Scientists identify chemicals in noxious weed that 'disarm' deadly bacteria

"Nature is the best chemist, hands down," says Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave, shown with berries from the Brazilian peppertree. The plant is native to South America where traditional healers in the Amazon have used it as a treatment for skin infections. 

By Carol Clark

Scientists have identified specific compounds from the Brazilian peppertree — a weedy, invasive shrub in Florida — that reduce the virulence of antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria. Scientific Reports published the research, demonstrating that triterpenoid acids in the red berries of the plant “disarm” dangerous staph bacteria by blocking its ability to produce toxins.

The work was led by the lab of Cassandra Quave, an assistant professor in Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health and the Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology. The researchers’ laboratory experiments provide the first evidence that triterpenoid acids pack a punch against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

The Brazilian peppertree (Schinus terebinthifolia), native to South America, is also abundant in Florida, where it forms dense thickets that crowd out native species. “It is a noxious weed that many people in Florida hate, for good reason,” Quave says. “But, at the same time, there is this rich lore about the Brazilian Peppertree in the Amazon, where traditional healers have used the plant for centuries to treat skin and soft tissue infections.”

Brazilian peppertree

Quave, a leader in the field of medical ethnobotany and a member of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center, studies how indigenous people incorporate plants in healing practices to uncover promising candidates for new drugs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.” Each year in the U.S., at least 2.8 million people get antibiotic-resistant infections, leading to more than 35,000 deaths.

“Even in the midst of the current viral pandemic of COVID-19, we can’t forget about the issue of antibiotic resistance,” Quave says. She notes that many COVID-19 patients are receiving antibiotics to deal with secondary infections brought on by their weakened conditions, raising concerns about a later surge in antibiotic-resistant infections.

In 2017, the Quave lab published the finding that a refined, flavone-rich mix of 27 compounds extracted from the berries of the Brazilian peppertree inhibits formation of skin lesions in mice infected with MRSA. The extract works not by killing the MRSA bacteria, but by repressing a gene that allows the bacteria cells to communicate with one another. Blocking that communication prevents the cells from taking collective action, which essentially disarms the bacteria by preventing it from excreting the toxins it uses to damage tissues. The body’s immune system then stands a better chance of healing a wound.

That approach is different from the typical treatment of blasting deadly bacteria with drugs designed to kill them, which can help fuel the problem of antibiotic resistance. Some of the stronger bacteria may survive these drug onslaughts and proliferate, passing on their genes to offspring and leading to the evolution of deadly “super bugs.”

For the current paper, the researchers wanted to narrow down the scope of 27 major compounds from the berries to isolate the specific chemicals involved in disarming MRSA. They painstakingly refined the original compounds, testing each new iteration for its potency on the bacteria. They also used a series of analytical chemistry techniques, including mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography to gain a clear picture of the chemicals involved in the anti-virulence mechanism.

The results showed that three triterpenoid acids worked equally well at inhibiting MRSA from forming toxins in a petri dish, without harming human skin cells. And one of the triterpenoid acids worked particularly well at inhibiting the ability of MRSA to form lesions on the skin of mice. The researchers also demonstrated that the triterpenoid acids repressed not just one gene that MRSA uses to excrete toxins, but two genes involved in that process.

“Nature is the best chemist, hands down,” Quave says. She adds that weeds, in particular, tend to have interesting chemical arsenals that they may use to protect them from diseases so they can more easily spread in new environments.

The research team plans to do further studies to test the triterpenoid acids as treatments for MRSA infections in animal models. If those studies are promising, the next step would be to work with medicinal chemists to optimize the compounds for efficacy, delivery and safety before testing on humans.

“Plants are so incredibly complex chemically that identifying and isolating particular extracts is like picking needles out of haystacks,” Quave says. “When you’re able to pluck out molecules with medicinal properties from these complex natural mixtures, that’s a big step forward to understanding how some traditional medicines may work, and for advancing science towards a potential drug development pathway.”

First authors of the current paper are Huaqiao Tang — a former visiting scholar at Emory and a veterinarian at Sichuan Agricultural University in China — and Gina Porras, an Emory post-doctoral fellow. In addition to senior author Quave, co-authors include Francois Chassagne and James Lyles, who are both members of the Quave lab; John Basca, director of Emory’s X-ray Crystallography Center; and Alexander Horswill and Morgan Brown from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Related:
Brazilian peppertree packs power to knock out antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria
A future without antibiotics?

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2WORngu

"Nature is the best chemist, hands down," says Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave, shown with berries from the Brazilian peppertree. The plant is native to South America where traditional healers in the Amazon have used it as a treatment for skin infections. 

By Carol Clark

Scientists have identified specific compounds from the Brazilian peppertree — a weedy, invasive shrub in Florida — that reduce the virulence of antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria. Scientific Reports published the research, demonstrating that triterpenoid acids in the red berries of the plant “disarm” dangerous staph bacteria by blocking its ability to produce toxins.

The work was led by the lab of Cassandra Quave, an assistant professor in Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health and the Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology. The researchers’ laboratory experiments provide the first evidence that triterpenoid acids pack a punch against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

The Brazilian peppertree (Schinus terebinthifolia), native to South America, is also abundant in Florida, where it forms dense thickets that crowd out native species. “It is a noxious weed that many people in Florida hate, for good reason,” Quave says. “But, at the same time, there is this rich lore about the Brazilian Peppertree in the Amazon, where traditional healers have used the plant for centuries to treat skin and soft tissue infections.”

Brazilian peppertree

Quave, a leader in the field of medical ethnobotany and a member of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center, studies how indigenous people incorporate plants in healing practices to uncover promising candidates for new drugs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.” Each year in the U.S., at least 2.8 million people get antibiotic-resistant infections, leading to more than 35,000 deaths.

“Even in the midst of the current viral pandemic of COVID-19, we can’t forget about the issue of antibiotic resistance,” Quave says. She notes that many COVID-19 patients are receiving antibiotics to deal with secondary infections brought on by their weakened conditions, raising concerns about a later surge in antibiotic-resistant infections.

In 2017, the Quave lab published the finding that a refined, flavone-rich mix of 27 compounds extracted from the berries of the Brazilian peppertree inhibits formation of skin lesions in mice infected with MRSA. The extract works not by killing the MRSA bacteria, but by repressing a gene that allows the bacteria cells to communicate with one another. Blocking that communication prevents the cells from taking collective action, which essentially disarms the bacteria by preventing it from excreting the toxins it uses to damage tissues. The body’s immune system then stands a better chance of healing a wound.

That approach is different from the typical treatment of blasting deadly bacteria with drugs designed to kill them, which can help fuel the problem of antibiotic resistance. Some of the stronger bacteria may survive these drug onslaughts and proliferate, passing on their genes to offspring and leading to the evolution of deadly “super bugs.”

For the current paper, the researchers wanted to narrow down the scope of 27 major compounds from the berries to isolate the specific chemicals involved in disarming MRSA. They painstakingly refined the original compounds, testing each new iteration for its potency on the bacteria. They also used a series of analytical chemistry techniques, including mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography to gain a clear picture of the chemicals involved in the anti-virulence mechanism.

The results showed that three triterpenoid acids worked equally well at inhibiting MRSA from forming toxins in a petri dish, without harming human skin cells. And one of the triterpenoid acids worked particularly well at inhibiting the ability of MRSA to form lesions on the skin of mice. The researchers also demonstrated that the triterpenoid acids repressed not just one gene that MRSA uses to excrete toxins, but two genes involved in that process.

“Nature is the best chemist, hands down,” Quave says. She adds that weeds, in particular, tend to have interesting chemical arsenals that they may use to protect them from diseases so they can more easily spread in new environments.

The research team plans to do further studies to test the triterpenoid acids as treatments for MRSA infections in animal models. If those studies are promising, the next step would be to work with medicinal chemists to optimize the compounds for efficacy, delivery and safety before testing on humans.

“Plants are so incredibly complex chemically that identifying and isolating particular extracts is like picking needles out of haystacks,” Quave says. “When you’re able to pluck out molecules with medicinal properties from these complex natural mixtures, that’s a big step forward to understanding how some traditional medicines may work, and for advancing science towards a potential drug development pathway.”

First authors of the current paper are Huaqiao Tang — a former visiting scholar at Emory and a veterinarian at Sichuan Agricultural University in China — and Gina Porras, an Emory post-doctoral fellow. In addition to senior author Quave, co-authors include Francois Chassagne and James Lyles, who are both members of the Quave lab; John Basca, director of Emory’s X-ray Crystallography Center; and Alexander Horswill and Morgan Brown from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Related:
Brazilian peppertree packs power to knock out antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria
A future without antibiotics?

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2WORngu

Global experts call for mental health science to combat pandemic's impacts

Emory anthropologist Carol Worthman is among 25 mental health experts who issued a call for global action on mental health science surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Carol Clark

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 infected about 8,000 people and killed hundreds. Although SARS was stamped out relatively quickly, and before it could spread globally, it left a lingering impact. One study found that most SARS survivors in two major hospitals had high levels of psychological distress a year after the outbreak.

“Just surviving the pandemic was not the end of the story,” says Carol Worthman, professor of anthropology at Emory University. “And the COVID-19 pandemic is much more pervasive than SARS. It affects everybody, worldwide. Even those who do not get COVID-19 will have to live with the fallout.”

Worthman is among 25 mental health experts who issued a call for global action on mental health science surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, recently published by The Lancet Psychiatry. In a position paper, they stress the immediate need for creating neuro-psychological databases concerning the pandemic’s impacts on brain health, mental health and overall well-being. These databases are needed to support evidence-based responses to the pandemic and to develop longer-term strategies to promote mental health and well-being.

Even as nations mobilize to treat patients, develop drugs and vaccines, and salvage economies, coordinated efforts on a similar scale are needed for mental health, Worthman says. Her research focuses on how cultural and social factors interact with human health, for better or for worse.

“We’re used to thinking about physical diseases and mental illnesses as two separate things,” Worthman says, “but the two actually go hand-in-hand. Mental illness doesn’t just affect the lives of individuals, but of those around them. And like a virus, mental illness is invisible, in a way, and can be even harder to test and screen for.” Before the pandemic, depression already ranked in the top 10 causes of poor health worldwide and had climbed to the top four health problems related to healthy years of life lost.

The impacts of the lockdowns and social isolation on the mental health of vulnerable people are among the key questions that need to be tackled in an international response to COVID-19, the experts write. Their paper also stresses the need to research the best ways to move people to follow the advice of public health messages without unduly increasing stress and anxiety.

“People are especially hurting right now, they’re suffering, and they’re looking for ways to feel better,” Worthman says. “If we don’t develop pro-social ways to help people cope now and, in the future, we’re going to be living with the consequences for a long time.”

She points out that the 1918 flu pandemic, following on top of the first world war, helped set the stage for the social disruption and sense of hopelessness that fueled political movements and nationalism leading to the second world war.

One critical need is to gather data and develop strategies to support people currently working in high-intensity, high-risk settings during the pandemic, such as healthcare workers. “Burnout and higher suicide rates among healthcare providers had already been a growing problem for years,” Worthman says.

She cites the mental health effects of massive unemployment as another critical area. “Work is a huge part of peoples’ identities, not to mention their livelihoods,” she says. “Depression, anxiety, stress and lack of control are all things that undermine resilience. What can we do to help people stay resilient when they’re losing their sense of dignity and self-worth and predictability for their futures?”

Youth and adolescent mental health is another vital area to consider, Worthman says. “Young people are having to watch a remapping of the social-economic political world and try to find their way through it. Their future is our future and they need to be part of the solution. How do we mobilize youth to help them make their future as great as possible? Do we make supporting youth as important as saving airlines and other industries?”

COVID-19 is revealing and widening existing fault lines in social, economic and political systems. “We now have the challenge and opportunity to heal those ruptures even as we seek to heal ourselves of COVID-19,” Worthman says.

Related:
The importance of puberty: A call for better research models
How family stories help children weather hard times



from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3fmFTYB

Emory anthropologist Carol Worthman is among 25 mental health experts who issued a call for global action on mental health science surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Carol Clark

The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 infected about 8,000 people and killed hundreds. Although SARS was stamped out relatively quickly, and before it could spread globally, it left a lingering impact. One study found that most SARS survivors in two major hospitals had high levels of psychological distress a year after the outbreak.

“Just surviving the pandemic was not the end of the story,” says Carol Worthman, professor of anthropology at Emory University. “And the COVID-19 pandemic is much more pervasive than SARS. It affects everybody, worldwide. Even those who do not get COVID-19 will have to live with the fallout.”

Worthman is among 25 mental health experts who issued a call for global action on mental health science surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, recently published by The Lancet Psychiatry. In a position paper, they stress the immediate need for creating neuro-psychological databases concerning the pandemic’s impacts on brain health, mental health and overall well-being. These databases are needed to support evidence-based responses to the pandemic and to develop longer-term strategies to promote mental health and well-being.

Even as nations mobilize to treat patients, develop drugs and vaccines, and salvage economies, coordinated efforts on a similar scale are needed for mental health, Worthman says. Her research focuses on how cultural and social factors interact with human health, for better or for worse.

