Understanding the effect of bedding on thermal insulation during sleep

Researchers examine how different postures and bedding influence the thermal environment of sleeping

Waseda University

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The study considered various combinations of posture, sleepwear, and ambient temperatures to examine the thermal insulation of beddings, using a heated thermal manikin and thermoregulatory simulation models 

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Credit: Research Associate Mizuho Akimoto from Waseda University, Japan

The temperature of our sleeping environment has a major impact on the quality of our sleep, and good sleep is essential for our overall health and well-being. The bedding micro-environment is a key factor in maintaining thermally comfortable conditions for sleep. This includes the ambient temperature, humidity, the heat generated by the human body, and the thermal insulation provided by bedding like quilts, blankets, sheets, etc.  

In particular, the total thermal insulation, or the ability of the bedding systems to resist heat flow, significantly affects the thermal neutral temperature of sleeping environments. This refers to the ambient temperature range at which the human body can maintain a stable body temperature without needing to generate more heat (by shivering) or lose heat (by sweating). Despite its importance, there are currently no standardized methods for measuring the thermal insulation of bedding systems. Moreover, while a few studies have investigated bedding insulation, they have solely focused on the body as a whole, overlooking local thermal conditions of different body parts.  

To address this gap, a research team led by Research Associate Mizuho Akimoto from the Advanced Collaborative Research Organization for Smart Society (ACROSS) at Waseda University in Japan systematically examined the total thermal insulation of bedding systems, both for the whole body and individual body parts. The team included Assistant Professor Jun Shinoda, Assistant Professor Mariya P. Bivolarova, and Professor Pawel Wargocki from the Technical University of Denmark, along with Professor Shin-ichi Tanabe from Waseda University. Their study was made available online on April 26, 2025, and will be published offline in Volume 279 of the journal Building and Environment on July 01, 2025. 

“Since body posture and how much of the body is covered by the bedding can constantly change during sleep, it is essential to evaluate the local thermal conditions of each body part while measuring thermal insulation of bedding systems,” explains Akimoto. “In this study, we present a method for measuring thermal insulation of various combinations of bedding systems and sleepwear using a heated human manikin together with the open-source human thermoregulation model JOS-3.”  

The team conducted a series of measurements on a heated thermal manikin in a climate chamber with 84 different combinations of beddings and sleepwear, including two postures: supine (lying straight on the back) and lateral (lying on the right side); two clothing levels: nude and pajamas; two types of quilts: blanket and duvet, and four body coverage rates ranging from 23.3%, which used only a mattress, sheet, and pillow, to 94.1%, including a blanket covering the entire body except the head. The measurements were made at three ambient temperatures of 18.6° C, 22.6° C, and 26.4 ° C based on the World Health Organization’s guidelines for well-balanced room temperatures and the CIBSE criteria for overheating.  

The team measured the total thermal insulation of the bedding system, including the air layer around the body. Additionally, measurements were taken for both the whole body and 24 body segments. The results showed that the values for total thermal insulation ranged from 1.06 to 5.71 clothing insulation units (clo), depending on the posture, coverage, and materials. 

Because the manikin used in the experiment cannot simulate sweating, the researchers used the JOS-3 model to simulate how sweating would affect skin temperature and heat loss in a real human body. The simulations, which used the manikin measurements as inputs, revealed that even when the total insulation of the whole body remained unchanged under different conditions, the local skin temperature of different body parts could vary greatly depending on which parts were covered or in contact with the mattress. The simulations also provided insights into the range of bedding adjustments that can be made to avoid sweating at a given ambient temperature.  

“Our findings suggest that relying on total thermal insulation of the whole body is not enough, and new methods should be developed that account for both whole and local body effects,” notes Akimoto. “Further, these findings provide benchmarks for optimizing sleep environments and can serve as inputs for multi-segmental human thermoregulatory models, allowing predictions of thermal physiological responses such as heat stress during sleep.” 

In summary, this study provides important insights into how bedding systems can be optimized to support better sleep quality and, in turn, better overall health. 

