When the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) arrived in the United States in the 1980s, it took the invasive blood-sucker only one year to spread from Houston to St. Louis. New research from Washington University in St. Louis shows that the mosquitoes at the northern limit of their current range are successfully using time-capsule-like eggs to survive conditions that are colder than those in their native territory.

The northern mosquitoes have adapted to colder winters, compared to their southern counterparts. This new evidence of rapid local adaptation could have implications for efforts to control the spread of this invasive species, which is considered a “competent vector” of numerous pathogens that are relevant to humans, including Zika, chikungunya and dengue viruses. The work is published Aug. 21 in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

“This all happened within a period of 30 years,” said biologist Kim Medley, director of Tyson Research Center and first author of the new study. “This disease vector has evolved rapidly to adapt to the United States. The fact that this has occurred at a range limit may suggest that there is potential for the species to continue to creep farther northward.”

Mosquitoes respond to the shortening days signaling winter’s onset by laying diapause eggs —  literally, delayed development eggs. These special eggs contain a fertilized embryo that’s in a state of almost-hibernation and has a very slow metabolism. The result is almost like a mosquito time capsule.

The ability to produce eggs that can wait to hatch is not something new. This technique helps mosquitoes survive the winter cold, but it works for dry conditions as well. All mosquitoes lay their eggs in or near standing water, and the larvae need to hatch into standing water. But they can survive getting dried out in between.

Still, diapause eggs are different from regular eggs. Previous research had showed that northern mosquitoes lay more diapause eggs than their southern cousins. What researchers didn’t know was how these eggs actually perform in the conditions in which they’re prepped to perform.

For this new field experiment, Medley and her team, including Katie M. Westby, postdoctoral research associate at Tyson Research Center, collected live mosquito eggs and larvae from cities near the center of the habitat they’ve invaded (Huntsville, Ala.; Macon, Ga.; Beaufort, S.C.) and also from the approximate northern edge of their U.S. range (Peoria, Ill.; Columbus, Ohio; and Harrisburg, Pa.) The researchers hatched and raised these mosquitoes and their subsequent generations in batches in the laboratory.

Then it was time to get cold. The researchers exposed the mosquitoes to shortened periods of light to signal the onset of winter. They collected the diapause eggs that the mosquitoes produced, then dispatched batches of eggs to endure real winters in four different locations: in field sites at the northern edge and core of their current range; in a climate-controlled laboratory site that represented the “optimal” winter conditions in the mosquitoes’ home territory in Japan; and in a far-north site in Wisconsin, clearly outside of the mosquitoes’ current established range.

After that real winter passed, the researchers brought the eggs back into the lab and hatched them out.

“We counted all of the eggs to see how many survived the winter in all of these locations,” Medley said. “What we learned was that the northern mosquitoes’ diapause eggs survived northern winters significantly better than the southern mosquitoes’ eggs did.

“Everybody did OK in the southern range winter,” she said. “They performed about the same.” The same was true for those in the chamber with the optimal conditions. As for Wisconsin? Well …

“Nobody survived that Wisconsin winter,” Medley said.

While the Wisconsin conditions are too harsh for these mosquitoes — at least for now — Medley is particularly interested in the changes that she is observing at the very edge of what is survivable.

“These northern mosquitoes are producing a lot more diapause eggs,” Medley said. “Now we know that these eggs also do a lot better in the winter.”

What Medley and her team learned is important not just for this species but for ecologists studying how animals adapt to new conditions and push the boundaries of their historic ranges.

“Based on theory, we expect that populations at range limits will be small, they will be fragmented and that they will be low in genetic diversity,” she said. “It’s thought that these populations will not have the demographic and genetic robustness to adapt, so they remain at this state of maladaptation.

“That may not be the case with this species,” Medley said.

Read more: Medley, KA, Westby, KM, Jenkins, DG. Rapid local adaptation to northern winters in the invasive Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus: A moving target. J Appl Ecol. 2019; 00: 1– 10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13480

The post Mosquitoes push northern limits with time-capsule eggs to survive winters appeared first on The Source.

Nadine Strossen, author of the Common Reading Program selection “Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship,” will deliver the keynote address at “Reflections: Unity, Social Justice, and Peace,” an annual event celebrating the start of the academic year at Washington University in St. Louis.

The event, which also is the start of the Assembly Series fall lineup, begins at 4 p.m. Monday, Aug. 26, in Graham Chapel.

Strossen is professor of law at New York Law School and served as the first woman national president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Her book addresses common misperceptions about so-called hate speech and explores how free speech promotes democracy, equality and societal harmony.

After her address, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin will lead a discussion with Strossen about free speech on college campuses and how to promote equality through vigorous counterspeech and activism.

The event will be followed by a reception and book signing in Anheuser-Busch Hall’s Crowder Courtyard. Reflections is sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, the School of Law and the First Year Center’s Common Reading Program.

The post Academic year kicks off with annual Reflections event appeared first on The Source.

Washington University investigators at Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been awarded a $15 million grant to better understand the genetic changes that drive acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a deadly blood cancer, and predict patients’ responses to therapy. The findings also may enable investigators to develop more effective therapies tailored to patients, based on the genetic characteristics of their cancer cells.

The grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allows for the continuation of work by a team of researchers with complementary expertise in AML, drawing on their unique strengths in basic and translational research.

The funding mechanism is called a program project grant, which supports integrated research projects around a single type of cancer. Funding for the “Genomics of AML” program project grant originally was awarded to this group of investigators in 2003 and has now been renewed for the third time. It is the only program project grant in the country focused on AML genomics.

Funding from this grant, and from a direct gift from Alvin Siteman, allowed this group to sequence the first human cancer genomes (from AML patients) in 2008 and 2009, setting the stage for the entire field of cancer genomics. Separately in 2018, the School of Medicine also was awarded a $11.5 million grant for leukemia – a Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant, making Washington University a national hub for innovative leukemia research and leadership in developing new therapies for leukemia patients.

One of the biggest challenges in treating AML is that even when patients achieve remission, the cancer usually returns. The five-year survival rate is low, about 28 percent — but even lower for older patients with the disease. Research by Washington University investigators has shown that certain mutations in a patient’s AML cells — and whether they are cleared with initial therapy — can help to predict the aggressiveness of leukemia and response to treatment. The new grant will help researchers better understand the interplay of mutations and the gene expression patterns that they alter, which will help them understand why some patients relapse and others don’t.

“This grant is having a direct impact on how we approach patients,” said principal investigator Timothy J. Ley, MD, the Lewis T. and Rosalind B. Apple Professor of Medicine. “Today, every single patient with AML who comes to Siteman gets some kind of genetic analysis for their cancer. The mutations in their leukemia cells help physicians select the best treatment option.

“For example, sequencing patients’ cancer cells at presentation, and again after initial therapy, is providing a better understanding of who really needs a stem cell transplant and who will do well without one,” he said. “This is important because a stem cell transplant comes with its own risks. It’s important to identify patients who don’t need that procedure so we don’t put them through it unnecessarily.”

