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)
Thursday, May 21, 2026
The fungus that spoils nearly everything
Researchers discover the secret behind gray mold’s unstoppable spread
Even if you haven’t heard of Botrytis cinerea, you’ve likely seen it — slowly growing in your store-bought blueberries, tomatoes or even on your beautiful orchids. Commonly known as gray mold, the fungus attacks hundreds of plants. For years, scientists have unsuccessfully tried to breed crops that could resist the fungus. New research from the University of California, Davis, suggests decades of crop breeding strategies may have overlooked a crucial piece of the puzzle: the pathogen itself.
Two related studies led by Dan Kliebenstein, professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, show the problem may lie in a fundamental misunderstanding of how plants and the pathogen interact. The studies were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An unexpected defense
Scientists had long assumed that when different plants are attacked by a fungus, they mount a broadly similar defense — the same basic response with minor variations.
“It’s like they might do little decorations on the Christmas tree, but it’s always a Christmas tree,” Kliebenstein said. The team’s findings challenge that assumption. For some plants, it’s not a Christmas tree at all. It’s a saguaro cactus.
Each plant mounted a response that was fundamentally its own, whether comparing closely related crops or distant ones. That finding alone helps explain why decades of resistance breeding have yielded only modest results.
“It’s why we could never figure out how to move information from one plant to help another become resistant, because what one plant is doing doesn’t actually do anything for the other plant,” Kliebenstein said.
A human-like pathogen
The second study yielded more surprising results. Rather than having a universal “master key” to infect any plant it encounters, gray mold appears to sense what it’s growing on and adjusts its attack accordingly.
"The pathogen is like a human," Kliebenstein said. "At some level, it knows it's attacking a strawberry, and there's one set of things it should do. If it's attacking a tomato, it knows it's attacking a tomato and it decides to do something completely different."
In a sense, Kliebenstein said the fungus is “tasting” the difference between a strawberry and a tomato — reading the plant's own chemical defenses and flavors — then countering them.
Reframing the problem
The two studies could shift how scientists approach disease prevention, Kliebenstein said.
“They suggest that everything we’ve been trying on the plant or fungus side is probably always going to be doomed to fail, and instead we should be looking at how the pathogen knows what it’s attacking,” he said.
If researchers can identify the genes the fungus uses to recognize which plant it’s attacking, they might be able to confuse the fungus chemically or genetically. A disoriented pathogen could allow the plant’s own natural defenses to take over.
“We've been hitting ourselves against a brick wall and we just never thought about this,” Kliebenstein said. “Now we might have realized — oh, if we take two steps to the right, the brick wall ends.”
It's a strategy that could, in theory, work across many crops at once, in contrast to current approaches that must be engineered one plant at a time.
The stakes are significant. Gray mold causes an estimated 5% to 10% crop loss across many fruits and vegetables, affecting everything from grapes and lettuce to soybeans and cut flowers.
Other authors of the studies include Ritu Singh, Anna Jo Muhich, Cloe Tom, Celine Caseys, Jack McMillan, Karishma Srinivas and Lucca Faieta of UC Davis.
The studies were funded by the National Science Foundation.
This photo shows different parts of the (sometimes not-so-blue) blue button: the chitinous float; the mantle; gonozooids, responsible for reproduction; and the dactylozooids, which catch food and defend. Unseen at the center is the gastrozooid, which digests food to provide nutrients to the whole colony.
A new study of the blue button (Porpita porpita), a small and elusive sea creature which lives on the surface of the ocean, has found that it may live for several years adrift at sea, much longer than previously estimated. Researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Misaki Marine Biological Station also found that the float which keeps the animal adrift expands by growing new rings from its outermost layer. Blue buttons are notoriously difficult to keep alive in captivity, so this is a step closer towards eventually understanding their full life cycle.
The tiny blue button looks at first glance like a delicate jewellike jellyfish. But, it is in fact a collection of tiny, soft marine invertebrates, called zooids (or polyps), which grow as one colony. The zooids are attached to a circular disc made of chitin, the same stuff as crab and shrimp shells, which contains chambers of air and acts as a float. Similar to a raft with its crew, the individual zooids work in specialized groups to perform different tasks to survive, from catching prey (dactylozooids) to reproduction (gonozooids).
