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, March 04, 2021
Nature: new compound for male contraceptive pill
Dr. Wei Yan discovered a natural compound that exhibits almost ideal male contraceptive effects in pre-clinical studies
Nature Communications Publishes Paper by Lundquist Institute Investigator Dr. Wei Yan and Colleagues on New Promising Compound for Male Contraceptive Pill
The Lundquist Institute researchers discovered a natural compound that exhibits almost ideal male contraceptive effects in pre-clinical studies
LOS ANGELES (March 3, 2021) -- In a new paper published by Nature Communications, The Lundquist Institute (TLI) Investigator Wei Yan, MD, PhD, and his research colleagues spell out an innovative strategy that has led to the discovery of a natural compound as a safe, effective and reversible male contraceptive agent in pre-clinical animal models. Despite tremendous efforts over the past decades, the progress in developing non-hormonal male contraceptives has been very limited.
The compound is triptonide, which can be either purified from a Chinese herb called Tripterygium Wilfordii Hook F, or produced through chemical synthesis. Single daily oral doses of triptonide induce altered sperm having minimal or no forward motility with close to 100% penetrance and consequently male infertility in 3-4 and 5-6 weeks. Once the treatment is stopped, the males become fertile again in ~4-6 weeks, and can produce healthy offspring. No discernable toxic effects were detected in either short- or long-term triptonide treatment. All of their data suggest that triptonide is a highly promising non-hormonal male contraceptive agent for men because it appears to meet all of the criteria for a viable contraceptive drug candidate, including bioavailability, efficacy, reversibility and safety. A battery of biochemical analyses suggest that triptonide targets one of the last steps during sperm assembly, leading to the production of altered sperm without vigorous motility required for fertilization.
"Thanks to decades of basic research, which inspired us to develop the idea that a compound that targets a protein critical for the last several steps of sperm assembly would lead to the production of nonfunctional sperm without causing severe depletion of testicular cells", said Dr. Yan. "We are very excited that the new idea worked and that this compound appears to be an ideal male contraceptive. Our results using non-injurious studies on lower primates suggest triptonide will be an effective treatment for human males as well. Hopefully, we will be able to start human clinical trials soon to make the non-hormonal male contraceptive a reality."
"Dr. Yan's discovery represents a major leap forward in the field", said Drs. Christina Wang and Ronald Swerdloff, who are TLI co-Principal Investigators helping lead NIH-supported advanced clinical trials on hormone-based birth control approaches. "The more contraceptive methods available, the better, as we will want a family of pharmaceutical products to safely and effectively meet the family planning needs of men and couples at different stages of their reproductive lives, with differing ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds and economic means," emphasized Wang and Swerdloff.
About The Lundquist Institute: Research with reach
The Lundquist Institute is an engine of innovation with a global reach and a 69-year reputation of improving and saving lives. With its new medical research building, its state-of-the-art incubator, "BioLabs at The Lundquist," existing laboratory and support infrastructure, and the development of a new 15-acre business tech park, the Lundquist Institute serves as a hub for the Los Angeles area's burgeoning biotech scene. The research institute has over 100 principal investigators (PhDs, MDs, and MD/PhDs) working on more than 600 research studies, including therapies for numerous, and often fatal orphan diseases.
"What scientists have achieved in a year since the discovery of a brand-new virus is truly remarkable," says Emma Hodcroft from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) of the University of Bern, first author on the piece, "but the tools scientists are using to study how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting and changing were never designed for the unique pressures - or volumes of data - of this pandemic."
SARS-CoV-2 is now one of the most sequenced pathogens of all time, with over 600,000 full-genome sequences having been generated since the pandemic began, and over 5,000 new sequences coming in from around the world every day. However, the analysis and visualization tools used today (including Nextstrain, co-developed by Prof. Richard Neher's group at the SIB and the University of Basel) were never designed to handle the volume and speed of sequences being generated today, or the scale of the involvement with public health response. "Across the world, genomic surveillance rests on the initiative of academic researchers to find essential answers. Public health decision making would benefit from a more sustainalble collaboration framework," says Christophe Dessimoz at SIB and University of Lausanne.
