It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, July 26, 2026
NYU Abu Dhabi study uncovers new path toward fighting malaria
Discovery reveals a previously unknown weakness that could help guide future malaria treatments
Researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi have discovered that the malaria parasite relies on a specific type of fat to survive and multiply within the human host, uncovering a previously unknown vulnerability that could help guide future treatments.
Published in Genome Biology, the study analyzed blood samples from 396 children in Burkina Faso before and during malaria infection. The researchers found that, rather than using all available nutrients, the malaria parasite consistently selects blood fats containing linoleic acid, an essential fatty acid obtained through the diet, to support its growth during the blood stage of the disease.
The discovery challenges scientists' understanding of how the parasite survives inside the human body. Instead of broadly consuming nutrients from its host, the parasite appears to rely on a highly specific source of nourishment, revealing a previously unknown vulnerability that could be targeted by future drugs.
"Malaria continues to claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year, yet we still have much to learn about how the parasite survives inside the human body," said Associate Professor of Biology at NYU Abu Dhabi and the study's senior author Youssef Idaghdour. "We found that the parasite is surprisingly selective about the nutrients it uses. That gives us an opportunity to target a weakness that was previously unknown and could eventually lead to new ways of treating the disease."
The findings were remarkably consistent across children from three genetically and culturally distinct ethnic groups in Burkina Faso, suggesting that this survival strategy is a fundamental feature of malaria infection rather than one limited to a particular population. The team also confirmed the parasite's dependence on these fats through laboratory experiments, strengthening the evidence that they play an essential role in its growth.
By combining clinical samples with advanced genetic and metabolic analyses, the researchers were able to uncover previously hidden interactions between the malaria parasite and its human host. The study provides one of the most detailed pictures to date of how the parasite acquires the nutrients it needs to thrive during infection.
"Our goal is to better understand the biology of malaria so we can identify new opportunities for therapeutic intervention," said Idaghdour. "Studies like this help reveal how the parasite survives inside the human body and provide a foundation for developing more effective antimalarial strategies."
Beyond identifying new opportunities for drug development, the findings also raise important questions about the relationship between nutrition and infectious disease, opening new avenues for future research into how diet and metabolism may influence malaria.
The study showcases NYU Abu Dhabi's interdisciplinary approach to addressing global health challenges by bringing together expertise in biology, genomics, computational science, and population health through collaborations spanning Africa, the Middle East, and beyond.
From barred and speckled to solid black and snowy white, chickens display a variety of feather colors and patterns. For centuries, breeders have selected these striking traits, but scientists have long wondered how so much diversity could arise in a relatively short period of time.
By analyzing more than 10,000 chicken genomes, the team found that a key pigmentation gene evolved much more rapidly than expected, revealing an unexpected, rapid pattern of genetic evolution that may help explain how biodiversity develops across the animal kingdom.
“This study has discovered ultrarapid evolution of a gene named MC1R that plays a critical role in pigmentation in chickens and other vertebrates, including humans,” said Dr. Leif Andersson, a professor in VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences. “Normally, when we find a gene variant causing a specific trait with a simple monogenic inheritance, we usually find a single mutation causing the phenotype. Here, we show that multiple mutations with different effects on protein function are causing variation in pigmentation phenotypes.”
A colorful genetic puzzle
Chickens have become one of scientists’ most valuable models for studying genetics and evolution because humans have selectively bred them for roughly 8,000 years. During that time, breeders have favored birds with unique appearances and desirable traits, creating an extraordinary range of genetic diversity that allows researchers to better understand how new traits evolve.
Because feather color is easy to observe and often reflects changes in a single gene, it also provides researchers with an ideal system for studying how genetic mutations shape physical traits.
In addition, MC1R has long been known to influence pigmentation in vertebrates, but scientists traditionally believed that individual mutations were responsible for producing different color traits. Instead, the research team found that evolution can generate much greater diversity by combining multiple mutations within the same gene.
The researchers identified nine mutations in MC1R that, through genetic recombination, produced 18 distinct versions of the gene. Those combinations ultimately gave rise to a wide range of feather colors and patterns.
Rather than showing evolution as a slow process driven by isolated genetic changes, the findings reveal that multiple mutations can accumulate and interact over relatively short periods of time to produce entirely new variations.
“Evolutionary change is usually a slow process, but here we show that many mutations have been selected over a relatively short time,” Andersson said. “The different gene variants are caused by the accumulation of new mutations and by a combinatorial process where different combinations of mutations give different pigmentation patterns.”
More than one mutation
Analyzing more than 10,000 chicken genomes gave the researchers an unprecedented view of the gene’s diversity, allowing them to identify genetic patterns that would have been impossible to see with smaller datasets.
“This gave us a complete picture of the genetic diversity at the MC1R locus in chickens,” Andersson said. “We continue to use this dataset for further analysis of other genes.”
