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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 6, 2022 at 9:04am

Researchers harness bacteria-eating viruses to create powerful food decontamination spray

Researchers  have created a powerful new weapon against bacterial contamination and infection.

They have developed a way to coax bacteriophages—harmless viruses that eat bacteria—into linking together and forming microscopic beads. Those beads can safely be applied to food and other materials to rid them of harmful pathogens such as E. coli 0157. Each bead is about 20 microns, (one 50th of a millimeter) in diameter and is loaded with millions of phages.

The researchers' sprayable new super-disinfectant is food-safe and highly effective, as they describe in an article  published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Self-assembling nanofibrous bacteriophage microgels as sprayable antimicrobials targeting multidrug-resistant bacteria, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34803-7

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 6, 2022 at 8:51am

Study hints at the potentially crucial role of shear stress in the activation of pain sensing neurons

Feelings of pain and discomfort are crucial to the survival and evolution of animals, as they help to detect injuries or existential threats and pinpoint their location in the body. Pain signals are produced by nociceptors, sensory neurons that respond to damage to the body and send "threat" signals to the spinal cord.

Nociceptors (i.e., neurons sensing pain) are essentially bare nerve endings that can be found in all parts of the body, including the skin, muscles, bones and viscera. While many neuroscience studies have investigated their structure and function, the mechanisms underpinning their activation remain poorly understood.

Researchers have recently set out to better understand these mechanisms by conducting experiments on fruit fly larvae. Their findings, published in Neuron, suggest that these neurons specifically respond to shear stress (i.e., stress caused by two forces of similar strength acting on opposite sides of a body and moving in opposite directions), but do not respond to stretch.

The key goal of the recent work was to identify the specific forces that lead to the activation of these pain sensing neurons and elucidate the underlying transduction mechanisms. To do this, the researchers first conducted behavioral experiments, where they poked a fruit fly larva using a calibrated fishing line. "In the absence of stimulation, larvae tend to move forward with frequent changing of direction. However, when they poked a larva, it stopped moving and displayed a 360-degree body rotation. This rolling was interpreted as nocifensive behaviour (i.e., animal behavior aimed at withdrawing from danger). The strength of response was measured as a percentage of animals that rolled in response to poking. Using computer modeling, the team found that poking a fruit fly larva could elicit two different kinds of forces, stretch and shear stress to stimulate nociceptors. In the following calcium imaging experiments to explore which forces are responsible for nociceptor activation, the researchers stretched the larvae's nociceptors or apply a shear force to them. They found that the larvae's nociceptors were activated by shear stress, but not by stretch. They were also able to identify the specific type of ion channel that is found in nociceptors and is activated by shear stress, called transient receptor potential A1 (TrpA1). Interestingly, shear stress appeared to be able to activate TrpA1 in a small patch of cell membrane devoid of cellular environment, providing evidence of TrpA1 as a molecular sensor of shear stress. They further show the effect of shear stress was through modulation of membrane's fluidity.

This study has two notable findings:First, the researchers showed that shear stress could be a physiologically relevant force that is critical for activation of nociceptors. Second, it provided evidence that TrpA1 is a shear stress sensor and this property is conserved for TrpA1 derived from Drosophila, mice and humans.

Jiaxin Gong et al, Shear stress activates nociceptors to drive Drosophila mechanical nociception, Neuron (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.08.015

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 5, 2022 at 9:16am

Mapping the hidden connections between diseases

A new study by  researchers has identified patterns in how common health conditions occur together in the same individuals, using data from 4 million patients.

With advancing age, millions of people live with multiple conditions—sometimes referred to as multimorbidity—and the proportion of people affected in this way is expected to rise over the next decades. However, medical education and training, health care delivery, clinical guidelines and research have evolved to focus on one disease at a time.

The Academy of Medical Sciences and the UK Chief Medical Officer (CMO) have recognized this problem and set out a challenge of investigating which diseases co-occur in the same individuals and why.

