It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, November 03, 2022
Sensitivity to musical rhythm supports social development in infants
New study reveals that the universal behavior of singing to infants synchronizes caregiver-infant social engagement
IMAGE: SILAS LACAGNIN GAZES AT HIS MOTHER, ANSLEY LACAGNIN, WHILE SHE SINGS TO HIM.view more
CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
Engaging infants with a song provides a readymade means for supporting social development and interaction, according to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine enrolled 112 infants who were either 2 months or 6 months old.
The study tracked infants’ moment-by-moment eye-looking to reveal that the rhythm of caregivers’ singing causes infant eye-looking to become synchronized or entrained to the caregivers’ social cues at sub-second timescales.
As early as 2 months of age, when infants are first engaging with others in an interactive manner, infants were two times more likely to look to the singers’ eyes time-locked to the musical beat than would be expected by chance.
By 6 months of age, when infants are highly experienced in face-to-face musical games and are developing increasingly sophisticated rhythmic and communicative behaviors like babbling, they were more than four times as likely to look to the singers’ eyes synchronized to the musical beats.
“Singing to infants seems like such a simple act, but it is full of rich and meaningful social information,” said study lead author Miriam Lense, PhD, assistant professor
of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC. “Here we show that when caregivers sing to their infants, they are intuitively structuring their behavior to support the caregiver-infant social bond and infant social learning.”
During testing, researchers used eye-tracking technology to measure every movement of each infant’s eyes while they watched videos of people engaging them with song.
“For this study, we used videos of singing rather than live singing to ensure that any change in infant looking behavior was due to the infant, and not the singer adjusting to the infant,” Lense said. “Infants could look anywhere while watching the videos but we found that their looking behavior was not random.”
“Critically, the predictable rhythm of singing is essential for this entrained social interaction. When we experimentally manipulate the singing so that it no longer has a predictable rhythm, entrainment is disrupted and infants no longer successfully synchronize their eye-looking to the caregivers’ social cues,” she added.
Researchers confirmed their findings in a different group of 6-month-old infants who watched both the original videos of singing, as well as videos that had been manipulated to be jittered so that their rhythms were no longer predictable.
While the infants again displayed entrained eye-looking to the original videos when the singing was rhythmically predictable, this time-locked eye-looking effect was no longer present when the predictable rhythm had been disrupted.
“This is important because it reveals a remarkable physical coupling between caregiver behavior and infant experience,” said Warren Jones, PhD, the study’s senior author and Nien Distinguished Chair in Autism at Emory University School of Medicine. “Without conscious awareness, something as simple and intuitive as caregiver singing sets in motion a whole cascade of behaviors that alters infants’ experiences.”
“Although what a caregiver expresses is important, when and how they express social cues is particularly critical for infant-caregiver communication,” Lense added. “Rhythmic predictability – a universal feature of song – is an integral mechanism for structuring social interactions and supporting infant social development.”
Reyna Gordon, PhD, associate professor of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC, said the study underscores that making music is not only about entertainment: making music is a core aspect of early socio-emotional development.
“It is remarkable that these infants are basically tracking the beat of music with their eyes by modulating their eye contact with the singer’s eyes around the beat (or pulse) of singing,” said Gordon, who was not involved in the study.
“These findings represent a major step forward in our understanding of the extent that very young children are sensitive to musical rhythm, suggesting that innateness for music is intertwined with early social engagement,” she added.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Mental Health, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institute for Deafness and Communication Disorders) and the GRAMMY Foundation.
Lense said her team has now extended the research to study synchronization in autism as part of the Sound Health Initiative, a partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts.
JOURNAL
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
ARTICLE TITLE
Music of Infant-Directed Singing Entrains Infants' Social Visual Behavior
Access to media amplifies negative effects of terrorism on school enrolment in Kenya
Media coverage of terrorist attacks significantly raises fear amongst families and leads to children being kept out of schools in Kenya, new research reveals.
Media coverage of terrorist attacks significantly raises fear amongst families and leads to children being kept out of schools in Kenya, new research reveals.