 

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Reference 
Authors: Mizuho Akimotoa,b, Jun Shinodab, Mariya P. Bivolarovab, Shin-ichi Tanabec, and Pawel Wargockib 
DOI: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113074 
Affiliations: aAdvanced Collaborative Research Organization for Smart Society (ACROSS), Waseda University, Japan 
bDepartment of Environmental and Resource Engineering, International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark 
cDepartment of Architecture, Waseda University, Japan 

 

About Waseda University 
Located in the heart of Tokyo, Waseda University is a leading private research university that has long been dedicated to academic excellence, innovative research, and civic engagement at both the local and global levels since 1882. The University has produced many changemakers in its history, including eight prime ministers and many leaders in business, science and technology, literature, sports, and film. Waseda has strong collaborations with overseas research institutions and is committed to advancing cutting-edge research and developing leaders who can contribute to the resolution of complex, global social issues. The University has set a target of achieving a zero-carbon campus by 2032, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015.  
To learn more about Waseda University, visit https://www.waseda.jp/top/en   

 

About Research Associate Mizuho Akimoto 
Ms. Mizuho Akimoto is currently a Research Associate at the Advanced Collaborative Research Organization for Smart Society (ACROSS) at Waseda University. She is also a member of the Shin-ichi Tanabe lab at Waseda University. She obtained her M.S. degree from the Department of Architecture at Waseda University in 2022. She has published over 20 articles, which have received over 230 citations. Her research is primarily focused on understanding bedroom environments for better sleep quality and wellness in residential buildings. 

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Journal

Building and Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113074 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Effect of bedding on total thermal insulation in different sleeping postures measured with thermal manikin and modelled with JOS-3

Article Publication Date

1-Jul-2025

 

How the world is preparing the workforce for AI

Creating AI-focused curriculum and teaching employees how to use AI are priorities of many countries

University of Georgia

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Researchers estimate that most elementary students will have jobs in the future that don’t exist yet, and those careers will require advanced knowledge of AI, something not every country is prioritizing.

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Credit: Kaiya Plagenhoef

Artificial intelligence is spreading into many aspects of life, from communications and advertising to grading tests. But with the growth of AI comes a shake-up in the workplace.

New research from the University of Georgia is shedding light on how different countries are preparing for how AI will impact their workforces.

According to previous research, almost half of today’s jobs could vanish over the next 20 years. But it’s not all doom and gloom.

Researchers also estimate that 65% of current elementary school students will have jobs in the future that don’t exist now. Most of these new careers will require advanced AI skills and knowledge.

"Human soft skills, such as creativity, collaboration and communication cannot be replaced by AI.” —Lehong Shi, College of Education

To tackle these challenges, governments around the world are taking steps to help their citizens gain the skills they’ll need. The present study examined 50 countries’ national AI strategies, focusing on policies for education and the workforce.

Learning what other countries are doing could help the U.S. improve its own plans for workforce preparation in the era of AI, the researcher said.

“AI skills and competencies are very important,” said Lehong Shi, author of the study and an assistant research scientist at UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education. “If you want to be competitive in other areas, it’s very important to prepare employees to work with AI in the future.”

Some countries put larger focus on training, education

Shi used six indicators to evaluate each country’s prioritization on AI workforce training and education: the plan’s objective, how goals will be reached, examples of projects, how success will be measured, how projects will be supported and the timelines for each project.

Each nation was classified as giving high, medium or low priority to prepare an AI competent workforce depending on how each aspect of their plan was detailed.

Of the countries studied, only 13 gave high prioritization to training the current workforce and improving AI education in schools. Eleven of those were European countries, with Mexico and Australia being the two exceptions. This may be because European nations tend to have more resources for training and cultures of lifelong learning, the researcher said.

The United States was one of 23 countries that considered workforce training and AI education a medium priority, with a less detailed plan compared to countries that saw them as a high priority.

