Thursday, June 26, 2025

Genomes from people across modern-day India shed light on 50,000 years of evolutionary history

Cell Press

India’s population is genetically one of the most diverse in the world, yet it remains underrepresented in global datasets. In a study publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell, researchers analyzed genomic data from more than 2,700 people from across India, capturing genetic variation from most geographic regions, linguistic groups, and communities. They found that most modern-day Indian people’s ancestry can be traced back to Neolithic Iranian farmers, Eurasian Steppe pastoralists, and South Asian hunter-gatherers.

“This study fills a critical gap and reshapes our understanding of how ancient migrations, archaic admixture, and social structures have shaped Indian genetic variation,” says senior author Priya Moorjani of the University of California, Berkeley. “Studying these subpopulations allows us to explore how ancient ancestry, geography, language, and social practices interacted to shape genetic variation. We hope our study will provide a deeper understanding of the origin of functional variation and inform precision health strategies in India.”

The researchers used data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India, Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia (LASI-DAD) and generated whole-genome sequences from 2,762 individuals in India, including people who spoke a range of different languages. They used these data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of India over the past 50,000 years at fine scale, showing how history impacts adaptation and disease in present-day Indians. They showed that most Indians derive ancestry from populations related to three ancestral groups: Neolithic Iranian farmers, Eurasian Steppe pastoralists, and South Asian hunter-gatherers.

“In India, genetic and linguistic variation often go hand in hand, shaped by ancient migrations and social practices,” says lead author Elise Kerdoncuff of UC-Berkeley. “Ensuring linguistic variation among the people whose genomes we include helps prevent biased interpretations of genetic patterns and uncover functional variation related to all major communities to inform both evolutionary research and future biomedical surveys.”

One of the key goals of the study was to understand how India’s complex population history has shaped genetic variation related to disease. In India, many subpopulations have an increased risk of recessive genetic disorders, which is due largely to historical isolation and marrying within communities.

Another focus was on the impact of archaic hominin ancestry—specifically, Neanderthal and Denisovan—on disease susceptibility. For example, some of the genes inherited from these archaic groups have an impact on immune functions.

“One of the most striking and unexpected findings was that India harbors the highest variation in Neanderthal ancestry among non-Africans,” says co-lead author Laurits Skov, also of UC-Berkeley. “This allowed us to reconstruct around 50% of the Neanderthal genome and 20% of the Denisovan genome from Indian individuals, more than any other previous archaic ancestry study.”

One constraint of this work was the limited availability of ancient DNA from South and Central Asia. As more ancient genomes become available, the researchers will be able to refine this work and identify the source of Neolithic Iranian farmer and Steppe pastoralist-related ancestry in contemporary Indians. They also plan to continue studying the LASI-DAD cohort to enable a closer look at the source of the genetic adaptations and disease variants across India.

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This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the University of Southern California.

Cell, Kerdoncuff et al. “50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00462-3

Cell (@CellCellPress), the flagship journal of Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that publishes findings of unusual significance in any area of experimental biology, including but not limited to cell biology, molecular biology, neuroscience, immunology, virology and microbiology, cancer, human genetics, systems biology, signaling, and disease mechanisms and therapeutics. Visit: http://www.cell.com/cell. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com. 

Journal

Cell

DOI

10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.027

Article Title

50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

Scientists complete the most thorough analysis yet of India's genetic diversity

Analysis of 2,700 genomes uncovers a wealth of ancient and recent diversity and genetic links to disease

University of California - Berkeley

With around 5,000 different ethno-linguistic and religious groups, India is one of the most culturally and genetically diverse countries in the world. Yet, it remains underrepresented in genomic surveys, even when compared to other non-European groups, such as East Asians and Africans.

A new analysis of Indian genomes — the largest and most complete to date — helps untangle these groups' complex evolutionary history, uncovering a 50,000-year history of genetic mixing and population bottlenecks that shaped genetic variation, health and disease in South Asia.

The analysis, led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi, India, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Michigan, was published today (June 26) in the journal Cell.

"These findings fill a critical gap and reshape our understanding of how ancient migrations, archaic admixture and social structures, like endogamy, have shaped the Indian genetic variation and risk of diseases, and will help inform precision health strategies in India," said Priya Moorjani, a senior author of the paper and a UC Berkeley assistant professor of molecular and cell biology.