Kenyan families with access to radio, mobile phones or TV are found to be significantly more afraid of terrorism and are less likely to send their children to school.
The new study by Lancaster University Management School and Bocconi University in Italy, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, finds that Kenyan parents with access to mass media believe that the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is 12 times larger than actual rates. As a result, these parents are more likely to keep their children out of school.
Comparing school enrolment rates over time, the study finds that the negative effect of terrorist attacks on school enrolment is twice as large for children with access to mass media, than for children without.
“Terrorism differs from other types of violence such as war or gun crime, in that it results in relatively low casualty numbers and causes minimal damage to infrastructure,” co-author Dr Marco Alfano from Lancaster University Management School explains. “Nevertheless, terrorism can severely affect economies by heightening fears.
“Our data shows that while al-Shabaab rarely targets educational institutions, their attacks decrease school enrolments substantially in Kenya. Crucially, results show that this negative effect doubles in size if parents have access to mass media, such as the radio, for instance. This suggests that media coverage plays a crucial role in stoking fears and keeping children out of school.”
Researchers say that families without media access react predominantly to attacks close to their homes, whereas families with access to media keep their children out of school in response to terrorist attacks happening more than 100km away.
“This loss of education is significant,” co-author Dr Joseph-Simon Görlach from Bocconi University adds. “The decline in school enrolment leads to decreased earnings later on in life when compared to peers in areas with no terrorist attacks. We find media coverage of terrorist events reduces children’s earnings in later life by around 25% of a year’s income.”
The study saw researchers use geo-coded data on wireless signal strength for radio and television and the staggered rollout of mobile phone coverage to study the effect of exposure to mass media from both a geographical and chronological point of view.
They analysed the geographical concentration of terrorist attacks using precise information from the Global Terrorism Database and, by studying the chronology of attacks over a long period of time, the authors were able to identify variation and trends in the data. They then used three independent data sources on school attendance and enrolment in Kenya (the Hunger Safety Net Program and the 2009 and 2014 rounds of country-wide Demographic Health Survey, and county level administrative data) along with Afrobarometer for data capturing public attitudes as part of the study. In assessing trends from these multiple sources, then overlaying the geographical coordinates of respondents’ homes in relation to radio signal coverage and mobile network data, the authors were able to show that each terrorist attack decreases school enrolment by around 0.4-0.5 percentage points for households without media access. For households with wireless signal coverage for radio, telephone or television, the effect is a statistically significant 0.5-0.7 percentage points stronger.
“This study should be useful for Kenyan Government and other similar nations that are pouring incredible resource and finances into incentives to boost school attendance and the quality of education for young people,” Dr Alfano continues. “Our results show that access to media has significantly increased fear of terrorism in the country and this has a significant ripple-effect which is impacting younger generations who are being kept out of school and suffer financially later in life.
“Our results could serve as a caution against sensationalism and in favour of moderate and fact-oriented reporting of terrorist events. Providing children with fast, reliable and secure transport to school may also mitigate some of these negative effects. These changes would likely make a considerable difference to children’s education and Kenya’s long-term growth and development.”
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A chemical analysis of sediment cores from the North Pacific Ocean show a consistent pairing of volcanic ash and hypoxia, a low ocean oxygen interval spanning thousands of years, during times of rapid climate warming at the end of the last ice age, new research shows.
Understanding the relationship between volcanic activity, hypoxia and ice melt due to warming temperatures during the last ice age, which ended about 18,000 years ago, raises important questions about what might occur as the planet warms today.
“It is unknown right now whether volcanic eruptions will increase as the climate warms,” said the study’s lead author, Jianghui Du of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
“But we know that the remaining glaciers on volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean ring of fire are melting fast, and it will be important to include this ice loss in predictions of future eruptions, which would be risky for populated regions and could also make emerging hypoxic dead zones in the North Pacific worse.”
