(Press-News.org) DENVER, March 22, 2015 -- A pair of air pollutants linked to climate change could also be a major contributor to the unparalleled rise in the number of people sneezing, sniffling and wheezing during allergy season. The gases, nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone, appear to provoke chemical changes in certain airborne allergens that could increase their potency. That, in combination with changes in global climate, could help explain why airborne allergies are becoming more common.
The findings will be presented today at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting features nearly 11,000 reports on new advances in science and other topics. It is being held here through Thursday.
"Scientists have long suspected that air pollution and climate change are involved in the increasing prevalence of allergies worldwide. But understanding the underlying chemical processes behind this phenomenon has proven elusive," says Ulrich Pöschl, Ph.D., of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. "Our research is just a starting point, but it does begin to suggest how chemical modifications in allergenic proteins occur and how they may affect allergenicity."
About 50 million people in the United States suffer from nasal allergies, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. And those numbers are on the rise.
In previous work, Pöschl; Christopher Kampf, Ph.D.; Manabu Shiraiwa, Ph.D.; and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute explored how allergy-causing substances are altered in the air. Building on that work, they decided to dig deeper into how that happens and examine how traffic-related air pollutants could increase the strength of these allergens.
In laboratory tests and computer simulations, they studied the effects of various levels of ozone and nitrogen dioxide on the major birch pollen allergen called Bet v 1.
The researchers determined that ozone -- the main component of smog -- oxidizes an amino acid called tyrosine that helps form Bet v 1 proteins. This transformation sets in motion a chain of chemical reactions that involves reactive oxygen intermediates and can bind proteins together, altering their structures and their potential biological effects. When this occurs, Kampf says the cross-linked proteins can become more potent allergens.
Pöschl's team also found that nitrogen dioxide, a component of automobile exhaust, appears to alter the polarity and binding capabilities of Bet v 1 allergenic proteins. This, in conjunction with the effects of ozone, the researchers predict, may enhance the immune response of the body to these particles, particularly in humid, wet and smoggy environments.
The scientists plan to identify other modified allergenic proteins in the environment and hope, in collaboration with biomedical researchers, to study their effects on the human immune system, which may also be affected by other physiological factors.
"Our research is showing that chemical modifications of allergenic proteins may play an important role in the increasing prevalence of allergies worldwide," Kampf says. "With rising levels of these pollutants we will have more of these protein modifications, and in turn, these modifications will affect the allergenic potential of the protein."
A press conference on this topic will be held Monday, March 23, at 2:30 a.m. Mountain time in the Colorado Convention Center. Reporters may check-in at Room 104 in person, or watch live on YouTube http://bit.ly/ACSLiveDenver. To ask questions, sign in with a Google account.
INFORMATION:
The researchers acknowledge funding by the Max Planck Society.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 158,000 members, ACS is the world's largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
To automatically receive news releases from the American Chemical Society, contact newsroom@acs.org.
Note to journalists: Please report that this research is being presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Follow us: Twitter | Facebook
Title
Effects of air pollution and climate change on allergenic protein containing aerosols in the anthropocene
Abstract
Increasing temperature, relative humidity, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and soot concentrations, arising from human activities in the Anthropocene, i.e., the era of the human dominated environment, have multiple consequences for airborne allergenic proteins (aeroallergens) in the atmosphere. These consequences include among others: An altered bioavailability and allergen content of pollen due to longer pollination seasons and higher temperature, and chemical modifications of the allergenic proteins, which are found both in fine and coarse mode particles, by air pollutants. Thus air pollution and climate change are potential key factors for the increasing prevalence of allergies. In laboratory and numerical simulation studies we have examined the chemical transformation of proteins by the air pollutants ozone and nitrogen dioxide depending on the pollutant concentrations and relative humidity (RH). Further, the phase state of the proteins was varied between solid (low RH experiments), semi-solid (high RH experiments), and liquid (bulk solution experiments) to account for the differences in phase state of atmospheric particulates, e.g., aerosol particles and cloud droplets. In a recent paper, we report the efficiency and site-selectivity of protein nitration for the major birch pollen allergen Bet v 1. The kinetics and site-selectivity of nitration by ozone and nitrogen dioxide were found to be strongly dependent on protein phase state as outlined above. In recent experiments we were also able to show that protein ozone expo sure at atmospherically relevant concentration induces oligomerization processes, which likely affect the immune response in the human body towards the respectively modified allergenic proteins. For these first experiments, we used bovine serum albumin (BSA), which contains 21 tyrosine residues in the amino acid sequence, as a model protein. We were able to show that the cross-linking upon ozone exposure is caused by the formation of covalent dityrosine species. In this presentation, experimental design, analytical methods, results, and conclusions will be discussed.