What an improved sequencing would enable
The genetic sequences from SARS-CoV-2 hold valuable information to implementing effective pandemic policies and staying ahead of the virus. Comparing how many mutations different samples share, for example, allows scientists to track the transmission of the virus - helping to identify super-spreading events and international spread. But at the moment it can be hard to combine this genetic information with other key variables - like who attended an event, and when symptoms appeared - which could help make these methods even more informative.
The 'R-number' has gone from a scientific concept to a household word in the last year - it measures the average number of people an infected person will transmit to. Here, sequences can help too, by helping to pick apart imported cases from local transmission. This allows for a more accurate estimate of Re, but needs high levels of sequencing and complex analyses, which are currently not widely implemented.
Finally, sequencing is the only way to identify and track the many mutations that arise in SARS-CoV-2. While mutations are a normal part of virus life, scientists need to know which are harmless variations and which could change the virus' transmissibility or clinical outcome. Combining sequences, lab work, and computational predictions could allow for a better understanding of mutational impacts, but there's little framework to help these different specialities work together. "The viral data - sequences and associated metadata- must be determined, gathered and harmonized thanks to stable infrastructures compatible with the principles of Open Data to facilitate peer-review by the community and their reuse", says Christophe Dessimoz at SIB and University of Lausanne, last author of the comment.
Benefits for Switzerland
"In Switzerland, the population could benefit from more systematic and representative sequencing, for example through better contract tracing, targeted isolation and quarantine of smaller regions, and guiding the closing and opening of schools based on the presence of certain variants", explains Emma Hodcroft. Harmonisation of health data practices is also a critical topic. Switzerland is already putting a lots of efforts at the national level through the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN).
The researchers are convinced that Switzerland's potential in terms of expertise and infrastructure is just waiting to be tapped, to the benefit of public health. "The tools to enable research are there, and researchers have self-organized and taken the first step: to scale up and sustain these efforts to bring research and public health closer together, we rely on a sustainable public funding", says Christophe Dessimoz.
###
Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine ISPM at the University of Bern
The Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) provides undergraduate and postgraduate education and carries out interdisciplinary research in the fields of social and behavioural health, clinical epidemiology and biostatistics, and international and environmental health. It also provides a wide range of postgraduate education to train students to become excellent public health researchers and to work as public health specialists. This year, the ISPM celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an internationally recognized non-profit organization, dedicated to biological and biomedical data science. Its data scientists are passionate about creating knowledge and solving complex questions in many fields, from biodiversity and evolution to medicine. They provide essential databases and software platforms as well as bioinformatics expertise and services to academic, clinical, and industry groups. SIB federates the Swiss bioinformatics community of some 800 scientists, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing.
The institute contributes to keeping Switzerland at the forefront of innovation by fostering progress in biological research and enhancing health.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Lessons from Wuhan: What managers and employees need to know
As COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines are lifted, businesses are now faced with the challenge of how to keep their employees who are returning to work motivated and engaged.
A study led by a University of Illinois Chicago researcher shows that both employees and managers have an important part to play in promoting employee engagement during the pandemic.
The research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggests employee engagement and performance are the highest when employees are mentally prepared for their return to work and their managers are strongly committed to employees' health and safety at work.
"Given the turmoil and distress during lockdowns and quarantines, employees may have trouble reconnecting with their work. We wanted to find out what factors could help employees effectively stay engaged at work upon return. This is an important topic because highly engaged employees tend to intrinsically enjoy their work and outperform others," says lead author Zhenyu Yuan, assistant professor of managerial studies in the UIC College of Business Administration.
In the study, Yuan and his co-authors surveyed more than 350 employees from the original epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic -- Wuhan, China -- where many employees were returning to work after the strict city-wide lockdown was lifted.
According to the research, employees first need to mentally reconnect with their work.
"As employees are physically returning to work, they also need to be mentally prepared to reconnect," Yuan explained. "For example, employees are encouraged to spend some time reviewing work progress and set work priorities for upcoming tasks before coming back to work. This is similar to the warm-up before a workout. With some mental 'warm-up,' employees will find it easier to reconnect and re-engage at work."
