Waiting for a bed, but not for care: Emergency department boarding study finds wide variation in handoffs

How long ED boarders wait to be seen by an inpatient team, including in the ED before they move to a hospital unit, could make a key difference in their care and safety

Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan

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Every day across the country, patients wait hours or days in clogged emergency departments for a hospital bed to open – a well-known crisis called boarding.

Now, a new study published in JAMA looks more closely at what happens after doctors decide they’re sick enough to be admitted. The findings could have important patient safety and public policy implications.

The study finds wide variation among hospitals in how many hours such patients wait before they start receiving inpatient-quality care, even if they are still physically in the emergency department waiting to be wheeled upstairs.

Such care includes medication management, therapy assessments, and planning for where the patient will go after leaving the hospital.

In all, the study shows 23% of emergency department boarding patients, accepted for general hospital care but waiting for an available bed, wait at least 4 hours before that transition from emergency care to inpatient management.

Of these patients, many wait 12 or even 24 hours for such a handoff to a team that can focus on the testing, treatment and planning they need.

The study's co-first author is Alex Janke, M.D., M.Sc., M.H.S., an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School and a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. He has written extensively on the problem of hospital boarding of admitted patients in the emergency department.

“Emergency departments don’t control who arrives or when. Ambulances keep coming and waiting rooms fill. Emergency care is organized around that reality: rapid assessment, stabilization of life- and limb-threatening illness and injury, and the first hours of treatment, with attention always available to new patients as they come in the door,” he said. “Inpatient care runs on a different clock, orchestrating clinical resources, pursuing diagnoses, adjusting medications, and discharge planning over days. Great care requires both, and delays in the transition from emergency care to inpatient management can be dangerous."

Janke notes that these waits for handoff to inpatient management are different from the total emergency department boarding time. The authors chose the 4-hour mark based on the Joint Commission standard, which identified emergency department boarding for more than 4 hours prior to an inpatient bed transfer as a critical patient safety issue.

Inpatient care in the ED

In recent years, hospitals have increasingly mobilized inpatient teams to assume responsibility for care while patients are still boarding in the emergency department.

This ensures that diagnosis and management can move forward before a bed is available. But these workflows have not been the subject of significant research or regulatory focus.

The new findings come from a team of emergency medicine physicians from across the country who pooled data from 56 hospitals in 17 health systems. They call themselves the Research in Emergency Systems and Quality Using EHRs Network, or RESQUE-NET.

RESQUE-NET was founded by Janke, along with the study’s co-first author Adrian Haimovich, M.D., Ph.D. of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the study’s senior author Ari Friedman, M.D., Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Hospital boarding in emergency departments is endemic across the U.S. right now. Health systems must have a plan for resourcing clinical teams to keep patients safe while they board.” Janke said. “This is especially important for older patients, those with multiple chronic conditions, and those taking high-risk medications.”

Boarder handoff time as a patient safety and hospital quality factor

The study shows that ED boarders waiting for general care beds at some hospitals -- especially those that are larger, serve more patients covered by Medicaid, and/or are training grounds for new physicians -- were more likely to wait 12 or even 24 hours after the conclusion of their ED care for inpatient management.

In general, patients who are over 65, those covered by Medicare, and those with higher illness acuity were more likely to experience a prolonged delay before an admitting team assumed care.

For complex patients taking multiple medications, attention from experienced physicians and hospital pharmacists can make a major difference.

Assessments by physical and occupational therapists, which are typically done in inpatient settings and can be important for decisions about patient discharge, may be delayed for patients who are boarding for prolonged periods.

While the study isn’t representative of all the nation’s hospitals, its authors hope to inspire more research on a topic that has not received much attention.

The study focuses on emergency patients who have been admitted to general medical inpatient units, not to surgical or intensive care, or treated and sent home.

The authors even suggest that measuring ED-to-inpatient-management handoffs could be another way of addressing how well hospitals are managing the inpatient capacity crisis.