DENVER, March 22, 2015 -- One person's trash literally could become another's high-tech treasure, according to researchers who have developed a way to turn discarded packing peanuts into components for rechargeable batteries that could outperform the ones we use currently. They will report on the process for the first time today.
The talk will be one of nearly 11,000 presentations here at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society, taking place here through Thursday. A brand-new video on the research ...
A new paper by Zhi Da, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Notre Dame, find that residential electricity usage can track household production in real time and helps to price assets.
"The importance of household production in economics has been recognized by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker back in 1960s but measuring what household produces at home has been an empirical challenge," Da said." For example, it has been a puzzle why certain industries such as consumer product, food, and clothing earn higher average returns than others such as steel ...
A new study from Princeton University sheds light on the handing over of genetic control from mother to offspring early in development. Learning how organisms manage this transition could help researchers understand larger questions about how embryos regulate cell division and differentiation into new types of cells.
The study, published in the March 12 issue of the journal Cell, provides new insight into the mechanism for this genetic hand-off, which happens within hours of fertilization, when the newly fertilized egg is called a zygote.
"At the beginning, everything ...
Irvine, Calif., March 20, 2015 - A controversial decision in 2011 to blow up Mississippi River levees reduced the risk of flooding in a city upstream, lowering the height of the rain-swollen river just before it reached its peak, according to a newly published computer modeling analysis led by UC Irvine scientists.
The work focused on a Missouri agricultural area called the New Madrid Floodway that was inundated when the levees were detonated. The researchers found that the region would have flooded anyway if the river had been allowed to overtop the levee banks. And ...
Banning sodas from school vending machines, building walking paths and playgrounds, adding supermarkets to food deserts and requiring nutritional labels on restaurant menus: Such changes to the environments where people live and work are among the growing number of solutions that have been proposed and attempted in efforts to stem the rising obesity epidemic with viable, population-based solutions. But which of these changes actually make an impact?
To answer that question, many public health researchers take advantage of "natural experiments"--looking at people's calorie ...
BOZEMAN, Mont. - Scientists from Montana State University and Sweden have discovered an antioxidant system that helps sustain the liver when other systems are missing or compromised.
Like a generator kicking in when the power fails or an understudy taking the stage when a lead actor is sick, the newly found system steps up during a crisis. It's fueled by methionine, an amino acid that can't be manufactured in the body and doesn't come from herbal teas or supplements. People get it only by eating protein.
"This is an important finding," said Ed Schmidt, a professor in ...
BOSTON (March 20, 2015) - A study reported in this week's Science Translational Medicine found that qualified investigators are more likely to respond to opportunities for clinical trials if they are contacted by an institution-specific point person, or navigator.
Jonathan M. Davis, MD, Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Director of Regulatory Affairs and Chief of Newborn Medicine at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center and a multi-institution team of child health researchers instituted the Point-Person Project, a pilot study that ...
URBANA, Ill. - Distillers dried grains with solubles, or DDGS, are increasingly common in swine diets in the United States. In recent years, different types of DDGS have come on the market.
"Ethanol plants use different procedures to produce DDGS, which results in different end products," said Hans H. Stein, a professor of animal sciences at University of Illinois.
"To produce conventional DDGS, the corn is cooked to gelatinize starch prior to fermentation. However, uncooked DDGS can also be used if specific enzymes are used to pre-digest the starch prior to fermentation. ...
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - March 20, 2015 - Medicine obviously can't do much good if it sits on a pharmacy shelf. Yet more than one-quarter of the acne patients surveyed by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers didn't get medications prescribed by their dermatologists.
Among the 143 acne patients who participated in the study, 27 percent failed to obtain all of their medications, including both prescription drugs and over-the-counter products. Those who were prescribed two medications had the highest rate of primary non-adherence - not getting a medication or not using ...
Philadelphia, PA, March 20, 2015 - A new study provides the first evidence that the mediator complex subunit 15 (MED15) may play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). MED15 overexpression was found to be associated with higher mortality rates in HNSCC patients with cancer recurrence, particularly in oral cavity/oropharyngeal tumors, according to the study published in The American Journal of Pathology. MED15 overexpression was also associated with heavy alcohol consumption, which is an HNSCC risk factor.
HNSCC is the sixth ...