Blue buttons only grow to about 4-5 centimeters in diameter and drift wherever the current takes them, making them difficult to spot, unless you are lucky enough to be in the right place on the open ocean or they unfortunately get stranded on a beach. Despite their hardiness out at sea – surviving wind, rain, waves and sun – it has proven challenging to keep them alive in captivity, making studying them very difficult.
However, researchers at the University of Tokyo, along with specialists at two Japanese aquariums, have recently achieved some success.
“We were able to keep 10 blue button colonies alive for up to 21 days,” reported Associate Professor Kohei Oguchi from the University of Tokyo. “From our observations of these colonies, we can now estimate that blue buttons may actually live for several years drifting on the ocean surface. This is much longer than previously thought, which was less than a year.”
Oguchi searched for blue buttons in rock pools on daily walks around the University of Tokyo’s Misaki Marine Biological Station, on the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo. The team then undertook extensive testing of the conditions needed to keep them alive, trialing different-sized containers (30 cm to 1 meter in diameter), a range of temperatures (18-25 degrees Celsius), flowing or still water, varied levels of sunshine, and different types of food. In the end, they found success using the simplest method – a 30-cm plastic container of filtered seawater, changed daily and placed near a sunny spot, and a diet of small shrimp.
Photographs were taken of the blue buttons when they were collected and again at the end of their rearing period. From the change in the radius of the colony, Daiki Wakita, a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in mathematical analysis, could estimate the age of a colony using a mathematical tool called the von Bertalanffy growth model, often used to gauge the growth of fish and coral. A 4-millimeter-radius colony was about 3 months old, a 12-mm one about 1 year old, while a 23-mm colony was an unexpected average of 5 years old.
Aside from finding out more about the blue button’s longer lifespan, the team had the opportunity to observe how the float grew. “The chitinous float that supports the colony looks just like the cross section of a tree, with concentric rings. We found that new layers grow from the periphery of the outer ring,” said Oguchi. “This means that it doesn’t grow from the expansion of preexisting layers, which we didn’t know for sure before.”
Following on from this initial success, Oguchi’s ambition is to rear blue buttons from their first stage of life through their entire life cycle. “My research focuses on how the different specialized individuals that make up a blue button colony develop, and how they are integrated so that the colony behaves almost like a single organism,” said Oguchi. “Being able to keep colonies alive for as long as we have for this study is an encouraging step forward.”
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The growth of the blue button’s float varied between the colonies in this study, but some showed very clear expansion even as the other zooids/polyps in the colony diminished.
The long strands that look like tentacles are living zooids. While they do have a mild sting, it is typically not dangerous, unlike its relative the Portuguese man o’ war.
Credit
September 9, 2025; Movements of zooids in the blue button, Porpita porpita; Hisanori Kohtsuka.
Journal:
Daiki Wakita, Kaho Murai, Gaku Yamamoto, Ryota Tamada, Hisanori Kohtsuka, Kohei Oguchi. “A neustonic hydrozoan Porpita porpita drifts for over a year”. Scientific Reports. May 20 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-49897-y
Funding:
This work was partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP23K25835 to D.W., and JP24K09579, JP24K09600 to K.O..
Conflicts of Interest:
The authors declare there are no conflicts of interest for this manuscript.
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(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — From the highest mountains to the deepest ocean, the driest desert to the lushest jungle, Earth displays a dazzling array of lifeforms. And eukaryotes account for many of these lifeforms, including nearly all of the multicellular life we can see in the landscape. But scientists are still piecing together exactly how this domain of life evolved from simpler predecessors.
A team led by scientists at UC Santa Barbara and McGill University now has a better idea of what our early ancestors looked like, where they lived and how they functioned. “We found that the oldest eukaryotes that we’ve seen so far already needed oxygen in some capacity,” said co-lead author Leigh Anne Riedman, a paleontologist at UCSB. “And we were able to figure out that they were living on or within the seafloor by the way they were distributed across the samples.”