Hospital ED boarding’s public policy implications

Starting in January 2027, electronic health record systems at hospitals nationwide will start to feed anonymous data about ED patients’ travels through the system directly to the federal government’s reporting system.

Such reporting will be required for all hospitals a year later.

Boarding times and other data will be shared publicly through the federal government’s Care Compare site, and by 2030 hospitals’ performance on certain ED measures will factor into their payment rates from the Medicare program.

Some ED information is already available on Care Compare.

There is also a bill in Congress that aims to spur even more transparency around hospital bed availability and ED data tracking, with the goal of reducing hospital boarding of admitted patients in the ED further.

Other efforts to reduce ED boarding

At U-M Health’s University Hospital emergency department, Janke notes that hospitalists, general internal medicine and family medicine inpatient teams are essential to patient safety for patients boarding in the ED for prolonged periods.

“Our hospitalist teams come down to the ED and take over care for patients who are still physically with us,” he said. “That’s not a small thing to ask of a team that already has a full service upstairs, and it’s the reason boarding here is safer than it would otherwise be.”

U-M adult inpatient and observation units operate at very high capacity year-round. The Michigan Medicine Command Center, or M2C2, acts as a hub for optimizing inpatient bed use across the Ann Arbor medical campus.

But at every hospital in the U.S., admission decisions often come down to conversations between an emergency physician and an inpatient attending physician. These days, that can include a request for an inpatient team to leave the floor and come to the ED.

When that is not always possible, hospitals also need to work to ensure that ED teams have the tools and clinical support they need to manage complex patients for days after their emergency care has concluded, Janke said.

For ED boarders whose admission is based in part on their lack of ability to care for themselves, or the lack of a family caregiver or safe home environment, hospitals could do more to support in-ED assessments needed for admission to skilled nursing facilities or home-based professional care.

“Risk concentrates at these moments where one clinical team hands a patient to another. Emergency and inpatient teams work on different clocks, and they're doing this under resource constraints. What our data show is that some hospitals consistently manage that transition in under four hours, and others take more than a day, which suggests it comes down to how a hospital organizes the work, not just how full it is." said Janke. “Where this goes well, the work has been assigned, with emergency and inpatient teams given the resources to manage these patients wherever they happen to be.”

The study received no external funding.

Additional authors are listed with the paper, and come from Mass General Brigham, Brown University Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington, New York University, the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, Yale University, the University of Virginia, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Massachusetts, Rush University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Mayo Clinic, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Citation: Time to Inpatient Management for Boarding Emergency Department Patients, JAMA, DOI:10.1001/jama.2026.1330

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Journal

JAMA

DOI

10.1001/jama.2026.13302 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Time to Inpatient Management for Boarding Emergency Department Patients

Article Publication Date

17-Aug-2026

Time to inpatient management for boarding emergency department patients

JAMA

About the Study: This study examines the patient- and hospital-level variation in time to initiation of inpatient management among patients admitted to general medical services.

Corresponding Author: Alexander T. Janke, MD, MHS, MSc, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan, 1500 E Medical Center Dr, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (atjanke@med.umich.edu).

10.1001/jama.2026.13302

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JAMA

A sea of opportunity for health and sustainability

A new study from the University of Miami suggests Brazil could improve public health and food security by making better use of its seafood resources.

University of Miami

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New research into seafood consumption and production in Brazil highlights how one of the world’s most populous countries could build healthier and more sustainable food systems by encouraging people to eat more seafood, developing sustainable and nutritionally diverse aquaculture, and better managing fisheries.

To assess seafood consumption in Brazil, a multidisciplinary team of researchers including Juan Pablo Quimbayo, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, and postdoctoral researcher Luiza Waechter analyzed food consumption survey data from 30,700 people. They also looked at fishery statistics and information on the nutritional content of different types of seafood. Their goal was to determine how much seafood Brazilians currently eat, what nutrients it provides, and whether the available seafood supply could help improve public health in a country where an estimated 10.6 million people are undernourished and 33 million face food insecurity.