“We’re used to thinking about physical diseases and mental illnesses as two separate things,” Worthman says, “but the two actually go hand-in-hand. Mental illness doesn’t just affect the lives of individuals, but of those around them. And like a virus, mental illness is invisible, in a way, and can be even harder to test and screen for.” Before the pandemic, depression already ranked in the top 10 causes of poor health worldwide and had climbed to the top four health problems related to healthy years of life lost.

The impacts of the lockdowns and social isolation on the mental health of vulnerable people are among the key questions that need to be tackled in an international response to COVID-19, the experts write. Their paper also stresses the need to research the best ways to move people to follow the advice of public health messages without unduly increasing stress and anxiety.

“People are especially hurting right now, they’re suffering, and they’re looking for ways to feel better,” Worthman says. “If we don’t develop pro-social ways to help people cope now and, in the future, we’re going to be living with the consequences for a long time.”

She points out that the 1918 flu pandemic, following on top of the first world war, helped set the stage for the social disruption and sense of hopelessness that fueled political movements and nationalism leading to the second world war.

One critical need is to gather data and develop strategies to support people currently working in high-intensity, high-risk settings during the pandemic, such as healthcare workers. “Burnout and higher suicide rates among healthcare providers had already been a growing problem for years,” Worthman says.

She cites the mental health effects of massive unemployment as another critical area. “Work is a huge part of peoples’ identities, not to mention their livelihoods,” she says. “Depression, anxiety, stress and lack of control are all things that undermine resilience. What can we do to help people stay resilient when they’re losing their sense of dignity and self-worth and predictability for their futures?”

Youth and adolescent mental health is another vital area to consider, Worthman says. “Young people are having to watch a remapping of the social-economic political world and try to find their way through it. Their future is our future and they need to be part of the solution. How do we mobilize youth to help them make their future as great as possible? Do we make supporting youth as important as saving airlines and other industries?”

COVID-19 is revealing and widening existing fault lines in social, economic and political systems. “We now have the challenge and opportunity to heal those ruptures even as we seek to heal ourselves of COVID-19,” Worthman says.

Related:
The importance of puberty: A call for better research models
How family stories help children weather hard times



from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3fmFTYB

How family stories help children weather hard times

Stories of family members — who preserved by simply putting one foot in front of the other and by maintaining loving bonds — reassure children that their family will also find a way to get through a situation, says Emory psychologist Robyn Fivush. (Getty Images)

By Carol Clark

In times of great stress, stories sustain us, says Robyn Fivush, director of the Family Narratives Lab in Emory’s Department of Psychology.

Family reminiscing is especially important, says Fivush, who is also director of Emory’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. When children learn family stories it creates a shared history, strengthens emotional bonds and helps them make sense of their experiences when something senseless happens — like the current global pandemic.

“When we don’t know what to do, we look for stories about how people have coped in the past,” Fivush says. “You can see that happening in the media now, in articles comparing today to historical events, like the 1918 flu pandemic and 9/11.”

She sums up the 9/11 narrative in the United States: “A horrific event happened; we were attacked. But we came together as a nation, persevered and rose back up together.”

Such narratives help build a shared capacity for resilience. “That’s true for nations and it’s true for families,” Fivush says.

Over decades of research, Fivush and Emory psychologist Marshall Duke developed a scale to measure how much children know about their family histories. Using this scale, they conducted a study that began just before 9/11 and continued for two years. “We found that in families that talked in more coherent and emotionally open ways about challenging family events with 10- to 12-year-olds, the children coped better over the two-year period than in families telling less emotionally expressive and coherent stories about their challenges,” Fivush says.

The families in the study were all comparable, middle-class, two-parent households.

Standardized measures showed that children in the families that told the more coherent family narratives had better self-esteem, higher levels of social competence, higher quality friendships, and less anxiety and stress. They also had fewer behavioral problems, as reported by parents.

Tips for telling family stories 

For families under quarantine together, opportunities abound to weave family stories into conversation, Fivush says. The stories need to be tailored to different ages, she adds, so that children are emotionally and cognitively able to understand them.

Elementary school children, for example, are not ready to digest complex family stories. “With younger kids, it’s really more about helping them structure their own experiences into stories that help them process their feelings,” Fivush says. “You want to start by asking them non-judgmental, open-ended questions like: ‘Why do you think you were upset yesterday? What could you have done to make yourself feel better? What can we do about this?'"

She uses an example of a little girl who left her favorite storybook at her school and was worried that it wasn’t going to be there when she went back. A mother could tell a story about how she left a favorite toy somewhere when she was little but later her father took her back and they found it.

“Tell them a story from your own life that provides a model for how everybody forgets things, but you can get them back,” Fivush says. “Or, ‘My brother used to tease me a lot, too. But now he’s your Uncle Bill and we love each other.’ Parents are identity figures. Little kids are fascinated by stories about their parents when they were little.”

Ultimately, the goal is to help children construct a coherent story that validates their feelings while helping them think of resolutions.

“Particularly with very young kids, don’t make assumptions about what they may be upset or sad about,” Fivush says. “You may be surprised. Stay open to what your children of all ages may be experiencing.”

Middle school children are starting to have more of an ability to understand the bigger picture. “By the age of 10, children are thinking in the abstract and because of that, they are likely to be anxious about the future,” Fivush says.

By this stage, children begin to understand stories on a deeper level. It’s not that every story needs a happy ending or a silver lining, Fivush stresses. “You can explain to your child, ‘We don’t know yet how this story is going to end but let me tell you about some challenging times I got through, or your grandparents got through.’”

Examples of family members — who preserved by simply putting one foot in front of the other and by maintaining loving bonds — reassure children that their family will also find a way to get through a situation.

When they reach adolescence, children are especially vulnerable. “High school is a time when children start to really think about themselves as a person and what their life is going to be like,” Fivush says. “They are mulling big questions, like ‘Who am I? What are my passions?’ And now the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them.”

By the age of 16, parents can start talking to a teen-ager about their own vulnerabilities as people and as parents. “Emphasize how you can build strength together, as a family,” Fivush says. She suggests finding ways of giving teen-agers a role in supporting younger children in positive ways.

“Human beings are really altruistic and empathetic. We feel good when we help other people, particularly people that we love,” Fivush says. “That’s going to make every family member feel better about themselves and about each other.”

Silly, funny family stories are also valuable, along with small touchpoints about the past that emerge spontaneously, Fivush says. “When you’re cooking together with your children it’s a perfect time to say, ‘When I was a little girl, my mother taught me how to cook this dish. We used to have post roast every Friday and I would peel the carrots.’”

Adolescents are especially hungry for these kinds of stories, she adds. “If they roll their eyes, so be it, they’re still listening,” Fivush says. “It’s the really mundane, everyday stories that reassure them that life is stable. It provides a sense of continuity, of enduring relationships and values. They need to know that they come from a long line of people who are strong, who are resilient, who are brave. And who can cook. The definition of who they are is not just something independent and autonomous, spun from nowhere. It’s embedded in a long, intergenerational family story.”

Related:
Stories your parents should have told you
Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2SiTSVM

Stories of family members — who preserved by simply putting one foot in front of the other and by maintaining loving bonds — reassure children that their family will also find a way to get through a situation, says Emory psychologist Robyn Fivush. (Getty Images)

By Carol Clark

In times of great stress, stories sustain us, says Robyn Fivush, director of the Family Narratives Lab in Emory’s Department of Psychology.

Family reminiscing is especially important, says Fivush, who is also director of Emory’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. When children learn family stories it creates a shared history, strengthens emotional bonds and helps them make sense of their experiences when something senseless happens — like the current global pandemic.

“When we don’t know what to do, we look for stories about how people have coped in the past,” Fivush says. “You can see that happening in the media now, in articles comparing today to historical events, like the 1918 flu pandemic and 9/11.”

She sums up the 9/11 narrative in the United States: “A horrific event happened; we were attacked. But we came together as a nation, persevered and rose back up together.”

Such narratives help build a shared capacity for resilience. “That’s true for nations and it’s true for families,” Fivush says.

Over decades of research, Fivush and Emory psychologist Marshall Duke developed a scale to measure how much children know about their family histories. Using this scale, they conducted a study that began just before 9/11 and continued for two years. “We found that in families that talked in more coherent and emotionally open ways about challenging family events with 10- to 12-year-olds, the children coped better over the two-year period than in families telling less emotionally expressive and coherent stories about their challenges,” Fivush says.

The families in the study were all comparable, middle-class, two-parent households.

Standardized measures showed that children in the families that told the more coherent family narratives had better self-esteem, higher levels of social competence, higher quality friendships, and less anxiety and stress. They also had fewer behavioral problems, as reported by parents.

Tips for telling family stories 

For families under quarantine together, opportunities abound to weave family stories into conversation, Fivush says. The stories need to be tailored to different ages, she adds, so that children are emotionally and cognitively able to understand them.

Elementary school children, for example, are not ready to digest complex family stories. “With younger kids, it’s really more about helping them structure their own experiences into stories that help them process their feelings,” Fivush says. “You want to start by asking them non-judgmental, open-ended questions like: ‘Why do you think you were upset yesterday? What could you have done to make yourself feel better? What can we do about this?'"

She uses an example of a little girl who left her favorite storybook at her school and was worried that it wasn’t going to be there when she went back. A mother could tell a story about how she left a favorite toy somewhere when she was little but later her father took her back and they found it.

“Tell them a story from your own life that provides a model for how everybody forgets things, but you can get them back,” Fivush says. “Or, ‘My brother used to tease me a lot, too. But now he’s your Uncle Bill and we love each other.’ Parents are identity figures. Little kids are fascinated by stories about their parents when they were little.”

Ultimately, the goal is to help children construct a coherent story that validates their feelings while helping them think of resolutions.

“Particularly with very young kids, don’t make assumptions about what they may be upset or sad about,” Fivush says. “You may be surprised. Stay open to what your children of all ages may be experiencing.”

Middle school children are starting to have more of an ability to understand the bigger picture. “By the age of 10, children are thinking in the abstract and because of that, they are likely to be anxious about the future,” Fivush says.

By this stage, children begin to understand stories on a deeper level. It’s not that every story needs a happy ending or a silver lining, Fivush stresses. “You can explain to your child, ‘We don’t know yet how this story is going to end but let me tell you about some challenging times I got through, or your grandparents got through.’”

Examples of family members — who preserved by simply putting one foot in front of the other and by maintaining loving bonds — reassure children that their family will also find a way to get through a situation.

When they reach adolescence, children are especially vulnerable. “High school is a time when children start to really think about themselves as a person and what their life is going to be like,” Fivush says. “They are mulling big questions, like ‘Who am I? What are my passions?’ And now the pandemic has pulled the rug out from under them.”

By the age of 16, parents can start talking to a teen-ager about their own vulnerabilities as people and as parents. “Emphasize how you can build strength together, as a family,” Fivush says. She suggests finding ways of giving teen-agers a role in supporting younger children in positive ways.

“Human beings are really altruistic and empathetic. We feel good when we help other people, particularly people that we love,” Fivush says. “That’s going to make every family member feel better about themselves and about each other.”

Silly, funny family stories are also valuable, along with small touchpoints about the past that emerge spontaneously, Fivush says. “When you’re cooking together with your children it’s a perfect time to say, ‘When I was a little girl, my mother taught me how to cook this dish. We used to have post roast every Friday and I would peel the carrots.’”

Adolescents are especially hungry for these kinds of stories, she adds. “If they roll their eyes, so be it, they’re still listening,” Fivush says. “It’s the really mundane, everyday stories that reassure them that life is stable. It provides a sense of continuity, of enduring relationships and values. They need to know that they come from a long line of people who are strong, who are resilient, who are brave. And who can cook. The definition of who they are is not just something independent and autonomous, spun from nowhere. It’s embedded in a long, intergenerational family story.”

Related:
Stories your parents should have told you
Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2SiTSVM

Bat ecology in the era of pandemics

The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently appointed Emory graduate student Amanda Vicente to its Bat Specialist Group — global recognition for her expertise. (Photo by Neto Villalobos)

Bats are primarily creatures of the night. Their cape-like wings, alien faces and strange behaviors drive human fascination and fear.

“People have so many misconceptions,” says Amanda Vicente, who studies the disease ecology of bats as an Emory University doctoral candidate. “Bats are associated with dark things, like Dracula. They have never had a good reputation.”

Evidence linking viruses carried by bats to disease outbreaks, from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to SARS, Marburg, MERS, Nipah, Hendra and Ebola, is not helping their image.

“It’s important for people to know that our enemies are not the bats, but the pathogens,” Vicente says. “And in order to better fight these pathogens, we need to understand their evolutionary relationship with bats, and how that relationship is being altered by human behaviors.”

Read more about the work of Vicente, who is leading a team of Emory students to study cave bats in her native Costa Rica.

Related:
Spillover: Why germs jump from animals to people
Experts raise alarm for COVID-19 risk to endangered great apes

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3eJHWWD

The International Union for Conservation of Nature recently appointed Emory graduate student Amanda Vicente to its Bat Specialist Group — global recognition for her expertise. (Photo by Neto Villalobos)

Bats are primarily creatures of the night. Their cape-like wings, alien faces and strange behaviors drive human fascination and fear.