The paper, published in Nature, overturns certain long-held assumptions about early eukaryotes while corroborating others. For instance, it seems they had probably acquired mitochondria early on, as many scientists believed, but likely didn’t move into the water column until much later than expected.
The divisions of life
Kingdom is often considered the ultimate grouping when sorting life into categories. Distinctions like animal, plant and fungus sit at this level. However, biology is more complex than the labels we invent to classify the living world. Animals, plants and fungi are all part of a larger group called Eukarya, as are other lifeforms with characteristics like mitochondria, membrane-bound organelles and genes enclosed within a nucleus. Learning how this group arose and diversified is a large part of understanding how our world came to look the way it does.
In the early 2000s, most scientists assumed that these microscopic (and mostly single-celled) organisms probably lived in the water column, since they looked a lot like modern plankton. “There was also a conventional wisdom that all these early eukaryotes breathed oxygen and had mitochondria,” said senior author Susannah Porter, a professor in UCSB’s Earth Science Department. “We wrote a couple papers saying, ‘Hey, not so fast. We might be looking at organisms that pre-date these features.’”
Matching organisms to their homes
In this paper, Riedman, Porter and their co-authors wanted to determine whether these early eukaryotes did or did not use oxygen to produce energy, namely if they carried out aerobic or anaerobic respiration. So they used sedimentology and geochemistry to determine where these organisms lived and what oxygen levels were like in those environments.
The team focused on deposits from the McArthur and Birrindudu basins of Northern Territory, Australia, which host the oldest well accepted eukaryote fossils. Today, this region of Australia ranges from outback and savanna to the billabongs and forests of Kakadu N.P. But between 1.75 to 1.4 billion years ago, it was a shallow inland sea replete with lagoons, offshore mudflats and calm coastal waters. Oxygen was beginning to build up in the ocean at this time, but still had a patchy distribution. Atmospheric concentrations were 1% or less of modern levels. “We would not have been able to breathe,” Porter said.
Riedman prepared and sorted microfossils from drill core material, identifying the eukaryotes within the assemblages. Meanwhile, co-lead author Max Lechte and Professor Galen Halverson at McGill University characterized the environments preserved in the rock layers based on the sediment type. This enabled the team to match taxa to four environments — lagoons, tidal areas, coastal regions and offshore waters.
The team then looked at the minerals in the surrounding material to determine how much oxygen was present in each environment. Different concentrations of oxygen in the water affect which minerals will form. For instance, the presence of iron pyrite (FeS2) indicates that there wasn’t any oxygen that would’ve otherwise converted the sulfur to SO3 and SO4. The concentrations of other metal elements in the rock — like vanadium, molybdenum and uranium — also provided insights on ancient oxygen concentrations.
Combining the taxonomy, sedimentology and mineralogy enabled the authors to understand how the oxygen levels and inhabitants of these environments varied over time and space. And they found that these ancient eukaryotes appeared almost exclusively in rock formed from oxygenated seafloor environments. Not only in shallower waters, but also offshore, as long as there was oxygen.
This correlation implies that ancient eukaryotes probably required oxygen for at least part of their lifecycle. And the strength of the association suggests that these organisms were living on the seafloor itself. If they were present at the oxygenated surface, their remains would’ve settled into anoxic seafloor sediments as well.
The cradle of eukaryotic life
The authors had expected to find eukaryotes throughout the ancient seas. “What’s striking to me is how restricted eukaryotes are at this time,” Porter said. “The surface water seems like such an obvious place to live, especially if they have to have oxygen; there’s lots of oxygen at the surface.”
Porter and Riedman suspect that eukaryotes first evolved on the seafloor, and perhaps there hadn’t been any pressure to move into the water column yet, or any openings to allow them to make the change. They’re currently working to uncover when this occurred, which would also open the door to asking how and why.
The geographic restriction could also explain a puzzling pattern: Eukaryotes were neither abundant nor diverse for nearly 1 billion years after genetic and fossil evidence suggests they arose. And that would make sense if they were inhabiting a very limited environment. “The fossils that are 800 million years old, and the ones 1.7 billion years old are, for the most part, the same cast of characters,” Riedman and Porter explained.