Their findings, published in the journal Nature Food, show that average seafood consumption in Brazil is less than half the recommended level, and that deficiencies in nutrients found in seafood—such as vitamin A, magnesium, and calcium—are widespread.

“What’s very surprising is that in Brazil, people don’t consume a lot of seafood” despite the country’s extensive coastline, said Quimbayo, an ecologist who runs the University’s BioScales Lab. “But increasing seafood consumption cannot simply mean catching more fish. Many fisheries are already under pressure, so improving nutrition has to go hand in hand with sustainable fisheries management.”

A Brazilian fisherman holds his catch. Photo: Ronaldo Francini-Filho

The researchers found that Brazilians could reduce nutritional deficiencies by increasing seafood consumption from six percent to 25 percent of their total protein intake. Seafood, the researchers point out, is a low-cost and nutritionally diverse source of protein that has a relatively low environmental cost compared to beef and other types of animal protein. 

“Seafood is highly diverse, both taxonomically and nutritionally, which means that different species can provide different combinations of nutrients,” explained Waechter, who is Brazilian. “That means we can have a more flexible diet. We can change our diet to have different nutrients, and then we don’t need to focus on just one specific source or specific species.”

Lower than recommended seafood consumption isn’t the only problem the researchers uncovered. They also found that demand for seafood exceeds supply in several Brazilian states.

Rather than proposing that Brazilians catch more wild fish, however, the researchers posit that farming seafood through aquaculture could help meet an increased demand without impacting wild fish populations. They also argue that decisions about which species to catch or farm should be based in part on their nutritional value, in addition to how many fish can be harvested.

“One of the important findings is that this is not simply a question of getting enough protein,” Quimbayo said. “Brazilians already meet protein recommendations on average, yet their diets still fall short for several essential micronutrients. What people eat, and the nutritional quality of those foods, matters as much as how much protein they consume.”

The researchers acknowledged that a cultural preference for chicken, beef, and pork in some regions of Brazil may be hard to change, however.

The impacts of this research extend beyond Brazil. The study highlights how preserving biodiversity is important not just for environmental protection but also for public health, since biodiversity impacts the variety of nutrients available in food.

“It is easy to think about fisheries only in terms of their immediate value—you catch a fish and generate food or income,” Quimbayo said. “But we also need to ask what will be available for the next generation. If we protect the ecosystems that sustain fisheries, including coral reefs, mangroves, and other coastal habitats, we can help ensure that future generations continue to have access to both food and biodiversity.”

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Journal

Nature Food

DOI

10.1038/s43016-026-01402-4 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Article Title

Seafood consumption could help fill nutrition gaps in Brazil

 

Sandia conducts next-level test for secure transportation vehicle

Mobile Guardian Transporter crash test provides critical data

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories

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The second prototype of the Mobile Guardian Transporter test vehicle arrives at the sled track facility at Sandia National Laboratories for a head-on crash. Test results will help qualify the Mobile Guardian Transporter design, ahead of full-rate production. 

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Credit: Photo by Joel Ortiz/Sandia National Labs

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — With rockets propelling it down the sled track at Sandia National Laboratories, a semitrailer loaded with mock nuclear weapons slammed into a barrier. It took mere moments to complete the second and final full-scale crash test of the Mobile Guardian Transporter, a next-generation system that will carry nuclear weapons and other sensitive materials for the Department of Energy’s Office of Secure Transportation.

The tests are designed to demonstrate that, if a trailer were ever involved in an accident on a public road, the cargo inside would remain secure and pose no danger to nearby communities, a key tenet of the Office of Secure Transportation’s mission and vision.

“This was our last opportunity to understand how the trailer performs in a crash,” said Jason Berger, the program’s crash test lead for the second test asset. “The results will help qualify the design, a critical step before production can begin.”

Sandia conducted a side-impact crash that evaluated the first Mobile Guardian Transporter test asset in 2020. The second test completes the full-scale crash series and gives engineers a more complete picture of how the trailer performs in severe accidents.

“The second prototype crash test is a critical step in showing that the trailer and its cargo do not pose a hazard to the public,” Berger said.