“People have so many misconceptions,” says Amanda Vicente, who studies the disease ecology of bats as an Emory University doctoral candidate. “Bats are associated with dark things, like Dracula. They have never had a good reputation.”

Evidence linking viruses carried by bats to disease outbreaks, from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to SARS, Marburg, MERS, Nipah, Hendra and Ebola, is not helping their image.

“It’s important for people to know that our enemies are not the bats, but the pathogens,” Vicente says. “And in order to better fight these pathogens, we need to understand their evolutionary relationship with bats, and how that relationship is being altered by human behaviors.”

Read more about the work of Vicente, who is leading a team of Emory students to study cave bats in her native Costa Rica.

Related:
Spillover: Why germs jump from animals to people
Experts raise alarm for COVID-19 risk to endangered great apes

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3eJHWWD

Mathematicians unite faculty, students and countries to fight COVID-19

Emory math professor Alessandro Veneziani, left, visited his hometown of Bergamo, Italy, last year with his former student Alexander Viguerie, who received his PhD in math in 2018. Bergarmo later became ground zero in Italy for COVID-19.

By Carol Clark

Alessandro Veneziani loves numbers and he loves people. A professor in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science, he uses numerical analysis and computing for real-world applications — such as modeling blood flow through the vascular system to determine risks for an aneurysm or a stroke.

The pandemic shifted the focus of Veneziani — a native of Italy, one of the hardest hit countries — onto the rising number of new COVID-19 cases and the people affected by them. After the campus closed, Veneziani and colleagues launched an Emory student contest to create mathematical models that might yield useful data for controlling the pandemic. More than 90 students jumped in to form teams and take on the challenge.

“The students want to help, and this is a way they can use what they’re learning,” Veneziani says. “They are part of the Emory community and when you work as a community you have more power to make bigger contributions to the world.”

On February 19, only two cases had been detected in Italy, and COVID-19 still seemed a distant problem in the country. On that day, about 45,000 soccer fans from the region of Veneziani’s hometown, Bergamo, traveled to Milan to watch their elite team, Atalanta, beat the Spanish challenger in a Champions League match. They returned home to celebrate.

On February 20, in his adopted hometown of Atlanta, Veneziani celebrated the birth of a daughter, Eleonora, with his wife, Manuela Manetta. Manetta is also Italian, from Abruzzo near Rome, and is a lecturer in Emory’s Department of Mathematics.

On March 19, which is Father's Day in Italy, Veneziani celebrated at his home in Atlanta with his newborn daughter, Eleonora.

By March 19, Italy had become the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world. And ground zero was Bergamo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Members of Veneziani’s family still live in the town. They are quarantined in separate homes where he stays in touch with them through Skype. His brother takes his mother meals and leaves them outside her door. “I’m mostly worried about my mom,” Veneziani says, “because she’s 78 and the most vulnerable.”

Veneziani felt frustrated being so far away as Bergamo struggled. “I was awake late at night, my wife was feeding our baby, and I was thinking and thinking,” he recalls. That’s when he got the idea for the math modeling contest.

“The spirit of the initiative is that it is less a competition than a collaboration,” Veneziani says. “We are coming together to fight a common enemy, a virus. And our weapons are differential equations.”

Jim Nagy, chair of the Department of Mathematics, supported the idea and three faculty immediately volunteered to help manage the initiative: Manetta, Longmei Shu, a visiting faculty member, and Maja Taskovic, an assistant professor. They are pulling together other faculty from related disciplines across campus to select the top three student groups in May. Veneziani also enlisted entrepreneur Russell Medford as a judge. A former physician at Emory, Medford is now chair of the board of the Center for Global Health Innovation in Atlanta and is always on the lookout for a fresh perspective.

Students from all majors were welcomed into the initiative, from first years on up.

The sun rises over the ancient, fortified city of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. (Photo by Sven Manguard)

Veneziani tells stories of hope and resilience from Bergamo to inspire the students, who are all dealing with their own concerns surrounding the pandemic. Bergarmo is situated on a hill and surrounded by stone fortress walls dating to 1500. “Bergarmo is very beautiful and very old,” Veneziani says. “Its people are tough. And they are also generous.”

Bergarmo is known for skilled builders from a range of construction trades. As the existing medical facilities reached peak capacity, people from the region adopted the slogan “Bergarmo, don’t give up” and came together to build a new hospital. “Bergamo was under a storm and people volunteered to help. They built a hospital in just six days,” Veneziani says. “That’s incredible. That’s what a community can do when it comes together.”

Now the pandemic curve is showing signs of flattening in Bergamo and across Italy. On April 11, the United States surpassed Italy as the country with the most deaths from COVID-19.

The Emory student teams are finishing up their projects, including 20-page papers. Students were given free rein to pursue any kind of mathematical modeling project to help understand the spread of the pandemic and make useful predictions.

“The main aim of this initiative is educational,” Veneziani says. “I want students to understand that developing a mathematical model is a creative process. You come up with an idea, introduce some assumptions and then check them with reality to see if you’re on the right track. You have to keep refining your model, keeping it as simple as possible but complex enough to learn something useful.”

Veneziani celebrates with Alexander Viguerie as Viguerie receives his PhD at Emory Commencement in 2018.

“I’ve loved math since I was very young,” says Sanne Glastra, a sophomore majoring in qualitative theories and methods who is involved in the contest. “This is a chance to apply data science to a real problem that everyone is facing right now.”

Her team is modeling COVID-19 through the lens of nursing homes. “I’m learning a lot about how to collect data on health and demographics and work with a team to figure out what’s relevant,” says Glastra, who is quarantining with her family in Boston.

“The students have fresh energy and fresh minds,” Veneziani says. “They may come up with new ideas that deserve further exploration after the competition ends.”

Veneziani also has a math modeling project for COVID-19 underway with one of his former students, Alexander Viguerie, who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pavia, near Milan. Viguerie, a native of Atlanta, began his academic career at Oxford College before coming to the Emory campus for his undergraduate degree and his PhD in math, which he received in 2018.

Viguerie still has collaborations with Veneziani. He flew into Atlanta on February 20 so the two could work on a project, unrelated to COVID-19, that was expected to last a few weeks. It was the day Veneziani’s daughter was born and the news reported a confirmed COVID-19 case in Italy not related to travel, meaning the virus was on the loose in the country.

“It was surreal, the timing of everything,” Viguerie says.

A simulated outbreak in Georgia using artificial data. Viguerie is leading a team that's attempting to model COVID-19 transmission using Georgia as a framework. The work is still in the preliminary stages.

He and Veneziani soon scrapped their planned collaboration and began to work on modeling COVID-19 transmission. From his parents’ home in Georgia, where he is spending quarantine, Viguerie pulled together an international team for the project. Members include an expert in supercomputing in Germany; an expert in disease modeling from the University of Texas; students from the University of Pavia; and three undergraduates from Emory: Glastra, Kasey Cervantes and Shreya Rana.

“Everyone jumped right in to help,” Viguerie says.

“We’re really pumped about this project,” says Cervantes, a junior majoring in biology and minoring in computer science who is quarantined with his family in Chicago. Cervantes previously worked on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention project to model malaria transmission and plans a career in computational biology or epidemiology.

Rena is a sophomore, majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology and minoring in computer informatics. She is quarantined with her family in the San Francisco Bay area. “The more information we have on how a virus spreads through a community, the more prepared we can be in the future,” she says.

The researchers are modeling the spatial-temporal spread of COVID-19. The team chose the state of Georgia as the framework for their model, which they hope could eventually be applied elsewhere.

Health data is collected at the county level, Viguerie explains. Georgia happens to have a high number of counties that are relatively small compared to other states, or to Italian provinces, which yields a greater level of spatial precision for the modelers.

“This is a long-term project, not intended for decision-making today,” Viguerie stresses. “We want to create a tool for down the road. We might learn something useful, for instance, that could help in the case of later waves of the outbreak.”

Georgia happens to have a high number of counties that are relatively small, making it easier for the researchers to generate rich special resolution as the basis for their model.

The researchers created a digital map of Georgia and broke it into a mosaic of 100,000 individual points in space. They wrote differential equations for variables related to COVID-19 transmission and created a computer program including all the equations. They are now running preliminary simulations to test various scenarios and see if the model works.

“You start with a simple model and progressively make it more and more complex,” Viguerie explains. “Our model seeks to describe the spread of COVID-19 across time and space. And from there, we can hopefully use the model to learn some mechanistic natures of the spread.”

By comparing the data on symptomatic spread to actual new cases, they can make assumptions to test. “Certain things, like asymptomatic cases, are difficult to measure but possible to simulate using a model,” Viguerie says. “Good models and simulations are crucial with a disease like COVID-19.”

For Veneziani, who officially became a U.S. citizen in February, the Emory student competition and the international project with his former student are both “emergency” measures and business as usual. He has long used math to tackle healthcare problems and to forge bonds between people and countries.

Emory has many specialists working on various aspects of COVID-19, from nurses and medical doctors to researchers specialized in biology, chemistry, epidemiology, virology, infectious diseases and vaccine development, as well as experts in social, historical, cultural, mental well-being, legal and ethical aspects of disease.

“Math is a common language that joins all these forces so we can all communicate,” Veneziani says. “The enormous problem of this pandemic is truly interdisciplinary. Emory is working together, and the whole world needs to come together. We will fight this virus together and we will win. Like in Bergarmo, at Emory we don’t give up.”

Related:
Modeling the math of shark skin
The math of your heart

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3cCURrg

Emory math professor Alessandro Veneziani, left, visited his hometown of Bergamo, Italy, last year with his former student Alexander Viguerie, who received his PhD in math in 2018. Bergarmo later became ground zero in Italy for COVID-19.

By Carol Clark

Alessandro Veneziani loves numbers and he loves people. A professor in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science, he uses numerical analysis and computing for real-world applications — such as modeling blood flow through the vascular system to determine risks for an aneurysm or a stroke.

The pandemic shifted the focus of Veneziani — a native of Italy, one of the hardest hit countries — onto the rising number of new COVID-19 cases and the people affected by them. After the campus closed, Veneziani and colleagues launched an Emory student contest to create mathematical models that might yield useful data for controlling the pandemic. More than 90 students jumped in to form teams and take on the challenge.

“The students want to help, and this is a way they can use what they’re learning,” Veneziani says. “They are part of the Emory community and when you work as a community you have more power to make bigger contributions to the world.”

On February 19, only two cases had been detected in Italy, and COVID-19 still seemed a distant problem in the country. On that day, about 45,000 soccer fans from the region of Veneziani’s hometown, Bergamo, traveled to Milan to watch their elite team, Atalanta, beat the Spanish challenger in a Champions League match. They returned home to celebrate.

On February 20, in his adopted hometown of Atlanta, Veneziani celebrated the birth of a daughter, Eleonora, with his wife, Manuela Manetta. Manetta is also Italian, from Abruzzo near Rome, and is a lecturer in Emory’s Department of Mathematics.

On March 19, which is Father's Day in Italy, Veneziani celebrated at his home in Atlanta with his newborn daughter, Eleonora.

By March 19, Italy had become the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world. And ground zero was Bergamo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Members of Veneziani’s family still live in the town. They are quarantined in separate homes where he stays in touch with them through Skype. His brother takes his mother meals and leaves them outside her door. “I’m mostly worried about my mom,” Veneziani says, “because she’s 78 and the most vulnerable.”

Veneziani felt frustrated being so far away as Bergamo struggled. “I was awake late at night, my wife was feeding our baby, and I was thinking and thinking,” he recalls. That’s when he got the idea for the math modeling contest.

“The spirit of the initiative is that it is less a competition than a collaboration,” Veneziani says. “We are coming together to fight a common enemy, a virus. And our weapons are differential equations.”

Jim Nagy, chair of the Department of Mathematics, supported the idea and three faculty immediately volunteered to help manage the initiative: Manetta, Longmei Shu, a visiting faculty member, and Maja Taskovic, an assistant professor. They are pulling together other faculty from related disciplines across campus to select the top three student groups in May. Veneziani also enlisted entrepreneur Russell Medford as a judge. A former physician at Emory, Medford is now chair of the board of the Center for Global Health Innovation in Atlanta and is always on the lookout for a fresh perspective.

Students from all majors were welcomed into the initiative, from first years on up.

The sun rises over the ancient, fortified city of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region of northern Italy. (Photo by Sven Manguard)

Veneziani tells stories of hope and resilience from Bergamo to inspire the students, who are all dealing with their own concerns surrounding the pandemic. Bergarmo is situated on a hill and surrounded by stone fortress walls dating to 1500. “Bergarmo is very beautiful and very old,” Veneziani says. “Its people are tough. And they are also generous.”

Bergarmo is known for skilled builders from a range of construction trades. As the existing medical facilities reached peak capacity, people from the region adopted the slogan “Bergarmo, don’t give up” and came together to build a new hospital. “Bergamo was under a storm and people volunteered to help. They built a hospital in just six days,” Veneziani says. “That’s incredible. That’s what a community can do when it comes together.”

Now the pandemic curve is showing signs of flattening in Bergamo and across Italy. On April 11, the United States surpassed Italy as the country with the most deaths from COVID-19.

