necessarily that great,” says Sæther.

Reference: Sæther SA, Feddersen N, Andresen E, Bjørndal CT. Balancing sport and academic development: Perceptions of football players and coaches in two types of Norwegian school-based dual career development environments. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. July 2022. doi:10.1177/17479541221111462

 

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Sports Science

DOI

10.1177/17479541221111462 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Balancing sport and academic development: Perceptions of football players and coaches in two types of Norwegian school-based dual career development environments

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news rele

Gender-balanced teams produce more innovative, impactful scientific work, according to new research from MSU, Northwestern, Notre Dame and NYU

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: RESEARCH TEAMS WITH A BALANCE OF MEN AND WOMEN, LIKE THAT OF MSU PROFESSOR EVANGELYN ALOCILJA (SHOWN HERE — ALOCILJA IS IN THE FRONT LEFT OF THIS IMAGE), PERFORM MORE INNOVATIVE AND IMPACTFUL WORK, ACCORDING TO NEW WORK FROM MSU, NORTHWESTERN, NOTRE DAME AND NYU view more 

CREDIT: CREDIT: DERRICK L. TURNER

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Scientists often need to ask hard questions to make the biggest difference, but that doesn’t mean simple ideas can’t also push the envelope. 

Case in point: Research teams with a balanced number of men and women have had a significantly higher likelihood of producing more innovative and impactful work compared with their unbalanced counterparts.  

That’s according to a study from researchers at Michigan State University, Northwestern University, New York University and the University of Notre Dame, published Aug. 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

“This work quantifies the impact that diversity has on academic achievement,” said MSU Provost Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D., who is an author of the new report.  

Woodruff is also executive vice president for academic affairs at MSU, as well as an MSU Foundation Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology. 

“The more diverse the environment, the better the outcome for those who fund the research and those in whose interest the work is done," Woodruff said. 

“These are interesting and important findings, not only for recognizing the contributions of women in science — and women and men working together — but also for improving science,” said Brian Uzzi, the senior author of the study and the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.  

“Chances are, if we had more mixed-gender teams working on pressing issues, we'd have faster breakthroughs,” he said. 

In addition to Woodruff and Uzzi, authors of the study include Tanya Y. Tian of New York University; Benjamin F. Jones of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management; and Yang Yang, who was with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems before joining the University of Notre Dame. 

 ‘Diversity drives innovation’ 

In its study, the team evaluated millions of scientific papers published since the year 2000 in 45 different medical research subfields with an eye toward two key metrics: one was novelty, or the degree to which a paper combined existing ideas in innovative ways; the other was impact, measured by a paper’s total number of citations. 

Using an algorithm to infer the gender of the authors from their names, the researchers also found the gender ratio of each paper’s authorship team. With their approach, the researchers said that an important limitation was that they could not account for nonbinary authors. 

Taking that limitation and other variables into account, the researchers were still able to conclusively show that mixed-gender teams produced work that significantly surpassed the average in terms of novelty and impact.  

Furthermore, teams that had an equal number of men and women — or close to it — had the highest likelihood of novel and impactful results. Gender-balanced teams with six or more members were nearly 10% more likely to publish novel work than the base rate, and almost 15% more likely to be among the most highly cited papers. 

The conclusions held in all 45 medical subfields the team studied, and the strengths of mixed-gender teams were apparent whether teams were led by a man or a woman. Preliminary work published with the report also indicates that the team’s findings are generalizable across scientific disciplines beyond medicine. 

Although these results are striking, Woodruff was not surprised by what she and her colleagues found. She has previously collaborated with Uzzi and other researchers on several projects involving gender and visibility in the sciences. They’ve shown, for instance, that certain grants are disproportionately smaller for women than men and that scientific prizes provide less money and prestige for women than men, she said. 

“The ability to do these kinds of big data studies provides a prismatic view on the ways we understand success in the sciences and ways to work toward bigger impact,” Woodruff said. “We all believe that diversity increases impact, and this new paper proves that statement, here through the lens of gender and scientific productivity.”    

