Preventing the long-term effects of traumatic brain injury

You've been in a car accident and sustained a head injury. You recovered, but years later you begin having difficulty sleeping. You also become very sensitive to noise and bright lights, and find it hard to carry out your daily activities, or perform well at your job.

This is a common situation after a traumatic brain injury -- many people experience bad side effects months or years later. These long-term effects can last a few days or the rest of a person's life.

"No therapies currently exist to prevent the disabilities that can develop after a brain trauma," says Jeanne Paz, PhD, associate investigator at Gladstone Institutes. "So, understanding how the traumatic brain injury affects the brain, especially in the long term, is a really important gap in research that could help develop new and better treatment options."

In a new study published in the journal Science, Paz and her team helped close that gap. They identified a specific molecule in a part of the brain called the thalamus that plays a key role in secondary effects of brain injury, such as sleep disruption, epileptic activity, and inflammation. In collaboration with scientists at Annexon Biosciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, they also showed that an antibody treatment could prevent the development of these negative outcomes.

A Vulnerable Brain Region

Traumatic brain injuries, which range from a mild concussion to a severe injury, can be the result of a fall, sports injury, gunshot injury, blow to the head, explosion, or domestic violence. Often, soldiers returning from war also suffer head injuries, which commonly lead to the development of epilepsy. Traumatic brain injury affects 69 million people around the world annually, and is the leading cause of death in children and a major source of disability in adults.

"These injuries are frequent and can happen to anyone," says Paz, who is also an associate professor of neurology at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and a member of the Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience. "The goal of our study was to understand how the brain changes after traumatic brain injuries and how those changes can lead to chronic problems, such as the development of epilepsy, sleep disruption, and difficulty with sensory processing."

To do so, Paz and her team recorded the activity of different cells and circuits in the brain of mice after brain injury. The researchers monitored the mice continually and wirelessly, meaning the mice could go about their normal activities without being disrupted.

"We collected so much data, from the time of injury and over the next several months, that it actually crashed our computers," says Paz. "But it was important to capture all the different stages of sleep and wakefulness to get the whole picture."

During a trauma to the head, the region of the brain called the cerebral cortex is often the primary site of injury, because it sits directly beneath the skull.

But at later time points, the researchers discovered that another region -- the thalamus -- was even more disrupted than the cortex. In particular, they found that a molecule called C1q was present at abnormally high levels in the thalamus for months after the initial injury, and these high levels were associated with inflammation, dysfunctional brain circuits, and the death of neurons.

"The thalamus seems particularly vulnerable, even after a mild traumatic brain injury," says Stephanie Holden, PhD, first author of the study and former graduate student in Paz's lab at Gladstone. "This doesn't mean the cortex isn't affected, but simply that it might have the necessary tools to recover over time. Our findings suggest that the higher levels of C1q in the thalamus could contribute to several long-term effects of brain injury."

The Paz Lab collaborated with Eleonora Aronica, MD, PhD, a neuropathologist at the University of Amsterdam, to validate their findings in human brain tissues obtained from autopsies, in which they found high levels of the C1q molecule in the thalamus 8 days after people had sustained a traumatic brain injury. In addition, by working with fellow Gladstone Assistant Investigator Ryan Corces, PhD, they determined that C1q in the thalamus likely came from microglia, the immune cells in the brain.

"Our study answered some very big questions in the field about where and how changes are happening in the brain after a trauma, and which ones are actually important for causing deficits," says Paz.

The Right Window to Treat Chronic Effects After Traumatic Brain Injury

The C1q molecule, which is part of an immune pathway, has well-documented roles in brain development and normal brain functions. For instance, it protects the central nervous system from infection and helps the brain forget memories -- a process needed to store new memories. The accumulation of C1q in the brain has also been studied in various neurological and psychiatric disorders and is associated, for example, with Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.

"C1q can be both good and bad," says Paz. "We wanted to find a way to prevent this molecule's detrimental effect, but without impacting its beneficial role. This is an example of what makes neuroscience a really hard field these days, but it's also what makes it exciting."