The Emory student teams are finishing up their projects, including 20-page papers. Students were given free rein to pursue any kind of mathematical modeling project to help understand the spread of the pandemic and make useful predictions.

“The main aim of this initiative is educational,” Veneziani says. “I want students to understand that developing a mathematical model is a creative process. You come up with an idea, introduce some assumptions and then check them with reality to see if you’re on the right track. You have to keep refining your model, keeping it as simple as possible but complex enough to learn something useful.”

Veneziani celebrates with Alexander Viguerie as Viguerie receives his PhD at Emory Commencement in 2018.

“I’ve loved math since I was very young,” says Sanne Glastra, a sophomore majoring in qualitative theories and methods who is involved in the contest. “This is a chance to apply data science to a real problem that everyone is facing right now.”

Her team is modeling COVID-19 through the lens of nursing homes. “I’m learning a lot about how to collect data on health and demographics and work with a team to figure out what’s relevant,” says Glastra, who is quarantining with her family in Boston.

“The students have fresh energy and fresh minds,” Veneziani says. “They may come up with new ideas that deserve further exploration after the competition ends.”

Veneziani also has a math modeling project for COVID-19 underway with one of his former students, Alexander Viguerie, who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pavia, near Milan. Viguerie, a native of Atlanta, began his academic career at Oxford College before coming to the Emory campus for his undergraduate degree and his PhD in math, which he received in 2018.

Viguerie still has collaborations with Veneziani. He flew into Atlanta on February 20 so the two could work on a project, unrelated to COVID-19, that was expected to last a few weeks. It was the day Veneziani’s daughter was born and the news reported a confirmed COVID-19 case in Italy not related to travel, meaning the virus was on the loose in the country.

“It was surreal, the timing of everything,” Viguerie says.

A simulated outbreak in Georgia using artificial data. Viguerie is leading a team that's attempting to model COVID-19 transmission using Georgia as a framework. The work is still in the preliminary stages.

He and Veneziani soon scrapped their planned collaboration and began to work on modeling COVID-19 transmission. From his parents’ home in Georgia, where he is spending quarantine, Viguerie pulled together an international team for the project. Members include an expert in supercomputing in Germany; an expert in disease modeling from the University of Texas; students from the University of Pavia; and three undergraduates from Emory: Glastra, Kasey Cervantes and Shreya Rana.

“Everyone jumped right in to help,” Viguerie says.

“We’re really pumped about this project,” says Cervantes, a junior majoring in biology and minoring in computer science who is quarantined with his family in Chicago. Cervantes previously worked on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention project to model malaria transmission and plans a career in computational biology or epidemiology.

Rena is a sophomore, majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology and minoring in computer informatics. She is quarantined with her family in the San Francisco Bay area. “The more information we have on how a virus spreads through a community, the more prepared we can be in the future,” she says.

The researchers are modeling the spatial-temporal spread of COVID-19. The team chose the state of Georgia as the framework for their model, which they hope could eventually be applied elsewhere.

Health data is collected at the county level, Viguerie explains. Georgia happens to have a high number of counties that are relatively small compared to other states, or to Italian provinces, which yields a greater level of spatial precision for the modelers.

“This is a long-term project, not intended for decision-making today,” Viguerie stresses. “We want to create a tool for down the road. We might learn something useful, for instance, that could help in the case of later waves of the outbreak.”

Georgia happens to have a high number of counties that are relatively small, making it easier for the researchers to generate rich special resolution as the basis for their model.

The researchers created a digital map of Georgia and broke it into a mosaic of 100,000 individual points in space. They wrote differential equations for variables related to COVID-19 transmission and created a computer program including all the equations. They are now running preliminary simulations to test various scenarios and see if the model works.

“You start with a simple model and progressively make it more and more complex,” Viguerie explains. “Our model seeks to describe the spread of COVID-19 across time and space. And from there, we can hopefully use the model to learn some mechanistic natures of the spread.”

By comparing the data on symptomatic spread to actual new cases, they can make assumptions to test. “Certain things, like asymptomatic cases, are difficult to measure but possible to simulate using a model,” Viguerie says. “Good models and simulations are crucial with a disease like COVID-19.”

For Veneziani, who officially became a U.S. citizen in February, the Emory student competition and the international project with his former student are both “emergency” measures and business as usual. He has long used math to tackle healthcare problems and to forge bonds between people and countries.

Emory has many specialists working on various aspects of COVID-19, from nurses and medical doctors to researchers specialized in biology, chemistry, epidemiology, virology, infectious diseases and vaccine development, as well as experts in social, historical, cultural, mental well-being, legal and ethical aspects of disease.

“Math is a common language that joins all these forces so we can all communicate,” Veneziani says. “The enormous problem of this pandemic is truly interdisciplinary. Emory is working together, and the whole world needs to come together. We will fight this virus together and we will win. Like in Bergarmo, at Emory we don’t give up.”

Related:
Modeling the math of shark skin
The math of your heart

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3cCURrg

Pandemic lockdowns set up 'natural experiment' on air pollution

Graphic shows the change from January to February in China's levels of nitrogen dioxide, which primarily gets into the air from the burning of fuel by motor vehicles and power plants. (European Space Agency)

By Carol Clark

For years, Eri Saikawa has tracked growing levels of dangerous greenhouse gases and researched ways to reduce them. As an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences, she trains students to do the same. Together, they’ve held conferences, published papers and served as delegates at the annual U.N. global climate talks.

Now the COVID-19 lockdowns have slashed air pollution levels faster than Saikawa or her students could have imagined. First in China, where COVID-19 was reported in December, then across Europe, and now in the United States.

“It’s an interesting natural experiment, for sure,” says Saikawa, an expert in public policy and the science of emissions linked to global warming. “Since not every industry has shut down, it may help us to better understand what emissions are coming from what sources. That could help guide the best strategies to improve air quality when the pandemic is over.”

This natural experiment has now become the focal point for Saikawa’s class “Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry.” Previously, the students were set to do outreach projects for the Atlanta Science Festival, at K-12 schools and in Atlanta neighborhoods. COVID-19 changed those plans as the festival and other events were cancelled and schools and universities shifted to remote learning. 

Saikawa is now asking her students to track current greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants and compare them with levels for the same period in previous years, based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and global sources.

“The students will be among the first to study this,” Saikawa says. “That’s so much different than answering questions from a textbook. When you’re doing actual science, unexpected things happen that open up new questions. The students will be taking on real questions as they come up in real time.”

At the end of the class, in early May, plans call for the students to hold a webinar so that anyone interested in learning how the novel coronavirus impacted air quality and climate change can tune in and learn from it.

The pandemic also affected projects of Saikawa’s graduate students in Asia. Her lab has collaborations with universities in Nanjing, China, Tokyo, Japan and Yongsei, South Korea. “Our focus was looking at air emissions in East Asia in relation to climate change,” Saikawa says. “Now we are broadening that to also look at how a pandemic affects air quality, climate and economies.” 

The researchers may be better able to pinpoint the impact of emissions from different sectors, including industries that are major users of fossil fuels, such as steel-making, oil, natural gas and mining; electricity and other sources of power; and transportation in the form of motor vehicles, shipping and tractors.

“China is the largest emitter in the world of carbon dioxide and most other air pollutants,” Saikawa says. Even with the dramatic drop in pollution, as China ground nearly to a halt following the initial outbreak of COVID-19, the country had dangerously high levels of air pollution on some days. “That shows that the background level of pollution is really high, and how far China needs to go to clean its air,” Saikawa says.

She worries that all the gains made around the world could boomerang into even worse conditions than previous norms if economies go into overdrive to recover. The 2020 U.N. climate talks, set for Scotland in November, have been postponed until 2021. The conference venue in Glasgow where the conference was to be held is now a field hospital for people with COVID-19.

And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced a sweeping waiver of its enforcement of regulations, due to the pandemic.

“Those that are hardest hit by the effects of the pandemic are those who are the most vulnerable in society,” Saikawa says. “The suspension of environmental laws makes them even more vulnerable.”

Related:
Mandatory policies work best to curb power plant emissions, study finds
Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks
The growing role of faming and nitrous oxide in climate change

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3bRtTM8

Graphic shows the change from January to February in China's levels of nitrogen dioxide, which primarily gets into the air from the burning of fuel by motor vehicles and power plants. (European Space Agency)

By Carol Clark

For years, Eri Saikawa has tracked growing levels of dangerous greenhouse gases and researched ways to reduce them. As an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences, she trains students to do the same. Together, they’ve held conferences, published papers and served as delegates at the annual U.N. global climate talks.

Now the COVID-19 lockdowns have slashed air pollution levels faster than Saikawa or her students could have imagined. First in China, where COVID-19 was reported in December, then across Europe, and now in the United States.

“It’s an interesting natural experiment, for sure,” says Saikawa, an expert in public policy and the science of emissions linked to global warming. “Since not every industry has shut down, it may help us to better understand what emissions are coming from what sources. That could help guide the best strategies to improve air quality when the pandemic is over.”

This natural experiment has now become the focal point for Saikawa’s class “Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry.” Previously, the students were set to do outreach projects for the Atlanta Science Festival, at K-12 schools and in Atlanta neighborhoods. COVID-19 changed those plans as the festival and other events were cancelled and schools and universities shifted to remote learning. 

Saikawa is now asking her students to track current greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants and compare them with levels for the same period in previous years, based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and global sources.

“The students will be among the first to study this,” Saikawa says. “That’s so much different than answering questions from a textbook. When you’re doing actual science, unexpected things happen that open up new questions. The students will be taking on real questions as they come up in real time.”

At the end of the class, in early May, plans call for the students to hold a webinar so that anyone interested in learning how the novel coronavirus impacted air quality and climate change can tune in and learn from it.

The pandemic also affected projects of Saikawa’s graduate students in Asia. Her lab has collaborations with universities in Nanjing, China, Tokyo, Japan and Yongsei, South Korea. “Our focus was looking at air emissions in East Asia in relation to climate change,” Saikawa says. “Now we are broadening that to also look at how a pandemic affects air quality, climate and economies.” 

The researchers may be better able to pinpoint the impact of emissions from different sectors, including industries that are major users of fossil fuels, such as steel-making, oil, natural gas and mining; electricity and other sources of power; and transportation in the form of motor vehicles, shipping and tractors.

“China is the largest emitter in the world of carbon dioxide and most other air pollutants,” Saikawa says. Even with the dramatic drop in pollution, as China ground nearly to a halt following the initial outbreak of COVID-19, the country had dangerously high levels of air pollution on some days. “That shows that the background level of pollution is really high, and how far China needs to go to clean its air,” Saikawa says.

She worries that all the gains made around the world could boomerang into even worse conditions than previous norms if economies go into overdrive to recover. The 2020 U.N. climate talks, set for Scotland in November, have been postponed until 2021. The conference venue in Glasgow where the conference was to be held is now a field hospital for people with COVID-19.

And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced a sweeping waiver of its enforcement of regulations, due to the pandemic.

“Those that are hardest hit by the effects of the pandemic are those who are the most vulnerable in society,” Saikawa says. “The suspension of environmental laws makes them even more vulnerable.”

Related:
Mandatory policies work best to curb power plant emissions, study finds
Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks
The growing role of faming and nitrous oxide in climate change

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3bRtTM8

Beware false 'cures' for COVID-19

Cinchona is toxic and self-medication with it or any other unproven "cures" should be avoided.

Following is an excerpt from an article in The Conversation, co-written by Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University; Kim Walker, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Nataly Olivia A. Canales, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark. 

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are [antimalaria drugs that are] currently being researched as potential treatments for COVID-19. …

False links are now being made [on social media networks] between another source of antimalarial compounds, cinchona bark, as a natural or alternative source of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. As quinine from cinchona bark is an ingredient in tonic water (in very low amounts), there have been rumors that it could also protect against SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19.

Since its discovery in the 17th century, the bark of the Andean cinchona tree and its chemical constituents, known as quinoline alkaloids (quinine, quinidine, cinchonine and cinchonidine), provided the only treatment for malaria for over 300 years. In 1934, scientists developed the first synthetic antimalarial, later known as chloroquine. Although chloroquine was inspired by the antimalarial activity of quinine, its chemical structure (and pharmacological properties) are quite different from the natural compounds found in cinchona bark.

To date, there is no laboratory or clinical evidence that quinine or any other cinchona bark compounds exhibit activity against COVID-19. Also, not everything that is natural is safe. Cinchona and quinine are toxic and can cause serious side-effects known as “cinchonism” which can include hearing and vision loss, breathing issues, and heart and kidney issues. It can also lead to a coma.

While quinine pills were once sold over the counter in the US to treat night leg cramps, they were pulled from the market by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006 after serious side effects and death were reported.

History is full of examples of people profiting from the public’s panic and fear during unstable times. The European Union law enforcement agency has already seized 48,000 packages of potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, including unauthorized chloroquine, as well as fake masks and bogus coronavirus cures.

The benefits, if any, of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 are still not fully understood. Cinchona bark does not contain either of these compounds, and the alkaloids in the bark bear no relation to them. Likewise, there is no evidence of cinchona being able to prevent or treat COVID-19.

Cinchona is highly toxic and self-medication with it or any other unproven cures should be avoided. Protect your health and don’t waste money funding unethical people and companies profiteering off fear in these uncertain times.