MSU Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Jabbar R. Bennett, Ph.D., who earned his doctorate in biomedical sciences, echoed this sentiment. 

“These findings support and expand what we know anecdotally about the value of diverse teams in search of answers to challenging questions both within and beyond the laboratory,” said Bennett, who is also a professor in the College of Human Medicine. “Diversity drives innovation and excellence in scientific research, and accelerates the pathway toward discovery.” 

The team is the first to quantify the benefits of mixed-gender research teams in this way. Although the report does not delve into the reasons underlying the benefits, previous research offers insights.  

Diverse teams “utilize innovative and nuanced approaches to problem-solving, often informed by personal experience and through an equity lens,” Bennett said. “Intentionality makes all the difference.”  

Northwestern’s Uzzi said teams with an equal gender balance may achieve a “‘Goldilocks level’ of divergent thinking balanced by communication processes that promote listening to and building off of each other’s ideas.” 

The team’s analysis does show that research teams have trended toward a more equal gender balance over the past two decades. Yet teams still usually have more men and fewer women than would be expected by putting together a team at random. That means there’s a fairly straightforward step that most research teams can take as they try to push their work to new levels of impact and innovation. 

“Collaborating with more diversity in your team can lead to higher impact,” Woodruff said. “I encourage everyone, in all disciplines, to see how diversity is a key to academic success and excellence.” 

Read on MSUToday

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Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 165 years. One of the world's leading research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For MSU news on the Web, go to MSUToday. Follow MSU News on Twitter at twitter.com/MSUnews.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2200841119 

How more female executives in the C-suite can spur improved customer orientation and financial performance

News from the Journal of Marketing

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Researchers from St. Edward’s University, University of Mississippi, and University of Texas at Austin published a new Journal of Marketing study that examines the relationship between female leadership and customer orientation and the resulting effect on firm financial performance.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Customer Orientation and Financial Performance: Women in Top Management Teams Matter!” and is authored by Chandra Srivastava, Saim Kashmiri, and Vijay Mahajan.

When Mary Barra was appointed the first female CEO of General Motors in 2014, the company had recently declared bankruptcy, was under fire for an ignition-switch product recall that had led to customer deaths, and had seen a slowdown in U.S. sales due to changing consumer preferences. Investors, employees, and analysts debated if (and how) Barra could change GM’s strategic approach. One of Barra’s early moves was to hire a set of female leaders and get her team to focus on “incorporating the voice of the customer in everything we do.” GM codified customer orientation into its vision statement and made customer-centric decisions such as creating a foundation to compensate customers who suffered ignition switch problems and initiating a massive U.S. shift from sedans to more popular sport utility vehicles.

Barra’s strategic vision, and the subsequent change in the strategic and financial trajectory of the company, raises an important question: How do female executives influence the strategic orientation of the firm? Barra admitted she benefitted from the support and expertise of women such as Alicia Boler-Davis (EVP) and Dhivya Suryadevara (CFO) and it is vital to explore the collective influence of these women on the firm’s decisions. This topic is especially relevant in the current social context where there is a greater push for gender equality and laws requiring firms to have women on the board of directors.

In this new study, the researchers examine 389 Fortune 500 firms over six years and find that female executives are likely to focus on customer relationships to a greater degree than their male counterparts and thus encourage more customer-oriented discussions in the C-suite. Consequently, the entire team is more likely to make strategic choices that reflect a growing focus on customers, which in turn accounts for more than half of the positive link between female influence in the C-suite and long-term financial performance.

However, the findings are not uniform across all firms. The relationship between female leadership and customer orientation is reduced by 17% in industries characterized by unpredictable customer preferences, fast-paced technological changes, and strong competitive forces and is reduced by 25% in firms with a high degree of ownership by the founding family. The effect of female leadership on customer orientation is increased by 137% in industries where the C-suite has a high degree of control over firm strategy, is increased by 80% for firms with high female representation on the board, and is increased by 89% for firms with marketing-experienced directors on the board.