In the new study, published in The Lancet Digital Health, the team used routine health records data to systematically identify patterns of clustering of 308 common mental and physical health conditions of men and women of different ages and with different ethnicities.

Some patterns found include: heart failure often co-occurred with hypertension, atrial fibrillation, osteoarthritis, stable angina, myocardial infarction, chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Hypertension was most strongly associated with kidney disorders in those aged 20–29 years, but with dyslipidaemia, obesity, and type 2 diabetes in individuals aged 40 years and older.

Breast cancer was associated with different comorbidities in individuals from different ethnicities, asthma with different comorbidities between the sexes, and bipolar disorder with different comorbidities in younger ages compared with older ages.

Millions of people live with multiple diseases, yet our understanding of how and when these transpire is limited. This research project is the first step towards understanding how these diseases co-occur and identifying how to best treat them.

The study includes accessible tools to help users visualize patterns of disease co-occurrence, including for diseases that cluster more commonly than expected by chance, providing an entry point to investigate common risk factors and treatments.

The findings should help patients better understand their illness, doctors better plan management of patients with multimorbidity, health care providers optimize service delivery, policy makers plan resource allocation, and researchers to develop new or use existing medicines to treat several diseases together.

Valerie Kuan et al, Identifying and visualising multimorbidity and comorbidity patterns in patients in the English National Health Service: a population-based study, The Lancet Digital Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2589-7500(22)00187-X

The findings, the researchers say, provide the data and resources to help improve health and care planning for patients in England living with more than one condition.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 4, 2022 at 12:18pm

Janavis: new species of toothed bird from the Age of Dinosaurs

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 4, 2022 at 12:16pm

Brain cells use a telephone trick to report what they see

"How many fingers am I holding up?”

For vision-sensing brain cells in a monkey’s visual cortex, that answer depends on whether the digits are next to each other or partially overlapping.

A new study from Duke University finds that single neurons conveying visual information about two separate objects in sight do so by alternating signals about one or the other. When two objects overlap, however, the brain cells detect them as a single entity.

The new report is out Nov. 28 in the journal eLife.

The findings help expand what is known about how the brain makes sense of its complicated and busy world. Most research on sensory processing, be it sounds or sights, sets the bar too low by testing how brain cells react to a single tone or image.

This study is the first one  to show that single auditory brain cells efficiently transmit information about two different sounds by using something called multiplexing.

Multiplexing is an idea that comes from engineering. When you have one wire and a lot of signals, you can swap the signals out, kind of like a telephone party line.

The telecommunications technology works by rapidly switching back-and-forth between relaying information from one phone call and the other using just one wire. In the brain, the switching is probably happening much more slowly but the general idea is similar.

“Coordinated Multiplexing of Information About Separate Objects in Visual Cortex,” Na Young Jun, Douglas A. Ruff, Lily E. Kramer, Brittany Bowes, Surya T. Tokdar, Marlene R. Cohen, Jennifer M. Groh. eLife, Nov. 29, 2022. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.76452.sa0

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 4, 2022 at 11:52am

Researchers discover new form of antimicrobial resistance

Researchers have uncovered a new form of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), undetectable using traditional laboratory testing methods, in a discovery set to challenge existing efforts to monitor and tackle one of the world's greatest health threats.

In research published today in Nature Communications, the researchers revealed a new mechanism that enables bacteria to take up nutrients from their human host and bypass antibiotic treatment. The researchers made the discovery while investigating antibiotic susceptibility of group A. streptococcus—a potentially deadly bacteria often found in the throat and on the skin.

Bacteria need to make their own folates to grow, and in turn, cause disease. Some antibiotics work by blocking this folate production to stop bacteria growing and treat the infection. When looking at an antibiotic commonly prescribed to treat group A. strep skin infections, researchers found a mechanism of resistance, where for the first time ever, the bacteria demonstrated the ability to take folates directly from its human host when blocked from producing their own. This makes the antibiotic ineffective and the infection would likely worsen when the patient should be getting better.