Ley and his colleagues have contributed to an understanding that even in the bone marrow of a single patient, leukemia cells are not all identical. The cancerous cells are also a moving target, evolving and adapting to different treatment strategies. One type of treatment might destroy many AML cells but leave behind a subset of cells that have a slightly different set of mutations. That subset then has room to expand and contribute to relapse. This grant has supported research analyzing how tumors respond and evolve during therapy, which could lead to new treatments for patients whose cancer returns after a period of remission.

The work also has uncovered roles for the so-called epigenome in cancer development and progression. The epigenome is another layer of regulation that controls how genes are turned on or off, and can contribute to cancer even in the absence of obvious mistakes in the DNA sequence. New techniques to study the epigenetic changes involved in cancer — along with a new strategy called single-cell sequencing, which allows a look at the RNA expression profile of each cell of a tumor rather than a mixture of all cells — stand to help researchers analyze tumors in unprecedented detail.

“Single-cell technologies will allow us to better understand subsets of tumor cells that emerge and evolve and are changed by chemotherapy, whether they’re sensitive or resistant to it,” Ley said. “Interpretation of this new data is going to be incredibly challenging, but we already can tell from the work we’ve done recently that this technology is going to let us address questions that were confusing even a couple of years ago.

“Studying cancer is a bit like opening sets of Russian nesting dolls,” Ley said. “You uncover one layer, and there’s another layer of complexity underneath, and so on. But we’re getting closer. There are only so many ways this can happen, and our computational capacities are reaching a point where we can make sense of such complex datasets. We benefit tremendously from the expertise at McDonnell Genome Institute, where every new tool that is known to genomic science is rapidly adopted for the benefit of investigators here.”

With the latest renewal, the grant will support four research projects:

• Led by Ley, the first project will examine the genetic and epigenetic characteristics of intermediate-risk AML, the most common type. It is also the type that poses the most challenges in predicting how well patients will do after undergoing standard therapy. As such, this project further aims to uncover better predictors of relapse.
• Led by John F. DiPersio, MD, PhD, the Virginia E. and Sam J. Golman Professor of Medicine, and Michael P. Rettig, PhD, an associate professor of medicine, the second project will examine ways to improve patient responses to stem cell transplantation, seeking ways to boost the way the transplanted immune cells attack the patients’ AML.
• Led by Matthew J. Walter, MD, a professor of medicine, the third project will focus on the genetics and epigenetics of a different but closely related disease called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) that is slow-growing but sometimes progresses to AML. The goal is to understand why some patients progress to AML, and find ways to prevent it.
• Led by Daniel C. Link, MD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Professor of Medicine, the fourth project will focus on understanding the genetic and epigenetic changes in an important gene called TP53, which often drives AML and has an impact on patient prognosis.

The work also is supported by four core research resources that integrate the activities of the program project grant.

Core A is led by Peter Westervelt, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine, and Sharon E. Heath, a senior clinical research coordinator. This core enrolls all of the patients for sample banking and assembles their clinical data. Core B is led by Jacqueline Payton, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology and immunology. This core manages and distributes all of the samples in Siteman Cancer Center’s Tissue Procurement Core.

Core C, led by Christopher A. Miller, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine, and Robert S. Fulton, an assistant professor of genetics, produces and analyzes all of the sequencing data for the project. And Core D, led by Ley and Nancy Reidelberger, a senior research administrator, manages all of the administrative aspects of the grant.

“When we first started talking about sequencing the genomes of human cancer cells in the early 2000s, it was considered an outrageous idea,” Ley said. “People thought we were a little crazy. But it was ultimately successful, and the strategy took off, and those early studies have served as a blueprint for using genome sequencing to understand this disease.”

Ley described the complexity of the disease by giving an example of two patients whose diseases look identical at presentation. But, he explained, one might relapse after standard therapy and die within six months, while the other also gets standard therapy and is apparently cured.

“Why are the outcomes so different? We think about half of it is explained by the DNA sequencing and how the tumor is organized and what the mutations are,” Ley said. “But the other half is still pretty mysterious. Our goal over the next five years is to understand the other half. And now, we may have the technology to do it.”

This work is supported by the Genomics of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) Program Project Grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant number P01 CA101937.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

The post $15 million supports quest for personalized leukemia therapies appeared first on The Source.

Providing an unparalleled student experience is among the very highest priorities at Washington University in St. Louis. In affirmation of that commitment, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin has announced the organizational realignment of the Division of Student Affairs to report to his office, effective immediately. Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Lori S. White, who had previously served under the provost, will now report directly to Martin.

The change is a direct result of Martin’s review of promising practices and a vision for prioritizing the student experience. He cited the evolving landscape of higher education —  particularly the extensive role the student experience plays across the board — as one factor that went into the decision.

“While the student experience is certainly an important piece of the academic experience, it is also critical to remember that our students’ needs, well-being, community engagement and leadership preparation during their time here are often much more transcendent, holistic and complex,” Martin wrote in a statement about the transition.

“As we continue to prioritize the myriad aspects of the student experience, it will be essential for Dr. White and the Division of Student Affairs to have a strong relationship with me and, more broadly, the Office of the Chancellor. It will reinforce the role of the vice chancellor for student affairs as the primary point person for student well-being, issues and concerns, and also allow us to renew our focus of the provost’s office to be solely academic in nature. I expect the offices of the provost and vice chancellor for student affairs to continue their important partnership in support of Washington University’s world-class educational mission.”

“It’s wonderful to see Chancellor Martin placing such high value on the student experience as we consider our most important strategic priorities moving forward under his leadership,” White said. “This realignment will allow us to take a fresh look at the ways we educate, prepare and support our students, tapping even more closely into university-level thinking, planning and resources as we chart a course for future success in student affairs. In addition to our unwavering, ongoing commitment to academic excellence, I’m heartened to know our students also are benefiting from the full support of the university in all other areas, at the very highest levels.”

“This marks an exciting step for both the Division of Student Affairs and the Office of the Provost, as we double down on our commitment to providing a top-notch, holistic education, and as we streamline our organizational models to better align with our institutional mission and strategic priorities,” Martin wrote. “I’m extremely grateful for Lori White’s leadership, and I look forward to our future collaboration. She has been, and will continue to be, an invaluable partner to all of us at the university as we continue to make the student experience an exceptional one.”

The post Division of Student Affairs to report to Chancellor Martin appeared first on The Source.

Big brains can help an animal mount quick, flexible behavioral responses to frequent or unexpected environmental changes. But some birds just don’t need ’em.

A global study comparing 2,062 birds finds that, in highly variable environments, birds tend to have either larger or smaller brains relative to their body size. Birds with smaller brains tend to use ecological strategies that are not available to big-brained counterparts. Instead of relying on grey matter to survive, these birds tend to have large bodies, eat readily available food and make lots of babies.

The new research from biologists at Washington University in St. Louis appears Aug. 23 in the journal Nature Communications.

“The fact is that there are a great many species that do quite well with small brains,” said Trevor Fristoe, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University, now at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

“What’s really interesting is that we don’t see any middle ground here,” Fristoe said. “The resident species with intermediate brain size are almost completely absent from high latitude (colder and more climatically variable) environments. The species that don’t go all in on either of the extreme strategies are forced to migrate to more benign climates during the winter.”