But Earth’s surface temperatures plunged around 720 million years ago, and it entered the Cryogenian, also known as Snowball Earth. During this period, ice sheets extended from the poles to the equator. The extreme conditions certainly would have caused mass extinctions, the authors explained, which would’ve opened up previously occupied niches as the planet emerged from its big freeze 635 million years ago. Indeed, the Ediacaran Period that followed marks the first emergence of complex, multicellular life, all of it eukaryotic.
An early acquisition
The distribution of fossils also suggests that eukaryotes had probably acquired mitochondria very early on. These specialized energy-generating organelles are a hallmark of all living eukaryotes, and the leading theory posits that they developed from free-living bacteria that were incorporated into an ancestral eukaryotic host cell. In fact, living on the seafloor would’ve put ancestral eukaryotes in close proximity with other organisms, something that would have facilitated this assimilation. Some scientists hypothesize that mitochondria enabled eukaryotes to develop such complex morphology, which the fossils from the McArthur and Birrindudu basins display even 1.75 billion years ago.
While early eukaryote diversity was low in an absolute sense, it’s higher than scientists would expect if the group had just gotten going. “So, although these are the oldest eukaryote fossils yet described, the diversity and variety of form achieved by this point suggest they have a deeper history,” Porter said. She, Riedman and UCSB PhD student Wentao Zheng are currently looking at microfossils from even older layers in the McArthur Basin, as well as the Animikie Basin of Minnesota, but would like to peer earlier still to uncover how the group reached the sophistication already present in these specimens.
Their research is part of a joint project between the Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigating the origin of the eukaryotic cell, with additional funding from NASA’s Exobiology program.
“Studies like this give us an opportunity to understand these little guys as organisms,” Riedman said. “Rather than just viewing them as a name or part of a stamp collection, we can picture where they were living, what they were doing and who they were.” This perspective is precisely what’s needed to unravel the events that led to our planet’s incredible biodiversity, and ultimately our own origins.
Journal
Nature
Carbon markets underestimate the risks U.S. forests face from climate change
Forests can’t offset emissions as a carbon store if trees are constantly succumbing to droughts, pests and fires
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — The world’s forests form a vast network of carbon reservoirs, keeping carbon sequestered from the atmosphere where its presence is disrupting Earth’s climate systems. Many corporate, national and sub-national climate policies rely on forests’ essential ability to store carbon, often tracked and funded through a system of “carbon credits” issued to polluting industries in exchange for protecting and restoring forests.
But if trees die — from wildfire, drought or insect infestation — large amounts of greenhouse gasses are released, exacerbating ongoing climate change. And the warming climate is accelerating this problem by making such disturbances more frequent and severe, but only in some places and not in others.
Scientists at the University of Utah and UC Santa Barbara, in collaboration with international experts, sought to determine which forests are most likely to release their stored carbon over the next 100 years, and whether current carbon-credit systems accurately account for those risks.
The results, published in Nature, show that there are places in the United States where carbon emissions from die-backs far exceed what is currently accounted for in carbon-credit systems. This is particularly true for the parched American West. Fortunately, the researchers point out ways it can be corrected.
“Getting to net zero emissions will take a portfolio of solutions,” said co-author Anna Trugman, a forest ecologist at UCSB. “But in many regions, escalating disturbance associated with climate change makes it riskier to count on forests to sequester carbon.”
“Forests are facing increasing durability risks due to climate change,” added senior author William Anderegg, a biology professor at the University of Utah. “Those risks have been underappreciated to date in multi-billion-dollar carbon markets.
“But with better science, we can set these policies up to potentially work better,” Anderegg continued. “We’re providing a potential solution as well.”
Carbon-credit programs aim to cover the risk of fire and other disturbances by using “buffer pools.” These are reserves of extra carbon credits set aside to compensate for forests that suddenly lose carbon if their trees burn or die. However, the study found these buffer pools are currently far too small for US forest projects within the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which manages one of the largest compliance carbon-credit programs in the nation. On average, they would need to be around six times larger to fully cover the expected losses over a century for the projects that have been set up so far.