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3aFaI86

Cinchona is toxic and self-medication with it or any other unproven "cures" should be avoided.

Following is an excerpt from an article in The Conversation, co-written by Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University; Kim Walker, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Nataly Olivia A. Canales, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark. 

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are [antimalaria drugs that are] currently being researched as potential treatments for COVID-19. …

False links are now being made [on social media networks] between another source of antimalarial compounds, cinchona bark, as a natural or alternative source of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. As quinine from cinchona bark is an ingredient in tonic water (in very low amounts), there have been rumors that it could also protect against SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19.

Since its discovery in the 17th century, the bark of the Andean cinchona tree and its chemical constituents, known as quinoline alkaloids (quinine, quinidine, cinchonine and cinchonidine), provided the only treatment for malaria for over 300 years. In 1934, scientists developed the first synthetic antimalarial, later known as chloroquine. Although chloroquine was inspired by the antimalarial activity of quinine, its chemical structure (and pharmacological properties) are quite different from the natural compounds found in cinchona bark.

To date, there is no laboratory or clinical evidence that quinine or any other cinchona bark compounds exhibit activity against COVID-19. Also, not everything that is natural is safe. Cinchona and quinine are toxic and can cause serious side-effects known as “cinchonism” which can include hearing and vision loss, breathing issues, and heart and kidney issues. It can also lead to a coma.

While quinine pills were once sold over the counter in the US to treat night leg cramps, they were pulled from the market by the Food and Drug Administration in 2006 after serious side effects and death were reported.

History is full of examples of people profiting from the public’s panic and fear during unstable times. The European Union law enforcement agency has already seized 48,000 packages of potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, including unauthorized chloroquine, as well as fake masks and bogus coronavirus cures.

The benefits, if any, of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 are still not fully understood. Cinchona bark does not contain either of these compounds, and the alkaloids in the bark bear no relation to them. Likewise, there is no evidence of cinchona being able to prevent or treat COVID-19.

Cinchona is highly toxic and self-medication with it or any other unproven cures should be avoided. Protect your health and don’t waste money funding unethical people and companies profiteering off fear in these uncertain times.

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3aFaI86

Great apes and COVID-19: Experts raise the alarm for endangered species

A mountain gorilla in the wild. Endangered great apes are susceptible to human respiratory diseases, warns Emory disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie.

By Carol Clark

Primate experts warn that the global human health emergency of COVID-19 also threatens our closest living relatives — endangered great apes.

Nature published their commentary raising the alarm that non-human great apes are susceptible to human respiratory diseases. The 25 authors call for urgent discussions on the need to severely limit human interaction with great apes in the wild, and in sanctuaries and zoos, until the risk of COVID-19 subsides.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a critical situation for humans, our health and our economies,” says Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory University, and a lead author of the commentary. “It’s also a potentially dire situation for great apes. There is a lot at stake for those in danger of extinction.”

Some countries have already suspended great ape tourism, and others with ape tourism and field research need to seriously consider following suit, the authors write. They add that the same applies to sanctuaries and zoos where great apes and humans are in closer contact.

While great ape tourism will inevitably plummet due to the pandemic, all it takes is one infected visitor to spark catastrophe, the experts warn.

The non-human great apes include chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, which live in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and orangutans, which are native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists chimpanzees and bonobos as endangered species, while gorillas and orangutans are critically endangered.

Habitat loss, poaching and disease are the primary threats to the remaining great apes.

Even exposure to viruses that have mild effects in people, such as those causing the common cold, have been associated with mortality events in wild primates. Because the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is fatal for some humans, experts fear it could potentially prove devastating to great apes. Evidence suggests COVID-19 may be transmitted by people who have only mild symptoms, and perhaps even those who are asymptomatic.

“People who are younger, who may be less at risk for severe illness from COVID-19, are the ones who are more apt to be hiking into the national parks of Africa and Asia to see great apes in the wild,” Gillespie says. “It would be extremely difficult to monitor whether they were infected with COVID-19 since they may not have obvious symptoms.”

Great ape tourism has contributed to conservation in many positive ways, providing an economic incentive for governments and individuals to support their protection. Donors are needed to help shore up marginal economies facing the loss of tourism dollars and to continue to protect the health of people and the great apes in the wild, Gillespie says.

Tourism has habituated wild great apes to not fear humans, he adds. Without staff to patrol and protect them, the animals would become even more vulnerable to poachers.

“Essential staff needs to remain in place,” Gillespie says. “But we need to make sure that staff numbers are low and that they are engaged in proper processes to protect themselves, and the apes, from exposure to COVID-19.”

Gillespie studies how germs jump between wild animals, domesticated animals and people. Through this “One Health” approach, he aims to protect humans, ecosystems and biodiversity. As a member of the IUCN, Gillespie helped develop the organization’s “Best Practice Guidelines for Health Monitoring and Disease Control in Great Ape Populations.” In 2017, Gillespie co-authored a landmark report detailing that 60 percent of the more than 500 primate species worldwide are threatened with extinction, while 75 percent have declining populations.

Fabian Leendertz, from the Robert Koch-Institute, Germany, is co-lead author of the Nature commentary. Additional authors include experts involved in primate research, conservation and policymaking from around the world.

“As professionals working with great apes,” the authors conclude, “we bear a responsibility to protect them from our pathogens. We hope for the best but should prepare for the worst and critically consider the impact of our activities on these endangered species.”

Related:
Spillover: Why germs jump species from animals to humans
Experts warn of impending extinction of many of the world's primates



from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3alO6JE

A mountain gorilla in the wild. Endangered great apes are susceptible to human respiratory diseases, warns Emory disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie.

By Carol Clark

Primate experts warn that the global human health emergency of COVID-19 also threatens our closest living relatives — endangered great apes.

Nature published their commentary raising the alarm that non-human great apes are susceptible to human respiratory diseases. The 25 authors call for urgent discussions on the need to severely limit human interaction with great apes in the wild, and in sanctuaries and zoos, until the risk of COVID-19 subsides.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a critical situation for humans, our health and our economies,” says Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory University, and a lead author of the commentary. “It’s also a potentially dire situation for great apes. There is a lot at stake for those in danger of extinction.”

Some countries have already suspended great ape tourism, and others with ape tourism and field research need to seriously consider following suit, the authors write. They add that the same applies to sanctuaries and zoos where great apes and humans are in closer contact.

While great ape tourism will inevitably plummet due to the pandemic, all it takes is one infected visitor to spark catastrophe, the experts warn.

The non-human great apes include chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, which live in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and orangutans, which are native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists chimpanzees and bonobos as endangered species, while gorillas and orangutans are critically endangered.

Habitat loss, poaching and disease are the primary threats to the remaining great apes.

Even exposure to viruses that have mild effects in people, such as those causing the common cold, have been associated with mortality events in wild primates. Because the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is fatal for some humans, experts fear it could potentially prove devastating to great apes. Evidence suggests COVID-19 may be transmitted by people who have only mild symptoms, and perhaps even those who are asymptomatic.

“People who are younger, who may be less at risk for severe illness from COVID-19, are the ones who are more apt to be hiking into the national parks of Africa and Asia to see great apes in the wild,” Gillespie says. “It would be extremely difficult to monitor whether they were infected with COVID-19 since they may not have obvious symptoms.”

Great ape tourism has contributed to conservation in many positive ways, providing an economic incentive for governments and individuals to support their protection. Donors are needed to help shore up marginal economies facing the loss of tourism dollars and to continue to protect the health of people and the great apes in the wild, Gillespie says.

Tourism has habituated wild great apes to not fear humans, he adds. Without staff to patrol and protect them, the animals would become even more vulnerable to poachers.

“Essential staff needs to remain in place,” Gillespie says. “But we need to make sure that staff numbers are low and that they are engaged in proper processes to protect themselves, and the apes, from exposure to COVID-19.”

Gillespie studies how germs jump between wild animals, domesticated animals and people. Through this “One Health” approach, he aims to protect humans, ecosystems and biodiversity. As a member of the IUCN, Gillespie helped develop the organization’s “Best Practice Guidelines for Health Monitoring and Disease Control in Great Ape Populations.” In 2017, Gillespie co-authored a landmark report detailing that 60 percent of the more than 500 primate species worldwide are threatened with extinction, while 75 percent have declining populations.

Fabian Leendertz, from the Robert Koch-Institute, Germany, is co-lead author of the Nature commentary. Additional authors include experts involved in primate research, conservation and policymaking from around the world.

“As professionals working with great apes,” the authors conclude, “we bear a responsibility to protect them from our pathogens. We hope for the best but should prepare for the worst and critically consider the impact of our activities on these endangered species.”

Related:
Spillover: Why germs jump species from animals to humans
Experts warn of impending extinction of many of the world's primates



from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3alO6JE

Dealing with disruption: Tips from an academic scientist

Emory chemist Jennifer Heemstra (@JenHeemstra) will moderate a Twitter chat, #COVIDisruption, on Wednesday, March 25  from 3 to 4 pm. The chat is one of a series organized by Chemical and Engineering News Magazine on topics of interest involving academia and the pandemic. (Photo by Kay Hinton)

By Carol Clark

Efforts to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic have caused K-12 schools to shutter, driven universities from on-campus to remote learning, and forced laboratory scientists doing research that is not immediately critical to saving lives to stop experiments and close their facilities.

Jennifer Heemstra, associate professor of chemistry at Emory University, is working to adapt to many new realities, like people across the Emory community and around the globe. By March 18, she had shut down her lab, which is run by a team of 16 students and post-doctoral fellows. Their many projects included synthesizing molecules as tools for diagnostics, gene therapy and drug delivery. When the lab doors shut, other doors opened onto new challenges for everyone involved.

Heemstra, who is also a spouse and parent of two young children, Tweeted: “Waking up and realizing I have two new job titles: Professor at an online university and first- and sixth-grade homeschool teacher.”

“It’s been really challenging,” Heemstra admits by phone, more than a week later. “It’s fun to spend more time together as a family, but I’m not a natural work-life integrator. I enjoy intense days at work and then coming home to be a mom. But blending work with the rhythm of family life is more difficult than I expected.”

It’s this kind of frankness that has earned Heemstra more than 48,000 followers on her lively Twitter feed (@jenheemstra). While her career is thriving, Heemstra is no stranger to academic disruptions and disappointments. She draws from her own experiences to encourage others to learn and grow from setbacks.

Heemstra writes a column for Chemical and Engineering News Magazine, a leading trade publication, called “Office Hours.” It covers topics like the importance of human relationships to science and how to create a supportive environment in a research lab.

“As scientists, we are trained to do research,” Heemstra says. “But there are many other things involved in managing a lab, like leading and motivating teams of people. Apparently, there was a gap that needed to be filled for chemists talking about the ‘people’ part of doing science.”

On Wednesday, March 25, Heemstra will moderate a Chemical and Engineering News Magazine Twitter chat, #COVIDisruption, from 3 to 4 pm ET, focusing on the impact on faculty. The chat is part of a #COVIDisruption series by the magazine (@cenmag), running at the same time each day from March 24 to March 27. Different moderators will take questions on topics of interest involving the pandemic and academia, such as the impact on employment, the switch to online teaching and graduate student mental health.

“This pandemic may be one of the biggest challenges many of us face in our careers and our lives,” Heemstra says. “One of the toughest parts of it right now is the uncertainty of the situation.” 

Heemstra invites anyone seeking community to join in the Twitter chat on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, here are a few coping strategies she recommends.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s important to reach out to family, friends and colleagues when you need it, and to tap any institutional resources at your disposal. Emory, for example, has a web site listing support services for the well-being of students, faculty and staff. “Dealing with the impact of COVID-19 is not easy for anyone, but I’m so thankful in this moment to be a faculty member at Emory,” Heemstra says.

Acknowledge the loss. Even though we’re in a global crisis, it’s normal to feel badly about how it’s impacting you personally. “It’s okay to let yourself mourn the loss of the experiences you thought you were going to have,” Heemstra says, whether you’re a senior who will not get to walk across a stage for commencement or a PhD candidate having to defend a thesis virtually.

Find some higher purpose. Missing out on lab research, or other experiences you had planned, means you’re helping to reduce infection rates by staying home. “That a huge purpose,” Heemstra says. “Look for opportunities to help others however you are able.”

Cultivate community. “During Zoom calls with team members and collaborators we spend a good amount of time listening to everyone’s stories about how we’re coping,” Heemstra says. “That’s been unbelievably therapeutic. Hopefully, one thing everyone can gain from this experience is going beyond texts and emails to having more real conversations.” If you’re feeling isolated, consider joining one of the many online social groups popping up, everything from virtual book clubs to Twitter’s #COVIDCafe, where researchers from around the world gather in small groups to chat about how the pandemic is affecting them.

Practice gratitude. Be thankful for the healthcare workers on the frontlines of the pandemic, and all the other people providing essential services, from cashiers to police officers. Learn to appreciate small things, like the chance to take a walk on a beautiful spring day. “When you’re going through a difficult situation, you realize that so much of what you put your energy into is just noise,” Heemstra says. “This crisis may be a chance to think about what really matters and to learn to focus on that.”