Further, managers also have a critical role to play, Yuan added. With the continuous health threat of the coronavirus, employees can get easily overwhelmed and distracted in the workplace. Therefore, managers need to take concrete measures to promote workplace health and safety so that employees feel safe at work.
"Managers' commitment to safety can't be merely lip service," he said. "They should set a good example themselves by clearly communicating, enforcing, and promoting workplace health and safety protocols."
Importantly, the researchers found these two factors work synergistically.
"Engagement and performance were highest only when both conditions are met," Yuan said. "This reinforces the idea that managers can't simply expect their employees to be devoted to work without providing effective support for their health and safety."
Given that their study was based on data collected from Wuhan, China, Yuan cautioned about the applicability of their findings across different countries and regions.
"Depending on how the virus has spread and been managed in different places, other factors are also important to consider," he said. "But we think our key finding holds regardless of locations. That is, managers and employees are in this together -- they need to work together to promote engagement, workplace productivity, and safety. This will be critical as businesses and employees try to rebound from the economic toll of the current pandemic."
###
Study co-authors include Zhuxin Ye, assistant professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology; and Meng Zhong, a doctoral candidate in the UIC Department of Managerial Studies.
Neuroimaging reveals how ideology affects race perception
ITHACA, N.Y. - How might people's political ideology affect their perception of race?
Previous research by Amy Krosch, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has shown that white people who identify themselves as political conservatives tend to have a lower threshold for seeing mixed-race Black and white faces as Black.
More often than liberals, Krosch found, white political conservatives show a form of social discrimination termed "hypodescent" - categorizing multiracial individuals as members of the "socially subordinate" racial group.
In new research published Feb. 22 in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B, Krosch used neuroimaging to show that this effect seems to be driven by white conservatives' greater sensitivity to the ambiguity of mixed-race faces rather than a sensitivity to the Blackness of faces; this sensitivity showed up in a neural region often associated with affective reactions.
Taken together, these study results suggest white political conservatives might overcategorize mixed-race faces as Black not because of an aversion to Blackness, but because of an affective reaction to racial mixing more generally, Krosch said. The study appears in a special issue about political neuroscience.
"We knew from our previous work that conservatives tend to categorize more mixed-race faces as their 'socially-subordinate' race, or according to hypodescent," Krosch said, "a principle closely related to notorious 'one-drop' rules, used to subjugate individuals with any nonwhite heritage by denying them full rights and liberties under the law from the earliest days of American slavery through the Civil Rights Era."
In the new study, Krosch said, she and the other researchers wanted to figure out why this is the case: "Specifically, we wanted to know if conservatives and liberals differ in the way they are literally seeing, thinking or feeling about mixed-race faces."
Mixed-race faces vary on at least two critical dimensions, Krosch wrote: "Do conservative and liberals differ in their sensitivity to the racial content or racial ambiguity of such faces? Such questions are difficult to separate in behavioral investigations but might be critical to understanding the link between ideology and hypodescent."
In the new study, the researchers used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) - a proxy for blood flow in regions of the brain - to examine the role of neural mediators of political ideology on discriminatory hypodescent regarding mixed-race faces.
Forty-one self-identified white participants self-reported political ideology on an 11-point scale before the neuroimaging. Members of this ideologically diverse group of individuals were presented with computer-generated face images that ranged from 100% white to 100% Black at 10% increments while neuroimaging captured brain activity.
"Of primary interest was a specific neural region - the insula - because of its relevance in independent investigations of ideology, race and ambiguity," Krosch wrote. The insula plays a key role in emotional processing, and the anterior insula is associated with processing ambiguity, so it might also be associated with political ideology and hypodescent, she wrote.
In the results, conservatives exhibited a lower threshold for seeing mixed-race faces as Black and this was related to their higher sensitivity to racial ambiguity in the anterior insula. Conservatives also made decisions faster than liberals. Together, these results indicate that conservatives might feel an aversion to racial ambiguity of any kind which causes them to resolve racial ambiguity "quickly and in the most culturally accessible or hierarchy-affirming way - that is, according to hypodescent," Krosch writes.