Different countries prioritize different issues when it comes to AI preparation

Some common themes emerged between countries, even when their approaches to AI differed. For example, almost every nation aimed to establish or improve AI-focused programs in universities. Some also aimed to improve AI education for K-12 students.

On-the-job training was also a priority for more than half the countries, with some offering industry-specific training programs or internships. However, few focused on vulnerable populations such as the elderly or unemployed through programs to teach them basic AI skills.

Shi stressed that just because a country gives less prioritization to education and workforce preparation doesn’t mean AI isn’t on its radar. Some Asian countries, for example, put more effort into improving national security and health care rather than education.

Cultivating interest in AI could help students prepare for careers

Some countries took a lifelong approach to developing these specialized skills. Germany, for instance, emphasized creating a culture that encourages interest in AI. Spain started teaching kids AI-related skills as early as preschool.

Of the many actions governments took, Shi noted one area that needs more emphasis when preparing future AI-empowered workplaces. “Human soft skills, such as creativity, collaboration and communication cannot be replaced by AI,” Shi said. “And they were only mentioned by a few countries.”

Developing these sorts of “soft skills” is key to making sure students and employees continue to have a place in the workforce.

This study was published in Human Resource Development Review.

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Journal

Human Resource Development Review

DOI

10.1177/15344843251332360 

Article Title

Global Perspectives on AI Competence Development: Analyzing National AI Strategies in Education and Workforce Policies

 

Microbial carbon fixation technology helps CO2 emission reduction in cement industry, and high-value utilization of steel slag ushers in innovative solutions

This study reveals the effect and mechanism of microbial mineralization technology on accelerating CO2 fixation, improving soundness and enhancing hydration activity of steel slag

Higher Education Press

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Schematic diagram of the carbon fixation reactor and CO2 transmission pathway.

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Credit: Chunxiang Qian

A recent study published in Engineering has unveiled a novel approach to addressing two critical challenges in the construction materials sector: the efficient utilization of steel slag and the reduction of CO2 emissions from cement production. The research, led by Professor Chunxiang Qian from Southeast University in China, explores the use of microbial technology combined with a rotary kiln process to accelerate the carbonation of steel slag, thereby fixing CO2 from cement kiln flue gas and producing supplementary cementitious materials.

Cement production is a significant contributor to global CO2 emissions, accounting for approximately 8% of the total. Steel slag, a byproduct of the steelmaking process, is an alkaline solid waste with over 400 million metric tons produced globally each year. Despite its potential use in construction, the comprehensive utilization rate of steel slag is less than 30%, leading to substantial accumulation and environmental concerns.

In this study, a combination of microbial technology and a rotary kiln process was employed to expedite the carbonation of steel slag for CO2 fixation from cement kiln flue gas. This approach resulted in a significant increase in the CO2-fixation rate, with a CO2-fixation ratio of approximately 10% achieved within 1 hour and consistent performance across different seasons throughout the year. Investigation revealed that both the CO2-fixation ratio and the particle fineness are pivotal for increasing the soundness and reactivity of steel slag. When the CO2-fixation ratio exceeds 8% and the specific surface area is at least 300 m2/kg, the soundness issue of steel slag can be effectively addressed, facilitating the safe utilization of steel slag. Residual microbes presented in the carbonated steel slag powder act as nucleating sites, increasing the hydration rate of the silicate phases in Portland cement to form more hydration products. Microbial regulation results in the biogenic calcium carbonate having smaller crystal sizes, which facilitates the formation of monocarboaluminate to increase the strength of hardened cement paste. At the same CO2-fixation ratio, microbial mineralized steel slag powder exhibits greater hydration activity than carbonated steel slag powder. With a CO2-fixation ratio of 10% and a specific surface area of 600 m2/kg, replacing 30% of cement clinker with microbial mineralized steel slag powder yields an activity index of 87.7%. This study provides a sustainable solution for reducing carbon emissions and safely and efficiently utilizing steel slag in the construction materials sector, while expanding the application scope of microbial technology.