Because of the complex history of gene flow and endogamy, or within-community marriages, Moorjani said, some groups within India are as genetically different from each other as Europeans are from East Asians. Studying diverse individuals across India thus helps to understand how ancient ancestry, geography, language and social practices interacted.

The researchers analyzed the complete genomes of 2,762 individuals, representing most of the nation's major linguistic, ethnic and geographic communities, that were sequenced as part of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India-Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia (LASI-DAD). LASI-DAD seeks to understand genetic variation in India and uncover the causes of aging and age-associated diseases. Moorjani and her UC Berkeley team were supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The UC Berkeley team found that most of the genetic variation in India can be explained by a single migration of humans out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. These populations interbred with now-extinct relatives — Neanderthals and Denisovans — and then spread throughout Europe and Asia, including India. As a result, Indians and Europeans both carry about equal amounts of Neanderthal genes — between 1% and 2% of the entire genome.

"Potentially, there were earlier waves out of Africa to India, but it’s likely that those groups either did not survive or left little genetic impact on today’s populations," said Elise Kerdoncuff, a former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and one of two lead authors of the paper.

Surprisingly, Indians have a greater variety of Neanderthal DNA segments than other populations around the world. According to Moorjani, the European populations sampled by earlier studies share among them about 30% of the Neanderthal genome. The much smaller sample of Indian genomes, however, contained Neanderthal ancestry segments representing half of the Neanderthal genome.

“One of the most striking and unexpected findings was that India harbors the highest variation in Neanderthal ancestry among non-Africans,” said co-lead author Laurits Skov, a former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow. “This allowed us to reconstruct around 50% of the Neanderthal genome and 20% of the Denisovan genome from Indian individuals, more than any other previous archaic ancestry study.”

"This is because of the complex history of South Asians," Moorjani explained. "They've had multiple mixture events over the past 10,000 years, followed by strong bottlenecks in many groups. Together, that leads to a very complex mosaic of different ancestries, such that when you compare the Neanderthal segments in two individuals, they're often not shared."

Neolithic farmers from Iran

The earliest inhabitants of India may have been hunter-gatherers, who were ancient ancestral South Indians whose closest genetic relatives today may still be living on the isolated Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. People from the south of India have higher levels of this ancestry than those in the north.

Archaeological evidence, including from the Mehrgarh site in present-day Pakistan, suggests that agriculture in South Asia began 8,000–9,000 years ago, likely introduced by Neolithic farmers from West Asia, as it involved wheat and barley — crops originally domesticated in that region. Kerdoncuff analyzed 14 ancient populations from the Neolithic to the Iron Age from Central Asia and the Middle East to pinpoint where the farmers may have come from and found that the closest match are fourth millennium BCE farmers and herders from Tajikistan, specifically, an archeological site named Sarazm.

Archeologists had previously documented trade connections between Sarazm and South Asia, including connections with agricultural sites of Mehrgarh and the early Indus Valley Civilization. Kerdoncuff noted that “it is striking that one of the two Sarazm individuals in our study was found with shell bangles that are identical to ones found in Neolithic sites in India and Pakistan, and made from sea shells originating from the Indian Ocean or the Arabian Sea."

The genome analysis also confirmed evidence in India for steppe pastoralist ancestry, ranging between 0-45% among present-day individuals. Together, these three groups — farmers, pastoralists and hunter-gatherers — gave rise to the genetic variation now seen throughout India.

The role played by endogamy

After this complex mix of cultures, however, India experienced a shift toward strong endogamy, the practice of marrying within one’s community. Endogamous marriages increase the prevalence of deleterious variants and the chance that an individual would inherit two, homozygous copies of a bad gene, if the parents are related or from a small population. In a previous paper, Moorjani and her colleagues determined that these types of bottlenecks, or founder events, occurred between 3,500 and 2,000 years ago. A founder event is when a small number of ancestral individuals gives rise to a large fraction of the population, often because war, famine or disease drastically reduced the population, but also because of geographic isolation — on islands, for example — or cultural practices.

"With these founder events, members of a group become much more related because they're exchanging genes just within the community," Moorjani said. "So if a deleterious variant is present in the community, it can drift to high frequency in the population because there's less variation."