“We are extremely proud of the commitment and dedication of teams across Sandia and our external partners, who applied their knowledge to make this a successful test,” said Kelly Neely, the senior manager overseeing the Mobile Guardian Transporter program. “It’s taken focus, determination and technical expertise to get us to this point.”

Test planning and execution

While the test itself lasted only a few moments, planning and preparation took about a year and a half. For a test of this scope, that’s not very long.

“This was a very heavily instrumented test and the overall scope of it was very large,” said James Dykes, the test director. “These kinds of large-scale, high-consequence tests don’t come along very often because of the complexity. It was the largest data collection effort in the history of Sandia’s rocket sled track facility.”

A test with 100 channels of data collection and a few cameras would already be considered complex. In this test, the trailer was equipped with nearly 500 data channels for acceleration, strain, force and temperature, plus about three dozen cameras, when rockets propelled it down Sandia’s sled track in the fall of 2025.

Test coordination

As part of the planning process, the team created redundant pathways and backup channels to ensure they could capture the most critical data if some equipment failed.

“With this test, we’ve gone beyond the bounds of what is understood commercially and inside Sandia for data collection and acquisition,” Berger said. “To accomplish this, Sandia’s sled track test team stood up a temporary multi-acre facility with a control center, data collection trailers and console trailers near the sled track. Working at a remote, undeveloped site introduced many challenges. Strong monsoon storms caused flooding at the sled track multiple times, but the teams worked through these challenges to ensure the test occurred on schedule.”

Impact on weapons programs

Several nuclear weapons modernization and stockpile programs provided hardware for the test, including Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. These systems represent different types of nuclear weapons that must be transported.

“Nuclear deterrence programs need to assess safe and secure transportation for each weapon type,” said Tara Olivier, a Sandia senior manager working in nuclear deterrence. “Gathering the environmental data from the crash will help qualify those systems on the Mobile Guardian Transporter.”

With so many partners, a large task in test planning was getting everyone on the same page.

“It’s a huge effort to coordinate all of the teams, and then to ensure we’re doing the right test and collecting the right data,” Berger said.

As part of the test, the trailer, restraints and the shipping containers for the weapon systems were pushed to their limits. Capturing the right data was essential for understanding how this hardware performed and for supporting future design qualification.

Validating the models

With the test complete, the team is now focused on analyzing the data.

“We met all our testing objectives, including the speed at which the trailer crashed. We’re where we wanted to be with data acquisition and collection,” Dykes said. 

The Mobile Guardian Transporter team will continue working closely with modeling and simulation teams to compare the test results with pretest predictions and refine their computer models.

“Using the crash test data, we’ll build a modeling and simulation tool that will allow us to analyze many different crash environments,” Berger said. “The modeling and simulation tool will be our enduring tool to assess trailer performance, assess safety of our weapons systems during transport, and assess nuclear safety of the trailer.”

Key partnerships

Strong partnerships across the nation’s nuclear security enterprise were essential to executing a successful test.

“Executing this crash test is a shining example of Sandia integration and what we can do,” Berger said. “Large-scale systems-of-systems tests involve many stakeholders and, specific to the crash test, it was critical that the Office of Secure Transportation, NNSA and Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national labs were all in lockstep for funding, delivery of test hardware on schedule and development of a complex technical basis and data collection design.”

At Sandia, the design agency for Office of Secure Transportation’s Mobile Guardian Transporter and the lead systems integrator for nuclear weapons programs, about 200 employees worked on the test.

“Completing the crash test for the Mobile Guardian Transporter is a significant accomplishment, thanks to the dedication and commitment of many Sandians and our exceptional partners,” Labs Director Laura McGill said. “Safe and secure transport is a key element of maintaining a credible deterrent.”

The Kansas City National Security Campus’s New Mexico Operations location is the production agency for the Mobile Guardian Transporter. The crash test data will help inform final design decisions and support future production of the new transporter fleet.

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Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.

 

Firing set operator Paul Vinyard prepares to push the button that will initiate the rocket motors to propel the Mobile Guardian Transporter down the sled track at Sandia National Laboratories. 