As Srivastava explains, “In effect, companies that operate in relatively stable environments, are not family-owned, have female and marketing-experienced board members, and whose executives have more latitude to decide firm strategy are best suited to unlock the benefits of female leadership. The relatively unregulated nature of their industries offers strategic and tactical freedom. Thus, the inclusion of female executives may provide a ‘turnaround’ strategy for these firms, helping them instill and benefit from a greater customer orientation.”

Earlier studies posit that female executives engage in reduced risk-taking across a variety of business contexts, creating the impression that female executives are conservative and risk-averse in all areas. Kashmiri says that “Managers should reject this stereotype and consider that customer orientation may actually result in female executives pursuing riskier strategies in some situations in order to satisfy customers.”

“CEOs and boards should consider if their organizations could benefit from a greater gender balance in the C-suite to facilitate customer orientation, thus leading to greater shareholder value. Even if there are only a few female executives on the top management team, companies can strengthen the relationship between these female executives and customer orientation by adding female directors and marketing-experienced board members to support customer-centric strategies,” says Mahajan. If members of the top management team are predominantly male, they can make conscious efforts to counteract the tendency to under-value customers.

A note of caution: Hiring more female executives will not always lead to superior financial returns. An entirely female top management team suffers from the same issues of gender imbalance – more homogenous perspectives and groupthink– as an entirely male top management team. CEOs must find the gender balance in their top management teams that facilitates an appropriate strategic orientation for their firms.

Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429221120419

About the Journal of Marketing 

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Shrihari Sridhar (Joe Foster ’56 Chair in Business Leadership, Professor of Marketing at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.
https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA) 

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.
https://www.ama.org

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JOURNAL

Journal of Marketing

DOI

10.1177/00222429221120419 

ARTICLE TITLE

Customer Orientation and Financial Performance: Women in Top Management Teams Matter!

MSU researchers help reveal a ‘blueprint’ for photosynthesis

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University researchers and colleagues at the University of California Berkeley, the University of South Bohemia and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have helped reveal the most detailed picture to date of important biological “antennae.”  

Nature has evolved these structures to harness the sun’s energy through photosynthesis, but these sunlight receivers don’t belong to plants. They’re found in microbes known as cyanobacteria, the evolutionary descendants of the first organisms on Earth capable of taking sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and turning them into sugars and oxygen. 

Published Aug. 31 in the journal Nature, the findings immediately shed new light on microbial photosynthesis — specifically, how light energy is captured and sent to where it’s needed to power the conversion of carbon dioxide into sugars. Going forward, the insights could also help researchers remediate harmful bacteria in the environment, develop artificial photosynthetic systems for renewable energy and enlist microbes in sustainable manufacturing that starts with the raw materials of carbon dioxide and sunlight. 

“There’s a lot of interest in using cyanobacteria as solar-powered factories that capture sunlight and convert it into a kind of energy that can be used to make important products,” said Cheryl Kerfeld, Hannah Distinguished Professor of structural bioengineering in the College of Natural Science. “With a blueprint like the one we’ve provided in this study, you can start thinking about tuning and optimizing the light-harvesting component of photosynthesis.” 

“Once you see how something works, you have a better idea of how you can modify it and manipulate it. That’s a big advantage,” said Markus Sutter, a senior research associate in the Kerfeld Lab, which operates at MSU and Berkeley Lab in California.  

The cyanobacterial antenna structures, which are called phycobilisomes, are complex collections of pigments and proteins, which assemble into relatively massive complexes.  

For decades, researchers have been working to visualize the different building blocks of phycobilisomes to try to understand how they’re put together. Phycobilisomes are fragile, necessitating this piecemeal approach. Historically, researchers have been unable to get the high-resolution images of intact antennae needed to understand how they capture and conduct light energy.  

Now, thanks to an international team of experts and advances in a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy, the structure of a cyanobacterial light harvesting antenna is available with nearly atomic resolution. The team included researchers from MSU, Berkeley Lab, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. 