One example of such a recessive trait is a mutation in the butylcholinesterase (BCHE) gene that causes muscle paralysis and other severe reactions to anesthetics like micavarium. It is particularly prevalent in communities such as the Vysya in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Moorjani said, but present at very low frequency across the rest of India and not present outside India. Identifying such variants is crucial for genetic screening and improving medical interventions, she said.

The team also identified numerous rare and population-specific pathogenic genetic variants, including variants linked to blood disorders, congenital hearing loss, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria.

Moorjani and her colleagues are continuing to analyze the Indian genomes in the LASI-DAD study, which is part of the LASI study that has collected over 70,000 individuals, and aims to sequence a subset to study epigenetic differences, metabolomics and proteomics to understand aging and age-associated diseases in India.

"Our expertise is in leveraging the evolutionary history to do more reliable disease mapping, because this complex history highlights how critical it is to incorporate ancestry and homozygosity in future medical and functional genomics research in India," Moorjani said.

The other senior authors of the paper are Aparajit Ballav Dey of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Sharon Kardia of the University of Michigan and Jinkook Lee of USC. Kerdoncuff currently is at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Skov is an assistant professor at the Globe Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Moorjani and her UC Berkeley team were supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (U01AG065958, R35GM142978), Burroughs Wellcome Fund and Denmark's Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Journal

Cell

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

A nutritional epigenetics study protocol indicates changes in prenatal ultra-processed food intake may reduce lead and mercury exposures to prevent autism and ADHD

THE NON GENETIC THEORY OF AUTISM

Prenatal intake of ultra-processed food determines birth outcomes and risk of child developing autism or ADHD

Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute

Nutritional epigenetics model for autism and ADHD — image:
Figure shows a simplified version of the nutritional epigenetics model. Poor prenatal diet of excessive ultra-processed food intake results in the consumption of food colors, vegetable oils, refined sugars and preservatives. These food ingredients contribute to mercury (Hg) and lead (Pb) exposures and deficits in nutrition such as selenium and zinc losses. Zinc loss and selenium deficits disrupt metallothionein protein production which leads to the bioaccumulation of Hg and Pb in the blood. These heavy metals create oxidative stress and symptoms associated with child behavioral and learning disorders. Oxidative stress impacts DNA methylation patterns creating adverse child health and learning outcomes in the next generation. A healthy diet, free of ultra-processed foods, may reduce Hg and Pb levels and symptoms associated with behavioral and learning disorders (*e.g.*, autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders
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Credit: Dufault, Renee J developed the nutritional epigenetics model for autism and ADHD

In a recent publication released by PubMed, American scientist Dr. Renee Dufault at the Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute, provides a peer-reviewed protocol for determining the role ultra-processed foods play in prenatal heavy metal exposures and changes in the expression of the zinc dependent MT-1 (metallothionein) gene that impact child neurodevelopment. Previous biomarker studies show dietary zinc deficits impact metallothionein protein levels and are associated with the bioaccumulation of lead and/or mercury in children with symptoms associated with autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders. This protocol builds on the results of previous clinical trial research and provides valid and reliable methods for measuring changes in ultra-processed food intake and diet pre-post administration of nutritional epigenetics education. The impact of dietary changes on lead and mercury exposures and MT gene behavior would be determined using a randomized test and control group design. Pregnant women serving in the test group would participate in the nutritional epigenetics education intervention designed to reduce ultra-processed food intake and heavy metal levels in blood while increasing whole food intake and MT and zinc levels. Changes in maternal lead mercury, zinc, and metallothionein levels would be measured via blood sample analyses prior to the nutritional epigenetics education intervention and after childbirth via cord blood analyses to determine infant risk factors for the development of autism and/or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders.

The line of research that focuses on the effect of dietary factors on gene expression is known as nutritional epigenetics. Dr. Dufault’s has led research efforts in this field of study since 2005 when she first identified the problem of inorganic mercury residues in high fructose corn syrup while still working at the Food and Drug Administration.

Heavy metal residues continue to be a problem in the food supply. The US Congress released two reports in 2021 on the problem of heavy metals in baby foods. The first report issued on February 4, 2021, revealed baby foods are tainted with dangerous levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury. The second report, issued on September 29, 2021, confirmed new disclosures from manufacturers show dangerous levels of heavy metals in even more baby foods. These heavy metal exposures may further exacerbate the development of autism and ADHD.