The study was published today in the journal Nature. The findings point to a systematic relationship between climate, glacier retreat, volcanic activity, biological productivity and deoxygenation of the ocean, said Alan Mix, an oceanographer and paleoclimatologist at Oregon State and a co-author of the paper.
“These surprising linkages between parts of the Earth we usually think of as separate highlight how interconnected the whole system really is,” he said. “Solving environmental problems, such as those we face in the ongoing climate crisis, demands that we look with open minds at the whole linked system and not just at isolated parts.”
The volcanic region in the Pacific Ocean is known as the ring of fire in part because it is one of the most active tectonic and volcanic regions of the world.
The timing of volcanic events in relation to the retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which once covered large portions of western North America, suggests that the rapid melting of ice covering volcanoes in the region induced increased volcanic activity, Mix said.
“Ice cover to volcanoes is like a cork in a champagne bottle. Remove the icy cork and boom, the eruptions begin,” he said.
Past research had shown a few ash layers in sediment in the region, but Du’s chemical study, using deep-sea sediment cores from the Gulf of Alaska, revealed more traces of ash that were not visible to the eye.
Du catalogued and compared volcanic eruptions from areas that were covered in ice against those areas that were not ice-covered during the last ice age.
“We found a distinct pattern of many eruptions during warming and ice retreat in the areas where glaciers were present, and much less change in the frequency of eruptions outside the ice-covered zone, particularly in western North America,” Du said. “That provides strong evidence for the volcanic response to warming and ice retreat.”
The chemical fingerprints also showed a consistent pairing of volcanic ash and hypoxic events. The increase in volcanic ash likely fueled ocean productivity that ultimately created low-oxygen conditions.
Co-authors from Texas A&M University, Christina Belanger and Sharon, who uses only one name, examined a species of seafloor organisms called foraminifera and found that they closely tracked the volcanic ash input from the Gulf of Alaska. These organisms thrive under highly productive waters and can tolerate low oxygen conditions.
“Volcanic ash includes important trace nutrients for plankton, especially iron,” said co-author Brian Haley, a research professor at Oregon State.
“When the ash hits the ocean, the plant plankton gobble up that iron and bloom. This fertilization effect underscores a practical application of our work. Some have proposed fertilizing the North Pacific with iron to capture excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” he said. “We show that the real world has effectively run that experiment in the past with volcanic iron, and the fertilization effect works and exports carbon to the deep sea. That’s good news. But there are some dangerous consequences because when that excess organic matter decomposes as it falls to the ocean depths, it consumes oxygen and creates dead zones.”
IMAGE: IMAGE SHOWS ST ANDREWS SETI POST-DETECTION HUB TEAM, FROM LEFT: DEREK BALL, EMILY FINER, MARTIN DOMINIK, JOHN ELLIOTT, EMMA JOHANNA PURANEN, AND ADAM BOWERview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
What does humanity do when we discover we are not alone in the cosmos? A new international research hub at the University of St Andrews will coordinate global expertise to prepare humanity for such an event and how we should respond.
While we might never learn about the existence of life beyond Earth, or even about another intelligent civilisation, there’s a chance it could be detected sooner rather than later. But are we prepared?
The new SETI Post-Detection Hub, hosted by the Centre for Exoplanet Science and the Centre for Global Law and Governance of the University of St Andrews, will act as a coordinating centre for an international effort bringing together diverse expertise across both the sciences and the humanities for setting out impact assessments, protocols, procedures, and treaties designed to enable a responsible response.
Dr John Elliott, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews and coordinator of the Hub, said: “Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere.
“But we need to go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity. We need to coordinate our expert knowledge not only for assessing the evidence but also for considering the human social response, as our understanding progresses and what we know and what we don’t know is communicated. And the time to do this is now.
“Scanning signals of assumed extra-terrestrial origin for structures of language and attaching meaning is an elaborate and time-consuming process during which our knowledge will be advanced in many steps as we learn ‘Extra-Terrestrial’.”
The SETI Post-Detection Hub will close a substantial policy gap and will also consider responsible science communication in the social media era.