This new form of resistance is undetectable under conditions routinely used in pathology laboratories, making it very hard for clinicians to prescribe antibiotics that will effectively treat the infection, potentially leading to very poor outcomes and even premature death.

Researchers  suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg—they have identified this mechanism in group A. strep but it's likely it will be a broader issue across other bacterial pathogens.

Host-dependent resistance of Group A Streptococcus to sulfamethoxazolemediated by a horizontally-acquired reduced folate transporter, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34243-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 9:43am

Wormhole inside a quantum computer

Physicists have sent quantum information through a simulated wormhole in a ‘toy’ universe that exists only inside a quantum computer. The tunnel is analogous to passages through space-time that might connect the centres of black holes in the real Universe. “The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” write the authors of an analysis published alongside the study in Nature. Some scientists think that such experiments could help to unite the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity in the simplified realm of toy universes, leading ultimately to the answer to one of the biggest problems in physics: a real-world quantum theory of gravity.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 9:09am

Astronomers See Stellar Self-Control in Action

Stars can regulate their growth when they are part of a bigger group called a cluster. Once stars get very big and bright, they can blow most of the gas out of the cluster. This prevents too many new stars from forming, controlling the stellar family’s size. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes examined a large gas cloud for this finding.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 8:32am

Short term memory problems can be improved with laser therapy, according to new study

Laser light therapy has been shown to be effective in improving short term memory in a study published in Science Advances.

Scientists 

demonstrated that the therapy, which is non-invasive, could improve short term, or working memory in people by up to 25%.

The treatment, called transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM), is applied to an area of the brain known as the right prefrontal cortex. This area is widely recognized as important for working memory. In their experiment, the team showed how working memory improved among research participants after several minutes of treatment. They were also able to track the changes in brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring during treatment and testing.

Previous studies have shown that laser light treatment will improve working memory in mice, and human studies have shown tPBM treatment can improve accuracy, speed up reaction time and improve high-order functions such as attention and emotion.

This is the first study, however, to confirm a link between tPBM and working memory in humans.

Chenguang Zhao et al, Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3211. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3211

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 3, 2022 at 7:36am

An architecture that gives users full control of their smartphones

In recent years, many smartphone users have become concerned about the privacy of their data and the extent to which companies might have access to this data. As things stand today, the applications that users can run on their phone and what they can do with these applications is determined by a few big tech companies.

Researchers have recently set out on a quest to change this current trend, through the development of a new smartphone architecture called TEEtime. This architecture, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows users to flexibly choose what resources on their smartphone they will dedicate to legacy operating systems, such as Android or iOS, and which they wish to keep for their own proprietary software and data.

Essentially, TEEtime isolates different domains, allowing users to decide the extent to which each of these domains has access to resources on their phone. This means that users could, for instance, run a navigation application in their own isolated domain, giving GPS access only to this domain and thus preventing Android/iOS from accessing their GPS data. The same could also be done with other peripherals, such as Bluetooth or the phone's in-built microphone and camera.

The introduction of domains has two main advantages in terms of giving users control over their devices. Firstly, it gives users full control of the privacy of their data, for instance allowing them to store their photos in a separate domain, where the user can make sure that no client-side scanning is performed. Note that in current phone ecosystems these features can be silently introduced without the user even noticing or having the possibility to opt-out.

The second advantage of the TEEtime architecture is that it can prevent censorship or increase resistance to it. In other words, if their operating service providers blocks an application or prevents them from installing it, they can still run it in a separate domain.

So far, the researchers tested a prototype of their architecture on an ARM emulator, a software tool often used to test operating systems and other smartphone software. These initial evaluations were promising, as they suggested that TEEtime works well and does not impact a system's security.

Friederike Groschupp et al, It's TEEtime: Bringing User Sovereignty to Smartphones, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2211.05206

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