Related:
'Bilingual' molecule connects codes for life

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2UxuL1I

Emory chemist Jennifer Heemstra (@JenHeemstra) will moderate a Twitter chat, #COVIDisruption, on Wednesday, March 25  from 3 to 4 pm. The chat is one of a series organized by Chemical and Engineering News Magazine on topics of interest involving academia and the pandemic. (Photo by Kay Hinton)

By Carol Clark

Efforts to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic have caused K-12 schools to shutter, driven universities from on-campus to remote learning, and forced laboratory scientists doing research that is not immediately critical to saving lives to stop experiments and close their facilities.

Jennifer Heemstra, associate professor of chemistry at Emory University, is working to adapt to many new realities, like people across the Emory community and around the globe. By March 18, she had shut down her lab, which is run by a team of 16 students and post-doctoral fellows. Their many projects included synthesizing molecules as tools for diagnostics, gene therapy and drug delivery. When the lab doors shut, other doors opened onto new challenges for everyone involved.

Heemstra, who is also a spouse and parent of two young children, Tweeted: “Waking up and realizing I have two new job titles: Professor at an online university and first- and sixth-grade homeschool teacher.”

“It’s been really challenging,” Heemstra admits by phone, more than a week later. “It’s fun to spend more time together as a family, but I’m not a natural work-life integrator. I enjoy intense days at work and then coming home to be a mom. But blending work with the rhythm of family life is more difficult than I expected.”

It’s this kind of frankness that has earned Heemstra more than 48,000 followers on her lively Twitter feed (@jenheemstra). While her career is thriving, Heemstra is no stranger to academic disruptions and disappointments. She draws from her own experiences to encourage others to learn and grow from setbacks.

Heemstra writes a column for Chemical and Engineering News Magazine, a leading trade publication, called “Office Hours.” It covers topics like the importance of human relationships to science and how to create a supportive environment in a research lab.

“As scientists, we are trained to do research,” Heemstra says. “But there are many other things involved in managing a lab, like leading and motivating teams of people. Apparently, there was a gap that needed to be filled for chemists talking about the ‘people’ part of doing science.”

On Wednesday, March 25, Heemstra will moderate a Chemical and Engineering News Magazine Twitter chat, #COVIDisruption, from 3 to 4 pm ET, focusing on the impact on faculty. The chat is part of a #COVIDisruption series by the magazine (@cenmag), running at the same time each day from March 24 to March 27. Different moderators will take questions on topics of interest involving the pandemic and academia, such as the impact on employment, the switch to online teaching and graduate student mental health.

“This pandemic may be one of the biggest challenges many of us face in our careers and our lives,” Heemstra says. “One of the toughest parts of it right now is the uncertainty of the situation.” 

Heemstra invites anyone seeking community to join in the Twitter chat on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, here are a few coping strategies she recommends.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s important to reach out to family, friends and colleagues when you need it, and to tap any institutional resources at your disposal. Emory, for example, has a web site listing support services for the well-being of students, faculty and staff. “Dealing with the impact of COVID-19 is not easy for anyone, but I’m so thankful in this moment to be a faculty member at Emory,” Heemstra says.

Acknowledge the loss. Even though we’re in a global crisis, it’s normal to feel badly about how it’s impacting you personally. “It’s okay to let yourself mourn the loss of the experiences you thought you were going to have,” Heemstra says, whether you’re a senior who will not get to walk across a stage for commencement or a PhD candidate having to defend a thesis virtually.

Find some higher purpose. Missing out on lab research, or other experiences you had planned, means you’re helping to reduce infection rates by staying home. “That a huge purpose,” Heemstra says. “Look for opportunities to help others however you are able.”

Cultivate community. “During Zoom calls with team members and collaborators we spend a good amount of time listening to everyone’s stories about how we’re coping,” Heemstra says. “That’s been unbelievably therapeutic. Hopefully, one thing everyone can gain from this experience is going beyond texts and emails to having more real conversations.” If you’re feeling isolated, consider joining one of the many online social groups popping up, everything from virtual book clubs to Twitter’s #COVIDCafe, where researchers from around the world gather in small groups to chat about how the pandemic is affecting them.

Practice gratitude. Be thankful for the healthcare workers on the frontlines of the pandemic, and all the other people providing essential services, from cashiers to police officers. Learn to appreciate small things, like the chance to take a walk on a beautiful spring day. “When you’re going through a difficult situation, you realize that so much of what you put your energy into is just noise,” Heemstra says. “This crisis may be a chance to think about what really matters and to learn to focus on that.”

Related:
'Bilingual' molecule connects codes for life

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2UxuL1I

Getting back to chemistry basics: How simple soap saves lives

"Even now, I don't think most people spend a full 20 seconds washing their hands," says Emory chemist Bill Wuest, who researches disinfectants. "But maybe if they understood the chemistry of soap and water it would make them more conscious of the need to do so." 

By Carol Clark

Scientists are rushing to find effective treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 infections sweeping the globe. Meanwhile, social distancing and hygiene are the best defense.

Emory University chemist Bill Wuest — who researches disinfectants — recently appeared on The Weather Channel to explain how washing your hands with plain soap and water can destroy the coronavirus that causes the infections, to help minimize its spread.

“There are so many unknowns about this pandemic that are driving fear and leading to irrational actions, like panic buying of toilet paper,” Wuest says. “It’s important to focus on what we do know — washing your hands properly and often with soap and water can help reduce your chances of getting infected with many pathogens and for spreading them to others.”

Soap and water work through the hydrophobic effect, a basic chemistry concept that explains why oil and water don’t mix. The effect drives protein folding, a process that alters the structures of amino acids and allows them to perform different functions within a cell.

“I usually use the example of protein folding to teach the hydrophobic effect to chemistry undergraduates,” Wuest says. “But now I realize that soap provides a much more relatable example.”

Soap molecules have hydrophilic heads — meaning they cling to water molecules — and tails that are hydrophobic — which means “water-fearing.” When immersed in water, the soap molecules form into tiny balls, called micelles, with their hydrophobic tails pointed inwards. While the soap molecule tails want to avoid water, they are attracted to oils and fats.

Many bacteria and viruses, including coronaviruses, are encased in a fatty acid membrane. In the most simplistic terms, the soap molecule tails poke into these bilayer membranes, breaking them apart, and destroying the pathogens.

Warmer temperatures boost the hydrophobic effect, and may help hand soap to lather and remove grime or microbes sticking to your skin, just as hot water and soap helps remove grease from a kitchen pan. Wuest recommends lathering your hands in water that’s warm to the touch. Evidence suggests it’s best to spend at least 20 seconds washing your hands to remove more germs, he adds. 

Wuest plans to use the soap and water example in his Chem 202 classroom from now on. Emory’s Chemistry Unbound curriculum is designed to give undergraduates context for real-world problems and solutions. Although washing with soap and water may sound too basic a topic for college students, Wuest now realizes that it is not.

“This pandemic has changed the way I think about teaching,” he says. “Even now, I don’t think most people spend a full 20 seconds washing their hands, but maybe if they understood the chemistry of soap and water it would make them more conscious of the need to do so.”

Hand washing is important to reduce illnesses and deaths for many diseases, including seasonal influenza, he notes.

If soap and water is not available, hand sanitizer containing at least 60 percent alcohol is also effective at breaking up the membranes surrounding coronaviruses and bacteria. It should be rubbed thoroughly into the hands until all the liquid evaporates, Wuest says.

Wuest is a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator and associate professor in Emory’s Department of Chemistry. He is also a member of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center.

For everyday use in a non-medical setting, Wuest encourages people to choose soaps and hand sanitizers that do not contain anti-bacterial ingredients. Proper use of plain soap and water or an alcohol-based sanitizer product is key, he stresses.

“I worry that there could be a spike in anti-bacterial resistance in a few years if too many people start using antibacterial products to clean their hands,” he says.

Related:
Chemists teach old drug new tricks to target deadly staph bacteria

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3dbg2St

"Even now, I don't think most people spend a full 20 seconds washing their hands," says Emory chemist Bill Wuest, who researches disinfectants. "But maybe if they understood the chemistry of soap and water it would make them more conscious of the need to do so." 

By Carol Clark

Scientists are rushing to find effective treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 infections sweeping the globe. Meanwhile, social distancing and hygiene are the best defense.

Emory University chemist Bill Wuest — who researches disinfectants — recently appeared on The Weather Channel to explain how washing your hands with plain soap and water can destroy the coronavirus that causes the infections, to help minimize its spread.

“There are so many unknowns about this pandemic that are driving fear and leading to irrational actions, like panic buying of toilet paper,” Wuest says. “It’s important to focus on what we do know — washing your hands properly and often with soap and water can help reduce your chances of getting infected with many pathogens and for spreading them to others.”

Soap and water work through the hydrophobic effect, a basic chemistry concept that explains why oil and water don’t mix. The effect drives protein folding, a process that alters the structures of amino acids and allows them to perform different functions within a cell.

“I usually use the example of protein folding to teach the hydrophobic effect to chemistry undergraduates,” Wuest says. “But now I realize that soap provides a much more relatable example.”

Soap molecules have hydrophilic heads — meaning they cling to water molecules — and tails that are hydrophobic — which means “water-fearing.” When immersed in water, the soap molecules form into tiny balls, called micelles, with their hydrophobic tails pointed inwards. While the soap molecule tails want to avoid water, they are attracted to oils and fats.

Many bacteria and viruses, including coronaviruses, are encased in a fatty acid membrane. In the most simplistic terms, the soap molecule tails poke into these bilayer membranes, breaking them apart, and destroying the pathogens.

Warmer temperatures boost the hydrophobic effect, and may help hand soap to lather and remove grime or microbes sticking to your skin, just as hot water and soap helps remove grease from a kitchen pan. Wuest recommends lathering your hands in water that’s warm to the touch. Evidence suggests it’s best to spend at least 20 seconds washing your hands to remove more germs, he adds. 

Wuest plans to use the soap and water example in his Chem 202 classroom from now on. Emory’s Chemistry Unbound curriculum is designed to give undergraduates context for real-world problems and solutions. Although washing with soap and water may sound too basic a topic for college students, Wuest now realizes that it is not.

“This pandemic has changed the way I think about teaching,” he says. “Even now, I don’t think most people spend a full 20 seconds washing their hands, but maybe if they understood the chemistry of soap and water it would make them more conscious of the need to do so.”

Hand washing is important to reduce illnesses and deaths for many diseases, including seasonal influenza, he notes.

If soap and water is not available, hand sanitizer containing at least 60 percent alcohol is also effective at breaking up the membranes surrounding coronaviruses and bacteria. It should be rubbed thoroughly into the hands until all the liquid evaporates, Wuest says.

Wuest is a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator and associate professor in Emory’s Department of Chemistry. He is also a member of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center.

For everyday use in a non-medical setting, Wuest encourages people to choose soaps and hand sanitizers that do not contain anti-bacterial ingredients. Proper use of plain soap and water or an alcohol-based sanitizer product is key, he stresses.

“I worry that there could be a spike in anti-bacterial resistance in a few years if too many people start using antibacterial products to clean their hands,” he says.

Related:
Chemists teach old drug new tricks to target deadly staph bacteria

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/3dbg2St

A peek into the minds babies are born with

Understanding how an infant's brain is typically organized my help answer questions when something goes awry. (Photo by Cory Inman)

Within hours of birth, a baby’s gaze is drawn to faces. Now, brain scans of newborns reveal the neurobiology underlying this behavior, showing that as young as six days a baby’s brain appears hardwired for the specialized tasks of seeing faces and seeing places.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the findings by psychologists at Emory University. Their work provides an early peek into the visual cortex of newborns, using harmless functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

“We’re investigating a fundamental question of where knowledge comes from by homing in on ‘nature versus nature,’” says Daniel Dilks, associate professor of psychology, and senior author of the study. “What do we come into the world with and what do we gain by experience?”

Read the full story here.

Related:
How babies see faces: New fMRI methods open window into infants' minds
Babies have logical reasoning before age one, study finds

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/32OAZxI

Understanding how an infant's brain is typically organized my help answer questions when something goes awry. (Photo by Cory Inman)

Within hours of birth, a baby’s gaze is drawn to faces. Now, brain scans of newborns reveal the neurobiology underlying this behavior, showing that as young as six days a baby’s brain appears hardwired for the specialized tasks of seeing faces and seeing places.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the findings by psychologists at Emory University. Their work provides an early peek into the visual cortex of newborns, using harmless functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

“We’re investigating a fundamental question of where knowledge comes from by homing in on ‘nature versus nature,’” says Daniel Dilks, associate professor of psychology, and senior author of the study. “What do we come into the world with and what do we gain by experience?”

Read the full story here.

Related:
How babies see faces: New fMRI methods open window into infants' minds
Babies have logical reasoning before age one, study finds

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/32OAZxI

New DNA origami motor breaks speed record for nano machines

Sixteen strands of DNA, stacked four-by-four, form the beam-shaped "chassis" of the DNA motor (in gray). Bits of DNA (in green) protrude from the chassis like little feet. The motor is fueled by RNA laid on a track. The RNA binds with the DNA feet on the bottom face of the chassis. An enzyme targeting bound RNA then destroys these RNA molecules (grey and red). The process repeats, as more RNA pulls the DNA feet, tipping the chassis forward, causing it to roll. (Stephanie Jones, bio-illustrations.com) 

Through a technique known as DNA origami, scientists have created the fastest, most persistent DNA nano motor yet. Angewandte Chemie published the findings, which provide a blueprint for how to optimize the design of motors at the nanoscale — hundreds of times smaller than the typical human cell.