The findings also illustrate how a relatively small number of mutations can produce far more diversity than expected because genetic recombination continually reshuffles them into new combinations.
“One can say the result of these recombinations is that one plus one equals four rather than just two,” Andersson said. “If two different mutations occur at separate positions in the gene, recombination can generate entirely new combinations, creating four different variations instead of just two.”
Lesson beyond feathers
While the study helps explain the remarkable variety of feather colors seen in domestic chickens, the findings also have practical implications for poultry breeding. Because feather coloration is one of the defining characteristics of many breeds, understanding the genetics behind these traits can help breeders preserve breed standards.
While the findings will help breeders better understand the genetics behind the traits that define individual chicken breeds, Andersson believes the broader significance extends well beyond poultry.
“An important avenue for future research is to explore how common this reshuffling mechanism is across the animal kingdom — is it more common in some parts of the genome and in some species?” Andersson said.
The study demonstrates that evolution can generate new diversity not only through isolated mutations but also by reshuffling existing genetic changes into new combinations — a process that may help explain how biodiversity arises throughout nature.
By Camryn Haines, Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
The adult secondary screwworm, pictured here, is related to the New World screwworm. CSU scientists are working to uncover the differences between the two blowflies to better control the New World screwworm. Photo by Anthony Grigsby.
Jessica Metcalf’s work stinks. Literally. But the Colorado State University professor’s research may be key to protecting livestock and wildlife from a flesh-eating parasite.
In a project recently funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Metcalf is studying foul-smelling substances to figure out what attracts the New World screwworm to its favorite meal – open wounds – so she can develop better lures for trapping this serious threat to the livestock industry. The pest was eradicated in the United States more than 50 years ago but was found in Texas in early June.
When a wound starts to smell, that’s when you know it may be infected and teeming with bacteria. Foul odors are among the chemical byproducts of bacteria, and the same smelly bacterial chemicals that cause revulsion and concern for humans attract the New World screwworm – a type of blowfly.
"We use these bacterial cues to stay away from certain things – to not eat spoiled meat, for example,” Metcalf said. “The insects are using them for a different reason. They're like, 'Yes, bring it, that smells like a great place to lay eggs.'”
The New World screwworm blowfly lays eggs in wounds and body openings. The maggots that emerge then feed on living tissue. It can infest any warm-blooded animal, including people and pets, although there is low risk in the United States. Left untreated, the parasite can be deadly.
The USDA recently announced $105 million in funding for 40 projects, including Metcalf’s, to improve the country’s defenses against the New World screwworm. As of July 23, the parasite has been detected in cattle, sheep, goats and two dogs in Texas and in another dog in New Mexico. Metcalf and her collaborators aim to help keep it from spreading.
Building better bait
Detection is the first step to controlling the New World screwworm. One of the most widely used lures utilizes bacterial-produced smells from rotting meat, so it attracts a closely related blowfly, the secondary screwworm, which prefers a diet of dead flesh. Traps fill with the abundant secondary screwworm, making it difficult to detect the more harmful New World screwworm. Metcalf’s project will develop lures specific to the New World screwworm using bacterial-produced smells from wounds for improved monitoring.
These bacterial-produced smells are known as volatile organic compounds, or organic chemical compounds that vaporize easily.
Metcalf's team will distinguish the difference between the VOCs that attract the New World screwworm versus the secondary screwworm. In other words, what is so appealing to the New World screwworm about live flesh over dead flesh, where it wouldn’t cause harm?
Blowflies also carry their own bacteria, which they use to communicate across the species. These bacteria signal to other blowflies where to find a suitable host, compounding the infestation.
Metcalf’s team will distinguish which bacteria are found on NWS versus the secondary screwworm to help design better lures for traps. Knowing what attracts NWS also potentially could be used to redirect it away from live hosts.
"Because we had been working on the relationship among insects, bacteria and animal decomposition for the last 15 years, and the New World screwworm evolved from a decomposer – an insect that utilizes dead flesh to raise its young – we were well set up to tackle this problem,” Metcalf said.
Metcalf’s work with the bacteria that decompose animals, including humans, has forensic science applications. She and her collaborators found that the microbes present on a body can accurately determine the time of death – useful information for solving crimes.
"We have been gaining a foundational understanding of animal decomposition at our main field site in Huntsville, Texas,” Metcalf said. “The basic science underlies tools we build for forensic science in estimating how long a person's been dead. It turns out we can also leverage decomposition ecology, which relies heavily on blowflies and their bacterial partners, to improve surveillance and control of the New World screwworm.”
Metcalf’s team, including CSU faculty Kayla Borton and Kelly Wrighton, will use sophisticated genomic and chemical data analysis tools through a partnership with the Colorado State Microbiome (CoSMic) Network.