The research team, which included scientists from seven other universities and organizations, used forest plot data, satellite observations and machine learning to predict where forest losses are most likely to occur. They mapped areas across the continental U.S., and calculated the risks of a carbon reversal — or carbon loss — occurring at least once in the next 100 years from wildfire, drought and insects. The maps show how risks vary across the landscape based on historical models and updated ones that account for climate change. The differences are stark.
While parts of the country remain relatively low risk, the portion of the country projected to experience a reversal expanded from 10% to 33% for wildfire; from 19% to 21% for drought; and from 23% to 25% for insects. Broad areas in Idaho, Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico show an 80% or more chance of experiencing such a carbon loss due to wildfire over the next century.
“Compared to other natural disturbances, we found that wildfire is the largest climate-sensitive risk to durability for forest nature-based climate solutions,” said co-lead author Chao Wu, now at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “Our analysis shows for the first time what a robust, climate-informed buffer pool would look like to handle accelerating climate threats.”
Along with the maps, the Wilkes Center is releasing a set of interactive tools to help plan where and how to conduct forest management and conservation efforts with the highest chances of success.
Carbon credits are among a host of mechanisms to finance nature-based climate solutions. These strategies harness market incentives to encourage investments that keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Promoting tree growth is a great way to pull carbon and keep it locked up for decades — as long as the risk of trees dying prematurely is considered and appropriately managed.
“Nature-based climate solutions in forests aim to store carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere,” Anderegg said. “Sometimes that forest carbon is claimed as a ‘carbon offset’ for fossil fuel emissions elsewhere. Somebody’s buying that credit, assuming that a ton of carbon in the trees is the same as a ton of carbon in fossil fuels that you emit to the atmosphere.”
For this system to function as a climate solution, that carbon has to remain in the trees for a long time. Projects are typically planned on a 100-year horizon in the major California program that the researchers examined. Many offset protocols assume risks are stable over time and space. In reality, risks vary widely by location and are increasing due to climate change. And this new research makes it possible for the first time to account for how risks vary through space and time.
Trugman’s lab is currently investigating which species will continue to thrive under emerging climate conditions, why this is, and what managers can do to increase the resilience of high-value ecosystems under threat.
“There is some positive news here,” Anderegg said. “Once you have the best-available science and data directly incorporated into programs and policies, you can then inform and strategically guide where new projects get developed.
“This ability to choose and really focus on forest carbon in low-risk areas is very promising,” he continued. “This can incentivize these forest activities where they’re likely to last, and then maybe steer clear of areas where forests are likely to be gone in 100 years.”
Journal
Nature
Lab study reveals patterns of inheritance that defy Mendel's laws
Genetic information in the DNA and modifications, such as DNA methylation, define the epigenetic landscape and phenotype and show both Mendelian and non-Mendelian heredity.
Credit: Art design by Michael Koldobskiy and Andrew Feinberg, illustration by Kate Zvorykina
Scientists have long known that the DNA code in genes is not the only way to pass genetic traits from parents to offspring. “Epigenetic” marks — chemical modifications to DNA that don’t change the DNA code itself — can also be passed down.
Now, a new federally funded study using mice reveals that some of those marks — about 7% of them — can be inherited in ways that break the century-long understanding of the rules of inheritance explored and recorded by Gregor Mendel’s work with pea plants. The study also reveals new, unexpected examples of inheritance patterns that defy Mendel’s law — such as a naturally occurring paramutation, seen previously in plants and flies, and not in mammals.
“Non-Mendelian patterns of inheriting epigenetics could be a faster way to acquire diverse or new traits than alterations in the genomic sequence itself, especially in response to environmental pressures,” says Andrew Feinberg, M.D., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Whiting School of Engineering and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and co-leader of the research with colleagues at Texas A&M University.
The new study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, was reported May 20 in Nature Genetics, as well as an accompanying Nature brief.
The well-studied rules of genetic inheritance — known as Mendel’s Laws — cover how genetic material known as alleles sort themselves, are dominant or recessive, and in what ways they get passed down to new generations. Alleles are variations on genes that lead to a specific trait or disease state. In mammals, one allele is inherited from each parent, and either of those alleles can be dominant or recessive.