Limited attention has been given to the topic, a rare exception being the Royal Society holding a Scientific Discussion Meeting on ‘The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society’ in 2010, after which the then-Director of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Mazlan Othman, had to debunk the emerging news story of her having been appointed as ‘alien ambassador’.
There are now procedures and entities established with the United Nations for dealing with the threat posed by impacts of asteroids on Earth, but there is nothing similar in place for picking up a radio signal from E.T.
Currently, the only existing agreed ‘contact’ protocols are those drawn up by the SETI community itself in 1989, which were last revised in 2010. Focusing entirely on general scientific conduct, they constitute non-enforceable aspirations and fall short of being useful for managing in practice the full process of searching, handling candidate evidence, confirmation of detections, post-detection analysis and interpretation, and potential response.
The SETI Post-Detection Hub for the first time provides a permanent ‘home’ for coordinating the development of a fully comprehensive framework, drawing together interested members of the SETI and wider academic communities as well as policy experts to work on topics ranging from message decipherment and data analytics to the development of regulatory protocols, space law, and societal impact strategies.
Dr Elliott said: “Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know. We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill prepared – scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless – for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”
Vaccine uptake remains low among at-risk Canadians
As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever, say researchers
As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever to prevent disease and death from pneumonia and other forms of pneumococcal disease. But vaccine uptake remains low among adults at high risk, say researchers from McGill University.
Q&A with Giorgia Sulis, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health
What is pneumococcal disease?
Pneumococcus is the leading bacterial cause of pneumonia and can cause other serious infections, including sepsis and meningitis. Pneumonia is among the top 10 causes of death among adults in Canada. Most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine preventable.
What question did you set out to answer?
Understanding vaccine uptake and the factors associated with non-vaccination has important implications for reducing the risk of pneumococcal disease and can save lives. To find answers, our study analyzed self-reported data of pneumococcal vaccine uptake from 33,061 Canadian community-dwelling adults enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Specifically, we examined two key groups at high risk: older adults (i.e. those aged 65 or older) and adults aged 47-64 who had underlying chronic medical conditions.
What did you find?
While most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine-preventable, pneumococcal vaccine uptake remains low among those at high risk, particularly among adults aged 65 and older and adults with an underlying chronic health condition. We found that about half of those aged 65 and older, and over 80% of those aged 47 to 64 who had an underlying chronic condition reported never receiving a pneumococcal vaccine in their lifetime. While the proportion of non-vaccinated adults was lower among those who got the flu shot or had contact with a family doctor in the previous year, many people missed opportunities for vaccination. This contrasts sharply with the 80% vaccination coverage target set by the Canadian National Immunization Strategy, to be achieved by 2025.
What is the significance of these findings?
Our study is the largest analysis of pneumococcal vaccine uptake and factors associated with non-vaccination among high-risk adults in Canada. It also sheds new light on the problem of missed opportunities for vaccination. We hope that our study can contribute to raise awareness about this problem and promote effective strategies aimed at increasing pneumococcal vaccine uptake to reduce hospitalizations and mortality.
Pneumococcal vaccination uptake and missed opportunities for vaccination among Canadian adults: A cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA)
Bacterial sensors send a jolt of electricity when triggered
Rice labs’ Nature paper introduces groundbreaking bioelectronic devices
IMAGE: PUCKLIKE BIOELECTRONICS DESIGNED AT RICE UNIVERSITY CONTAIN PROGRAMMABLE BACTERIA AND ARE ATTACHED TO AN ELECTRODE THAT DELIVERS A SIGNAL WHEN THEY DETECT A TARGET CONTAMINANT, ENABLING REAL-TIME SENSING.view more
CREDIT: BRANDON MARTIN/RICE UNIVERSITY
HOUSTON – (Nov. 2, 2022) – When you hit your finger with a hammer, you feel the pain immediately. And you react immediately.
But what if the pain comes 20 minutes after the hit? By then, the injury might be harder to heal.
Scientists and engineers at Rice University say the same is true for the environment. If a chemical spill in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to remediate.
