Domesticating plants impacts their microbiome, study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

New research led by the University of Oxford indicates that human domestication of crops can alter the communities of microorganisms that are associated with plants. Intriguingly, independent domestication events were found to have similar impacts on the plant microbiome. The results have been published today in Current Biology.

Lead researcher Dr Riccardo Soldan (Department of Biology, University of Oxford) said: 'Our study provides evidence that regardless of where and how domestication took place, domesticated plants have microbial communities that distinguish them from their wild counterparts. This knowledge is important because if we know that a certain domesticated crop species consistently associates with specific microbes, one day we might be able to engineer these communities to deliver positive effects to the host plant.'

As microorganisms can have numerous beneficial effects on host plants such as enhancing growth, stress tolerance, and drought or disease resistance, these findings could ultimately help inform microbe-based approaches to improve crop yields and food security. For instance, previous work by the research team suggests that domestication may have reduced the ability of crop plants to recruit microorganisms that enhance disease resistance.

In the new study, the researchers analysed the microbial communities associated with two crop species that are known to have been domesticated independently multiple times in Mesoamerica and South America: Phaseolus vulgaris (common bean) and Phaseolus lunatus (lima bean). This meant they had a series of replicates for an event that lasted thousands of years.

As the researchers wanted to understand whether any changes in the microbiome were linked to plant traits that were subject to selection by humans during domestication, they focused on microbes associated with seeds. In seed crops, such as beans, seeds have undergone significant changes during domestication. For example, domesticated bean seeds are significantly larger compared with their wild relatives and have different mineral contents (linked to improved seed quality and cooking properties).

Using statistical and machine learning approaches, the researchers found significant differences in the composition of the microbial communities associated with beans from the wild and domesticated plants.

Furthermore, these changes in microbiome abundance and composition correlated with changes in seed mineral content across multiple domestication events. In particular, reduced calcium concentrations in domesticated P. vulgaris seeds, which may have been selected for as a consequence of selection for improved cooking properties, showed a notable correlation with changes in microbiome composition.

The principal investigator, Professor Gail Preston (Department of Biology, University of Oxford) commented: 'Our results provide evidence that the similarities in the microbial communities of independently domesticated plants can be partially explained by the fact that domesticated plants have closely matched plant traits. In this case, independent domestication processes selecting for bigger and better seeds in two different regions of the Americas shaped the seed microbiome in similar ways. Understanding the factors that shape microbial communities in wild and domesticated plants could open up exciting opportunities to modify the composition of domesticated crop microbiomes to increase resilience and improve productivity.'

In future work, the research team intend to investigate the effect of domestication on other plant traits and for a wider range of crop species. A key question is whether there are beneficial traits present in wild species which act to recruit a diverse and health-promoting microbiome that could be reintroduced into domesticated crops.

Notes to editors

Interviews with Professor Gail Preston are available on request. Media contact: Professor Gail Preston gail.preston@biology.ox.ac.uk  

The paper ‘Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota’ will be published in Current Biology on 16:00 GMT / 11:00 ET Tuesday 16 January. It will be available online when the embargo lifts at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.12.056 To view a copy of the manuscript before this under embargo, contact Dr Caroline Wood caroline.wood@admin.ox.ac.uk

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the eighth year running, and ​number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

The Department of Biology is a University of Oxford department within the Maths, Physical, and Life Sciences Division. It utilises academic strength in a broad range of bioscience disciplines to tackle global challenges such as food security, biodiversity loss, climate change and global pandemics. It also helps to train and equip the biologists of the future through holistic undergraduate and graduate courses. For more information visit www.biology.ox.ac.uk.

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JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2023.12.056 

ARTICLE TITLE

Consistent effects of independent domestication events on the plant microbiota

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jan-2024

U$A

Cost of employer-sponsored health insurance is flattening worker wages, contributing to income inequality

A new study from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University shows that insurance premiums are holding back wage growth, especially for people of color

 NEWS RELEASE 16-JAN-2024

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

The rising cost of health insurance is an ongoing concern in the United States. New research shows that increasing health insurance costs are eating up a growing proportion of worker’s compensation, and have been a major factor in both flattening wages and increasing income inequality over the past 30 years. 