The paper “Microbial-Enhanced Steel Slag Fixation of CO2 from Cement Kiln Flue Gas for the Production of Supplementary Cementitious Material,” authored by Chunxiang Qian, Yijin Fan, Yafeng Rui, Xiao Zhang, Yangfan Xu. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2025.03.024. For more information about Engineering, visit the website at https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/engineering.

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Journal

Engineering

DOI

10.1016/j.eng.2025.03.024 

Article Title

Microbial-Enhanced Steel Slag Fixation of CO2 from Cement Kiln Flue Gas for the Production of Supplementary Cementitious Material

 

AI medical receptionist modernizing doctor appointments, poised to improve patient care nationwide

Texas A&M teams with Humanate, an NVIDIA Inception company, to advance “Cassie,” which uses facial recognition for more human and empathetic interactions

Texas A&M University

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Humanate's AI medical receptionist "Cassie," created through research conducted at Texas A&M University.

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Credit: Humanate Digital/Texas A&M University

A virtual medical receptionist named “Cassie,” developed through research at Texas A&M University, is transforming the way patients interact with health care providers.

Cassie is a digital-human assistant created by Humanate Digital, a startup founded by three Aggies, including Dr. Mark Benden, professor in the Texas A&M School of Public Health and director of the Center for Worker Health.

The artificial intelligence-powered avatar can speak more than 100 languages, including American Sign Language, and uses facial recognition to mimic human emotions, making interactions feel more natural and comforting.

Cassie is being tested in several clinics to assist with administrative tasks such as checking in patients, requesting medical records and guiding users through paperwork. “We’re not trying to replace doctors or nurses,” Benden said. “We’re focused on the administrative side — tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming and not the best use of a clinician’s time.”

At the 2025 Texas A&M New Ventures Competition last month, Humanate took home the grand prize, including $35,000 in funding and multiple investment offers, for its work on the Cassie technology.

Using Facial Recognition To Determine Patient Mood

A key differentiator from early research is that Cassie was developed to be emotionally responsive, using facial recognition to read the user’s expressions and adjust its tone accordingly. “Our goal is to provide a happy digital human to have a conversation with you. She can smile, interact, tell dad jokes — even mimic your mood. But if you’re on a serious topic, like a cancer diagnosis, she can become more serious, more focused,” Benden said.

Unlike traditional kiosks or chatbots, Cassie offers a two-way interaction that feels more like a conversation than a transaction.

Benden said the technology has potential applications in pediatric care — Humanate is developing a cartoon-style avatar named Oliver to help children navigate medical procedures. “Oliver would guide a child through something that might be kind of scary and stay with them throughout, on a mobile device, for comfort and engagement,” Benden said.

An Idea So New, Technology Had To Catch Up

Cassie was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic as a tool to train remote workers but has since evolved into a sophisticated AI assistant thanks to advances in large language models and a key partnership with AI technology innovator NVIDIA.

“We started this five years ago to figure out a way to train remote office workers with the same confidence and quality we would have if we had a professional trainer in the room,” said Benden, who co-founded Humanate with Carlos Rodriguez, company CEO and an A&M engineering graduate; and Leslie Jebson, who earned his MBA from Mays Business School and serves as company consultant.

“Before large language models, we had to guess what AI assistants might say and manually enter those responses,” Benden said. “Now, Cassie can understand various accents and multiple languages, and provide more flexible and intelligent responses.”

Rodriguez said Humanate Inc. is revolutionizing the patient-to-clinician interaction. “Our agentic AI technology is automating labor intensive work flows to increase access and produce better healthcare outcomes,” he said.

Reducing Administrative Burdens, Empowering Health Care Facilities

Cassie is a potential solution to a growing problem in health care: administrative overload and staffing shortages, especially in rural or underserved areas. “These are jobs that turn over very often — 200 to 300% in a typical year,” Benden said. “They’re lower paying, and most days are pretty much the same; humans don’t necessarily like those kinds of jobs, and that’s why turnover is high.”

Cassie can work 24/7 without breaks, sick days or distractions.