Credit

Photo by Bryn Whisenand/Sandia National Labs

 

The Nike rocket motors and the pusher sled that propelled the Mobile Guardian Transporter Prototype 2 test vehicle down the track at Sandia National Laboratories rest in the sand brake trough used to stop the sled. 

Credit

Photo by Michael Ludwig/Sandia National Labs

 

Tsimané and Moseten peoples of lowland Bolivia demonstrate an intriguing case of epidemiological resilience

Researchers explore possible reasons the remote Indigenous Tsimané and Moseten people of lowland Bolivia were remarkably resilient to the COVID virus

University of California - Santa Barbara

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A health educator conveys information about COVID-19 transmission to members of Bolivia's Tsimané population.

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Credit: Michael Gurven

“The fact that the fatality rate was very, very low, was a bit of a head scratcher,” said UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Michael Gurven, who has worked with these populations for decades. After all, experts and lay public alike had assumed that remote Indigenous populations, with limited access to healthcare, would be especially vulnerable to the contagion. But a total of only three people succumbed to the disease, a remarkable feat of resilience that Gurven and fellow researchers attribute to “a more vigorous and effective immune response to infection, with implications for future global pandemics.”

The researchers’ work is published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

The coming of COVID

When the COVID pandemic began in early 2020, Gurven’s mind went immediately to the Tsimané and Moseten tribes of lowland Bolivia. Still very nonindustrial, and with minimal access to healthcare, they had the odds stacked against them.

“Many people were worried about these remote groups in the Amazon that history has unfortunately shown to be highly vulnerable to novel infections,” said Gurven, who co- directs the Tsimané Health and Life History Project. “We know that virgin soil epidemics can be lethal. Over the past few centuries, many introduced infections have devastated whole groups.” Elsewhere in the world, the disease was indeed hitting Indigenous populations hard.

“And so there was a big concern with what might happen, especially with the minimal medical resources out there,” he said.

Working collaboratively with Indigenous leaders and local health officials to stem the tide of infection,the researchers’ initial efforts centered around a strategy of voluntary collective isolation, in which these largely self-sufficient groups would refrain from making contact with the outside world in an effort to leverage their remoteness.

The pandemic came anyway, and, bracing for the worst, the research team switched to surveillance mode, monitoring and recording how the disease spread, who got infected and the severity and duration of their symptoms. Once introduced, the virus indeed spread quickly, to the majority of the population: 71% of the Tsimané and 63% of the Moseten. People who were infected reported the same kinds of symptoms that were being experienced all over the world.

“COVID spread far and wide in the communities and it wasn’t just a minor thing,” Gurven said. “Eighty percent of positive cases experienced flu-like symptoms, headaches, loss of smell, loss of taste, just like elsewhere.”

But, contrary to expectations, only three people died. “If we were using the same fatality rates we saw elsewhere, we would have expected a lot more deaths,” he said. Even when taking into account the younger age profile of Tsimané and Moseten populations, their death rates were much lower than expected. What had allowed these populations to evade the worst of the COVID pandemic?

There are many factors to consider, according to Gurven, but the answer could lie in a combination of things, many of which have to do with their lifestyle and environment. The Tsimané and Moseten are mostly non-industrial forager-horticulturalists who inhabit a food-limited environment with high exposure to diverse parasites and pathogens. Compared to much of industrialized society, they have very active lifestyles, which may protect them from the comorbidities that often come with a sedentary lifestyle — such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension — conditions that could lead to severe complications when occurring alongside a COVID infection.

Meanwhile, blood tests revealed evidence of a “vigorous and effective” immune response in the high levels of COVID-specific antibodies the two Indigenous communities had — more than double the amount measured in a French cohort during the same COVID wave. While post-infection antibody levels can’t be responsible for the low mortality, the researchers propose that the high levels of antibodies could indicate a heightened immune response earlier in the disease progression, so that the COVID infection is rarely able to advance beyond the initial flu-like phase. Blood tests also revealed high levels of infection-fighting white blood cells.