In a study from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, researchers found that the cost of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) health care benefits increased much faster than workers’ wages since the late 1980s, and likely reduced wages by an average of about $9,000 per year by 2019. They also found that the percentage of worker compensation going toward premiums was substantially higher for Black and Hispanic workers and lower-income workers, and likely contributed to income inequality.

“Employers are spending more on insurance premiums instead of that money going to workers as wages,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School, and senior author of the study, which was published on January 16 in JAMA Network Open. “These hidden costs of increasing health care are even worse for people of color and low-wage workers, leading to less wage growth, heavier insurance premium burden, and greater income inequality.” 

In the study, researchers examined national insurance data from individuals covered by ESI family plans in every year between 1988 (44.7 million individuals) and 2019 (44.8 million individuals), bringing together data from the Kaiser Employer Health Benefits Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey. They combined these with data on earnings of families with ESI from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

In 1988, health care premiums represented an average of 7.9% of total worker compensation (which is wages plus health care premiums). By 2019, that number jumped to 17.7%. If ESI costs had remained the same proportion as in 1988, the average family with ESI could have earned $8,774 more in annual wages by 2019.

Researchers also found that Black and Hispanic families lost a higher percentage of their wages than white families. By 2019, health care premiums as percentage of compensation were 18.5% for Asian families, 19.2% for Black families, and 19.8% for Hispanic families, compared to 13.8% for white families.

Lower-wage workers are also hit hard by this disparity. In 2019, health care premiums as percentage of compensation represented 28.5% of compensation for families in the 20th

percentile of earnings, compared with only 3.9% for families in the 95th percentile.

“The loss of $125,000 in wages due to rising premium costs over three decades has a real impact on U.S. families, especially those who face economic hardship,” says the study’s first author Kurt Hager, who completed the work as a doctoral student at the Friedman School and is now an instructor of population and quantitative health at UMass Chan Medical School. “This is even worse for lower-paid workers and can lead to a spiral of financial insecurity as insurance costs go up, and wages continue to be suppressed.”

These findings are one more factor highlighting the critical importance of changing U.S. health care policy to focus on prevention and lower cost care, says Mozaffarian. “Health insurance should help people, not hold them back, or push them further behind when it comes to wages and income equality.”

Research reported in this article was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute under grant 2R01HL115189-06A1, and the Colton Family Foundation. Complete information on authors, funders, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper.

This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.51644 

ARTICLE TITLE

Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Premium Cost Growth and Its Association With Earnings Inequality Among US Families

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

16-Jan-2024

COI STATEMENT

Dr Emanuel reported receiving personal fees from Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, Princeton University, Philadelphia Committee on Foreign Relations, Yale University, Hartford Medical Society, Association of Academic Health Centers, Hawaii Medical Service Association & Queens Health System, Advocate Aurora Health Summit, DPharm Conference, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Shadyside, University of California San Francisco, Advocate Aurora Health, Cain Brothers Conference, Bowdoin College, Ontario Hospital Association, University of Oklahoma, Sanford Health, Health Plan Alliance, and Emory Health Care Leaders Retreat; nonfinancial support from Macalester College, Oak CEO Summit, Galien Jerusalem Ethics Forum, HLTH 2022, HMSA, Tel Aviv University, The Suntory Foundation, The Quadrangle, Lazard Healthcare Leadership Summit, HLTH 2023, and HC9 Ventures; serving on the external advisory board for Village MD; serving as a board member for Oncology Analytics; serving on the board of advisors for Cellares; serving as an occasional advisor for Notable Health; serving as an advisory board member for JSL Health Fund; serving as a health advisor for Clarify; serving as an advisory board member for the Peterson Center on Healthcare; serving as an advisory board member for FeelBetter; serving as a consultant for Healthcare Foundry, Korro/Coach-AI, and Aberdeen Inc; being a co–principal investigator receiving an industrial grant from Mendel Health Inc for Human-Machine Collaborations to Extract Cancer-Specific Data For Adjudicating Trial Eligibility; being a principal investigator for Schmidt Futures ML Guided Risk Scoring (funding source, Schidt Futures Schwab Charitable Fund); being a principal investigator receiving an industrial grant from Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc purchased services agreement for subject matter expertise for Janssen informed consent form optimization; being a principal investigator for Bergen Centre For Ethics And Priority Setting in Health; and being a co–principal investigator for Designing And Implementing Value- Based Fee-For-Service (funding source, Laura And John Arnold Foundation). Dr Mozaffarian reported receiving grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Kaiser Permanente Fund at East Bay Community Foundation; serving on the Scientific Advisory Board for Beren Therapeutics, Brightseed, Calibrate, Elysium Health, Filtricine, HumanCo, Instacart, January Inc, Perfect Day, Season Health, and Validation Institute during the conduct of the study; and receiving grants from the Gates Foundation and Vail Innovative Global Research; receiving personal fees from Barilla; and serving on the Scientific Advisory Board for Perfect Day and Tiny Organics Scientific Advisory Board outside the submitted work; holding a patent for UpToDate with royalties paid for online chapters on fish oil and dietary fats; and stock ownership in Calibrate and HumanCo. No other disclosures were reported.