“Having a large brain is typically associated with strong energetic demands and a slower life-history,” said Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences and co-author of the paper. “Free from these constraints, species with small brains can exhibit traits and lifestyles that are never seen in larger-brained ones.”

“What we found is that alternative ecological strategies that either increase or decrease investments in brain tissue are equally capable of coping with the challenges of living in high-latitude environments,” he said.

Evolution of brain size

Because the brain is such a costly organ to develop and maintain, biologists have long been interested in understanding how large brain size — in all species — could have evolved.

One hypothesis is based around the idea that one of the main advantages of possessing a big brain is that it allows for a high degree of behavioral flexibility. With flexibility comes the ability to respond to different conditions — such as wide swings in temperature, or changes in food availability.

The so-called cognitive buffer hypothesis is not the only possible explanation for the evolution of brain size — but it is an important and influential one.

Relative brain size is a measure of the size of the brain as compared to the body — think: an ostrich’s brain might be much bigger than a chickadee’s brain, but so is the ostrich’s body. Predictably, the global distribution of relative brain size of birds follows a bell curve, with most species landing squarely in the middle, and only a handful of outliers with relatively large or relatively small brains.

Previous studies had found general trends towards larger relative brain sizes in higher latitudes, where conditions are more variable — consistent with the cognitive buffer hypothesis. Fristoe and Botero’s new study is different because it looks at the full distribution of brain sizes across environments, allowing them to test whether different sizes are over- or under-represented.

Smaller brains, different strategies

Excluding contributions from migrants — the birds that live in polar or temperate environments only during more favorable times of the year — the researchers found that at high latitudes, bird brain size appears to be bimodal. This morphological pattern means that bird brains are significantly more likely to be relatively large, or relatively small, compared to body size.

What was going on here? Fristoe, born in Alaska, had a few ideas.

In fact, Fristoe suggests that the Alaska state bird, the ptarmigan, might be a good poster child for the small-brained species. Endearing though she is — with her plushy bosom, feathered feet and unusual chuckling call — she’s not exactly known for her smarts. The ptarmigan can, however, chow down on twigs and willow leaves with the best of them.

“In our paper, we find that small-brained species in these environments employ strategies that are unachievable with a large brain,” Fristoe said. “First, these species are able to persist by foraging on readily available but difficult to digest resources such as dormant plant buds, the needles of conifers, or even twigs.

“These foods can be found even during harsh winter conditions, but they are fibrous and require a large gut to digest,” he said. “Gut tissue, like brain tissue, is energetically demanding, and limited budgets mean that it is challenging to maintain a lot of both.

“We also found that these species have high reproductive rates, producing many offspring every year,” Fristoe said. “This would allow their populations to recover from high mortality during particularly challenging conditions. Because big-brained species tend to invest more time in raising fewer offspring, this is a strategy that is not available to them.”

In other words, maybe big brains are not all that.

“Brains are not evolving in isolation — they are part of a broader suite of adaptations that help organisms be successful in their lives,” Botero said. “Because of trade-offs between different aspects of that total phenotype, we find that two different lineages may respond to selection from environmental oscillations in completely different ways.

“Given that our own species uses its brain to cope with these changes, it is not really surprising that biologists, ourselves included, have historically exhibited a bias toward thinking about environmental variability as a force that drives the expansion of brain size,” Botero said. “But the interesting thing that we find here is that when we take a broader view, we realize that other strategies also work — and remarkably, the alternative here involves making a brain actually smaller!”

Read more: Trevor S. Fristoe & Carlos A. Botero. “Alternative ecological strategies lead to avian brain size bimodality in variable habitats.” Nature Communications, Aug. 23, 2019. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11757-x

The post Big brains or big guts: Choose one appeared first on The Source.

As they grow and develop, children who were born at least 10 weeks before their due dates are at risk for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder and anxiety disorders. They also have a higher risk than children who were full-term babies for other neurodevelopmental issues, including cognitive problems, language difficulties and motor delays.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who have been trying to determine what puts such children at risk for these problems have found that their mental health may be related less to medical challenges they face after birth than to the environment the babies enter once they leave the newborn intensive care unit (NICU).

In a new study, the children who were most likely to have overcome the complications of being born so early and who showed normal psychiatric and neurodevelopmental outcomes also were those with healthier, more nurturing mothers and more stable home lives.

The findings are published Aug. 26 in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

“Home environment is what really differentiated these kids,” said first author Rachel E. Lean, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in child psychiatry. “Preterm children who did the best had mothers who reported lower levels of depression and parenting stress. These children received more cognitive stimulation in the home, with parents who read to them and did other learning-type activities with their children. There also tended to be more stability in their families. That suggests to us that modifiable factors in the home life of a child could lead to positive outcomes for these very preterm infants.”

The researchers evaluated 125 5-year-old children. Of them, 85 had been born at least 10 weeks before their due dates. The other 40 children in the study were born full-term, at 40 weeks’ gestation.

The children completed standardized tests to assess their cognitive, language and motor skills. Parents and teachers also were asked to complete checklists to help determine whether a child might have issues indicative of ADHD or autism spectrum disorder, as well as social or emotional problems or behavioral issues.

It turned out the children who had been born at 30 weeks of gestation or sooner tended to fit into one of four groups. One group, representing 27% of the very preterm children, was found to be particularly resilient.

“They had cognitive, language and motor skills in the normal range, the range we would expect for children their age, and they tended not to have psychiatric issues,” Lean said. “About 45% of the very preterm children, although within the normal range, tended to be at the low end of normal. They were healthy, but they weren’t doing quite as well as the more resilient kids in the first group.”

The other two groups had clear psychiatric issues such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder or anxiety. A group of about 13% of the very preterm kids had moderate to severe psychiatric problems. The other 15% of children, identified via surveys from teachers, displayed a combination of problems with inattention and with hyperactive and impulsive behavior.

The children in those last two groups weren’t markedly different from other kids in the study in terms of cognitive, language and motor skills, but they had higher rates of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder and other problems.

“The children with psychiatric problems also came from homes with mothers who experienced more ADHD symptoms, higher levels of psychosocial stress, high parenting stress, just more family dysfunction in general,” said senior investigator Cynthia E. Rogers, MD, an associate professor of child psychiatry. “The mothers’ issues and the characteristics of the family environment were likely to be factors for children in these groups with significant impairment. In our clinical programs, we screen mothers for depression and other mental health issues while their babies still are patients in the NICU.”

Rogers and Lean believe the findings may indicate good news because maternal psychiatric health and family environment are modifiable factors that can be targeted with interventions that have the potential to improve long-term outcomes for children who are born prematurely.

“Our results show that it wasn’t necessarily the clinical characteristics infants faced in the NICU that put them at risk for problems later on,” Rogers said. “It was what happened after a baby went home from the NICU. Many people have thought that babies who are born extremely preterm will be the most impaired, but we really didn’t see that in our data. What that means is in addition to focusing on babies’ health in the NICU, we need also to focus on maternal and family functioning if we want to promote optimal development.”