“The Tsimané still experienced that first stage of COVID, but they never quite got to that second stage where it enters your lungs, when people experienced cytokine storms and sometimes needed to be hooked up to a respirator,” Gurven said, referring to the severe and sometimes fatal immune reaction that is associated with advanced COVID infections. “In fact, we had struggled to find and set up oxygen concentrators because we were worried, especially for the older adults, but there was no need to even use them.”

Underlying this upregulated immune system, the researchers hypothesize, is the persistent exposure to pathogens. Lack of sanitation and an environment of parasites, bacterial infections, and the like help to maintain what they call “immune readiness.”

“There’s a stronger, more reactive response, and the diversity of exposures could possibly speak to the regulation of responses,” Gurven said. With this enhanced ability to regulate, he added, “you can turn it up when needed and you can crank it back down when you don’t.”

In comparison, our relatively hygienic industrial society doesn’t give us the same diversity of pathogen exposure, so our immune systems are not as fine-tuned. “With us, the immunity can be overly responsive, and to non-pathogens — so we see far more cases of allergies and autoimmune diseases than groups like the Tsimané,” he said.

This well-regulated immune response may also confer another protective factor, particularly for the older members of the communities. “Inflammaging,” or a chronic, low-level inflammation that increases with age, is notably minimal within the Tsimané and Moseten populations.

“What we observe the immune system doing as we age doesn’t appear to be the case in some of these more rural contexts where there’s a larger and more diverse set of infectious exposures,” Gurven said.

Taken together, Gurven concludes, “There’s a confluence of factors that, in interaction, shape people’s risk. And so we shouldn’t be looking for a single magic bullet.

“And if there are lessons to learn that might generalize to conditions that are favorable toward being protected against infectious disease, well, that’s great. We need that.”

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Journal

Social Science & Medicine

 

Global biobank awareness: Celebrating impact, advancing support, and increasing global visibility of biobanks

SAGE

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Biobanks are collections of biospecimens and associated data from animals, humans, environments, microbes, geological deposits, botanicals and crops or historical artifacts that can be used in critical scientific research. In the case of human and animal biospecimens, these may also be able used in direct clinical interventions such as precision medicine. Despite being a foundation and linchpin of modern science, with major contributions in nearly every sub-discipline of scientific research around the world, biobanking as a discipline remains somewhat in obscurity. This unfamiliarity represents an ongoing threat to the sustainability of biobanks, which includes reductions in funding, government and public support, and ultimately scientific impact. Therefore, awareness of biobanking’s global impact must be the foundation for further advocacy and education, and with this in mind, a new international initiative, ‘Global Biobank Awareness’ (GBA) has been launched to propel biobanking into the public consciousness.

“Biobanking is often overlooked or misunderstood for its complexity and its global impact. Even people who work in the field and/or collaborate with biobanks may not immediately connect the term “biobanking” with the specialized processes, expertise, infrastructure, and stewardship behind it” said GBA co-chair Ms. Debra Leiolani Garcia.

Global Biobank Awareness (GBA) is a worldwide initiative dedicated to helping the public, stakeholders, academic institutions and governments better understand the essential role biobanks play in scientific discovery, environmental sustainability, and modern healthcare. “It’s not uncommon for scientific professionals to completely underestimate the precise practices and diligence required to appropriately collect and curate high-quality biobanks” said GBA co-chair Dr Cassandra Griffin, “Appropriate infrastructure, global regulatory and legislative approvals as well as a detailed understanding of standardized methodologies such as cryopreservation are essential to ensure that specimens yield the highest quality research data”.