Their living bioelectronic sensors can help. A team led by Rice synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin andJonathan (Joff) Silberg and lead authors Josh Atkinson and Lin Su, both Rice alumni, have engineered bacteria to quickly sense and report on the presence of a variety of contaminants.
Their study in Nature shows the cells can be programmed to identify chemical invaders and report within minutes by releasing a detectable electrical current.
Such “smart” devices could power themselves by scavenging energy in the environment as they monitor conditions in settings like rivers, farms, industry and wastewater treatment plants and to ensure water security, according to the researchers.
The environmental information communicated by these self-replicating bacteria can be customized by replacing a single protein in the eight-component, synthetic electron transport chain that gives rise to the sensor signal.
“I think it’s the most complex protein pathway for real-time signaling that has been built to date,” said Silberg, director of Rice’s Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. Program. “To put it simply, imagine a wire that directs electrons to flow from a cellular chemical to an electrode, but we’ve broken the wire in the middle. When the target molecule hits, it reconnects and electrifies the full pathway.”
“It’s literally a miniature electrical switch,” Ajo-Franklin said.
“You put the probes into the water and measure the current,” she said. “It’s that simple. Our devices are different because the microbes are encapsulated. We’re not releasing them into the environment.”
The researchers’ proof-of-concept bacteria was Escherichia coli, and their first target was thiosulfate, a dichlorination agent used in water treatment that can cause algae blooms. And there were convenient sources of water to test: Galveston Beach and Houston’s Brays and Buffalo bayous.
They collected water from each. At first, they attached their E. coli to electrodes, but the microbes refused to stay put. “They don’t naturally stick to an electrode,” Ajo-Franklin said. “We’re using strains that don’t form biofilms, so when we added water, they’d fall off.”
When that happened, the electrodes delivered more noise than signal.
Enlisting co-author Xu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Ajo-Franklin’s lab, they encapsulated sensors into agarosein the shape of a lollipop that allowed contaminants in but held the sensors in place, reducing the noise.
“Xu’s background is in environmental engineering,” Ajo-Franklin said. “She didn’t come in and say, ‘Oh, we have to fix the biology.’ She said, ‘What can we do with the materials?’ It took great, innovative work on the materials side to make the synthetic biology shine.”
With the physical constraints in place, the labs first encoded E. coli to express a synthetic pathway that only generates current when it encounters thiosulfate. This living sensor was able to sense this chemical at levels less than 0.25 millimoles per liter, far lower than levels toxic to fish.
In another experiment, E. coli was recoded to sense an endocrine disruptor. This also worked well, and the signals were greatly enhanced when conductive nanoparticles custom-synthesized by Su were encapsulated with the cells in the agarose lollipop. The researchers reported these encapsulated sensors detect this contaminant up to 10 times faster than the previous state-of-the-art devices.
The study began by chance when Atkinson and Moshe Baruch of Ajo-Franklin’s group at Berkeley Lawrence National Laboratory set up next to each other at a 2015 synthetic biology conference in Chicago, with posters they quickly realized outlined different aspects of the same idea.
“We had neighboring posters because of our last names,” said Atkinson. “We spent most of the poster session chatting about each other’s projects and how there were clear synergies in our interests in interfacing cells with electrodes and electrons as an information carrier.”
“Josh’s poster had our first module: how to take chemical information and turn it into biochemical information,” Ajo-Franklin recalled. “Moshe had the third module: How to take biochemical information and turn it into an electrical signal.
“The catch was how to link these together,” she said. “The biochemical signals were a little different.”
“We said, ‘We need to get together and talk about this!’” Silberg recalled. Within six months, the new collaborators won seed funding from the Office of Naval Research, followed by a grant, to develop the idea.
“Joff’s group brought in the protein engineering and half of the electron transfer pathway,” Ajo-Franklin said. “My group brought the other half of the electron transport pathway and some of the materials efforts.” The collaboration ultimately brought Ajo-Franklin herself to Rice in 2019 as a CPRIT Scholar.