Network of stakeholders
Metcalf and her collaborators will enlist the help of on-the-ground volunteers, including livestock producers, veterinarians and wildlife biologists, to swab animal wounds for lab testing. These stakeholders will receive diagnostic results from the lab tests and will benefit from the solutions developed through the project. Meanwhile, Metcalf’s lab in CSU’s Department of Animal Sciences will compare wound bacteria and smells to dead animal samples.
To build the network of stakeholders, the research team is leveraging statewide partners, including producer associations, state agencies, CSU Extension and CSU’s Agricultural Experiment Station and Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratories. Stakeholders will receive information about the New World screwworm, sampling supplies and training. Project collaborators in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico will do similar outreach and sampling.
Tracey Goldstein, director of CSU’s One Health Institute, will coordinate outreach, training and sampling activities across the network. She said the network needs to be as wide as possible to watch for New World screwworm because if it infests wildlife, it will be especially challenging to control.
"This particular fly doesn't care if you're a person, a deer, a pig or a chicken. It will infest everything, which is a little scary,” Goldstein said. “That's also part of why it's hard to manage it. We really need all eyes and ears out there on the ground to help figure out if and when it gets to Colorado."
Julia Herman, beef cattle specialist veterinarian with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, will connect producers across the country with the research. She said producers in infestation zones are required to check every animal for wounds, and wounds must be healed before they can move livestock.
"We can't treat our way out of this problem,” Herman said. “We have to have other ways to manage this fly, and this project provides a way that we can decrease New World screwworm fly populations.”
She added, “While the New World screwworm isn't affecting a lot of animals, it is affecting the cattle industry as a whole, from animal welfare to transportation challenges to extra time and money and resources to find this fly’s larvae and treat the wounds. Hopefully we can take some of that stress off the producer and minimize the time and resource loss with projects like Dr. Metcalf's.”
Additional research question and potential solution
The current international effort to manage the New World screwworm is largely based on irradiating male blowflies to make them sterile. The USDA and Panama’s Ministry of Agriculture Development operate a facility in Panama that breeds, sterilizes and releases millions of New World screwworm blowflies. Female blowflies mate only once, and when they mate with sterile males, their eggs do not hatch.
This has effectively kept the species out of the U.S. for decades, but in 2023 the flesh-eating insect started to make a comeback in Mexico and Central America. Metcalf’s research will give her team the data to assess whether sterile males lose any of their bacterial attraction during sterilization.
“Another potential outcome of our research is understanding how we could make the sterile flies more fit,” Metcalf said.
CSU Ph.D. student Anthony Grigsby, a forensic entomologist and microbiologist in Metcalf’s lab, said understanding what influences blowfly behavior and their ecological role could be helpful in controlling pests of livestock and humans.
"So much of the New World screwworm control work up to this point has been reliant on methods created over half a century ago,” he said. “We can help modernize the infrastructure underlying Sterile Insect Technique programs along with our understanding of screwworm ecology with this project.”
Unravelling the climate behind the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations
The Eastern Mediterranean dried as part of a broader climate transition; weakening monsoons and shifting atmospheric circulation reduced moisture from Africa and rainfall across the region. Image: Katherine Power/Stockholm University
The most severe droughts in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean arose when multiple natural climate cycles coincided, according to a new study from Stockholm University published in Science Advances. The findings shed new light on the climate conditions surrounding the Late Bronze Age collapse and may help improve understanding of future drought risks in a warming world.
“Rather than being caused by a single climatic event, we found that the most extreme droughts emerged when natural climate cycles operating over different timescales coincided. This helps explain why the drought associated with the Late Bronze Age collapse were so severe”, says Katherine Power, PhD student, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, and first author of the study.
Around 3,200 years ago, many of the great civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Mycenaeans, Minoans and Hittite Empire, experienced widespread societal collapse. Although severe droughts have long been linked to this period, the climatic processes behind these events remain uncertain. To investigate this, Katherine Power and Qiong Zhang, professor in paleoclimate modelling, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University and co-author of the study, used a state-of-the-art climate model to reconstruct the evolution of the Mediterranean climate over the past 8,000 years.
“Our results show that the region underwent a gradual drying trend over thousands of years, driven by slow changes in Earth’s orbit. Superimposed on this long-term trend we also found shorter-term fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean and atmosphere”, says Katherine Power.
The researchers found that most severe droughts occurred when several natural climate cycles aligned, temporarily reinforcing one another and producing droughts far more intense than the long-term drying trend alone.
“The convergence of these processes pushed the Eastern Mediterranean beyond a critical hydroclimatic threshold, reducing water availability and increasing pressure on agriculture and food security within already vulnerable societies”, Katherine Power says.