She and her group decided to leverage the "latent phase" after a traumatic brain injury, during which changes are occurring in the brain but before long-term symptoms appear.

"My cousin, for example, was hit in the head when he was 10 years old, and the impact broke his skull and damaged his brain," says Paz. "But it wasn't until he was 20 that he developed epilepsy. This latent phase presents a window of opportunity for us to intervene in hopes of modifying the disease and preventing any complications."

Paz reached out to her collaborators at Annexon Biosciences, who produce a clinical antibody that can block the activity of the C1q molecule. Then, her team treated the mice who sustained brain injury with this antibody to see if it might have beneficial effects.

When the researchers studied mice genetically engineered to lack C1q at the time of the trauma, the brain injury appeared much worse. However, when they selectively blocked C1q with the antibody during the latent phase, they prevented chronic inflammation and the loss of neurons in the thalamus.

"This indicates that the C1q molecule shouldn't be blocked at the time of injury, because it's likely very important at this stage for protecting the brain and helping prevent cell death," says Holden. "But at later time points, blocking C1q can actually reduce harmful inflammatory responses. It's a way of telling the brain, 'It's okay, you've done the protective part and you can now turn off the inflammation.'"

"There is a paucity of treatments for patients who have suffered from an acute brain injury," says Ted Yednock, PhD, executive vice president and chief scientific officer at Annexon Biosciences, and an author of the study. "This result is exciting because it suggests that we could treat patients in the hours to days after an acute injury like traumatic brain injury to protect against secondary neuronal damage and provide significant functional benefit."

Path to a Potential Treatment

In addition to chronic inflammation, Paz and her team also uncovered abnormal brain activity in the mice with traumatic brain injury.

First, the researchers noticed disruptions in sleep spindles, which are normal brain rhythms that occur during sleep. These are important for memory consolidation, among other things. The scientists also found epileptic spikes, or abnormal fluctuations in brain activity. These spikes can be disruptive to cognition and normal behavior, and are also indicative of a greater susceptibility to seizures.

The scientists observed that the anti-C1q antibody treatment not only helped restore the sleep spindles, but also prevented the development of epileptic activities.

"Overall, our study indicates that targeting the C1q molecule after injury could avoid some of the most devastating, long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury," says Holden. "We hope this could eventually lead to the development of treatments for traumatic brain injury."

Annexon's anti-C1q inhibitors are designed to treat multiple autoimmune and neurological disorders, and are already being examined in clinical trials, including for an autoimmune disorder known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, where the drug has been shown to be safe in humans.

"The fact that the drug is already in clinical trials may speed the pace at which a treatment could eventually be made available to patients," says Yednock. "We already understand doses of drug that are safe and effective in patients for blocking C1q in the brain, and could move directly into studies that ameliorate the chronic effects after traumatic brain injury."

For Holden, who previously worked with individuals who experienced brain injury and heard many of their personal stories, the impact of this study is particularly meaningful.

"Brain injury is a hidden disability for many of the people I met," she says. "The side effects they experience can be difficult to diagnose and their physicians often can't provide any medical treatment. Being able to contribute to finding ways to treat the detrimental consequences of the injury after it happens is really inspiring."

Paz and her lab are continuing to expand their understanding of what happens in the brain after injury. Next, they will focus on studying whether they can help prevent convulsive seizures, which are often reported by people with severe traumatic brain injuries.

Read more at Science Daily

How land birds cross the open ocean

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean—without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete long sea crossings. They found that all birds exploited wind and uplift to reduce energy costs during flight—even adjusting their migratory routes to benefit from the best atmospheric conditions. This is the most wide-ranging study of sea-crossing behavior yet and reveals the important role of the atmosphere in facilitating migration over the open sea for many terrestrial birds.

Flying over the open sea can be dangerous for land birds. Unlike seabirds, land birds are not able to rest or feed on water, and so sea crossings must be conducted as nonstop flights. For centuries, bird-watchers assumed that large land birds only managed short sea crossings of less than 100 kilometers and completely avoided flying over the open ocean.