“Nanoscale motors have tremendous potential for applications in biosensing, in building synthetic cells and also for molecular robotics,” says Khalid Salaita, a senior author of the paper and a professor of chemistry at Emory University. “DNA origami allowed us to tinker with the structure of the motor and tease out the design parameters that control its properties.”

The new DNA motor is rod-shaped and uses RNA fuel to roll persistently in a straight line, without human intervention, at speeds up to 100 nanometers per minute. That’s up to 10 times faster than previous DNA motors.

Read the full story here.

Related:
DNA origami takes flight in emerging field of nano machines
Nano machines take speedy leap forward with first rolling DNA-based motor

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/39m1qxp

Sixteen strands of DNA, stacked four-by-four, form the beam-shaped "chassis" of the DNA motor (in gray). Bits of DNA (in green) protrude from the chassis like little feet. The motor is fueled by RNA laid on a track. The RNA binds with the DNA feet on the bottom face of the chassis. An enzyme targeting bound RNA then destroys these RNA molecules (grey and red). The process repeats, as more RNA pulls the DNA feet, tipping the chassis forward, causing it to roll. (Stephanie Jones, bio-illustrations.com) 

Through a technique known as DNA origami, scientists have created the fastest, most persistent DNA nano motor yet. Angewandte Chemie published the findings, which provide a blueprint for how to optimize the design of motors at the nanoscale — hundreds of times smaller than the typical human cell.

“Nanoscale motors have tremendous potential for applications in biosensing, in building synthetic cells and also for molecular robotics,” says Khalid Salaita, a senior author of the paper and a professor of chemistry at Emory University. “DNA origami allowed us to tinker with the structure of the motor and tease out the design parameters that control its properties.”

The new DNA motor is rod-shaped and uses RNA fuel to roll persistently in a straight line, without human intervention, at speeds up to 100 nanometers per minute. That’s up to 10 times faster than previous DNA motors.

Read the full story here.

Related:
DNA origami takes flight in emerging field of nano machines
Nano machines take speedy leap forward with first rolling DNA-based motor

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/39m1qxp

Atlanta Science Festival creates a climate for discovery

The festival opens with an immersive, theatrical event on Friday, March 6, called "2100: A Climate Odyssey," which will propel audience members 80 years into the future.

By Carol Clark

The Atlanta Science Festival will take the city by storm March 6-21 as science-themed activities pop up throughout the metro area, starting with the launch extravaganza — “2100: A Climate Odyssey.” 

Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater and the Weather Channel collaborated to produce “2100: A Climate Odyssey,” set at Ferst Center for the Arts at 8 pm on Friday, March 6. Tickets are $20 online, or $10 if you use the coupon code “HALF.” This immersive, theatrical event will propel audience members 80 years into the future, to explore the possible effects of a changing climate.

“The premise of the event is that, in the year 2100, we have gathered for the largest mass teleportation in North American history, to visit places impacted by climate change,” says Ariel Fristoe, founder and artistic director of Out of Hand Theater.

A torrential rainstorm hits Midtown Atlanta, right outside the auditorium. Broadcasts from actual Weather Channel personalities will make the storm seem like a real event. More broadcasts will take the audience around the world and from the future, covering ways that life may be different. The broadcasts will include commercials for products spurred by a changing environment. (Bug chips, anyone?)

“The production is based on science, but it’s also entertainment, aimed at ages 10 and up,” Fristoe says. “It will include a lot of humor and at the end, we’ll have a question and answer session with real scientists. It’s going to leave people feeling empowered. We’re going to talk about things everyone can do now to prepare for the possible effects of climate change and actions you can take to mitigate those effects.”

Fristoe is an Emory graduate who teaches arts administration at Emory. She is also the daughter of Vincent Murphy, the former long-time artistic director of Theater Emory. “My great joy is I get to use my skill as a theater artist to work on causes that I care about, and to get other people to care about them as well,” she says.

Science enthusiasts of all ages are mesmerized by the interactive exhibits of the annual Physics Live! The Emory event will take place on Friday, March 20 this year.

Founded by Emory, Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber, the first Atlanta Science Festival was held in 2014.

“This year we have nearly 140 events — up from 100 events our first year — at venues throughout the metro area,” says Meisa Salaita, executive co-director of the festival. “As more people experience the festival, more people want to contribute and to become part of it, so we just keep growing.”

Two perennial festival favorites — Chemistry Carnival and Physics Live! — return this year to the Emory campus on Friday, March 20, from 3:30 to 7 pm. Emory science faculty and students will explain their research, give lab tours, and entertain with games like Peptide Jenga, a change to play with giant soap bubbles and tastings of liquid nitrogen ice cream. Hundreds of visitors are expected to turn out for the events, held in the Mathematics and Science Center and Atwood Chemistry Center. 

“Garden Detox,” on Saturday, March 14, from 3 to 5 pm at Historic Westside Gardens, features a team from Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences. You can bring a soil sample from your yard in a Ziploc bag and the scientists will test it for contamination from heavy metals. Learn about potential risks and simple ways to clean your soil if you’re planning to start a garden.

“Queer Scientists Panel” is a new event this year, on Wednesday, March 18 at 7 pm at Waller’s Coffee Shop. Emory’s Center for Selective C-H Functionalization is sponsoring this event, which will celebrate the contributions of LGBTQ scientists.

Oxford College and Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health are sponsoring “Comic Strip Science” on March 18 at 7 pm at the Carter Presidential Library. Scientist and artist Garfield T. Kwan will talk about how his Squidtoons comics walk the line between scientific accuracy and visual appeal. Kwan will also be featured at the Oxford campus on Friday, March 20 at 2 pm in an event called “Discovering Science through Art.”

Emory chemists draw crowds every year for the "Ping Pong Big Bang" at the "Exploration Expo," the festivals culminating event, set for March 21.

“Become an Archaeologist” returns this year, allowing kids to join Emory experts to learn how to extract DNA and put ancient objects and skeletons back together like a puzzle. The event will be held Thursday, March 19 from 6 to 8 pm at Brownwood park Pavilion in East Atlanta Village.

“Health Hacks Coding Workshop” will feature Emory mentors to spark inspiration for participants who want to immerse themselves into the foundations of coding in ways that can improve health. No coding experience is required for this event, on Friday, March 20 from 4 to 7 pm in Emory’s Psychology Building, room 230. Click here to see more events with an Emory connection.

The festival culminates on Saturday, March 21, with the Exploration Expo at Piedmont Park — a day-long, free carnival of science with hundreds of hands-on activities. More than a dozen booths will feature Emory faculty and students who will engage crowds in activities like testing the air quality in the park that day, learning how vaccines protect against pathogens and the Ping Pong Big Bang.

Special funding from Delta Airlines, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Emory and others has helped the Atlanta Science Festival extend its programming and events year-round under an umbrella non-profit organization Science ATL. In addition to the annual festival, the organization produces a Chief Science Officers leadership program for middle and high school students, a science communication fellowship for college students, a 5K Race Through Space and many other educational science opportunities. Learn more at ScienceATL.org.

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The festival opens with an immersive, theatrical event on Friday, March 6, called "2100: A Climate Odyssey," which will propel audience members 80 years into the future.

By Carol Clark

The Atlanta Science Festival will take the city by storm March 6-21 as science-themed activities pop up throughout the metro area, starting with the launch extravaganza — “2100: A Climate Odyssey.” 

Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater and the Weather Channel collaborated to produce “2100: A Climate Odyssey,” set at Ferst Center for the Arts at 8 pm on Friday, March 6. Tickets are $20 online, or $10 if you use the coupon code “HALF.” This immersive, theatrical event will propel audience members 80 years into the future, to explore the possible effects of a changing climate.

“The premise of the event is that, in the year 2100, we have gathered for the largest mass teleportation in North American history, to visit places impacted by climate change,” says Ariel Fristoe, founder and artistic director of Out of Hand Theater.

A torrential rainstorm hits Midtown Atlanta, right outside the auditorium. Broadcasts from actual Weather Channel personalities will make the storm seem like a real event. More broadcasts will take the audience around the world and from the future, covering ways that life may be different. The broadcasts will include commercials for products spurred by a changing environment. (Bug chips, anyone?)

“The production is based on science, but it’s also entertainment, aimed at ages 10 and up,” Fristoe says. “It will include a lot of humor and at the end, we’ll have a question and answer session with real scientists. It’s going to leave people feeling empowered. We’re going to talk about things everyone can do now to prepare for the possible effects of climate change and actions you can take to mitigate those effects.”

Fristoe is an Emory graduate who teaches arts administration at Emory. She is also the daughter of Vincent Murphy, the former long-time artistic director of Theater Emory. “My great joy is I get to use my skill as a theater artist to work on causes that I care about, and to get other people to care about them as well,” she says.

Science enthusiasts of all ages are mesmerized by the interactive exhibits of the annual Physics Live! The Emory event will take place on Friday, March 20 this year.

Founded by Emory, Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber, the first Atlanta Science Festival was held in 2014.

“This year we have nearly 140 events — up from 100 events our first year — at venues throughout the metro area,” says Meisa Salaita, executive co-director of the festival. “As more people experience the festival, more people want to contribute and to become part of it, so we just keep growing.”

Two perennial festival favorites — Chemistry Carnival and Physics Live! — return this year to the Emory campus on Friday, March 20, from 3:30 to 7 pm. Emory science faculty and students will explain their research, give lab tours, and entertain with games like Peptide Jenga, a change to play with giant soap bubbles and tastings of liquid nitrogen ice cream. Hundreds of visitors are expected to turn out for the events, held in the Mathematics and Science Center and Atwood Chemistry Center. 

“Garden Detox,” on Saturday, March 14, from 3 to 5 pm at Historic Westside Gardens, features a team from Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences. You can bring a soil sample from your yard in a Ziploc bag and the scientists will test it for contamination from heavy metals. Learn about potential risks and simple ways to clean your soil if you’re planning to start a garden.

“Queer Scientists Panel” is a new event this year, on Wednesday, March 18 at 7 pm at Waller’s Coffee Shop. Emory’s Center for Selective C-H Functionalization is sponsoring this event, which will celebrate the contributions of LGBTQ scientists.

Oxford College and Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health are sponsoring “Comic Strip Science” on March 18 at 7 pm at the Carter Presidential Library. Scientist and artist Garfield T. Kwan will talk about how his Squidtoons comics walk the line between scientific accuracy and visual appeal. Kwan will also be featured at the Oxford campus on Friday, March 20 at 2 pm in an event called “Discovering Science through Art.”

Emory chemists draw crowds every year for the "Ping Pong Big Bang" at the "Exploration Expo," the festivals culminating event, set for March 21.

“Become an Archaeologist” returns this year, allowing kids to join Emory experts to learn how to extract DNA and put ancient objects and skeletons back together like a puzzle. The event will be held Thursday, March 19 from 6 to 8 pm at Brownwood park Pavilion in East Atlanta Village.

“Health Hacks Coding Workshop” will feature Emory mentors to spark inspiration for participants who want to immerse themselves into the foundations of coding in ways that can improve health. No coding experience is required for this event, on Friday, March 20 from 4 to 7 pm in Emory’s Psychology Building, room 230. Click here to see more events with an Emory connection.

The festival culminates on Saturday, March 21, with the Exploration Expo at Piedmont Park — a day-long, free carnival of science with hundreds of hands-on activities. More than a dozen booths will feature Emory faculty and students who will engage crowds in activities like testing the air quality in the park that day, learning how vaccines protect against pathogens and the Ping Pong Big Bang.

Special funding from Delta Airlines, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Emory and others has helped the Atlanta Science Festival extend its programming and events year-round under an umbrella non-profit organization Science ATL. In addition to the annual festival, the organization produces a Chief Science Officers leadership program for middle and high school students, a science communication fellowship for college students, a 5K Race Through Space and many other educational science opportunities. Learn more at ScienceATL.org.

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/38e1qhl

Spillover: Why germs jump species from animals to people

"Whenever you have novel interactions with a diverse range of species in one place you can have a spillover event," says Thomas Gillespie, an Emory disease ecologist.

When a disease spreads from one species to another it is known as a “spillover event.” Although not yet confirmed, preliminary evidence suggests that the 2019 coronavirus, now known as Covid-19, may have originated in horseshoe bats in China and then spread to another species which in turn infected humans at a Wuhan live animal market, or “wet market.”

Thomas Gillespie, associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, is a disease ecologist who studies how germs jump between wild animals, domesticated animals and people. Through this “One Health” approach, he aims to protect humans, ecosystems and biodiversity.

Most of Gillespie’s research is focused in Africa and Latin America where his team is characterizing the diversity of new viruses and other pathogens in tropical forests. In the following interview, Gillespie explains how shrinking natural habitats and changing human and animal behaviors can add to the risks of spillover events.