“We were fortunate to be a team made up of people with complementary expertise, people who worked well together,” said Kerfeld, who is also a member of the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. “The group had the right chemistry.” 

‘A long journey full of nice surprises’ 

“This work is a breakthrough in the field of photosynthesis,” said Paul Sauer, a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Eva Nogales' cryogenic electron microscopy lab at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.  

“The complete light-harvesting structure of a cyanobacteria’s antenna has been missing until now,” Sauer said. “Our discovery helps us understand how evolution came up with ways to turn carbon dioxide and light into oxygen and sugar in bacteria, long before any plants existed on our planet.” 

Along with Kerfeld, Sauer is a corresponding author of the new article. The team documented several notable results, including finding a new phycobilisome protein and observing two new ways that the phycobilisome orients its light-capturing rods that hadn’t been resolved before. 

“It’s 12 pages of discoveries,” said María Agustina Domínguez-Martín of the Nature report. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Kerfeld Lab, Domínguez-Martín initiated the study at MSU and brought it to completion at the Berkeley Lab. She is currently at the University of Cordoba in Spain as part of the Marie Skłowdoska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. “It’s been a long journey full of nice surprises.”  

One surprise, for example, came in how a relatively small protein can act as a surge protector for the massive antenna. Before this work, researchers knew the phycobilisome could corral molecules called orange carotenoid proteins, or OCPs, when the phycobilisome had absorbed too much sunlight. The OCPs release the excess energy as heat, protecting a cyanobacterium’s photosynthetic system from burning up. 

Until now, there’s been debate about how many OCPs the phycobilisome could bind and where those binding sites were. The new research answers these fundamental questions and offers potentially practical insights. 

This kind of surge-protecting system — which is called photoprotection and has analogs in the plant world — naturally tends to be wasteful. Cyanobacteria are slow to turn their photoprotection off after it has done its job. Now, with the complete picture of how the surge protector works, researchers can design ways to engineer “smart,” less wasteful photoprotection, Kerfeld said.  

And, despite helping make the planet habitable for humans and countless other organisms that need oxygen to survive, cyanobacteria have a dark side. Cyanobacteria blooms in lakes, ponds and reservoirs can produce toxins that are deadly to native ecosystems as well as humans and their pets. Having a blueprint of how the bacteria not only collect the sun’s energy, but also protect themselves from too much of it could inspire new ideas to attack harmful blooms. 

Beyond the new answers and potential applications this work offers, the researchers are also excited about the new questions it raises and the research it could inspire. 

“If you think of this like Legos, you can keep building up, right? The proteins and pigments are like blocks making the phycobilisome, but then that’s part of the photosystem, which is in the cell membrane, which is part of the entire cell,” Sutter said. “We’re climbing up the ladder of scale in a way. We’ve found something new on our rung, but we can’t say we’ve got the system settled.” 

“We’ve answered some questions, but we’ve opened the doors on others and, to me, that’s what makes it a breakthrough,” Domínguez-Martín said. “I’m excited to see how the field develops from here.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health, the Czech Science Foundation and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. 

Note for media: Please include the following link to the study in all alone media coverage. 

Read on MSUToday.

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Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 165 years. One of the world's leading research universities, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery to make a better, safer, healthier world for all while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.

For MSU news on the Web, go to MSUToday. Follow MSU News on Twitter at twitter.com/MSUnews.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05156-4 

Princeton chemists reveal first pathway for selenium insertion into natural products

The Seyedsayamdost Lab has discovered a biosynthetic pathway that incorporates selenium into microbial small molecules, marking the first time such atoms have been uncovered in natural products, and opening new avenues in selenobiology.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: THIS ILLUSTRATION SHOWS THE BIOSYNTHETIC PATHWAY INCORPORATING SE INTO MICROBIAL SMALL MOLECULES, WHICH POINTS TOWARD AN AN UNTAPPED "CHEMICAL SPACE" IN BACTERIA THAT CAN NOW BE MINED FOR NOVEL NATURAL PRODUCTS. ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF NATURE view more 

CREDIT: NATURE, JOURNAL

Researchers at Princeton Chemistry have discovered a biosynthetic pathway that incorporates selenium into microbial small molecules, marking the first time such atoms have been uncovered in natural products, and opening new avenues in selenobiology. 