Journal

World Journal of Experimental Medicine

DOI

10.5493/wjem.v15.i2.101555

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Biomarkers for tracking metabolic changes pre-post nutritional epigenetics diet/intervention to prevent autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders in children

Article Publication Date

20-Jun-2025

Warmer spots within fields have more blooms and more bees

Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Climate can vary across large areas of land, but it also can vary within much smaller areas such as farms. A new study by researchers at Penn State examined whether these microclimates — the climate of a very small or restricted area — affect pollination by both wild and managed bees and resulting wild blueberry yields.

The study — available online now and scheduled to publish in the October issue of the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment — took place on a 170 acre wild blueberry field in Maine.

Researchers discovered that both wild bees and honey bees found the most densely blooming areas of the fields and concentrated their foraging in these areas. Wild bees also tended to forage on plots that were warmer than average.

The researchers also found that even though managed honey bees were abundant at the site, there was no evidence of fewer wild bees near the honey bee hive locations or in the fields that had the highest honey bee foraging.

Heather Grab, assistant professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences and lead author on the paper, said the findings could be used to help inform precision agriculture approaches to help conservation efforts.

“For example, precision agricultural management approaches often suggest removing low performing sites from production, perhaps to the benefit of increasing areas for biodiversity conservation,” she said. “Remote sensing techniques could measure flower density patterns across the field and identify low blooming regions, which may be a promising method for selecting candidate areas to convert to conservation habitats.”

As pollinators decline worldwide, a lot of research has been dedicated to finding out why, with factors such as climate change and availability of floral resources and nesting habitats identified as contributors, according to Grab. The researchers said that while these factors are important at a broad scale, finer scale variations in these factors also can drive pollinator distributions in smaller microclimates, such as within farms.

While prior studies have shown that factors like habitat cover in the surrounding landscape and weather patterns can be important for predicting pollinator activity, diversity and health, Grab said a large amount of variability still remains to be explained.

“Much of that variation could be explained by fine spatial and temporal variation in temperature and humidity across the day and across different microclimates within a given area, which is what we sought to explore in this study,” she said.

Christina Grozinger, Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology and director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, said the project was a collaboration between the Penn State Center for Pollinator Research, the University of Pittsburgh and Wyman’s — one of the largest wild blueberry producers in the United States and the largest brand of frozen fruit in the U.S.

She noted that the center and Wyman’s have worked together for many years, supporting pollinators and pollination services in agricultural fields.

“Our collaborators at Wyman’s noted that some parts of their fields consistently produced fewer berries, but there was no obvious reason,” she said. “We decided to tackle this mystery by developing new strategies for monitoring and modeling crop yield, pollinator activity and environmental variation, in collaboration with Vikas Khanna’s group at University of Pittsburgh.”

Khanna, professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-author of the paper, noted one of the strengths of the study was how tightly knit the collaboration was between all three institutions.

“The impact of climate change on farming systems and agricultural productivity involves complex dynamics,” he said. “Tackling these issues demands interdisciplinary strategies that integrate knowledge from diverse fields, as demonstrated by this research team.”

Undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh deployed temperature and humidity sensors across the 170-acre commercial wild blueberry field — which was divided into 120 sites that were one square meter in size — and measured the progression of flower blooms as well as the number and diversity of blueberry pollinators.

“We were able to leverage this data to build a model of the microclimates throughout the farm — including both temperature and humidity — that tracked environmental changes every 10 minutes across the entire field throughout the bloom period,” Grab said. “We also had data on the location and number of honey bee hives and the fruit set and yield of blueberries at 100 plots across the field.”

The researchers found that across the site, variations in the landscape resulted in microclimates with differences of as much as 10 degrees Celsius and 29% relative humidity. Both managed honey bees and wild bees had overlapping foraging areas and habits, with both favoring warmer microclimates, although wild bees foraged earlier in the day and during a wider range of conditions.

The team also found that flower density, which was greater in spots with a warmer microclimate, was the primary driver of both wild bee and honey bee foraging, as well as blueberry yields.

“Because warmer areas of the field also had more flowers and higher yields, changes to the climate that increase microclimate variability may contribute to increased yield variability within fields,” Grab said.