Employer-sponsored health insurance premium cost growth and its association with earnings inequality among families

JAMA Network Open

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JAMA NETWORK

About The Study: The findings of this study of U.S. families receiving employer-sponsored health insurance suggest that three decades of increasing health care premiums were likely associated with reduced annual earnings and increased earnings inequality by race and ethnicity and wage level and were meaningfully associated with wage stagnation. 

Authors: Kurt Hager, Ph.D., M.S., of the UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, is the corresponding author. 

 To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.51644)

Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.51644?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=011624

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open

 

Identity concealment in sexual minority men may have impeded mpox care

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ITHACA, N.Y. – Openly gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men were more likely than those who conceal their sexual orientation to seek care for mpox during a global outbreak of the disease last year that disproportionately affected their community, researchers from Cornell University and the University of Toronto found.

It wasn’t necessarily concern over being “outed” that kept some sexual minority men from seeking care for the disease, formerly known as monkeypox. According to the researchers, it was an information gap, partially attributable to separation from community due to identity concealment.

“The resource knowledge and community-connected piece seems to be implicated in that process, not outing concerns, and that was a surprise to me,” said Joel Le Forestier, a postdoctoral researcher in communication at Cornell.

Le Forestier is first author of “Identity Concealment May Discourage Health-Seeking Behaviors: Evidence from Sexual Minority Men During the 2022 Global Mpox Outbreak,” which published Jan. 12 in Psychological Science in Psychological Science.

For their study, Le Forestier and the team recruited hundreds of sexual minority men from Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. at two points in the mpox outbreak: during its peak, in August of 2022 and as the outbreak waned, approximately two months later. Participants filled out an online questionnaire testing the researchers’ hypothesis that sexual orientation concealment would be associated with reduced mpox-related health behavior.

“People who conceal their sexual orientations reported what we thought they would: concerns that if they sought out mpox resources, that would ‘out’ them and that would be bad,” he said. “But we also predicted that having those concerns would be related to a lower likelihood of them accessing those resources – they’d be concerned about that and they wouldn’t go to the clinic – but that’s not what we found.”

Some participants’ responses indicated that the dangers of mpox trumped concerns over identity revelations. “What that suggests,” Le Forestier said, “is that people who are in the closet and afraid of being outed are nonetheless saying, ‘This is important enough to me that I’m going to do it anyway.’”

Le Forestier said a friend’s perspective on the awareness factor sparked the research. During his doctoral work, Le Forestier was living in Toronto next to a facility that had begun offering mpox vaccinations. Le Forestier noticed that the mpox line overwhelmingly featured men who presented as sexual minority. “I’m thinking, if you’re in this long line of identifiably sexual minority men, and your friend walks by, you’ve just been outed to your friend.”

But then in talking to his friend, Le Forestier’s perspective shifted. “He said, ‘It might not just be that they would be too afraid to get in that line because they worry about being outed; it might be that they don’t know that line even exists,’” Le Forestier said. “The only places that my friend had seen ads for mpox vaccine clinics were in gay bars, and in the local gay village community center. So if you’re not engaging in the community in these sort of public ways, then these resources just aren’t getting to you.”

So how does the public health community make sure people from marginalized groups get the kind of health-related information they need? It’s the “million-dollar question,” Le Forestier said.

“I think the lesson here is that there are things to be gained by enmeshing yourself in your community, if you can,” he said. “Affiliating with that community and becoming a part of that community can confer some real benefits to you. Knowing about public health resources is not the only thing but it’s definitely one of them.”

This work was supported in part by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. 

For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews. 

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JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/0956797623121741 

How did free wi-fi help unlock Hanoi wet markets’ mysteries?