The researchers are continuing to follow the children from the study.

Four-day-old Abel Stanart is participating in a new study, directed by Cynthia E. Rogers, MD, that is attempting to dig even deeper into what predicts risk of mental health-related issues and resilience in children who are born early. (Photo: Matt Miller/Washington University)

The post Stable home lives improve prospects for preemies appeared first on The Source.

The Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM) has been established at Washington University in St. Louis, thanks to a $500,559 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to Odis Johnson, professor of sociology and of education, both in Arts & Sciences.

More than $1.1 million has been secured by Johnson and his partners from the NSF and the Spencer Foundation to support ICQCM.

The collaborative effort will be led by Johnson, associate director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity at the university, along with partners at Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The grant is designed to mitigate the disparities in the number of underrepresented scholars that utilize quantitative and computational research methods and techniques.

“Our goal is to bring the brilliant minds of Latinx, indigenous and black scholars to bear on the social problem and potential of data science methodologies and eliminate the ‘data science divide’ within the nation’s grant-making apparatus,” Johnson said.

“In its first three to four years, ICQCM will provide several years of methods-training for each affiliated scholar, up to a total of 75,” he said. “ICQCM will also serve as a hub for the nation’s first network of leading data science methodologists of color, and as a repository of data science knowledge related to the examination and quantification of race/ethnicity in research.”

The institute aims to enable participants to incorporate quantitative and computational methods in conceptualizing research projects, establish collaborative networks of quantitative and computational research practitioners, and affirm self-efficacy of underrepresented faculty through culturally relevant, asset-focused training opportunities.

“The use of critical perspectives in race/ethnicity responds to a need for more underrepresented scholars to practice critical quantitative approaches in research to complement the larger number who practice critical qualitative approaches,” Johnson said.

The post Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, and Mixed Methodologies established appeared first on The Source.

Answers to big questions increasingly require access to the realm of the very small.

As researchers continue to push the limits of imaging, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis has uncovered a fundamental barrier to accuracy when it comes to measuring the rotational motion of molecules.

Matthew Lew, professor of electrical & systems engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, likens the consequence of this barrier to something many are familiar with.

“When you look at your sideview mirror in the car, there is a disclaimer: objects are closer than they appear,” said Lew, whose research was published in the Physical Review Letters, the flagship publication of the American Physical Society.

“We have found that objects in the microscope are less confined than they appear. Fluorescent molecules always appear to be more confined in rotational freedom than they actually are,” Lew said.

This discrepancy is a result of measurement noise.

This is important because molecules are not smooth, round balls moving along straight paths, bumping into each other and sticking together — they have a topography of sorts. This is critical to chemical and biological reactions: “There needs to be the right matching of pockets and binding motifs,” Lew said. The puzzle pieces, that is, need to match and connect in order for reactions to occur.

In addition to moving in three dimensions, molecules also rotate, like a ball rolling down an uneven surface they wobble, twist, and spin in all directions. Researchers need to see both the straight, translational movement and the spinning, rotational movement to understand how molecules interact.

In order to see anything, however, an imaging device needs to capture light emitted from the fluorescing object. In the case of these tiny bits of matter, that may mean a relatively small number of photons.

The limit Lew has discovered deals with light: If the object being imaged is too dim, it will appear rotationally constrained and look like it has less rotational movement than it actually does. Like a spinning fan, a rotating molecule should look smooth — like the blurred blades. But if that fan is dimly lit, the blades won’t look perfectly smooth and will instead appear to be “stuttering.” Therefore, they appear to be rotating less than they actually are. (The underlying physics of the fan analogy is different than that of imaging molecules, however).

“If a molecule was completely free to rotate, it would look like a smooth ball,” Lew said. “The ball can never be smooth if there’s noise on top of it. That noise, that roughness makes it look like the ball made up of a molecule that’s not completely free to rotate.”

That noise is a result of light. Imaging something as small as a molecule deals with a small number of photons. Taking photographs of these photons, an exquisitely small amount of light, falls within the realm of the quantum world. Such a photograph can never be perfectly smooth, since it is made up of a finite number of photons. Taking a photo with only a few photons produces a fuzzy or noisy picture — like taking a photograph at night.

Trying to capture the rotational motion underneath that noise is akin to flashing a strobe light in front of a moving fan — the resulting picture misses some of the movement, making it seem as if the molecule more restrained than it actually is:

Often, scientists will average multiple images to reduce the effect of noise, but in this case, averaging noisy images won’t produce an accurate result. “This is a fundamental physics problem,” Lew said.

His research has worked out the lower bound — the dimmest a molecule can be — after which it is fundamentally impossible to determine whether an object that looks as if it is partially fixed in place really is, or if it’s actually rotating freely but being disturbed by noise.

In addition, the research showed that scientists need to choose carefully between using methods that measure 2D rotation versus 3D rotation, as these technologies actually perceive the same rotational motion differently, possibly leading to different interpretations.

Regardless of the imaging technique, however, the uncertainty caused by noise remains.

The research is not entirely about uncertainty. “We can use simulations to model these limits and figure out what their effects are in our imaging of single molecules,” Lew said, “and incorporate this knowledge into image processing algorithms.”

Fundamentally, though, the math says that at a certain point, there is no way to distinguish between something that is completely rotating and something that is partially confined.

“But at least,” Lew said, “we’ll now know where that limit is.”

The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 98 tenured/tenure-track and 38 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 1,200 graduate students and 20,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECCS-1653777 and by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Grant No. R35GM124858.

The post New, fundamental limit to ‘seeing and believing’ in imaging appeared first on The Source.

James McCutcheon, a first-year student at Washington University in St. Louis, identifies as a moderate. His roommate is a Democratic Socialist. Will they get along? 

“Yes, I hope so,” said McCutcheon. “That’s why I’m here — to learn from people who have different views and perspectives than my own.” 

The new orientation workshop, “Dialogue Across Difference,” is helping students do just that. The program, which took place last week, reinforced the university’s commitment to both freedom of expression and inclusion and also provided students tools to use in difficult conversations. 

“We can communicate across differences in identity and ideology and still hold the other person’s humanity center,” said Sarah Steinkamp of the Division of Student Affairs. “We don’t have to agree with one another. But can we be open to being changed by what we learn? Can we decide together to build a community that leans into its differences and grows from them?”

Steinkamp and Melanie Houston, of the Academy for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, covered a lot of ground in the workshop. They introduced students to communication theory (debate and dialogue are not the same), explained how our bodies react to verbal attacks (the sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight-or-flight response), explored why we sabotage relationships (our need to be right trumps our desire to connect) and offered strategies for better conversations (speak for yourself, avoid assumptions).

“Finding shared values, listening without judgement, knowing our true selves and articulating areas of conflict — that’s hard stuff,” Houston told the group. “And it becomes impossible if you don’t believe that everyone is a human with value equal to your own.”

Between lessons, students practiced communication techniques such as maintaining eye contact and asking open-ended questions which, on this night, veered to the silly. McCutcheon, for instance, asked the room if a hot dog is a sandwich. 

