Researchers have made progress towards a G7 commitment to establish safe standards for the release of antimicrobials into the environment, by developing a new framework that establishes safe thresholds. The threat of bacteria developing resistance to antimicrobial drugs (often called antibiotics) used to treat infection is one of the greatest global health challenges, potentially resulting in 10 million deaths per year by 2050. A major issue is the spread of antimicrobials and resistant bacteria through water systems. When we take antibiotics, 70 per cent passes through our bodies into wastewater. Farm animals are treated with antibiotics which ...

Plants use numerous mechanisms for their pollination. Now botanists have discovered a particularly sophisticated system among pipevines that is based purely on deception. The flowers of the Greek plant Aristolochia microstoma emit a foul, musty scent that seems to mimic the smell of decaying insects. The fly pollinators from the genus Megaselia likely get attracted to this odor while searching for arthropod corpses to potentially mate over and lay their eggs. Then, when entering the tube of an Aristolochia flower, the flies are guided by downward-pointing hairs into a small chamber, which holds the female and male floral organs. Trapped inside, they deposit pollen they carry onto the stigma, before the stamens ripen and ...

It eventually became a Nobel prize-winning revolution when researchers first engineered CRISPR as a gene editing technology for bacterial, plant, animal and human cells. The potential of the technology is great and span from curing genetically disposed diseases to applications in agricultural and industrial biotechnology, but there are challenges. One such challenge consists of selecting a so-called gRNA molecule which should be designed to guide the Cas9 protein to the right location in the DNA where it will make a cut in relation to the gene editing. "Typically, there are multiple possible gRNAs and they are not all equally efficient. Therefore, ...

Using a new 3D printing process, University of Nottingham researchers have discovered how to tailor-make artificial body parts and other medical devices with built-in functionality that offers better shape and durability, while cutting the risk of bacterial infection at the same time. Study lead, Dr Yinfeng He, from the Centre for Additive Manufacturing, said: "Most mass-produced medical devices fail to completely meet the unique and complex needs of their users. Similarly, single-material 3D printing methods have design limitations that cannot produce a bespoke device with multiple biological or mechanical functions. "But for the first time, using a computer-aided, multi-material ...

RUDN and Shahid Beheshti University(SBU) chemist proposed an eco-friendly method for the synthesis of pyrrole and pyrazole derivatives with a wide range of applications in medicine: from antidepressants to anticancer. Moreover, the synthesized compounds possess interesting fluorescence features, and the bioactive scaffolds might attract great interest in the fields of clinical diagnostics and biomedical research in the future. The results are published in the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. Heterocyclic compounds expose remarkable chemistry with significant applications in medicinal and organic chemistry, industry, and pharmaceutical. These compounds are widely ...

Wine grape growers in California and elsewhere face increasing labor costs and severe labor shortages, making it difficult to manage and harvest a vineyard while maintaining profitability. Growers are increasingly turning to machines for pruning, canopy management and harvesting, but how well these practices are executed can substantially affect yield and quality. A new review by researchers at the University of California, Davis, published in the journal Catalyst, provides guidelines for growers to make the best use of machines. "Wine grape laborers have been virtually nonexistent. People don't want to work in vineyards anymore because it's remote, tough work," said Kaan Kurtural, professor of viticulture and enology and extension ...

BONN, 10 June - Unprecedented changes in climate and biodiversity, driven by human activities, have combined and increasingly threaten nature, human lives, livelihoods and well-being around the world. Biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and mutually reinforce each other. Neither will be successfully resolved unless both are tackled together. This is the message of a workshop report, published today by 50 of the world's leading biodiversity and climate experts. The peer-reviewed workshop report is the product of a four-day virtual workshop between ...

Kanazawa, Japan - Fungal diseases in cereal crops cause major economic losses and also threaten human and livestock health, because some fungi produce powerful toxins that might enter the food chain. Farmers use fungicides to control crop diseases, such as wheat head blight. Although agrochemicals are rigorously tested for safety, there can be concerns over chemical residues in food. Now, researchers at Kanazawa University, in collaboration with colleagues at Ehime University and Nagoya University, have shown that the natural substance nicotinamide (NIM - a vitamin found in food and used as a dietary supplement) can help stimulate ...