While Cassie may not immediately lower health care costs for patients, the technology can help clinics operate more efficiently — particularly those in financially vulnerable areas.

“A lot of smaller clinics — especially without federal money — don’t make sense to run as a business; you would close them,” Benden said. By reducing administrative burdens and freeing up clinicians to focus on patient care, Cassie could help stretch limited resources further.

“I think we can improve the quality of care, get more doctor-and-nurse time with the patient instead of with paperwork,” he said.

Partnership With NVIDIA

The project advanced when Humanate collaborated with NVIDIA to run large-scale simulations that enhanced Cassie’s capabilities. This partnership helped move the technology from a research prototype to a deployable product. Humanate has licensed the Texas A&M-filed patent for its receptionist-focused AI, one of the early filings in the emerging field of agentic AI.

“If that patent pans out, then we hold something that’s highly significant in the field,” Benden said.

For Texas A&M, Cassie represents more than just a technological achievement — it’s a testament to the university’s role in fostering innovation with real-world impact. “We think health care is primed for this,” Benden said. “They need to be disrupted because they’re struggling to meet the needs.”

Rodriguez hopes Cassie will not only streamline operations but also improve the patient experience — especially for those who find traditional systems confusing or impersonal. “We’ve had an amazing response from patients. Some of the older patients, in particular, have written to us and said, ‘It’s so much easier for me to talk to Cassie than to try to navigate confusing websites and mountains of paperwork,’” Rodriguez said. “That’s been very encouraging.”

About Texas A&M Innovation

Texas A&M Innovation at College Station works with a diverse array of partners – including entrepreneurs, investors, technology incubators, and large enterprises – to improve lives by commercializing innovations from The Texas A&M University System. Texas A&M research generates more than 300 new technologies each year, providing abundant and varied opportunities for industry collaboration. Learn more about the Texas A&M Innovation technology portfolio.

By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications

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How a genetic tug-of-war decides the fate of a honey bee

Penn State

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Queen bees emit a pheromone that attracts worker bees — the queen's daughters — to her side. The differentiation of bee larvae into either workers or queens has baffled researchers, and now a team led by researchers at Penn State has revealed the molecular mechanism underpinning this genetic mystery. 

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Credit: Sean Bresnahan

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Despite having identical genetic instructions, female honey bee larvae can develop into either long-lived reproductive queens or short-lived sterile workers who help rear their sisters rather than laying their own eggs. Now, an interdisciplinary team led by researchers at Penn State has uncovered the molecular mechanisms that control how the conflict between genes inherited from the father and the mother determine the larva’s fate.

They published their findings this week (June 18) in Genome Biology.

“Imagine if your mother's genes and your father's genes were in constant disagreement about how you should develop — that is essentially what genomic imprinting is, and we see that it happens across the tree of life: from honey bees to humans,” said Sean Bresnahan, the lead author of the study who conducted the study as a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Degree Program in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. Supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship at the time, Bresnahan graduated in 2024 and is now a data scientist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “We found that this genetic ‘argument’ can be detected during a critical developmental window where a honey bee larva becomes either a queen or a worker.”

That critical window closes and the bee’s fate becomes irreversible 192 hours after the egg is laid. To distinguish between patrigenes — genes inherited from the father — and matrigenes — genes inherited from the mother, study co-author Kate Anton, a research technologist in the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State, used instrumental insemination to create specific genetic crosses between selected queens and male bees, known as drones. The researchers worked with the Penn State Genome Research Incubator to analyze the larvae’s RNA, which contains and uses inherited genetic information to create proteins and support cellular activity, and identify the genes that were expressed differently between the two groups. The researchers also sequenced the parents’ genomes and used genetic markers to trace parent-of-origin gene expression in the larvae, meaning they could see how gene expression differed depending on whether the gene was from the mother or father.

“We found patrigenes were expressed at higher levels in queen-destined larvae, and matrigenes were expressed at higher levels in worker-destined larvae,” Bresnahan said.

The researchers then examined cellular and physiological pathways to determine if the genes showing parent-of-origin expression were functioning in the same pathway.