“That’s not even open-ended,” Steinkamp said with a laugh. “Can we workshop that? Maybe, ‘What characteristics do you think make a hot dog a sandwich?”

McCutcheon knows he will face much more difficult questions in the classroom and the residence hall and says he will call upon the lessons learned on this night. 

“A lot of us are from places that are pretty homogenous and have never had our ideas challenged,” said McCutcheon, who is from Westfield, N.J. “But if you want to get past the surface, you need to be willing for that to happen. I think this will help.” 

That’s good news to Lori White, vice chancellor for student affairs. She conceived “Dialogue Across Difference” as a response to the so-called “cancel culture” on college campuses. Across the country, universities are facing stepped-up pressure to cancel controversial speakers or suspend students with offensive views. And the American Council on Education reports that 49 percent of college students favor campus policies restricting free speech.  

“If you ask this generation of students if they favor free speech, they will overwhelmingly say ‘yes,’  White said. “But then they will add, ‘Until someone says something that I fundamentally disagree with or that hurts me or a community that I care about. Then I expect the university to step in.’ As an institution that values freedom of expression, that is not what we are about.” 

And yet, how are new students to know how to navigate the conversational minefields of race, religion, identify and politics, White asked.

“We have to do more,” White said. “I hope our students came away from this experience better prepared to engage with people who are different from them.” 

The post New students learn to navigate tough conversations appeared first on The Source.

Scientists have produced and tested, in mice, a vaccine that protects against a worrisome superbug: a hypervirulent form of the bacteria Klebsiella pneumoniae. And they’ve done so by genetically manipulating a harmless form of E. coli, report researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and VaxNewMo, a St. Louis-based startup.

Klebsiella pneumoniae causes a variety of infections including rare but life-threatening liver, respiratory tract, bloodstream and other infections. Little is known about how exactly people become infected, and the bacteria are unusually adept at acquiring resistance to antibiotics. The prototype vaccine, details of which are published online Aug. 27 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may offer a way to protect people against a lethal infection that is hard to prevent and treat.

“For a long time, Klebsiella was primarily an issue in the hospital setting, so even though drug resistance was a real problem in treating these infections, the impact on the public was limited,” said co-author David A. Rosen, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics and of molecular microbiology at Washington University. “But now we’re seeing Klebsiella strains that are virulent enough to cause death or severe disease in healthy people in the community. And in the past five years, the really resistant bugs and the really virulent bugs have begun to merge so we’re beginning to see drug-resistant, hypervirulent strains. And that’s very scary.”

Hypervirulent strains of Klebsiella caused tens of thousands of infections in China, Taiwan and South Korea last year, and the bacteria are spreading around the world. About half of people infected with hypervirulent, drug-resistant Klebsiella die. Two types in particular – known as K1 and K2 – are responsible for 70 percent of the cases.

Rosen; senior author Christian Harding, a co-founder of VaxNewMo; first author Mario Feldman, associate professor of molecular microbiology at Washington University and a co-founder of VaxNewMo; and colleagues decided to create a vaccine against the two most common strains of hypervirulent Klebsiella. The bacterium’s outer surface is coated with sugars so the researchers designed a glycoconjugate vaccine composed of these sugars linked to a protein that helps make the vaccine more effective. Similar vaccines have proven highly successful at protecting people against deadly diseases such as bacterial meningitis and typhoid fever.

“Glycoconjugate vaccines are among the most effective, but traditionally they’ve involved a lot of chemical synthesis, which is slow and expensive,” Harding said. “We’ve replaced chemistry with biology by engineering E. coli to do all the synthesis for us.”

The researchers genetically modified a harmless strain of E.coli, converting it into tiny biological factories capable of churning out the protein and sugars needed for the vaccine. Then they used another bacterial enzyme to link the proteins and sugars together.

To test the vaccine, the researchers gave groups of 20 mice three doses of the vaccine or a placebo at two-week intervals. Then they challenged the mice with about 50 bacteria of either the K1 or the K2 type. Previous studies had shown that just 50 hypervirulent Klebsiella bacteria are enough to kill a mouse. In contrast, it takes tens of millions of classical Klebsiella – the kind that affects hospitalized people – to be similarly lethal.

Of the mice that received the placebo, 80 percent infected with the K1 type and 30 percent infected with the K2 type died. In contrast, of the vaccinated mice, 80 percent infected with K1 and all of those infected with K2 survived.

“We are very happy with how effective this vaccine was,” Feldman said. “We’re working on scaling up production and optimizing the protocol so we can be ready to take the vaccine into clinical trials soon.”

The goal is to get a vaccine ready for human use before the hypervirulent strains start causing disease in even larger numbers of people.

“As a pediatrician, I want to see people get immunity to this bug as early as possible,” Rosen said. “It’s still rare in the United States, but given the high likelihood of dying or having severe debilitating disease, I think you could argue for vaccinating everybody. And soon we may not have a choice. The number of cases is increasing, and we’re going to get to the point that we’ll need to vaccinate everybody.”

Feldman MF, Mayer AE, Scott NE, Vinogradov E, McKee SR, Chavez SF, Twentyman J, Stallings CL, Rosen DA, Harding CM. A promising bioconjugate vaccine against hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Aug. 27, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1907833116

This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, grant number R41AI136333-01; the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant number K08-AI127714; the Children’s Discovery Institute of Washington University; and St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Conflict of Interest Statement: Mario F. Feldman and Christian M. Harding have a financial stake in VaxNewMo LLC, a for-profit entity developing bioconjugate vaccines against Streptococcus pneumoniae and Klebsiella pneumoniae using patented technology derived from the data presented in this and other published manuscripts.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Originally published by the School of Medicine

The post Vaccine against deadly superbug Klebsiella effective in mice appeared first on The Source.

There is a wide variety of parking, transportation and mobility services available to students, faculty and staff as Washington University in St. Louis’ 2019-20 academic year begins.

Watch the latest video to learn about getting to, through and around the university this year.

“To those who have been with us throughout this process, thank you for blessing our mess over the past two years,” said Dedric Carter, vice chancellor for operations and technology transfer. “To those who are new, I want to welcome you to WashU and encourage you to explore our many parking and alternative transportation solutions.”

Carter also announced that the university named an interim parking director, Marc Carlton, who began the role Aug. 1.

2019 College Transit Challenge

The Parking and Transportation Services team encouraged students to show their school spirt and help Washington University win the 2019 College Transit Challenge, which takes place today (Wednesday, Aug. 28).

“We are competing with several area universities to see which school can get the most students to use the Metro transit system,” Carter said.

Social media channels including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are being used to track participation. Carter asked students to check in on the social platforms from their Metro bus or MetroLink station and post #CollegeTransitChallenge with the hashtag #WashU.

High-volume events

Lastly, parking officials are calling attention to the following high-volume events, which may impact parking and transportation over the next few months.