While high profile biobanking initiatives such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are gaining traction in public awareness, there is considerable work to be done. Global Biobanking Awareness (GBA) launched in 2025 with the release of an introductory video showcasing the vast breadth and diversity of biobanking on a global scale. In 2026, this initiative will be expanding to include case studies and biobanking representation delivered during a dedicated Biobanking Awareness Week. Distinguishing it from past initiatives aimed to increase visibility of biobanking, GBA is directed not only at the scientific community but at the public. “Biobanking is a unique discipline of science, in which stakeholders such as donor patients or traditional custodians are essential advocates who underpin both our ability to collect samples and are likely to benefit from the research outcomes they generate.” Says Dr Griffin. “Ensuring an integrated awareness between the scientific and non-scientific communities alike will be key to attracting the attention of policy makers and funding bodies. The outcome, a more robust delivery of biobanking and biospecimen science programs and faster translation of research outcomes for essential programs such as personalised medicine in oncology.”

The GBA co-chairs emphasize that the success of Global Biobank Awareness depends on active participation from biobankers, partners, and allied communities. By engaging openly, sharing experience, and highlighting real-world impact, contributors can help make the value of biobanking more visible, relevant, and widely understood. To find out more about GBA visit globalbiobankawareness.net. A short report on this exciting initiative is also available in the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER; www.isber.org) Official Journal, Biopreservation and Biobanking titled ‘Global Biobank Awareness: An Initiative to Showcase Impact and Increase Global Visibility of Biobanks’1 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19475535261471389). As a generous show of support for this growing initiative, this manuscript is available to access without a journal subscription for a limited time.

Ms. Garcia concluded “Dr Griffin and I are excited to work with partners across global biobanking networks and associations to advance this initiative through coordinated collaboration in 2026 and beyond. Together, we aim to strengthen awareness, celebrate the impact of biobanking, and build global support for the field.”

References:

1. Griffin CP, Garcia DL, Grossman GH. Global Biobank Awareness: An Initiative to Showcase Impact and Increase Global Visibility of Biobanks. Biopreservation and Biobanking. 2026;0(0). doi:10.1177/19475535261471389

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Journal

Biopreservation and Biobanking

DOI

10.1177/19475535261471389 

Method of Research

News article

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Global Biobank Awareness: An Initiative to Showcase Impact and Increase Global Visibility of Biobanks

 

New research flips past findings on plant recovery from drought

Colorado State University

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Xylem tissues are highlighted with red stain in this cross section of a sunflower stem. Photo courtesy of Jared Stewart.

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Credit: Jared Stewart/Colorado State University

Sunflowers are unable to fully recover from drought, new research has found, contradicting previous findings on the plant’s ability to reverse drought-induced failure of water-transporting tissues and revealing new insights into how drought impacts plants.

As a plant dries, gas bubble blockages, or embolisms, can form in the plant's water-transporting tissues. Previous studies concluded that sunflowers could reverse these blockages through a process called refilling but offered very little direct evidence.

The study by Colorado State University, the University of Colorado Boulder and the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that although sunflowers appear to recover remarkably well from drought, the embolisms that accumulate in stems and leaves do not reverse after watering. Results are published in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

“The strain of extracting water from dry soil can introduce air into the tissue responsible for moving water from the roots to leaves,” said co-author Troy Ocheltree, a CSU associate professor in the Warner College of Natural Resources. “Once this happens, the air blockage prevents the leaves from getting the water they need to grow and photosynthesize.”

Past studies relied on destructive sampling of sunflower plants – a method that is likely to lead to false positives, said lead author Jared Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher at both CSU and CU. The new research directly observed embolisms in intact sunflower plants using a microCT scanner at CSU's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Previous work by the team found a complete reversal of embolism and full recovery in a type of wild grass within 24 hours of watering – the first evidence of refilling in intact plants. Those findings were published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Combined results from the two studies suggest that some plants can refill embolized tissue and others cannot, which sheds light on how different types of plants might recover from drought.

"Most researchers' opinions fall into one of two dichotomous extremes: refilling never occurs, or refilling is relatively common,” Stewart said. “The combination of our two studies means almost everyone is wrong. It also means our previous findings with barnyard grass might have enormous potential for agricultural efforts related to drought stress and resilience.”

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Journal

Journal of Experimental Botany

DOI

10.1093/jxb/erag294 

Article Title

No evidence of xylem embolism refilling during recovery from drought stress in intact sunflowers