However, recent advances in GPS tracking technology have overturned that assumption. Data obtained by attaching small tracking devices on wild birds has shown that many land birds fly for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers over the open seas and oceans as a regular part of their migration.

But scientists are still unraveling how land birds are able to accomplish this. Flapping is an energetically costly activity, and trying to sustain nonstop flapping flight for hundreds of kilometers would not be possible for large, heavy land birds. Some studies have suggested that birds sustain such journeys using tailwind, a horizontal wind blowing in the bird’s direction of flight, which helps them save energy. Most recently, a study revealed that a single species—the osprey—used rising air thermals known as “uplift” to soar over the open sea.

Now, the new study has examined sea-crossing behavior of 65 birds across five species to gain the most wide-ranging insight yet into how land birds survive long flights over the open sea. The researchers analyzed 112 sea-crossing tracks, collected over nine years, with global atmospheric information to pinpoint the criteria that the birds use for selecting their migration routes over the open sea. A large international collaboration of scientists shared their tracking data to make this study possible.

The findings not only confirm the role of tailwind in facilitating sea-crossing behavior, but also reveal the widespread use of uplift for saving energy during these nonstop flights. Suitable uplift means less drag, making sea crossing less energetically demanding.

“Until recently, uplift was assumed to be weak or absent over the sea surface. We show that is not the case,” says first author Elham Nourani, a DAAD PRIME postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biology at the University of Konstanz, who did the work when she was at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

“Instead, we find that migratory birds adjust their flight routes to benefit from the best wind and uplift conditions when they fly over the sea. This helps them sustain flight for hundreds of kilometers,” says Nourani.

The oriental honey buzzard, for example, flies 700 kilometers over the East China Sea during its annual migration from Japan to southeast Asia. The roughly 18-hour nonstop sea crossing is conducted in autumn when the air movement conditions are optimal. “By making use of uplift, these birds can soar up to one kilometer above the sea surface,” says Nourani.

Read more at Science Daily

Massive new animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale

Palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered the remains of a huge new fossil species belonging to an extinct animal group in half-a-billion-year-old Cambrian rocks from Kootenay National Park in the Canadian Rockies. The findings were announced on September 8, 2021, in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

Named Titanokorys gainesi, this new species is remarkable for its size. With an estimated total length of half a meter, Titanokorys was a giant compared to most animals that lived in the seas at that time, most of which barely reached the size of a pinky finger.

"The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found," says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM's Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.

Evolutionarily speaking, Titanokorys belongs to a group of primitive arthropods called radiodonts. The most iconic representative of this group is the streamlined predator Anomalocaris, which may itself have approached a metre in length. Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming. Within this group, some species also possessed large, conspicuous head carapaces, with Titanokorys being one of the largest ever known.

"Titanokorys is part of a subgroup of radiodonts, called hurdiids, characterized by an incredibly long head covered by a three-part carapace that took on myriad shapes. The head is so long relative to the body that these animals are really little more than swimming heads," added Joe Moysiuk, co-author of the study, and a ROM-based Ph.D. student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.

Why some radiodonts evolved such a bewildering array of head carapace shapes and sizes is still poorly understood and was likely driven by a variety of factors, but the broad flattened carapace form in Titanokorys suggests this species was adapted to life near the seafloor.

"These enigmatic animals certainly had a big impact on Cambrian seafloor ecosystems. Their limbs at the front looked like multiple stacked rakes and would have been very efficient at bringing anything they captured in their tiny spines towards the mouth. The huge dorsal carapace might have functioned like a plough," added Dr. Caron, who is also an Associate Professor in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto, and Moysiuk's Ph.D. advisor.

All fossils in this study were collected around Marble Canyon in northern Kootenay National Park by successive ROM expeditions. Discovered less than a decade ago, this area has yielded a great variety of Burgess Shale animals dating back to the Cambrian period, including a smaller, more abundant relative of Titanokorys named Cambroraster falcatusin reference to its Millennium Falcon-shaped head carapace. According to the authors, the two species might have competed for similar bottom-dwelling prey.