Notably, conservatives and liberals did not differ in their responses to ambiguity or face Blackness in brain regions related to lower-level visual processing or social cognition. "Rather than visually perceiving or thinking about mixed-race faces differently, conservatives might maintain a stricter boundary around whiteness (compared to liberals) because of the way they feel about racial ambiguity," Krosch wrote.
These results advance understanding of the role of political ideology in race categorization, Krosch wrote.
"They also help to explain how and why multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their most subordinate racial group - a phenomenon that enhances their vulnerability to discrimination and exacerbates existing racial inequalities," Krosch wrote. "Given the myriad societal consequences of minority-group categorization and the large number of people who are potentially vulnerable to biased categorization, understanding the processes by which ideology reinforces the racial status quo is critically important."
Camera traps reveal newly discovered biodiversity relationship
Data scientists analyze photos from 15 tropical rainforests
HOUSTON - (March 3, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, an analysis of camera-trap data from 15 wildlife preserves in tropical rainforests has revealed a previously unknown relationship between the biodiversity of mammals and the forests in which they live.
Tropical rainforests are home to half of the world's species, but with species going extinct at a rapid pace worldwide, it's difficult for conservationists to keep close tabs on the overall health of ecosystems, even in places where wildlife is protected. Researchers found that observational data from camera traps can help.
"In general, rainforest ecosystems are extremely diverse, and our study shows that mammal communities in rainforests can be predictably different, and these differences may be controlled, in part, by differences in plant productivity in forests," said Rice's Daniel Gorczynski, a graduate student in biosciences and corresponding author of a study featured on the cover of the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Gorczynski and more than a dozen co-authors, including his Ph.D. adviser, Rice ecologist Lydia Beaudrot, analyzed camera-trap photos from the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM), which uses motion-activated cameras to monitor species trends in tropical forests in Asia, Africa and South America.
Beaudrot, an assistant professor of biosciences, said the study's scientific contributions demonstrates the importance of having the same data collection replicated on the ground in forests all around the world.
"The TEAM data are an incredible resource for basic and applied ecology and conservation," she said. "Given the pace of tropical forest loss, it is more important now than ever to use standardized camera-trap data to understand environmental and anthropogenic effects on wildlife."
For each site, the researchers gathered data about all species of terrestrial mammals with an average body mass greater than 1 kilogram. All the mammal species studied at each site were treated as a single community, and data was compiled for communities with as many as 31 species and as few as five. The researchers also compiled the known functional traits for each species, such as body size, reproductive habits and diet. The combined functional traits of species in a community were used to calculate the community's "functional diversity," or the variety of roles in the forest's overall ecosystem that were filled by that community's species.
"We found that species with unique characteristics -- for example, species that are very large or eat unique foods -- are relatively more common in forests with high productivity," Gorczynski said, referring to the measure ecologists use to characterize the overall rate of plant growth within a forest. The research also showed that species with unique characteristics were less common at sites with low productivity.
"Higher productivity is thought to make rare resources, like certain food types that unique species often eat, more readily available, which unique species can capitalize on," he said. "And because they are unique, they don't have to compete as much with other species for rare resources, and they can persist at higher abundances."
The species that are considered unique vary by site, he said. Examples include elephants, tapirs and ground-dwelling monkeys.
Gorczynski said this relationship between mammal functional diversity and productivity had not been previously shown.
"Most studies of rainforest mammals rely on range maps, which don't give you an idea of how common different species are," he said. "We were able to find this relationship because we used camera trap observations. The observational data gives us an idea of how common different species are, which allows us to compare the relative abundances of species with different traits."
Study co-author Jorge Ahumada, a wildlife scientist at Conservation International, said the study also shows that destructive human activities, like deforestation, decrease the diversity of species' traits in protected areas.
"We found that in areas where local species extinctions have been documented due to significant deforestation or poaching, such as in Korup National Park in Cameroon, large carnivores like leopards and golden cats are the first to go," Ahumada said. "Without these apex predators, entire food chains can be thrown out of balance. Eventually, populations of smaller herbivores will skyrocket, forcing more competition for the same limited resources."