Peer-Reviewed Publication

THE ALLIANCE OF BIOVERSITY INTERNATIONAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE

 

IMAGE: 

RESEARCHERS ANALYZED AND INTERPRETED MOBILE DEVICE TRACKING DATA FROM 25 WI-FI ACCESS POINTS TO CHARACTERIZE THE CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR IN THE USERS OF HUNDREDS OF STORES AND FOOD STALLS ACROSS WET MARKETS IN HANOI.

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CREDIT: LOUIS REYMONDIN / ALLIANCE OF BIOVERSITY AND CIAT

Researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and their collaborators have been working on how to harness the power of the estimated 549 million Wifi hotspots worldwide, resulting in a project that used anonymized data gathered from free Wi-Fi to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on Hanoi’s wet markets during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the paper “Using free Wi-Fi to assess impact of COVID-19 pandemic on traditional wet markets in Hanoi” published in December 2023 in the scientific journal Food Security, the researchers analyzed and interpreted mobile device tracking data from 25 Wi-Fi access points to characterize the changes in behavior in the users of hundreds of stores and food stalls across five wet markets in Hanoi, from July 2019 to November 2020.

Lead author Louis Reymondin, who co-leads the Data Driven Sustainability research theme for the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT says that by counting the number of individual device addresses within a certain range of the access points, the researchers got a sense of the number of people present (with the details of users anonymised).

“We recorded every phone within the vicinity of the access points every 2 minutes, and recorded 173,668,702 data points, filtered down to 13,238,809 useful data points, corresponding to 656,789 unique devices observed, ” Reymondin says.

The Research

Reymondin explains that usually, if Wi-Fi is enabled on your smartphone, it is in “active-scanning” mode to detect available Wi-Fi hotspots, which in turn shares an address unique to every device with the hotspot

“This allows us to register all the devices present in the market, whether or not they are connected to the Wi-Fi network, and their movement in space and time, ”Reymondin says, “The project’s novel feature was to install free Internet access through Wi-Fi in the markets to monitor changes in behaviors from markets' actors.”

Reymondin’s group won a 2018 CIAT Inspire Challenge pilot project and 2019 scale-up runner up project, with the team receiving a total of 225,000 USD to put their ideas into practice and to complement more traditional survey approaches.

"We've been working with the Vietnamese government’s General Statistics Office (GSO) for years”, says Tuyen Huynh, scientist in Food Environment & Consumer Behavior at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and co-author of this study, “We're known for food systems work under A4NH - Agriculture for Nutrition and Health research program  in the country, so the government knows us, so it's a good entry point to have the initial discussions.”

Pandemic Impact

Despite the rise of "modern" distribution channels (e.g., supermarkets, convenience stores), traditional wet markets continue to account for approximately 90% of total vegetable sales in Hanoi, serving as the primary source for daily nutrient intake, and contributing to 56% of energy intake. However, the absence of traceability and sales registration systems render the food flows within these markets largely invisible.

The researchers found during the initial phase of Covid-19 crisis, from February to July 2020, there was a significant decrease in both the total number and frequency of visits to the market, suggesting a reduction in consumers’ market engagement.  Additionally, inter-market visits also experienced a sharp decline in these early months, suggesting a decrease in market operators’ activities.  Furthermore, the peak time for market shopping shifted significantly, indicating substantial behavioral changes attributed to the Covid-19 crisis.

"Even after the city was reopened, with no limitations, the visits to the market were still lower and even though Covid was managed, the feeling that these markets are not as safe as a supermarket; this has led to a change,"

Reymondin says, adding that the data suggests some intervention options for the future to counteract these trends.

Considering that the pandemic has disproportionately affected the poorest and most vulnerable populations nationwide, and recognizing the pivotal role of wet markets in providing access to fresh food and essential nutrients, the researchers advocate for reinforcing public health messaging related to nutrition and health.

Specifically, they propose emphasizing the significance of consuming fresh and nutritious food for health promotion during pandemics. This strategic messaging aims to underscore the crucial role such dietary habits play in sustaining robust immune systems and mitigating the risks of disease.

The researchers also proposed the enhancement of wet markets and associated infrastructure and facilities, aiming to facilitate the adoption of improved practices concerning hygiene and food safety conditions.

This upgrade is envisioned as a means to alter consumers' negative perceptions of wet markets’ food safety - a perception likely exacerbated by the Covid crisis and society's increasing desire for heightened sanitation.