These findings change how we think about past droughts, the researcher say, and understanding these processes is highly relevant today:
“The Mediterranean is one of the world’s climate change hotspots and the area is projected to become warmer and drier during the coming century. Our findings suggest that future drought risk may depend not only on long-term human-driven warming, but also on how natural variability in the Atlantic Ocean interacts with that background trend”, Katherine Power explains.
By revealing how different climate processes combine to amplify drought, this research can provide new insights into the risks of future hydroclimatic extremes in a warming world, the researchers say.
The study “Holocene ocean-atmosphere coupling and Mediterranean sensitivity to Atlantic circulation: Lessons from the Late Bronze Age collapse” was published in Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aed5439. For this research the model EC-Earth was used.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — If you look up invasive species in a textbook, there’s a good chance you’ll find a picture of a brown tree snake.
Native to Australia and the South Pacific, the brown tree snake arrived on Guam sometime after World War II, possibly by stowing aboard cargo planes. Since then, the snakes have driven many of the island’s native forest birds to local extinction and trigger hundreds of power outages each year by climbing electrical poles. In some areas of the U.S. territory, they reach densities as high as 30,000 per square mile.
The scale of the invasion has befuddled biologists given that only a small number of tree snakes were initially introduced. Inbreeding should have limited their ability to adapt to a new environment and slowed the population’s growth.
But it turns out that brown tree snakes have more genetic diversity than meets the eye, according to a new University at Buffalo-led study published Friday (July 24) in Science Advances.
Researchers from UB and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) used advanced long-read sequencing technology to reveal thousands of structural variants in the species’ genome. These variants — including duplications, deletions and rearrangements of DNA — are heavily concentrated in genes involved in immunity and smell.
This previously unseen genetic diversity may help explain how a population founded by only a handful of snakes was able to thrive despite a severe genetic bottleneck.
“The brown tree snake is maybe not wildly diverse, but it has important sources of genetic diversity that have been underappreciated,” says the study’s corresponding author, Trevor Krabbenhoft, PhD, associate professor in the UB Department of Biological Sciences.
The findings may be unwelcome news for agencies that have spent decades trying to control the brown tree snake population on Guam, but they could offer an encouraging message for conservation efforts.
“It’s possible that endangered species may have more flexibility in their genes than we realize,” says first author Christopher Osborne, PhD, a former PhD student in Krabbenhoft’s lab and now an aquatic biologist with State University of New York Oswego. “We're now getting a better understanding of unappreciated sources of genetic diversity that may explain how some inbred species can still respond to their environment.”
Long-read sequencing allows genome to be read cover to cover
Much of our understanding of genetic diversity comes from analyzing changes to single base pairs of DNA — like flipping an A to a G, or T to a C. That’s because that’s all initial DNA sequencing technology could reveal.
But long-read sequencing can characterize much longer pieces of DNA, revealing structural variants that can each affect 50 base pairs or more. In fact, structural variants affect nearly eight times more of the genome overall than single base-pair changes.
“It’s like looking at portions of two books letter by letter with a magnifying glass and thinking they’re the same, but not realizing entire paragraphs have been moved around or duplicated. Older sequencing technology didn’t allow us to easily see that DNA in one individual might be in a completely different place on the chromosome than in another,” says Levi Gray, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Krabbenhoft’s lab. “How we define genetic diversity and how we actually measure it is shaped largely by the technology of the day.”
Gray previously studied the brown tree snake problem in Guam while working for the USGS. It was through that collaboration that the researchers received DNA from the USGS Brown Tree snake Rapid Response Team (RRT), which aims to prevent the spread of the species in the U.S. and its territories.
Analyzing the DNA in Krabbenhoft’s lab, the team found that the brown tree snake genome has over 19,000 structural variants — or roughly 19,000 locations in the genome where segments of DNA differ due to duplications, deletions, or rearrangements.
These variants were not randomly distributed, but enriched in genes involved in immunity and olfaction, or sense of smell.
Brown tree snakes rely heavily on smell — using their forked tongues to taste chemical cues in the air and locate prey. Their enriched diversity in olfactory genes could help explain why brown tree snakes are known to eat other snakes in their native habitats but there’s little evidence of them doing so in Guam.
“The snakes’ heightened sense of smell may allow them to recognize one another as something more like siblings — especially given the high levels of inbreeding — than as prey,” Gray says.
It remains unclear whether the snakes’ structural variants arose before or after their introduction to Guam. Large-scale genomic changes typically accumulate over many generations, but some studies suggest that severe population bottlenecks can accelerate the formation of structural variants.
“Is it possible some of this diversity emerged after the invasion? It is, but we would have to sequence snakes from the native populations to know for sure,” Gray says.
Other co-authors include USGS scientists M. Renee Bellinger, PhD, and Melia Nafus, PhD, as well as UB research scientist Brian Foote, postdoctoral researcher Steven Fleck, PhD, as well as PhD students Sarah Chang and Hannah Waterman.