• Century Club (Sept. 17): Zone 3 permit holders may see a higher volume of traffic.
• East end dedication and chancellor’s inauguration events (Oct. 2 and 3): This event is expected to impact traffic and parking campuswide.
• Parent and Family Weekend (Nov. 1-3): Due to the increase in visitors, parking may be affected across campus.
• Century Club (Nov. 14): Zone 3 permit holders may see a higher volume of traffic.
• December recognition ceremony (Dec. 14): Traffic is expected to be higher than usual campuswide; however, because the event falls on a Saturday, disruption should be minimal.

Specific details will be posted to the High Traffic Events webpage in coming weeks.

For more information, visit parking.wustl.edu or contact the team at 314-935-5601 or parktrans@wustl.edu.

The post Parking and Transportation team offers tips, updates for new year appeared first on The Source.

The newly expanded Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will reopen to the public Sept. 28 with “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life,” a major survey featuring dozens of artworks by the world-renowned artist.

In conjunction with the exhibition, on Sept. 26, Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum, will host an Assembly Series Q&A with Ai in the university’s Edison Theatre. The talk — which also will serve as the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ fall Bunny and Charles Burson Visiting Artist Lecture — will explore the artist’s ongoing engagement with human rights issues and with Chinese culture past and present.

The Q&A is free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Advance tickets for museum members and Washington University students will be available beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 29 via the Edison Theatre website or the on-campus box office. Tickets are first-come, first-served, and space is not guaranteed. Museum members will receive a promo code via email to access advance ticket reservations.

Tickets for the general public will be available Aug. 31 via the Edison Theatre website or the on-campus box office. Should Edison Theatre reach capacity, overflow seating will be available in Steinberg Hall Auditorium for a livestream broadcast.

In addition to the Q&A, the Kemper Art Museum will host a special preview for museum members and the university community on Friday, Sept. 27. The preview is also free but RSVPs are requested. Register here.

Events will continue Oct. 4 with a screening of Ai’s film “Human Flow,” followed by a screening of “The Rest” (Nov. 16). Art historian John J. Curley will discuss Ai’s work Oct. 23. Eckmann will host gallery conversations with Igor Marjanović, the Sam Fox School’s JoAnne Stolaroff Cotsen Professor and chair of undergraduate architecture (Oct. 31); and with Kristina Kleutghen, the David W. Mesker Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology in Arts & Sciences (Nov. 14).

Other events will include the symposium “Art and the Contemporary Refugee: Narratives, Memorials, Communities” (Nov. 15-16); the panel discussion “When We Talk to Each Other,” in collaboration with the International Institute of St. Louis (Dec. 7); and the panel discussion “Ghost Sanctuary,” featuring visiting assistant professor Jonathan Stitelman and graduate architecture students (Dec. 12).

In addition, the museum will offer free exhibition tours each Saturday, as well as Chinese-language tours at 2 p.m. Oct. 6, Nov. 15 and Dec. 8. Visitors also are invited to record themselves reading excerpts from “Humanity,” Ai’s book of reflections on the global refugee crisis, as part of the #Humanity Video Project. The museum will share select videos on social media and incorporate them into a compilation playing on site.

For more information about “Ai Weiwei: Bare Life” and related events, call 314-935-5490 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu. For more information about museum membership, call 314-935-8243.

Image credit: Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957), “Illumination,” 2009. Lambda print mounted on aluminum, 49 5/8 x 66 1/8″ (126 x 168 cm). Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

The post Ai Weiwei Q&A tickets available Aug. 29 appeared first on The Source.

In St. Louis area schools, some students are far more likely to be suspended than those least at risk — 20, 30 or even 60 times more likely, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and Forward Through Ferguson.

The study found that being black, male or having a disability places students at greater risk of out-of-school suspension (OSS). When all three factors — race, sex and disability — were taken together, the numbers increased dramatically.

“Every time we suspend a student, we risk harming their sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging in school, and ultimately their lifelong well-being,” said study co-author Karishma Furtado, doctoral candidate at the Brown School, and research and data catalyst at Forward Through Ferguson. “Our students pay a horrible price because of our broken system of school discipline, and ultimately so do we all.”

The report, “Falling Through the Cracks: Disparities in Out of School Suspension in St. Louis at the Intersection of Race, Disability, and Gender,” was published online Aug. 29 via the Forward Through Ferguson website.

Using publicly available data from the 2015-16 school year, Furtado and Alexis Duncan, associate professor at the Brown School, along with co-authors Jennifer Kocher, parent advocate, and Pranav Nandan, Brown School master of public health candidate, investigated how race, sex and disability came together to affect risk of OSS for kindergartners through 12th graders in the St. Louis region.

They focused on the 30 public school districts located primarily in the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County to align with previous work by the Keep Kids in Class Coalition.

The findings showed that while white girls with a disability were only 1.4 times as likely to receive an OSS than the least at-risk students (white girls with no disabilities), white boys without a disability were 2.7 times more likely to receive an OSS.

White boys with a disability were 9.1 times more likely. Black girls without a disability were 11.0 times more likely. Black girls with a disability were 18.1 times more likely. Black boys without a disability were 18.3 times more likely. The most at-risk students, black boys with disabilities, were 24.6 times more likely than white girls with no disability.

“The magnitude of the combined effect of race, sex and disability on risk of out-of-school suspension in the St. Louis region is astronomically high and nearly unheard of in public health,” Furtado said. “A person could smoke a pack of cigarettes every day for 30 years and face a lower risk of getting lung cancer than the risk of OSS for a black boy with a disability. In some districts, black boys with disabilities are 40, 50, even 60 times more likely to get an OSS than a white girl without a disability.”

While the report used St. Louis area data, the findings almost certainly apply beyond the region, Duncan said. “Decades of research show that being male, black and having a disability are well-established risk factors for suspension due to systemic barriers like inadequate supports in schools, bias and institutionalized racism,” she said. “Recent national studies have looked at disability status combined with race and found that the risks grow when you examine them intersectionally. We simply extended this to look at sex, in addition to disability and race.”

However, the St. Louis region and Missouri have historically had especially high racial disparities when it comes to school discipline, she said.

The authors suggest that OSS is not an effective deterrent to perceived bad behavior, particularly when the child’s behavior is only a signal of an underlying need or issue.

“The scientific evidence shows that OSS doesn’t prevent kids from misbehaving in the future, and it is related to all sorts of negative outcomes that we are trying hard to prevent, like dropping out of school and involvement with the criminal justice system,” Duncan said. “Time off of school may feel more like a reward than a punishment to many kids, so OSS may actually increase the likelihood of future misbehavior. In fact, the majority of kids who are suspended once go on to be suspended again.”

Few investigations of the school discipline gap have taken into account the many identities that children hold simultaneously, including disability status.

“When children with disabilities are suspended, it is often due to behavior related to their disability,” Duncan said. “OSS does nothing to help in these cases and has a lot of potential for harm. Students with disabilities don’t get the in-school services that they need and are already excluded from their typically developing peers in many ways — OSS just makes the problem worse.”

The report also discusses evidence-based strategies for closing the discipline gap and calls on parents, teachers and district leaders to redouble their efforts to implement them.

“In addition to restorative practices that take the place of exclusionary measures like OSS, we also know that schools can work to prevent problem behaviors altogether,” Duncan said.