“We have to give so much credit to Lin and Josh,” she said. “They never gave up on this project, and it was incredibly synergistic. They would bounce ideas back and forth and through that interchange solved a lot of problems.”
“Each of which another student could spend years on,” Silberg added.
“Both Josh and I spent several years of our Ph.D.s working on this, with the pressure of graduating and moving on to the next stage of our careers,” said Su, a visiting graduate student in Ajo-Franklin’s lab after graduating from Southeast University in China. “I had to extend my visa multiple times to stay and finish the research.”
Silberg said the design’s complexity goes far beyond the signaling pathway. “The chain has eight components that control electron flow, but there are other components that build the wires that go into the molecules,” he said. “There are a dozen-and-a-half components with almost 30 metal or organic cofactors. This thing’s massive compared to something like our mitochondrial respiratory chains.”
All credited the invaluable assistance of co-author George Bennett, Rice’s E. Dell Butcher Professor Emeritus and a research professor in biosciences, in making the necessary connections.
Silberg said he sees engineered microbes performing many tasks in the future, from monitoring the gut microbiome to sensing contaminants like viruses, improving upon the successful strategy of testing wastewater plants for SARS-CoV-19 during the pandemic.
“Real-time monitoring becomes pretty important with those transient pulses,” he said. “And because we grow these sensors, they’re potentially pretty cheap to make.”
To that end, the team is collaborating with Rafael Verduzco, a Rice professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering who leads a recent $2 million National Science Foundation grant with Ajo-Franklin, Silberg, bioscientist Kirstin Matthews and civil and environmental engineer Lauren Stadler to develop real-time wastewater monitoring.
“The type of materials we can make with Raphael takes this to a whole new level,” Ajo-Franklin said.
Silberg said the Rice labs are working on design rules to develop a library of modular sensors. “I hope that when people read this, they recognize the opportunities,” he said.
Silberg is the Stewart Memorial Professor of BioSciences and a professor of bioengineering at Rice. Ajo-Franklin is a professor of biosciences. Atkinson is a visiting National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has an affiliation with the University of Southern California. Su is a postdoctoral research associate and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
The research was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0014462), the Office of Naval Research (0001418IP00037, N00014-17-1-2639, N00014-20-1-2274), the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RR190063), the National Science Foundation (1843556), the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (DE SC0014664), the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship and the China Scholarship Council Fellowship (CSC-201606090098).
-30-
Pucklike devices designed by Rice University scientists and engineers contain multitudes of programmable bacteria that can detect contaminants and report their presence in real time. The bacteria release an electrical signal when triggered.
Rice University synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Joff Silberg and their labs have developed programmable bacteria that sense contaminants and release an electronic signal in real time.
Rice University postdoctoral researcher Xu Zhang prepares a water sample for testing with programmable bacteria that test for contaminants and release an electronic signal for detection in real time.
Pucklike bioelectronics designed at Rice University contain programmable bacteria and are attached to an electrode that delivers a signal when they detect a target contaminant, enabling real-time sensing. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Pucklike devices designed by Rice University scientists and engineers contain multitudes of programmable bacteria that can detect contaminants and report their presence in real time. The bacteria release an electrical signal when triggered. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Xu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University, pulls a water sample from Houston’s Buffalo Bayou for testing with engineered living microbes designed to detect contaminants. When the microbes find evidence of a target contaminant, they release an electrical signal that can be read almost immediately. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Rice University synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Joff Silberg and their labs have developed programmable bacteria that sense contaminants and release an electronic signal in real time. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Rice University postdoctoral researcher Xu Zhang prepares a water sample for testing with programmable bacteria that test for contaminants and release an electronic signal for detection in real time. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Real-time environmental monitoring of contaminants using living electronic sensors
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
2-Nov-2022
COI STATEMENT
J.J.S., J.T.A., and G.N.B. have submitted a patent application (No 16/186,226) covering the use of fragmented proteins as chemical-dependent electron carriers, entitled “Regulating electron flow using fragmented proteins.”
.jpg)