He said "simply counting the number of species in a tropical forest does not provide a full picture" of biodiversity or ecosystem health.
The researchers said more data science studies are needed to understand the ramifications of local species extinctions and address other fundamental questions in conservation, ecology and wildlife biology.
Additional co-authors include Chia Hsieh and Jadelys Tonos Luciano of Rice; Santiago Espinosa of both the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosà in Mexico and the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador; Steig Johnson of the University of Calgary in Canada; Francesco Rovero of both the University of Florence in Italy and the MUSE-Science Museum in Trento, Italy; Fernanda Santos of the Museu Paraense EmÃlio Goeldi in Brazil; Mahandry Hugues Andrianarisoa of Centre ValBio in Madagascar; Johanna Hurtado Astaiza of the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica; Patrick Jansen of both the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Wageningen University in the Netherlands; Charles Kayijamahe of the International Gorilla Conservation Program in Rwanda; Marcela Guimara?es Moreira Lima of the Federal University of Pará in Brazil; and Julia Salvador of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Ecuador.
The research was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, HP, the Northrop Grumman Foundation and other donors.
TEAM data was provided by the TEAM Network, a collaboration between Conservation International, the Smithsonian Institute and the Wildlife Conservation Society.
###
Links and resources:
The DOI of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper is: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2098
CAPTION: An analysis of camera trap data from 15 tropical forests found unique traits may be more beneficial to mammals like the African elephant in areas where plants are highly productive and generate large quantities of biomass. (Photo by Daniel Gorczynski)
CAPTION: Lydia Beaudrot (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
Small-scale fisheries offer strategies for resilience in the face of climate change
STANFORD'S SCHOOL OF EARTH, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Coastal communities at the forefront of climate change reveal valuable approaches to foster adaptability and resilience, according to a worldwide analysis of small-scale fisheries by Stanford University researchers.
Globally important for both livelihood and nourishment, small-scale fisheries employ about 90 percent of the world's fishers and provide half the fish for human consumption. Large-scale shocks -- like natural disasters, weather fluctuations, oil spills and market collapse -- can spell disaster, depending on the fisheries' ability to adapt to change. In an assessment of 22 small-scale fisheries that experienced stressors, researchers revealed that diversity and flexibility are among the most important adaptive capacity factors overall, while access to financial assets was not as important for individual households as it was at the community scale. The research was published Jan. 23 in the journal Climatic Change.
"The idea of assets not being essential at the household level is an empowering finding because we looked at a lot of places in developing nations without a lot of assets," said lead author Kristen Green, a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "It shows we can invest in non-financial or non-asset-based adaptive mechanisms, and fishers can still adapt."
Focusing on response mechanisms
The researchers measured adaptive capacity using a new framework with three response pathways: adapt, react and cope. Adaptation is defined as proactive planning or taking collective action, reaction as an unplanned response, and coping as passive acceptance of consequences. The team of 11 study authors determined whether or not each fishery community or household had capacity in the areas of knowledge, assets, diversity and flexibility, governance and institutions, and natural capital.
"These adaptive capacity domains don't work in isolation -- it's the recipes or combinations that are important for successful adaptation," Green said.
While previous research has calculated a quantitative or numerical resilience score for different regions and sectors, the focus on community response is fairly new, according to senior author Larry Crowder, the Edward Ricketts Provostial Professor and professor of biology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences.
"Millions of people are dependent on making a living in small-scale fisheries, and some of them are currently doing it better than others," said Crowder, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "If we can identify the features that allow communities and individuals to be better prepared for those perturbations -- in other words, to have an adaptive response -- then we can try to build that capacity in communities that don't have it."
In one case study in their analysis, a tropical island in Vanuatu exhibited flexibility when a cyclone disrupted fishery reefs, infrastructure and fisher livelihoods. Because the fishers had agency over management of the marine area, they were able to temporarily open a previously closed section to maintain food supply and income.
"Part of our findings run counter to the emerging conventional wisdom that making specialists of fisherman is a good thing," Crowder said. "Historically, these fishers were generalists, and our findings suggest they're more able to adapt to fluctuating circumstances if they can maintain that generalist fishing approach."