In the future, additional studies could explore whether these patterns vary across different, broader regions and in different years, the researchers said.

Other co-authors of the paper were Garrett Sisk and Anaís Ostroski, of the University of Pittsburgh; Travis Dillard and Bruce Hall, of Jasper Wyman & Son; and Sarah Goslee, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service.

The USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriations under Project #PEN04716 and Accession #1020527 helped support this research.

At Penn State, researchers are solving real problems that impact the health, safety and quality of life of people across the commonwealth, the nation and around the world.

For decades, federal support for research has fueled innovation that makes our country safer, our industries more competitive and our economy stronger. Recent federal funding cuts threaten this progress.

Learn more about the implications of federal funding cuts to our future at Research or Regress.

Journal

Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.agee.2025.109734

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Unraveling microclimate effects on pollinator foraging and crop yield in lowbush blueberry

DEI

Female veterans, veterans from racial and ethnic minority groups at higher risk of dying from opioid overdose

“By uncovering differences in opioid overdose death by sex and race/ethnicity, clinicians can shape more personalized and effective care that saves lives and promotes long-term recovery.”

Boston University School of Medicine

(Boston)—Prior studies have shown veterans are particularly at risk of dying by opioid overdose and the possibility of that occurring has been rising steadily over the past two decades. From 2010-2019, there was a 61.2% increase in risk of overdose death among male veterans. Interestingly, this increased risk was not observed among female veterans, despite rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) rising more quickly among women than men in the general population. Racial disparities in opioid overdose deaths are also prominent with a significant increase in death due to opioids among all racial and ethnic minority veterans, except American Indian or Alaskan Native veterans.

Given increases in opioid overdose rates and policy changes expanding access to medications for OUD during the COVID-19 pandemic, BU and VA researchers sought to understand how the opioid overdose epidemic impacted veterans with opioid use disorder. In their new study, they found female veterans and veterans from racial and ethnic minority groups were at higher risk of dying from an opioid overdose than other veterans.

“These findings are novel because prior research has not comprehensively examined how overdose mortality patterns vary simultaneously by sex and race/ethnicity among veterans with opioid use disorder, nor how these disparities shifted during a period of major healthcare disruption such as the COVID-19 pandemic,” explained co-corresponding author Amar Mandavia, PhD, an instructor in psychiatry at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and an investigator in the Behavioral Health Sciences division of the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System.

The researchers reviewed medical records from more than 200,000 veterans who had been diagnosed with OUD between 2016 and 2021. They noted who died, what they died from and their age, sex and race. They then conducted statistical tests to see who was most at risk of dying from an opioid overdose—comparing males and females, different age groups and different races and ethnicities. Their findings revealed that younger, female, and racially and ethnically minoritized veterans are experiencing opioid overdose deaths at disproportionately high rates compared to White males, particularly during times of healthcare system stress.

According to the researchers, these findings underscore the urgent need for targeted approaches to overdose prevention and OUD treatment. “Clinically, these findings call for the expansion of tailored treatment models, improved access to medications for OUD, targeted overdose prevention efforts, and enhanced outreach to high-risk veterans,” says co-corresponding author Nicholas Livingston, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at the school and a research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD at the VA.

The researchers hope this study will help ensure that no veteran, regardless of sex or race is left behind in the fight against the opioid epidemic.

These findings appear online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

This research was supported by Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI)

Project Program Award (COVID-2020C2-11081; PI Livingston).

Journal

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

DOI

10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2025.112764

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Sex and race-ethnicity influences on opioid overdose deaths among veterans diagnosed with opioid use disorder between 2016 and 2021

Article Publication Date

23-Jun-2025

Receipt of buprenorphine and naltrexone for opioid use disorder by race and ethnicity and insurance type

JAMA Network Open

About The Study:

In this cohort study of opioid-related index health care events, race and ethnicity–based and insurance-based disparities in access to medications for opioid use disorder persisted despite efforts to expand treatment availability. These findings underscore the need for targeted interventions, including culturally tailored care, expanded access points, and policy reforms to address structural barriers and reduce inequities contributing to the overdose crisis.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Utsha G. Khatri, MD, MSHP, email utsha.khatri@mountsinai.org.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.18493)

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.

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About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.