The research also strongly suggests that selenium, an essential trace element across all kingdoms of life, may have a more important biological role in bacteria than scientists originally assumed.

Chase Kayrouz, fourth-year graduate student in the Mo Lab and lead author on the Nature paper published this week. Photo by C. Todd Reichart

The lab’s paper, “Biosynthesis of selenium-containing small molecules in diverse microorganisms,” was authored by Chase Kayrouz, a fourth-year graduate student in the lab; postdocs Jonathan Huang and Nicole Hauser; and Mohammad Seyedsayamdost, professor in the Department of Chemistry.

“This was kind of a closed field. Nobody had found a new pathway in selenium metabolism in 20 years,” said Kayrouz. “The biosynthesis of selenoproteins and selenonucleic acids were elucidated in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And since then, people kind of assumed that these are the only things microbes do with selenium. We simply wondered whether they might incorporate selenium into other small molecules? Turns out, they do.”

Said Seyedsayamdost: “Our work shows that nature has indeed evolved pathways to incorporate this element into small molecules, sugars, and secondary metabolites. Selenium has remarkable properties that are distinct from those of any other element found in biomolecules. Incorporation of selenium into selenoneine, for example, makes it a much better antioxidant than the sulfur version of the molecule. But while sulfur is ubiquitous in biomolecules, the occurrence of selenium is much rarer and was thought to be limited to biopolymers.

“Nature has evolved specific mechanisms for incorporating either sulfur or selenium into natural products, thereby taking advantage of the unique properties of both elements through pathways that are specific to each.”

LOOKING FOR SELENIUM

The lab started their investigation under the assumption that selenium atoms should exist in natural products because of their utilization ubiquity elsewhere. They asked, what would such a signature look like in microbial genomes?

“How do you actually see where a new drug or natural product or selenium metabolite is, how do you find it?” said Kayrouz. “We typically look for biosynthetic gene clusters – groups of genes on the chromosome that code for the biosynthesis of such molecules. So, if we have a pathway to make a selenium-containing compound, it has to be encoded by genes.”

They implemented a genome mining strategy in search of genes that are found next to selD, which encodes the first step in all known selenium processes inside the cell.

Fairly quickly, they found one gene that was co-localized with selD—called senB—that caught their attention, particularly because it has not before been implicated in selenium metabolism.

Further examination uncovered a third co-localized gene, called SenA. Kayrouz hypothesized that these three genes may be involved in a new selenium biosynthetic pathway. 

“First, we defined what a biosynthetic gene cluster that incorporates selenium would look like,” said Seyedsayamdost. “We then used bioinformatics to look for such genes and identified what we now call the 'sen cluster' in diverse microbial genomes.”

They were able to express each of these new genes in Escherichia coli, thus assembling the entire pathway in a test tube. This revealed production of two selenium-containing small molecules – a selenosugar and a molecule called selenoneine. It also revealed two enzymes that form carbon-selenium bonds, the first such enzymes to act on biological small molecules. 

“The microbes are putting selenium into these compounds for a reason, so there must be some interesting bioactivity associated with them,” said Kayrouz. “We don’t know what that is yet, but it is extremely exciting. As biological chemists, discoveries like this are what we wake up for every day.”

Read the Nature paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05174-2

“Biosynthesis of selenium-containing small molecules in diverse microorganisms,” was authored by Chase Kayrouz, Jonathan Huang, Nicole Hauser, and Mohammad Seyedsayamdost. This research is supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (No. 1847932 to M.R.S.), and the National Institutes of Health (GM129496) as well as the Edward C. Taylor 3rd Year Fellowship in Chemistry, the Life Sciences Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05174-2 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Biosynthesis of selenium-containing small molecules in diverse microorganisms

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Sep-2022

COI STATEMENT

N/A