Le Trung Hieu, the Deputy Director General of the General Statistics Office of Vietnam affirmed the usefulness of applying modern technology.

“The use of modern information collection tools has shortened time for conducting surveys, provide information opportunely to users, and save costs; it is in line with Vietnam's recent statistical development strategy, diversifying statistical products based on in-depth studies to provide information opportunely and sufficiently for management boards at all levels and fields,” Le Trung Hieu says,

“The result of the project is a very important source of information to help the management authorities and policy makers have solutions to strengthen food safety control via better understanding market actors’ behavior.”

In conclusion, Brice Even, scientist in Food Environment & Consumer Behavior at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and co-author of this study, emphasizes the importance of striking a delicate balance.

"While we must be vigilant in response to the escalation in surveillance society and its pervasive effects, we cannot ignore the opportunities created by new technology to generate scientific evidence,” Even says, “Exploring innovative methods of data collection is crucial in gaining deeper insights into our food system, with the ultimate goal of enhancing sustainability, promoting nutrition and health, and ensuring equity."

  

Despite the rise of "modern" distribution channels (e.g., supermarkets, convenience stores), traditional wet markets continue to account for approximately 90% of total vegetable sales in Hanoi.

CREDIT

Eliot Gee / Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT

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JOURNAL

Food Security

DOI

10.1007/s12571-023-01417-w 

ARTICLE TITLE

Using free Wi-Fi to assess impact of COVID-19 pandemic on traditional wet markets in Hanoi

 

New study aims to unlock secrets of the human brain

University of Ottawa's Dr. Richard Naud’s work has important implications for theories of learning and memory and could potentially lead to future developments in AI

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

 

IMAGE: 

DR. RICHARD NAUD (LEFT), AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA'S FACULTY OF MEDICINE’S Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine AND THE UOTTAWA Department of Physics.

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CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

The inner workings of the human brain are a gradually unraveling mystery and Dr. Richard Naud of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine has led a highly compelling new study that brings us closer to answering these big questions. The study’s results have important implications for theories of learning and working memory and could potentially help lead to future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) since AI developers and programmers watch the work of Dr. Naud and other leading neuroscientists.

Published in Nature Computational Science, the study tackles the many-layered mystery of the “response variability” of neurons, brain cells that use electric signals and chemicals to process information and greenlights all the remarkable aspects of human consciousness.

The findings unveil the nuts and bolts of how neuronal variability is controlled by dendrites, the antenna that reach out from each neuron to receive synaptic inputs in our own personal neural communication networks. The rigorous study establishes properties of dendrites potently control output variability, a property that’s been shown to control synaptic plasticity in the brain.

“The intensity of a neuron’s response is controlled by inputs to its core, but the variability of a neuron’s response is controlled by the inputs to its little antennas – the dendrites,” says Dr. Naud, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and the uOttawa Department of Physics . “This study establishes more precisely how single neurons can have this crucial property of controlling response variability with their inputs.”

Dr. Naud suspected that if a mathematical framework he’d used to describe the cell body of neurons was extended to take their dendrites into account, then they might have luck efficiently simulating networks of neurons with active dendrites.

Cue the contribution of Zachary Friedenberger, a PhD student at the Department of Physics and a member of Dr. Naud’s lab, with a background in theoretical physics to solve the theoretical challenges and the math in a record time. Fast forward to the completed study: The predictions of the model were validated by analysis of in vivo recording data and observed over a wide range of model parameters.

“He managed to solve the math in a record time and solved a number of theoretical challenges I had not foreseen,” Dr. Naud says.

Dr. Naud believed that their technique could provide insight on the neuronal response to variable inputs. So they began working on a technique that would be able to compute statistics from a neuronal model with an active dendrite.

One of the work’s reviewers noted that the theoretical analysis “provides key insight into biological computation and will be of interest to a broad audience of computational and experimental neuroscientists.”

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JOURNAL

Nature Computational Science

DOI

10.1038/s43588-023-00580-6 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Dendritic excitability controls overdispersion

 

Donovan’s Brain - The 1944 Radio Broadcast Starring Orson Welles

 

Donovan's Brain (1953) - Official Trailer

Trailers from Hell trailer of the 1953 classic horror film Donovan's Brain.

Directed by Felix E. Feist.