The rules state, for example, that alleles in offspring are inherited from each parent, and the traits of dominant alleles prevail over recessive ones, which are silenced. Several previous studies have already shown that some patterns of epigenetic inheritance, such as genomic imprinting, can break the guiding principles established by the Austrian-born friar. The new study also found examples of genomic imprinting, but also other types of non-Mendelian patterns of epigenetic inheritance that surprised the scientists.
In examples of genomic imprinting, an allele in either parent can be labeled as coming from sperm or an egg and silenced by methylation. Such imprinted alleles are passed down to offspring and are silenced not because they are recessive but based on which parent contributes the imprinted allele. The new research found imprinting examples in five additional genes.
In addition to the new examples of genetic imprinting, results of the current study suggest that epigenetic patterns of inheritance that defy Mendel’s rules may be more frequent than described in other studies. In addition, the research team found epigenetic patterns passed down to offspring that were not present in either parent.
For the study, researchers tracked how mice inherit a type of epigenetic change to DNA called methylation, in which chemical groups made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms are attached to the so-called promoter region of a gene, which turns it on or off.
The scientists sampled tissue from three generations of male and female mice at 4–6 months old: 26 in the first group, 34 offspring in the second generation and 19 in the third generation.
They scoured extensive parts of the mouse genome in each tissue sample, following how the genomic sequence and 12 known inherited patterns of DNA methylation were passed down in the three generations of mice.
Feinberg worked with co-corresponding authors David Threadgill, Ph.D., Regents professor at Texas A&M, and Kasper Hansen, Ph.D., professor of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They worked with Johns Hopkins graduate student Adam Davidovich to develop new experimental and computational strategies to map methylation and genomic data together.
In all, the researchers found 522 instances — about 7% of epigenetic inheritance patterns — in which methylation was inherited on non-sex chromosomes in a variety of ways that broke Mendel’s laws.
Some 54 of those instances represented rare or “emergent” types of epigenetic inheritance not present in either parent. For example, a cross between two mice with no methylation on the same allele, which should have resulted in a mouse that inherited no methylation on the allele, could instead result in a mouse with methylation on both alleles. “The methylation seemingly appeared out of nowhere,” says Feinberg.
The scientists also found another rare type of inheritance called paramutation in a gene called Capn11, which encodes a calcium-dependent gene that regulates normal sperm development. Alterations in the human version of the gene cause infertility and problems with sperm.
Paramutation occurs when methylation in one allele leads to methylation in another allele. The paramutation was located in an area of the gene associated with a repetitive element of a type known to be influenced by environmental exposure. “It’s almost like the methylation is transferred to another allele,” says Feinberg. He notes that epigenetic influences on the genome have been tied to environmental pressures such as environmental stress, trauma and diet.
“This work may convince scientists to integrate both genomics and epigenomics more often for a complete understanding of how traits that produce disease and healthy states are inherited,” says Hansen.
For their studies of the mouse genome, the research team used genomic sequencing involving “long-reads” of DNA segments that are between 10,000 pairs of chemical DNA letters up to more than a million chemical base pairs. Long-read sequencing is more labor-intensive, but it is better than short-read sequencing at identifying variations among alleles, as well as methylation spots that can be far away from the bulk of a gene.
Feinberg says they plan to study epigenetic inheritance patterns using human genomic data, as well. That work may provide more insights for tracking non-Mendelian patterns of epigenetic inheritance that can inform clinical geneticists looking for patterns of disease in families. It may also help scientists study how environmental factors, such as diet, influence epigenetic inheritance patterns.
Other scientists who authored the study are Danila Cuomo and Alexandra Naron from Texas A&M University; Hang Su and Leonard McMillan from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Sandeep Kambhampati, Qingqing Gong and Rakel Tryggvadottir from Johns Hopkins.
Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (DP1DK119129, R35GM149323, RM1HG008529, R01DK130333), the National Science Foundation and a Texas A&M Health Science Center Seedling Grant.