Incorporating diverse needs
The researchers found that diversity and flexibility were important at every scale, for both community and household adaptive capacity in responding to acute and chronic stressors -- for example, being able to diversify fishing portfolios or shift to other means of income. In addition to climate stressors, the researchers assessed responses to biological, economic, political and social changes, as well as environmental degradation and overfishing. The patterns that emerged from the study may be applied to adaptive capacity in other sectors, such as agriculture or manufacturing.
Using a broad "way of life" approach allowed the co-authors to consider what factors drive behavior, such as culture, heritage or spending time with their families -- not necessarily economics.
"From a Western perspective, sustainability would be a nice thing to have happen. But for people in these communities that are highly resource-dependent, it's not nice -- it's necessary," Crowder said. "Their future is potentially compromised if they and we don't help figure out how to make those lifestyles more sustainable in the long term."
The analysis revealed several examples of how Western-style management -- such as imposing fixed protection areas or maximizing one product that will make the most money -- doesn't always work for small-scale fisheries.
###
Co-authors on the study include Jennifer Selgrath, Timothy Frawley, William Oestreich, Elizabeth Mansfield and Stephanie Green of the Hopkins Marine Station; and Jose Urteaga, Shannon Swanson, Francisca Santana and Josheena Naggea of E-IPER. Frawley is also affiliated with the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz; S. Green is also affiliated with the University of Alberta
Temperature and aridity fluctuations over the past century linked to flower color changes
Clemson researchers combined color descriptions from museum flower specimens dating back to 1895 with historic climate data to link changes in temperature and aridity with color change in the human-visible spectrum
CLEMSON, South Carolina - Clemson University scientists have linked climatic fluctuations over the past one and a quarter-century with flower color changes.
Researchers combined descriptions of flower color from museum flower specimens dating back to 1895 with longitudinal- and latitudinal-specific climate data to link changes in temperature and aridity with color change in the human-visible spectrum (white to purple).
The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed the change varied across taxa.
"Species experiencing larger increases in temperature tended to decline in pigmentation, but those experiencing larger increases in aridity tended to increase in pigmentation," said Cierra Sullivan, a graduate student in the College of Science's Department of Biological Sciences and lead author of the paper titled "The effects of climate change on floral anthocyanin polymorphisms."
Matthew Koski, an assistant professor of biological sciences, co-authored the paper.
Previous research by Koski and his team, including Sullivan, showed that the ultraviolet-absorbing pigmentation of flowers increased globally over the past 75 years in response to a rapidly degraded ozone layer. That study discussed how flower color changes could influence the behavior of pollinators, which have UV photoreceptors that enable them to detect patterns not visible to human eyes. This study discusses plant color change visible to humans.
"Although we see these changes in flower color, that doesn't inherently mean it's doomsday because the forest, plants and animals naturally respond to what's going on in their environment," Sullivan said. "Seeing changes is not necessarily bad, but it's something to which we should pay attention."
Researchers selected 12 species with reported floral color polymorphisms in North America, representing eight families and 10 genera.
Sullivan obtained herbarium specimen data from the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SRNEC), Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria, Consortium of California Herbaria and the Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria. She also checked Clemson University Herbarium's physical collection for specimens not already represented in SERNEC.
After researchers retrieved the date of specimen collection and latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, they obtained historical bioclimatic data from the year and month that the plant was collected. That data included monthly precipitation, minimum, maximum and mean temperature, minimum and maximum vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and dew point temperature. Vapor pressure deficit is the difference between how much moisture is in the air and the amount of moisture that can be held when the air is saturated. It has implications for drought stress in plants -- higher VPD means more water loss from plants.
Researchers were able to get complete data sets for 1,944 herbarium specimens.
They found variation among the 12 species. Some increased in pigmentation, while others declined in color over the past century.
"It was all tightly linked to how much climatic variation they experienced over time across their range," Koski said.
Two of the species that tended to get lighter in pigmentation are found in the western parts of North America that experienced more dramatic temperature changes than the species in the eastern United States, which had more moderate temperature increases.
