LOS ANGELES, CA The Protein Society is proud to announce that the winners of the 2023 Protein Science Best Paper awards are Evan T. Liechty from the University of Colorado, USA, and Sophie Rizzo, from Lehigh University, USA. Evan T. Liechty Protein Science 2023 August;32(8):e4719.doi:10.1002/pro.4719 Analysis of neutral mutational drift in an allosteric enzyme Evan T. Liechty1, Andrew Hren1, Levi Kramer1, Gregory Donovan1, Anika J. Friedman1, Michael R. Shirts1, Jerome M. Fox1 1Department of Chemical and ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — The countries of the world agreed: Our planet needs more protection from human activity. And with the globe facing an assortment of environmental crises, they realized the plan needed to be ambitious. Thirty-by-thirty was their proposal: protect 30% of the planet by 2030. But while conservation is popular in principle, the costs of actually enacting it often stall even the most earnest efforts. Three researchers at UC Santa Barbara have proposed a market-based approach to achieving the 30x30 targets in the ocean. They tested whether a system that allowed countries to trade conservation ...

This year has already seen massive heatwaves around the globe, with cities in Mexico, India, Pakistan and Oman hitting temperatures near or past 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).   As global temperatures and urban populations rise, the world’s cities have become “urban heat islands,” with tight-packed conditions and thermal radiation emitting from pavement and skyscraper trapping and magnifying these temperatures. With 68 percent of all people predicted to live in cities by 2050, this is a growing, ...

Oregon State University researchers found that U.S. adults are fairly confident in linking wildfires and heat to climate change, but less confident when it comes to other extreme weather events like hurricanes, flooding or tornadoes. The recent study found that politics and personal experience played significant roles in people’s responses: Self-identified Republicans were less likely than Democrats to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, though Republicans who had personally experienced negative impacts from extreme weather events were more likely to link them to climate change than those who hadn’t. Looking at ...

The increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves in recent decades is one of the effects of global climate change. A study by the University of Barcelona, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, shows that the extreme heatwave of 2022 caused an “unprecedented” increase in mortality of the red gorgonian Paramuricea clavata, affecting 70% of the colonies located in the Montgrí Natural Park, the Medes Islands and the Baix Ter. According to the researchers, these results are “alarming ...

An analysis of reviews of translational biomedical research reveals that just 5% of therapies tested in animals reach regulatory approval for human use. The study, an umbrella review, published June 13th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, summarizes other systematic reviews and provides high level evidence that while the rate of translation to human studies is 50%, there is steep drop off before final approval. The authors argue that improved robustness and generalizability of experimental approaches could help increase the chances of translation and final approval. Animal studies are used in basic research ...

Plant-derived compounds best known for their antimalarial properties relieve polycystic ovary syndrome, a major public health problem that affects millions of women worldwide. These compounds, called artemisinins, achieve their affect by suppressing ovarian androgen production in multiple rodent models as well as in a small cohort of human patients, according to a new study. The findings not only underscore the versatility of artemisinins but reveal a promising new approach for preventing and treating the disorder. Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is one of the most common ...

In a Perspective, Courtney Sexton and Audrey Ruple discuss how companion animals, especially dogs, are distinctly positioned to be sentinels of human health due to the environments they and humans closely share, but, say the authors, systems for improving data capture around dogs’ environments are critically needed. Humans share their environments closely with companion animals, leading to similar health risks such as respiratory illnesses, cancers, and cognitive dysfunction. Dogs, having cohabitated with humans for about 30,000 years, are particularly well-suited ...

A new platform enables simultaneous capture of protein expression, cellular morphology, neural projection, and synapse distribution in large-scale human brain tissues at multiple scales, researchers report. The system ensures the preservation of cellular architecture while enabling detailed imaging and analysis of large human brain tissue samples at unprecedented resolution and speed. The authors demonstrated its utility by processing whole human brain hemispheres to reveal pathological features of Alzheimer’s disease tissue. “We envision that this scalable technology platform will ...

Observing anything and everything within the human brain, no matter how large or small while it is fully intact, has been an out-of-reach dream of neuroscience for decades, but in a new study in Science, an MIT-based team describes a technology pipeline that enabled them to finely process, richly label and sharply image full hemispheres of the brains of two donors—one with Alzheimer’s and one without—at high resolution and speed. “We performed holistic imaging of human brain tissues at multiple resolutions ...

Some species of tardigrades are highly and unusually resilient to various extreme conditions fatal to most other forms of life. The genetic basis for these exceptional abilities remains elusive. For the first time, researchers from the University of Tokyo successfully edited genes using the CRISPR technique in a highly resilient tardigrade species previously impossible to study with genome-editing tools. The successful delivery of CRISPR to an asexual tardigrade species directly produces gene-edited offspring. The design and ...

Most people today would lean towards environmentally friendly life choices, but not at the expense of being clean. When it comes to our washing habits, the fear of being perceived as dirty often wins out over the desire to act in an environmentally friendly way. And the more inclined we are to feel disgusted, the more we wash our clothes. This is shown by a unique study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, that examines the driving forces behind our laundering behaviours and provides new tools for how people's environmental impact can be reduced. Today, we wash our clothes more than ever ...