Effective preventative measures include trauma-informed practices, positive behavior interventions and supports, social emotional learning approaches, and better using Individualized Education Programs to support children with disabilities.

The report suggests that school districts should work to promote​ restorative alternatives to suspension, reduce disparities and prevent challenging behaviors.

“We also have to seriously look into how we can ensure disparities in the way we discipline students aren’t driven by biases on the part of educators and administrators,” Furtado said.

The post St. Louis area school discipline gap larger than thought appeared first on The Source.

International social work students recently completed work in a first-of-its-kind intensive summer seminar focused on advanced research methods. The 11-day event was presented thanks to an ongoing partnership between Washington University in St. Louis and its McDonnell International Scholars Academy partner Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU). The workshop’s goal was to provide important tools for social work practitioners and researchers working in other countries, including China.

“The social work profession in China is still relatively new,” said Shenyang Guo, the Frank J. Bruno Distinguished Professor of Social Work Research at the Brown School. Guo is also assistant vice chancellor for international affairs-Greater China and a Yangtze River Scholar.

“Over the past couple of decades, many new ideas have been implemented by social work practitioners there,” Guo said. “However, there still needs to be a sharper focus on research methods, particularly as they become ready to share what they’ve learned in the field.”

More than 150 faculty members, graduate students and practitioners took part in the special advanced workshop, which began July 19 at XJTU’s campus in Xi’an, China. Students from six universities in the the United Kingdom and the U.S. —  the Brown School among them — took part. The Brown School, in collaboration with XJTU, hosted the event.

Students learned from Washington University senior faculty, including Enola Proctor, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School, who presented sessions on implementation science; Carolyn Lesorogol, professor and associate dean for global strategy and programs, who taught qualitative research methods; and Guo, who focused on quantitative research methods. Linyun Fu, manager of global programs at the Brown School, led the Teaching Assistant team comprised of Washington University alumni Jiamin Chen and Qi Chen.

“Some of the students told us this was the best workshop they’d ever had, and practitioners told us they were impressed by the amount of information we were able to impart in such a short time,” said Jin Peng, deputy director of XJTU’s Department of Sociology and a Washington University alumna.

The workshop was first discussed in October during “Washington University Day” held at XJTU. Guo said that the event served as a catalyst, which set the wheels in motion for the summer workshop, with support from Mary McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School, and Chancellor Emeritus Mark S. Wrighton. Wrighton, along with XJTU’s President Shuguo Wang, attended the workshop’s opening ceremony and gave remarks.

The post Advancing research, international partnerships appeared first on The Source.

A new, global synthesis of regional archaeological knowledge on land-use changes over the past 10,000 years reveals that humans have reshaped landscapes, ecosystems and potentially climate over millennia in a manner that challenges conventional ideas that man’s impact has been “mostly recent.”

Tristram R. “T.R.” Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a member of the ArchaeoGLOBE project collaboration and one of more than 250 archaeologists who contributed data and community knowledge to the study published this week in the journal Science.

“I’ve always felt the work I’ve done in east-central China fits the patterns we identified in the paper,” Kidder said. “For me, the issue is to go outward — for example, in places like southwest China, or Central Asia, where I also work — and to see how these areas reflect land use changes under different environmental, climatic and cultural circumstances.”

Kidder has long studied the changes that humans have wrought on the land. In 2014, he published the earliest known archaeological evidence for human construction of large-scale levees and other flood-control systems in China — arguing that ancient levees along the Yellow River set the stage for massive, dynasty-toppling floods.

“The data are increasingly robust, but to see patterns — or to think about the way patterns are emerging — requires a global view,” Kidder said. “By joining this large, collaborative team, I feel that I can help to see a bigger picture than I have available to me.

“Why now? Because the data are shaping up, and because in the context of larger global environmental issues today, this synthesis is a timely way of thinking about how humans have shaped the environment for a long time,” he said.

“I find myself frustrated by the short time frame people often use for thinking about global environmental and climate change. I’d argue there is a deeper time frame that needs to be considered.”

Kidder’s contributions to the new study in Science focused on east and southwest China, and also parts of southeast and midwest North America — all regions where Kidder has completed extensive environmental archaeology work of his own.

“Because I work in China, where, I’d argue, the signs of human landscape transformation are abundant and early, I was not especially surprised (by the results),” Kidder said. “I’m a bit taken aback by the scale, which is greater spatially and temporally than I expected in other regions.”

The new paper reflects a unique approach to archaeological and historical environmental research. It points out how researchers can use big data to explore patterns, and how these interpretations feed into better modeling — which will make for better data, according to Kidder.

“I am also heartened by the fact that these data put to rest — I think convincingly — what the paper calls the ‘pristine myth,’” Kidder said. “The world did not change, for example, just because James Watt invented the steam engine. Humans have been transforming the environment for millennia, and to understand the modern world we need to consider how these past changes give shape to the modern environment.

“Because of its scale, the quality of the data and the engagement of a global community of scholars, I hope this paper can convince scholars to put the pristine myth behind them and to tackle the really interesting questions of how we use these data to understand the present and the future,” Kidder said.

Read more: “Archaeological assessment reveals Earth’s early transformation through land use.” Science 30 Aug 2019: Vol. 365, Issue 6456, pp. 897-902. DOI: 10.1126/science.aax1192

The post Time to retire the ‘pristine myth’ of climate change appeared first on The Source.

It might seem reasonable to assume that two cells that grow together and carry the same genetic material would have the same behavior, but that isn’t the case. One cell might be vulnerable to antibiotic treatment, and one might persist. One might be a hard worker, and one might not work much at all.

Fuzhong Zhang, an expert in synthetic biology in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, seeks to understand what causes cells to have different metabolic activity with a nearly $2 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant provides support for fundamental research and gives an investigator flexibility to pursue topics that fall within the mission of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

The research builds on previous work by Zhang and his team in which they discovered that genetically identical microbial cells have different work ethics. Their work, published in Nature Chemical Biology in 2016, stemmed from a tool the team developed called PopQC that only allows high-performing cells to grow and thrive, while killing lazy cells.

With the new funding, Zhang and his team will use this tool and others his lab has developed to understand what causes the genetically identical cells to have different metabolic activity, then to determine whether they can develop strategies to control those differences.

In particular, they will work on antibiotic persistence, a phenomenon that can be caused by cell-to-cell variation in metabolism.

“Most antibiotics only kill cells with active metabolism,” said Zhang, associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering. “These drugs are not effective to a subpopulation of metabolically dormant cells, known as persisters, that often coexist with normal growing cells. When an antibiotic treatment has ended and the patient thinks that they are ok, the persisters recover their normal metabolism, start to grow and cause problems.”

The major challenge in this work is observing the metabolite activity within single cells, Zhang said. There are tools allowing researchers to see large molecules, such as mRNAs and proteins in living cells, but metabolites are much harder to see.

“Using some of the unique tools we and other bioengineers have developed, we plan to quantify metabolite levels within single cells and study the difference between cells,” Zhang said.