"This study documents that flower color that is visually more obvious to humans is also responding to global change but is responding to different factors such as temperature and drought," Koski said.
He said such flower color changes are likely to affect plant-pollinator and plant-herbivore interactions and warrant further study.
Continued research will help give insight to how species will respond to the various aspects of climate change and which species are the most vulnerable to future climate projections," he said.
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology Grant 174590 and Clemson University. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the funders.
'Best case' goals for climate warming which could still result in massive wildfire risk
A seemingly small difference in global warming levels could greatly impact wildfires worldwide, researchers have found
GIST (GWANGJU INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY)
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 2.0°C and, ideally, to 1.5°C, over preindustrial levels. However, even before that treaty was signed, scientists had already warned that those "best case" targets were unlikely to be achievable. Consequently, many fire weather studies are built with models that simulate much higher levels of climate warming.
Recently, researchers from South Korea, Japan, and the United States have found that by projecting the fire weather conditions under two mildly varying warming levels -- one in which the global climate warms by 1.5°C and the other by 2°C -- even just a half-degree of warming could significantly increase the likelihood and significance of wildfires!
"When it comes to the conditions that make wildfires more likely, a little bit of warming goes a long way," explained lead author Rackhun Son, Ph.D. candidate at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea, "but, of course, this is troubling, because it is quite unlikely that we will only be experiencing a little bit of warming."
"Although it is reasonable to look at fire weather under more extreme circumstances, there is little sense in making goals without a good understanding of what might happen if you were to reach those goals," said co-author Seung-Hee Kim of Chapman University, "so, we asked 'what would happen if we did reach these goals? Would the fire weather conditions not become as severe?'"
That answer is complex, but this study's key finding is that just a half a degree of additional warming would likely create a notably greater danger of fire on the most widely inhabited continents, with dangers particularly concentrated in the Amazon rainforest and African savanna, and around the Mediterranean. "We also provided evidence that places like Australia and Indonesia are likely to reach peak levels of fire susceptibility even before we reach that lower threshold," said co-author Simon Wang of Utah State University.
The study does provide a silver lining of hope to this cloud of danger. Commenting on the implications of their findings, Dr. Wang comments, "If we were somehow able to suppress this extra half a degree of warming, we could reduce climate-driven extreme fire activities in many places, potentially saving many lives and billions of dollars."
Title of original paper: Changes in fire weather climatology under 1.5°C and 2.0°C warming Journal: Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abe675
About Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) Website: http://www.gist.ac.kr/
About the author
Jinho Yoon is Associate Professor of Earth Sciences and Environmental Engineering at GIST. His group focuses on understanding and predicting weather-climate extremes under climate change. Prof. Yoon's group is also analyzing aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions to understand the distribution and characteristics of clouds. Before coming to GIST, he was a scientist (level 3) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In 2004, Prof. Yoon received a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from Iowa State University.
Ghosts of past pesticide use can haunt organic farms for decades
Although the use of pesticides in agriculture is increasing, some farms have transitioned to organic practices and avoid applying them. But it's uncertain whether chemicals applied to land decades ago can continue to influence the soil's health after switching to organic management. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have identified pesticide residues at 100 Swiss farms, including all the organic fields studied, with beneficial soil microbes' abundance negatively impacted by their occurrence.
Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides protect crops by repelling or destroying organisms that harm the plants. In contrast, organic agriculture management strategies avoid adding synthetic substances, instead relying on a presumably healthy existing soil ecosystem. However, some organic farms are operating on land treated with pesticides in the past. Yet, it's unclear whether pesticides have a long-lasting presence in organically managed fields and what the reverberations are to soil life, specifically microbes and beneficial soil fungi, years after their application. So, Judith Riedo, Thomas Bucheli, Florian Walder, Marcel van der Heijden and colleagues wanted to examine pesticide levels and their impact on soil health on farms managed with conventional versus organic practices, as well as on farms converted to organic methods.