Curtin University researchers have helped uncover the four billion year old story of a lunar sample brought from the Moon to Earth, by the manned Apollo 17 mission more than 50 years ago. The global research collaboration, involving scientists from the UK, Canada, Sweden and Australia, aimed to analyse the ancient rock sample through a modern lens to find out its age, which crater it came from and its geological trajectory. That modern lens was provided, in part, by both Curtin's Geoscience Atom Probe Facility* and Space Science and Technology Centre* (SSTC) where the research team was ...

With the onset of the 4th industrial revolution, artificial intelligence has recently been utilized in smartphone cameras, providing functions such as auto-focusing, face recognition, and 100x zoom, to dramatically improve our daily life. It has also been applied to research and development of new materials. A joint research team from POSTECH and Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) has applied deep learning to the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) system to develop a technique that can detect and improve the quality of SEM images without human oversight. The EMS is an essential material analysis equipment used for developing new materials. The findings from this research were recently published ...

An inter-university research group has succeeded in constructing the gene expression network behind the vascular development process in plants. They achieved this by performing bioinformatics analysis using the 'VISUAL' (*1) tissue culture platform, which generates vascular stem cells (*2) from leaf cells. In this network, they also discovered a new BES/BZR transcription factor (*3), BEH3, which regulates vascular stem cells. In addition, they illuminated a novel vascular cell maintenance system whereby BEH3 competes with other transcription factors from the same BES/BZR family in order to stabilize vascular stem ...

Cell viability require that a variety of functions at the cell membrane are maintained properly. P-type ATPases translocate substrates across the membrane, and they have evolved into different types taking care of specific substrates within a diverse range. Now, key structural aspects have been described on how two different types of P-type ATPases - a Ca2+ transporting Ca2+ -ATPase and a lipid transporting P4-ATPase - have adapted to different substrates and physical environments. Many bacteria export intracellular calcium using active transporters homologous to the well-described ...

Researchers from Tel Aviv University took part in a new international study proposing an amendment to the widely accepted theory on the extinction of animal species - by moving the focus from the animal's body size to its reproductive capacity. The researchers found gaps and incompatibilities between mammals and amphibians in the relation between body size and extinction risk: Whereas large mammals bear a smaller number of offspring per birth, leading to higher risk of extinction, larger amphibian females lay more eggs, reducing the threat to the species. The researchers analyzed data from databases on both extinction risks and reproductive capacities of various species of amphibians (e.g., frogs and salamanders). Contributors to the ...

How much do the effects of climate change contribute to extreme weather events? It's hard to say--the variables involved are plentiful, each event is unique, and we can only do so much to investigate what didn't happen. But a new paper from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) climate scientist Michael Wehner investigates the question for one particular element of one significant storm and makes the results available to those who lived through it. In the paper, "Attributable human-induced changes in the magnitude of flooding in the Houston, Texas region during Hurricane Harvey," published May 19 in Climatic Change, Wehner and Christopher Sampson from Fathom Bristol used a hydraulic ...

Even on a good day, DNA is constantly getting damaged. Nicks, scratches, breaks: the delicate strands that carry life's genetic code take a beating as they jumble about in the course of their work. If left untreated, errors accumulate, with fatal consequences -- such as cancerous tumors -- for the cell and the organism. This is where two key proteins come to the rescue: PARP -- or poly ADP ribose polymerase -- acts as a marker for a trouble spot, allowing XRCC1 -- or X-ray repair cross-complementing protein 1 -- to zoom in and begin a repair. This much has been known for some time and was even recognized in the 2015 Nobel prizes ...

A team of archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) made a rare discovery when they unearthed a small clay seal impression dating back some 7000 years. The impression, with two different geometric stamps imprinted on it, was discovered in Tel Tsaf, a prehistoric village located in Israel's Beit She'an Valley up north. The discovery was made as part of a dig that took place between 2004 and 2007 and was led by HU's Professor Yosef Garfinkel along with two of his students, Professor David Ben Shlomo and Dr. Michael Freikman, both of whom are now researchers at Ariel University. One hundred and fifty clay sealings were originally found at the site, with one being particularly rare and of distinct, historic importance. The object ...