Journal

JAMA Network Open

Availability of medications for opioid use disorder in opioid treatment programs

JAMA Network Open

About The Study:

In this cross-sectional study of opioid treatment programs (OTPs), although the availability of medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) beyond methadone increased over time, most OTPs still did not offer all 3 forms of MOUD as of 2023. Specific organizational characteristics, such as being government operated and accepting Medicare, were associated with more comprehensive MOUD offerings. Future research should evaluate why OTPs vary in their MOUD offerings.

Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Zoe Lindenfeld, PhD, email zoe.lindenfeld@rutgers.edu.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.17616)

# # #

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Journal

JAMA Network Open

Affordable, highly efficient cold boxes poised to help tackle food waste for small farmers in East Africa

Aston University

image:
RADiCool
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Credit: RADiCool

The cold boxes, developed by a team from Aston University and RAD Global, keep food fresh for longer without access to grid electricity
RAD Global is an agricultural development firm and its founder Tim Messeder wanted to develop something to help small-scale fishers in Uganda
The RADiCool system is designed to keep fish fresh for 48 hours, is transportable on a motorbike and affordable to those on low incomes.

A collaboration between Aston University and RAD Global will help small farmers in East Africa keep food fresher for longer, preventing food waste and improving livelihoods.

Working with other partners they have developed pioneering cold storage boxes which can keep food fresh without access to grid electricity.

Whilst working in Uganda, Tim Messeder, founder of UK agricultural development company RAD Global, noticed that small scale fishers in Uganda had a major problem keeping fish fresh. The African country is large, and this causes an issue in keeping fish fresh in the blistering heat after it is caught from Lake Victoria and from various fishponds spread around the country in remote locations. The fishers, many of whom are women, have to transport their catch for up to nine hours during which time their harvest goes off. Surveys across the region reveal that 42% of traders experience fish spoilage due to inadequate cooling, resulting in lost income and increased food insecurity.

To help prevent waste Tim drew up a plan for a cool box that could keep fish fresh for up to 48 hours, could be transported on the back of a motorcycle and was affordable to people on very low incomes. He contacted Aston University and between the two they developed his idea into the prototype now known as RADiCool, which aims to extend the safe selling window for fish from 12 to 24 hours. The prototype development was supported by the Efficiency for Access Research and Development Fund.

The RADiCool system features a lightweight, insulated cold box powered by advanced phase change material (PCM) and integrated internet of things (IoT) technology for real-time temperature and GPS monitoring. The innovative system cools fish from 25°C to refrigeration temperatures within four hours and maintains cold storage conditions for over 24 hours, without additional pre-cooling capacity. Purpose-built to fit on motorbikes - the primary transport mode for rural vendors - RADiCool is practical, scalable, and tailored to first and last mile delivery needs in resource-constrained settings.

PCM technology is an environmentally friendly solution for maintaining cooling temperatures. The materials absorb and release energy as they transition from solid to liquid and back again, similar to the process of ice melting and refreezing. These specially designed PCMs can maintain a consistent cold temperature for extended periods without the need for continuous electricity. This makes them particularly suitable for transporting food, medicine, and other temperature-sensitive items in an energy-efficient way. The PCM panels for RADiCool are frozen in solar-powered hubs for later use in precooling and storing the fish at the desired temperature.

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Tim Messeder said: “RADiCool brings together cutting-edge technology while taking into account the challenging realities of the African context.

“We are committed to empowering small-scale traders with sustainable solutions that reduce waste and improve livelihoods.”

The project’s success marks a major step forward in addressing the cold chain gap in Africa’s informal food markets. Through field testing and technical iteration, the team has developed a system that can function effectively off-grid, supporting food security and economic resilience in the face of climate and infrastructure challenges.

RAD Global and Aston University are now focusing on scaling and commercialisation. Planned next steps include finalising the new special design PCM panels, partnering with manufacturers, expanding field trials, and deploying a pay-per-use business model to increase accessibility. Ongoing collaboration with other partners (ThinkAqua UK, Therma-Inova UK and Dulotrop Uganda) will ensure further staff training, impact evaluation, and long-term sustainability.

“RADiCool demonstrates the power of cross-sector innovation in addressing global development challenges,” said Dr Ahmed Rezk, senior lecturer in mechanical, biomedical & design engineering at Aston University. “We’re proud to contribute scientific expertise that translates directly into practical, community-driven solutions.”