The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 99 tenured/tenure-track and 38 additional full-time faculty, 1,361 undergraduate students, 1,291 graduate students and 21,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

Xiao Y, Bowen C, Liu D, Zhang F. Exploiting non-genetic cell-to-cell variation for enhanced biosynthesis. Nature Chemical Biology, 12, 339-344. DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2046.

The post Zhang wins $2 million NIH grant to study metabolite diversity in bacteria appeared first on The Source.

Tens of thousands of bridges across the country are deteriorating, creating potentially dangerous conditions. Particularly after a natural disaster, being able to assess a bridge’s structural integrity can be critical.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and Michigan State University (MSU) are teaming up to help solve this problem. They are testing innovative sensors on Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge that are powered by traffic vibrations and could detect bridge failures before they happen. This will make the Mackinac Bridge the first fully instrumented bridge in the country using advanced wireless and self-powered monitoring technology.

“Not only can this technology be used to issue early warnings prior to a catastrophic structural failure, it can also be used to quickly diagnose the effects of rare, high-impact events like earthquakes and hurricanes on a  large infrastructure like a bridge,” said Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering.

Chakrabartty worked with Nizar Lajnef, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MSU to develop the sensors, which are powered by the kinetic energy of the bridge’s movements and wirelessly structural data.

The first 20 prototype sensors were installed on the Mackinac Bridge in 2016. After the sensors proved their durability and performed as intended, researchers started the next phase of testing with the installation of up to 2,000 of the tiny devices. This will allow them to explore the logistics of an even larger deployment and provide useful monitoring data to the Mackinac Bridge Authority.

The successful large-scale deployment of this low-cost sensing technology could dramatically transform the economics of bridge preservation and management and improve the serviceability and safety of bridges.

News release courtesy of Michigan State University

The post Monitoring bridge safety with wireless sensors appeared first on The Source.

The Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement invites new members of the Washington University in St. Louis community to discuss Ferguson’s impact on the region at “New in the Lou: What Does Ferguson Mean to Me?” a series of moderated panel discussions.

The first panel, aimed at new undergraduates, will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 10. All will be held at the Stix House, 6470 Forsyth Blvd. Rob Wild, associate vice chancellor for student affairs and dean of students, will serve as moderator. Panelists include Stephanie Weiskopf, of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion; Nia Plump, a junior studying African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences; Trenton Ellis, a Brown School student; and Ellie Myers, a board member of We Stories.

The second panel, for graduate students, is at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17;  Vernon Mitchell, who leads academic engagement programs for University Libraries, will be the moderator. 

Nicole Hudson, assistant vice chancellor of the Academy for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, will lead the panel for faculty and staff at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24. 

Although the programming is geared toward newcomers, all are invited to attend. Light refreshments will be served. RSVP at the Gephardt Institute.

Stephanie Kurtzman, the Peter G. Sortino Director of the Gephardt Institute, said that each panel will introduce participants to a range of personal, organizational and academic perspectives and, she hopes, foster a commitment to engaging in the issues that continue to challenge the region.  

“The Ferguson uprising that followed Michael Brown’s death called all of us at WashU to look both inward and outward with deeper attention to the role that we play in advancing equity — both on campus and as part of the St. Louis community,” Kurtzman said. “Collectively, we are more honest, focused and engaged with equity as both a lens and a vision for communities that foster access, opportunity and dignity for all.” 

The post Gephardt hosts ‘New in the Lou: What Does Ferguson Mean to Me?’ appeared first on The Source.

The Community Academic Partnership on Addiction (CAPA) Clinic, a partnership between the Brown School and Preferred Family Healthcare (PFH), was able to increase treatment completion rates by 11% over a six-month time period.

“This is excellent work and very strong findings,” said Mary McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “This is great news for all the people involved in this important work and especially for individuals seeking substance use disorder treatment with our partner organization, Preferred Family Healthcare.”

CAPA is embedded in a PFH facility that offers medical detoxification along with residential and outpatient behavioral health services. It has a full clinical staff of therapists, counselors, community support and peer specialists along with a medical doctor, two nurse practitioners and about a dozen nurses.

The partnership added social work student interns working toward their master’s and doctoral degrees with an interest in careers in addiction-related services.

“Because successful addiction treatment completion is such an important health outcome, we at the clinic began focusing our attention toward improving the clinic’s treatment completion rates,” said David Patterson Silver Wolf, associate professor at the Brown School and director of CAPA.

This first-of-its-kind addiction-focused community-academic collaboration offers many opportunities for teaching, learning and research, Patterson Silver Wolf said.

“It is well-known that while there is a science of addiction, there is virtually no science of recovery,” he said. “Developing and transferring this new science throughout the addiction treatment industry is vital especially during the current opioid epidemic facing our country and the next one that is certain to come.”

“This is very promising,” said Cori Putz, executive vice president of Preferred Family Healthcare. “The CAPA Clinic serves a very high-need population. These outcome data show we can use innovative ideas to improve outcomes for individuals presenting with multifaceted health conditions.”

CAPA uses an addiction treatment platform called Takoda, which was co-founded by Patterson Silver Wolf.

“The goal of the clinical dashboard and soon-to-be-released suite of mobile applications developed by Takoda is to bring usable recovery performance data to front-line professionals so that they are able to leverage their clinical services more effectively,” Patterson Silver Wolf said.

The post CAPA Clinic shows promising results for addiction treatment patients in St. Louis appeared first on The Source.

The U.S. Green Building Council recently awarded Sumers Recreation Center its highest certification: LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum.  Sustainability was baked into the building from its very beginning, and the certification demonstrates the level of commitment Washington University in St. Louis has when it comes to designing buildings to reduce carbon emissions, conserve water, support the health of inhabitants, responsibly source materials and more.

“Here at Washington University, we are abundantly aware of the environment’s impact on human health and wellness. To that end, we have made a strong commitment to meet or exceed LEED Silver through our building projects,” Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said. “We’re proud that the Sumers Recreation Center, a building designed to enhance human health, has achieved the highest level of LEED certification.”

Sumers Recreation Center attained the Platinum certification by hitting industry-leading targets for design and performance. This includes a 37% reduction of water use and a 55% reduction of energy use and associated carbon emissions compared to a conventional building project, along with roofing materials that reduce the urban heat-island effect.

The project also recycled the majority of construction waste, used building products made from recycled materials — and even reused the wooden flooring from Francis Gymnasium.  A solar panel array, installed on the roof of the building and partially visible from Big Bend and Forsyth boulevards, will provide 22% of the building’s electricity from a carbon-free source. All of these measures added up to the council’s top honor.

The rec center is the third Washington University building to attain the milestone; the Lofts of Washington University was certified LEED Platinum in 2014, and Hillman Hall was certified LEED Platinum in 2016. Additionally, all five new buildings in the east end project have been designed to meet or exceed LEED Gold certification. Green building design on campus is part of the university’s sustainability master plan, which also aims to lower greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 via on-site energy efficiency and renewable energy.

To learn more about the university’s efforts, visit the Office of Sustainability’s webpage.

The post Sumers Recreation Center attains LEED Platinum certification appeared first on The Source.