The important role of the Southern Ocean in global biological processes and the carbon cycle has been confirmed anew by a study published in Science this week that, for the first time based on field evidence, reveals the underappreciated role of inorganic Zinc particles in these cycles. The Southern Ocean plays the greatest role in global phytoplankton productivity, which is responsible for absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. In these processes, Zinc, present in trace quantities in seawater, is an essential micronutrient critical to many biochemical processes in marine organisms and particularly for polar phytoplankton ...

A link between the neurotransmitter dopamine and the mentalising abilities of healthy people has been identified for the first time in a new study.  Mentalising describes the act of attributing and understanding mental states (such as thoughts, feelings or intentions) in other people and in oneself. Researchers at the University of Birmingham have been able to show that changing people’s brain dopamine levels affects their mentalising abilities. Their results are published today in PLOS Biology.  Dopamine ...

Bacteriophages, viruses that attack and destroy bacteria, are everywhere in the natural world where they play a vital role in regulating microbe populations in ways that are not yet well understood. New research led by the University of Utah and University College London (UCL) has found that plant bacterial pathogens are able to repurpose elements of their own bacteriophages, or phages, to wipe out competing microbes. These surprise findings suggest such phage-derived elements could someday be harnessed as an alternative to antibiotics, according to Talia Karasov, an assistant professor in the U’s School of ...

Smithsonian Conservation Research Brief:  Carbon dioxide-fueled accelerated plant growth dilutes nutrients, impacting herbivore populations.  A new study from researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) warns that as human activities increase carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, they may decrease the nutrient contents of plants. Declines in nutrient content, known as Nutrient Dilution, may already be harming plant-eating animals and could cause further population declines farther up the ecological chain. The paper, published today in the journal Trends ...

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is pleased to announce that 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Avi Wigderson will give his Turing Lecture at the 2024 ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) on Thursday, June 27 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Wigderson received the A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science. In "Alan Turing: A TCS Role Model," Wigderson ...

Opioids are a broad group of effective pain-relieving medicines that can become highly addictive in some individuals. According to government sources, nearly 40 million people are addicted to illicit drugs worldwide. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a national public health emergency. To combat the opioid epidemic, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine will develop an AI model that will more accurately predict opioid addiction in high-risk patients.  The project is funded through a three-year contract with Wellcome Leap as part of a $50 million groundbreaking initiative, called ...

Opioid overdoses for pregnant patients are at an all-time high in the United States, even as overall numbers are improving. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is highly correlated with substance use disorders, yet treatment protocols to help expecting parents manage opioid use disorders and ADHD together are essentially nonexistent. New research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis may help change that. A study published in Nature Mental Health indicates that patients with opioid use disorders and ADHD who remain on their ADHD medications during their pregnancies are far more likely to adhere to treatment for opioid use, and far less likely to ...

The small footprint and dim light of white dwarfs, remnants of stars that have burned through their fuel, may make excellent backdrops for studying planets with enough water to harbor life. The trick is spotting the shadow of a planet against a former star that has withered to a fraction of its size and finding that it’s a planet that has kept its water oceans for billions of years even after riding out the star’s explosive and violent final throes. A new study of the dynamics of white dwarf systems suggests that, in theory, some watery planets may indeed thread the celestial needles necessary to await ...

The ecosystem that surrounds a tumor, also known as the tumor microenvironment, includes immune cells, tissues, blood vessels and other cells that interact with each other and with the tumor. Over time, the tumor shapes this ecosystem to its own benefit, monopolizing all of the nutrients and shielding it from immune attack. In working to understand the ecosystem’s role in cancer risk, development and treatment, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory have not only identified how two immune cells work together to fight cancer but also revealed the cascade of molecules that help coordinate this attack. The work, ...

Québec City, June 13, 2024–Increased use of blood transfusions after major traumatic brain injury could help people hospitalized in intensive care units regain greater functional independence and a better quality of life.   Six months after a major traumatic brain injury (TBI), patients who benefited from this approach regained more functional independence and had a better quality of life than those subjected to a more restrictive approach, even though the combined incidence of death and major ...

In a session on diagnosing and managing complex diseases at the 2024 EULAR congress in Vienna, two abstracts tackled this issue.   First, Filippo Vesentini presented on the risk of flare with glucocorticoid compared to low-dose maintenance – based on a retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data from people with SLE. Flare-free remission and predictors of such were evaluated respectively in remitted patients on and off glucocorticoids.   During follow-up, 484 patients achieved remission at least once during ...

An HPR abstract sessions at the 2024 EULAR congress looked specifically at harnessing the benefits of exercise in rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMD) – and the challenges to their practical implementation.   Mohamed Saadi presented a systematic review examining barriers and facilitators affecting adherence to EULAR’s physical activity recommendations. Across 68 selected articles, 29 different themes were identified – 9 of which were social, 16 environmental, and 4 systemic. The five most frequently found themes were having supportive family and friends, a supportive health professional, followed by costs, and access or proximity to adapted and ...

Even though early therapeutic interventions have proven successful in inducing drug-free remission in other inflammatory rheumatic diseases, such studies remain difficult to conduct in axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), which manifests itself by insidious onset inflammatory back pain. As a result it is often diagnosed late,5 and a consensus definition of early disease was only recently published.6   At the 2024 EULAR congress, Łukasik and colleagues shared data from their prospective study evaluating the efficacy of a ...