The researchers measured surface soil characteristics and the concentrations of 46 regularly used pesticides and their breakdown products in samples taken from 100 fields that were managed with either conventional or organic practices. Surprisingly, the researchers found pesticide residues at all of the sites, including organic farms converted more than 20 years prior. Multiple herbicides and one fungicide remained in the surface soil after the conversion to organic practices; though the total number of synthetic chemicals and their concentrations decreased significantly the longer the fields were in organic management. According to the researchers, some of the pesticides alternatively could have contaminated the organic fields by traveling through the air, water or soil from nearby conventional fields. In addition, the team observed lower microbial abundance and decreased levels of a beneficial microbe when fields had higher numbers of pesticides in the fields, suggesting that the presence of these substances can decrease soil health. The researchers say future work should examine the synergistic effects of pesticide residues and other environmental stressors on soil health.
The paper is freely available as an ACS AuthorChoice article here.
For more of the latest research news, register for our upcoming meeting, ACS Spring 2021. Journalists and public information officers are encouraged to apply for complimentary press registration by emailing us at newsroom@acs.org.
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people. The Society is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a specialist in scientific information solutions (including SciFinder® and STN®), its CAS division powers global research, discovery and innovation. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
(Boston)--Children in Zambia under age 5 die at a rate that is between nearly six to more than 10 times higher than those in the U.S; it is estimated at 40-75 per 1000, compared to 6.98 per 1000. Identifying why these children are dying is the mission of Rotem Lapidot, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM).
"Significantly, over 80 percent of all community infant deaths involved some form of delay. While it is impossible to know what would have occurred in the absence of such delays, the majority of infant deaths in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, are from causes for which effective treatments currently exist," explained Lapidot, the corresponding author on the study that appeared online in the journal Pediatrics. A significant number of infants die in the community and are referred to as "brought in dead" (BID). There are limited data around the problem of infant community deaths and identifying the circumstances surrounding them is critical to reduce infant mortality rates.
In an effort to try and better identify common patterns of health seeking behaviors that contributed to these deaths, researchers from BUSM and Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH), analyzed free-text narratives from verbal autopsies from 230 families of BID infants younger than 6 months of age. They found almost 83 percent of infants had one or more delays in care--the most common delay being the family's decision to seek care (54.8 percent), even as severe symptoms were frequently described. Almost 28 percent of infants died in route to a healthcare facility. Delays in receiving adequate care, including infants dying while waiting in line at a clinic or during referral from a clinic to a hospital, occurred in almost 25 percent of infants. While a third of infants had been previously evaluated by a clinician in the days prior to their death.
According to the researchers, delays in care were the rule rather than the exception in this population of infants. "In many cases infants are dying because they do not receive existing treatments at all or receive them only after the illness has become unsalvageable. If our goal is to reduce child mortality, these findings have profound implications," adds Lapidot, who also is a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Boston Medical Center.
The researchers said it is important to emphasize that delays in seeking care are likely complex, multifactorial, and do not necessarily imply negligence by the child's caregivers. Logistical barriers they believe may be insurmountable, particularly in deeply impoverished, under-resourced communities, such as typified among the urban poor in Lusaka. "However, our current analysis suggests that there are relatively simple interventions that are low-tech and could be achieved at low cost to avoid such delays and save many infants lives," said Lapidot.
"By analyzing open-ended narratives from the verbal autopsies, we were able to explore the context surrounding infant deaths beyond what is written on a death certificate. We could gain a deeper understanding of the circumstances and social factors that led to the infant death, in the caregivers' own words. This type of data is often not reported in the scientific literature, but these voices and stories of infant death in underserved communities should be elevated and urgently listened to," added former BUSPH research fellow Anna Larson, MPH.
The data used in this study was collected as part of the larger Zambia Pertussis RSV Infant Mortality Estimation (ZPRIME) study. "In global health, we are often very focused on introducing new interventions, drugs, vaccines or technologies as strategies to reduce childhood mortality. What this study reminds us is that sometimes very simple interventions have the potential to save lives," said principal investigator of that study Christopher Gill, MD, associate professor of global health at BUSPH.
###
Other authors on this study included BUSPH's William MacLeod, ScD; Christopher Gill, MD; Anna Larson Williams; Andrew Enslen, from the University of California, San Diego and Ronke Olowojesku from the University of Georgia.
Funding for this study was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.