LA JOLLA--(June 10, 2021) In order for cancer to grow and spread, it has to evade detection by our immune cells, particularly specialized "killer" T cells. Salk researchers led by Professor Susan Kaech have found that the environment inside tumors (the tumor microenvironment) contains an abundance of oxidized fat molecules, which, when ingested by the killer T cells, suppresses their ability to kill cancer cells. In a vicious cycle, those T cells, in need of energy, increase the level of a cellular fat transporter, CD36, that unfortunately saturates them with even more oxidized fat and further curtails their anti-tumor functions. The discovery, published online in Immunity on June 7, 2021, suggests new pathways for safeguarding the immune system's ...

Scientists are hoping the RNA of an obscure infection can one day be used like a Trojan horse to deliver life-saving treatments to citrus trees. The infection, citrus yellow vein disease, was discovered 64 years ago in Riverside and has never been seen elsewhere in the world. Decades later, UC Riverside researchers have finally unraveled the associated pathogen's genetic codes -- a significant step toward harnessing its unique properties. A paper describing this work was published recently in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. It opens the door to testing whether this apparently ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) have described a potential disease-causing mechanism in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the most frequent hereditary disease of the heart. The study, published in the journal ACS Nano, provides the first description of an association between this disease and mechanical alterations to a component of the contractile machinery of the heart. The heart muscle is under constant mechanical stress throughout life as it contracts to pump blood to the body. The laboratory led by Dr. Jorge Alegre-Cebollada investigates how the mechanical properties of the cardiac proteins determine the physiological behavior of this muscle and how alterations to these properties lead to the appearance of diseases like ...

This targeted control of phages provides entirely new biotechnological and therapeutic approaches, e.g. for phage therapies. The results produced in the context of an ERC grant have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The human body and its microbiota harbour a large amount of phages. These infect bacteria as virus particles to ensure their own survival. One of their strategies is to integrate into the bacterial genome and multiply via bacterial cell division. However, external signal molecules can trigger the phages' sudden awakening from their dormant ...

Imagine you're a fisherman living by a lake with a rowboat. Every day, you row out on the calm waters and life is good. But then your family grows, and you need more fish, so you go to the nearby river. Then, you realize you go farther and faster on the river. You can't take your little rowboat out there - it's not built for those currents. So, you learn everything you can about how rivers work and build a better boat. Life is good again...until you realize you need to go farther still, out on the ocean. But ocean rules are nothing like river rules. Now you have to learn how ocean currents work, and then ...

DARIEN, IL - Findings from a recent study show that patients with untreated, moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea had a higher risk of experiencing a cardiovascular event, but the risk of incident heart problems was decreased in those who used CPAP therapy. Results show that people with moderate to severe sleep apnea and no record of CPAP use were 71% more likely than those without sleep apnea to experience incident myocardial infarction, stroke, unstable angina, heart failure or cardiovascular death. Compared with the risk of heart problems in people with untreated sleep apnea, the risk of experiencing a cardiovascular event was 32% lower ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - The Noceto Vasca Votiva is a unique wood structure that was unearthed on a small hill in northern Italy in 2005. Built primarily of oak and slightly larger than a backyard swimming pool, the exact purpose of the in-ground structure has remained a mystery, as has the date of its construction. Italian researchers estimated its origins go back to the late Middle Bronze Age, sometime between 1600 and 1300 B.C. While that gap might not seem huge, in archeological terms it's like comparing the culture that invented the steam engine with the one that produced the iPad. A Cornell University team led by Sturt Manning, Distinguished ...

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace. Their origins are unknown, and their appearance is unpredictable. In the decade following their discovery in 2007, only 140 FRBs had been seen. Now, thanks to the launch of a large stationary telescope in the interior of British Columbia in 2018, the number of new FRBs detected has almost quadrupled - for a total of 535. Moreover, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME/FRB), a McGill-led inter-university collaboration, has put together the first CHIME/FRB catalogue, which will be presented this week at the American Astronomical Society Meeting. CHIME is unique in that ...

Recently, a research team led by Prof. ZHAO Bangchuan from the Institute of Solid Materials of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) synthesized 3D porous honeycomb-like CoN-Ni3N/N-C nanosheets and vanadium nitride (VN) nanobelt arrays via in-situ growth method, respectively, and constructed a high-energy-density flexible supercapacitor device. The result has been published in Advanced Functional Materials. Transition metal nitrides (TMNs) are potential electrode materials for high-performance energy storage devices, but the structural instability severely hinders their application. Therefore ...