“We saw a striking match between the expression of matrigenes and patrigenes in the same pathway,” Bresnahan said, explaining that if a matrigene had increased expression then a patrigene would have decreased expression in the same pathway, or vice versa, showing that the two genes were working against each other. “If one gene showed parent-specific expression, another gene in the same pathway showed parent-specific expression from the opposite parent.”

Previously, the team examined whether DNA methylation — a process in which protein tags change how a gene is expressed without altering the underlying DNA — was the molecular mechanism underlying these differential gene expression patterns.

“In mammals and plants, differential expression in imprinted genes — genes where only the information inherited from one parent is expressed — is typically mediated by differences in DNA methylation in the regulatory regions, where specific DNA sequences control expression, of these genes,” said study co-author, Christina Grozinger, Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology and director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. “But our previous work found that DNA methylation does not have this function in honey bees.”

The researchers then turned to the idea that it may not be tags on the DNA that influence gene expression in honey bees, but rather tags on the structures around which DNA packages itself.   DNA is wound around histone proteins, in a structure called chromatin. During cellular reproduction, chromatin condenses into chromosomes. Typically developing multicellular organisms inherit equal numbers of chromosomes from each parent, providing the pool of genes from which an organism’s specific genetic composition is made up. The team hypothesized that changes in the structure of histone proteins — due to chemical “tags” placed on the tails of the proteins as the result of cellular processes — could make the patrigenes and matrigenes more or less accessible to other regulatory factors. Such control could potentially change their expression.

To test this hypothesis, the team used a method developed by study co-author, Shaun Mahony, associate professor in the Center for Eukaryotic Gene Regulation and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State. The process involves fragmenting DNA that is bound to a protein — histone proteins, in this case — and then using antibodies that are specific to the tagged proteins to capture and isolate these from the rest of the chromatin. Researchers can then analyze the DNA crosslinked to the captured protein and determine which genes are involved and whether they are expressed or inhibited.

“We found that, in honey bees, parent-of-origin expression is regulated by histone modifications,” Bresnahan said.

He explained that the chemical tags modifying the histone proteins appears to mediate whether patrigenes or matrigenes are expressed and, ultimately, whether a honey bee becomes a queen or a worker. While the underpinning mechanism is not DNA methylation like the researchers initially thought, Bresnahan said it’s not a surprising finding.

“What we're seeing in honey bees isn't actually that unusual when you take a step back — histone-based mechanisms for parent-of-origin effects are more widely utilized across the tree of life than DNA methylation-based systems,” Bresnahan said. “We see these chromatin-mediated imprinting mechanisms in flowering plants and in placental mammals as well. So, honey bees, and maybe other social insects, might be using the more ancestral toolkit for mediating these genetic conflicts.”

This understanding could potentially help selectively breed for honey bees with different behaviors and traits, which could help produce more productive and resilient bee colonies, according to Grozinger, who said her lab plans to study how intragenomic conflict influences how well a subset of honey bees, called nurse bees, rear young bees, among other traits.

Bresnahan said the project expands beyond honey bees, as the skills learned for this project translate to his current work. In his new role, Bresnahan continues to explore how genetic conflicts shape complex traits and social systems — but he’s now focused on how the placenta mediates traits for maternal-child health in humans.

“The skills I developed studying parent-of-origin effects translate directly to my current studies of maternal-child health mediated through the placenta,” Bresnahan said. “I am particularly interested in parent-of-origin gene expression associated with placenta-mediated traits, like early-life programming of metabolic and neuropsychiatric disease risk, that could help us better understand pregnancy complications and offspring health outcomes.”

Brock Harpur, associate professor of entomology at Purdue University also contributed to this study. The U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations, the Publius Maro Professorship and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences supported this work.

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Journal

Genome Biology

DOI

10.1186/s13059-025-03628-0 

Article Title

Intragenomic confict associated with extreme phenotypic plasticity in queen-worker caste determination in honey bees (Apis mellifera)