Bats are linked to outbreaks of Hendra, Marburg and Nipah viruses, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and the SARS virus outbreak in China in 2002. Why do bats keep cropping up as prime suspects? 

One quarter of mammal species overall are bats. And in tropical systems, bats make up 50 percent of the mammalian diversity. Most bats feed on insects or fruit, but there’s a huge range of bat behaviors. There are bats that eat other bats, bats that eat fish and bats that drink blood. We are still discovering new species of bats. And each of these myriad bat species carries a suite of different pathogens. Bats are able to host different viruses without getting sick.

So bats, and the pathogens that bats carry, are numerous. And bats and humans are both mammals. This relatedness means we’re more likely to get a pathogen from a bat than from a cricket, for instance.

Some evidence suggests COVID-19 may have originated in horseshoe bats. (Getty Images)

Why are wet markets hot spots for disease spillover? 

Wet markets bring together a really broad range of animal species from different parts of the world. These animals are not eating what they would normally eat in the wild. They are stressed, which lowers their immunity and makes them more susceptible to pathogens. They are kept in cages where they are defecating on one another and, perhaps, through the cages onto other species of animals. They are also being butchered at the markets. Cutting up an animal and getting its blood on you is a good way to get a pathogen. All these factors make wet markets a perfect storm for cross-species transmission.

Whenever you have novel interactions with a diverse range of species in one place — whether that’s in a natural environment like a tropical forest or in an artificially created environment like a wet market — you can have a spillover event.

How are land use changes driving spillover? 

Major landscape changes are causing wildlife to lose habitats, which means more species may become crowded together while also coming into closer contact with humans. We see this in the United States, where suburbs fragmenting forests raise the risk of humans catching Lyme disease. Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen, which involves ticks, mice and deer. And people living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria. 

Logging and subsistence agriculture in Africa are reducing habitat for wild primates. They have less forest to forage in. That can make them unhealthy and more susceptible to disease. And it may drive them to risk encounters with humans, raising risks of the exchange of pathogens. In Uganda, for instance, crop raiding by red-tailed guenon monkeys led farmers to put cattle feces on their corn to make it less attractive to the monkeys.

And everyone is talking about the problem of the wet market in Wuhan, but what about the effects of the nearby Three Gorges Dam project? It is the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, built on the Yangtze River in an area that was previously a mix of secondary forest and agricultural land. Many of the animals that used to live in that area likely died when their habitat was destroyed, but bats can fly. Where did they go? How did they adapt?

How does your research address these kinds of problems? 

Most people don’t realize that we haven’t yet catalogued the full diversity of life, everything from viruses to mammals. At the same time, we need to understand more about how changing landscapes and novel interactions between humans and other species influence spillover. Why has one pathogen jumped across species while another one hasn’t? It’s important to gather data so we can use it to identify potential hot spots and risky behaviors. That may help us reduce the number of major spillover events, saving lives and preventing enormous economic losses.

Related:
Ebola's backstory: How germs jump species
Ecosystems hanging by a thread
Experts warn of pending extinction of many of the world's primates
In Madagascar, a health crisis of people and their ecosystem

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/37oVFgk

"Whenever you have novel interactions with a diverse range of species in one place you can have a spillover event," says Thomas Gillespie, an Emory disease ecologist.

When a disease spreads from one species to another it is known as a “spillover event.” Although not yet confirmed, preliminary evidence suggests that the 2019 coronavirus, now known as Covid-19, may have originated in horseshoe bats in China and then spread to another species which in turn infected humans at a Wuhan live animal market, or “wet market.”

Thomas Gillespie, associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, is a disease ecologist who studies how germs jump between wild animals, domesticated animals and people. Through this “One Health” approach, he aims to protect humans, ecosystems and biodiversity.

Most of Gillespie’s research is focused in Africa and Latin America where his team is characterizing the diversity of new viruses and other pathogens in tropical forests. In the following interview, Gillespie explains how shrinking natural habitats and changing human and animal behaviors can add to the risks of spillover events.

Bats are linked to outbreaks of Hendra, Marburg and Nipah viruses, the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and the SARS virus outbreak in China in 2002. Why do bats keep cropping up as prime suspects? 

One quarter of mammal species overall are bats. And in tropical systems, bats make up 50 percent of the mammalian diversity. Most bats feed on insects or fruit, but there’s a huge range of bat behaviors. There are bats that eat other bats, bats that eat fish and bats that drink blood. We are still discovering new species of bats. And each of these myriad bat species carries a suite of different pathogens. Bats are able to host different viruses without getting sick.

So bats, and the pathogens that bats carry, are numerous. And bats and humans are both mammals. This relatedness means we’re more likely to get a pathogen from a bat than from a cricket, for instance.

Some evidence suggests COVID-19 may have originated in horseshoe bats. (Getty Images)

Why are wet markets hot spots for disease spillover? 

Wet markets bring together a really broad range of animal species from different parts of the world. These animals are not eating what they would normally eat in the wild. They are stressed, which lowers their immunity and makes them more susceptible to pathogens. They are kept in cages where they are defecating on one another and, perhaps, through the cages onto other species of animals. They are also being butchered at the markets. Cutting up an animal and getting its blood on you is a good way to get a pathogen. All these factors make wet markets a perfect storm for cross-species transmission.

Whenever you have novel interactions with a diverse range of species in one place — whether that’s in a natural environment like a tropical forest or in an artificially created environment like a wet market — you can have a spillover event.

How are land use changes driving spillover? 

Major landscape changes are causing wildlife to lose habitats, which means more species may become crowded together while also coming into closer contact with humans. We see this in the United States, where suburbs fragmenting forests raise the risk of humans catching Lyme disease. Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen, which involves ticks, mice and deer. And people living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria. 

Logging and subsistence agriculture in Africa are reducing habitat for wild primates. They have less forest to forage in. That can make them unhealthy and more susceptible to disease. And it may drive them to risk encounters with humans, raising risks of the exchange of pathogens. In Uganda, for instance, crop raiding by red-tailed guenon monkeys led farmers to put cattle feces on their corn to make it less attractive to the monkeys.

And everyone is talking about the problem of the wet market in Wuhan, but what about the effects of the nearby Three Gorges Dam project? It is the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, built on the Yangtze River in an area that was previously a mix of secondary forest and agricultural land. Many of the animals that used to live in that area likely died when their habitat was destroyed, but bats can fly. Where did they go? How did they adapt?

How does your research address these kinds of problems? 

Most people don’t realize that we haven’t yet catalogued the full diversity of life, everything from viruses to mammals. At the same time, we need to understand more about how changing landscapes and novel interactions between humans and other species influence spillover. Why has one pathogen jumped across species while another one hasn’t? It’s important to gather data so we can use it to identify potential hot spots and risky behaviors. That may help us reduce the number of major spillover events, saving lives and preventing enormous economic losses.

Related:
Ebola's backstory: How germs jump species
Ecosystems hanging by a thread
Experts warn of pending extinction of many of the world's primates
In Madagascar, a health crisis of people and their ecosystem

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/37oVFgk

New synthesis methods enhance 3D chemical space for drug discovery

Graphic shows the dirhodium catalyst developed used to synthesize a 3D scaffold of keen interest to the pharmaceutical industry. The Davies lab has published a series of major papers on dirhodium catalysts that selectively funcitonalized C-H bonds in a streamlined manner.

By Carol Clark

After helping develop a new approach for organic synthesis — carbon-hydrogen functionalization — scientists at Emory University are now showing how this approach may apply to drug discovery. Nature Catalysis published their most recent work — a streamlined process for making a three-dimensional scaffold of keen interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

“Our tools open up whole new chemical space for potential drug targets,” says Huw Davies, Emory professor of organic chemistry and senior author of the paper.

Davies is the founding director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Selective C-H Functionalization, a consortium based at Emory and encompassing 15 major research universities from across the country as well as industrial partners.

Traditionally, organic chemistry has focused on the division between reactive molecular bonds and the inert bonds between carbon-carbon (C-C) and carbon-hydrogen (C-H). The inert bonds provide a strong, stable scaffold for performing chemical synthesis with the reactive groups. C-H functionalization flips this model on its head, making C-H bonds become the reactive sites.

The aim is to efficiently transform simple, abundant molecules into much more complex, value-added molecules. Functionalizing C-H bonds opens new chemical pathways for the synthesis of fine chemicals — pathways that are more direct, less costly and generate less chemical waste.

The Davies lab has published a series of major papers on dirhodium catalysts that selectively functionalize C-H bonds in a streamlined manner.

The current paper demonstrates the power of a dirhodium catalyst to efficiently synthesize a bioisostere of a benzene ring. A benzene ring is a two-dimensional (2D) molecule and a common motif in drug candidates. The bioisostere has similar biologicial properties to a benzene ring. It is a different chemical entity, however, with a 3D structure, which opens up new chemical territory for drug discovery.

Previous attempts to exploit this bioisostere for biomedical research have been hampered by the delicate nature of the structure and the limited ways to make them. “Traditional chemistry is too harsh and causes the system to fragment,” Davies explains. “Our method allows us to easily achieve a reaction on a C-H bond of this bioisostere in a way that does not destroy the scaffold. We can do chemistry that no one else can do and generate new, and more elaborate, derivatives containing this promising bioisostere.”

The paper serves as proof of principle that bioisosteres can serve as fundamental building blocks to generate an expanded range of chemical entities. “It’s like getting a new Lego shape in your kit,” Davies says. “The more Lego shapes you have, the more new and different structures you can build.” 

Zachary Garlets, a former member of the Davies lab who currently works for the biopharmaceutical firm Bristol-Myers Squibb, is first author of the paper. The project was a collaboration between the Davies lab and computational chemists from UCLA (Jacob Sanders and K.N. Houk) and medicinal chemists from Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (Hasnain Malik and Christian Gampe). 

The paper follows another recent demonstration of the potential for generating novel scaffolds relevant to pharmaceutical research using the method. That work, a collaboration between Emory chemists and AbbVie, was published in the journal Chem.

Related:
Chemical catalyst turns 'trash' to 'treasure'
Chemists find 'huge shortcut' for organic synthesis
Creating global bonds

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2HaOBtk

Graphic shows the dirhodium catalyst developed used to synthesize a 3D scaffold of keen interest to the pharmaceutical industry. The Davies lab has published a series of major papers on dirhodium catalysts that selectively funcitonalized C-H bonds in a streamlined manner.

By Carol Clark

After helping develop a new approach for organic synthesis — carbon-hydrogen functionalization — scientists at Emory University are now showing how this approach may apply to drug discovery. Nature Catalysis published their most recent work — a streamlined process for making a three-dimensional scaffold of keen interest to the pharmaceutical industry.

“Our tools open up whole new chemical space for potential drug targets,” says Huw Davies, Emory professor of organic chemistry and senior author of the paper.

Davies is the founding director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Selective C-H Functionalization, a consortium based at Emory and encompassing 15 major research universities from across the country as well as industrial partners.

Traditionally, organic chemistry has focused on the division between reactive molecular bonds and the inert bonds between carbon-carbon (C-C) and carbon-hydrogen (C-H). The inert bonds provide a strong, stable scaffold for performing chemical synthesis with the reactive groups. C-H functionalization flips this model on its head, making C-H bonds become the reactive sites.

The aim is to efficiently transform simple, abundant molecules into much more complex, value-added molecules. Functionalizing C-H bonds opens new chemical pathways for the synthesis of fine chemicals — pathways that are more direct, less costly and generate less chemical waste.

The Davies lab has published a series of major papers on dirhodium catalysts that selectively functionalize C-H bonds in a streamlined manner.

The current paper demonstrates the power of a dirhodium catalyst to efficiently synthesize a bioisostere of a benzene ring. A benzene ring is a two-dimensional (2D) molecule and a common motif in drug candidates. The bioisostere has similar biologicial properties to a benzene ring. It is a different chemical entity, however, with a 3D structure, which opens up new chemical territory for drug discovery.

Previous attempts to exploit this bioisostere for biomedical research have been hampered by the delicate nature of the structure and the limited ways to make them. “Traditional chemistry is too harsh and causes the system to fragment,” Davies explains. “Our method allows us to easily achieve a reaction on a C-H bond of this bioisostere in a way that does not destroy the scaffold. We can do chemistry that no one else can do and generate new, and more elaborate, derivatives containing this promising bioisostere.”

The paper serves as proof of principle that bioisosteres can serve as fundamental building blocks to generate an expanded range of chemical entities. “It’s like getting a new Lego shape in your kit,” Davies says. “The more Lego shapes you have, the more new and different structures you can build.” 

Zachary Garlets, a former member of the Davies lab who currently works for the biopharmaceutical firm Bristol-Myers Squibb, is first author of the paper. The project was a collaboration between the Davies lab and computational chemists from UCLA (Jacob Sanders and K.N. Houk) and medicinal chemists from Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (Hasnain Malik and Christian Gampe). 

The paper follows another recent demonstration of the potential for generating novel scaffolds relevant to pharmaceutical research using the method. That work, a collaboration between Emory chemists and AbbVie, was published in the journal Chem.

Related:
Chemical catalyst turns 'trash' to 'treasure'
Chemists find 'huge shortcut' for organic synthesis
Creating global bonds

from eScienceCommons https://ift.tt/2HaOBtk