The Burgess Shale fossil sites are located within Yoho and Kootenay National Parks and are managed by Parks Canada. Parks Canada is proud to work with leading scientific researchers to expand knowledge and understanding of this key period of earth history and to share these sites with the world through award-winning guided hikes. The Burgess Shale was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 due to its outstanding universal value and is now part of the larger Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site.

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Who was king before Tyrannosaurus? Uzbek fossil reveals new top dino

Iconic tyrannosauroids like T. rex famously dominated the top of the food web at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs. But they didn't always hold that top spot.

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba has described a new genus and species belonging to the Carcharodontosauria, a group of medium- to large-sized carnivorous dinosaurs that preceded the tyrannosauroids as apex predators.

The new dinosaur, named Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was found in the lower Upper Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of the Kyzylkum Desert in Uzbekistan, and therefore lived about 90 million years ago. Two separate evolutionary analyses support classification of the new dinosaur as the first definitive carcharodontosaurian discovered in the Upper Cretaceous of Central Asia.

"We described this new genus and species based on a single isolated fossil, a left maxilla, or upper jawbone," explains study first author Assistant Professor Kohei Tanaka. "Among theropod dinosaurs, the size of the maxilla can be used to estimate the animal's size because it correlates with femur length, a well-established indicator of body size. Thus, we were able to estimate that Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis had a mass of over 1,000 kg, and was approximately 7.5 to 8.0 meters in length, greater than the length of a full-grown African elephant."

This size greatly exceeds that of any other carnivore known from the Bissekty Formation, including the small-sized tyrannosauroid Timurlengia described from the same formation. Therefore, the newly named dinosaur likely topped the food web in its early Late Cretaceous ecosystem.

The genus's namesake is fittingly regal; Ulughbegsaurus is named for Ulugh Beg, the 15th century mathematician, astronomer, and sultan of the Timurid Empire of Central Asia. The species is named for the country where the fossil was discovered.

Before the Late Cretaceous, carcharodontosaurians like Ulughbegsaurus disappeared from the paleocontinent that included Central Asia. This disappearance is thought to have been related to the rise of tyrannosauroids as apex predators, but this transition has remained poorly understood because of the scarcity of relevant fossils.

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500-million-year-old fossil represents rare discovery of ancient animal in North America

Many scientists consider the "Cambrian explosion" -- which occurred about 530-540 million years ago -- as the first major appearance of many of the world's animal groups in the fossil record. Like adding pieces to a giant jigsaw puzzle, each discovery dating from this time period has added another piece to the evolutionary map of modern animals. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found a rare, 500-million-year-old "worm-like" fossil called a palaeoscolecid, which is an uncommon fossil group in North America. The researchers believe this find, from an area in western Utah, can help scientists better understand how diverse the Earth's animals were during the Cambrian explosion.

Jim Schiffbauer, an associate professor of geological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science and one of the study's co-authors, said that while this fossil has the same anatomical organization as modern worms, it doesn't exactly match with anything we see on modern Earth.

"This group of animals are extinct, so we don't see them, or any modern relatives, on the planet today," Schiffbauer said. "We tend to call them 'worm-like' because it's hard to say that they perfectly fit with annelids, priapulids, or any other types of organism on the planet today that we would generally call a "worm." But palaeoscolecids have the same general body plan, which in the history of life has been an incredibly successful body plan. So, this is a pretty cool addition because it expands the number of worm-like things that we know about from 500 million years ago in North America and adds to our global occurrences and diversity of the palaeoscolecids."

At the time, this palaeoscolecid was likely living on an ocean floor, said Wade Leibach, an MU graduate teaching assistant in the College of Arts and Science, and lead author on the study.

"It is the first known palaeoscolecid discovery in a certain rock formation -- the Marjum Formation of western Utah -- and that's important because this represents one of only a few palaeoscolecid taxa in North America," Leibach said. "Other examples of this type of fossil have been previously found in much higher abundance on other continents, such as Asia, so we believe this find can help us better understand how we view prehistoric environments and ecologies, such as why different types of organisms are underrepresented or overrepresented in the fossil record. So, this discovery can be viewed from not only the perspective of its significance in North American paleontology, but also broader trends in evolution, paleogeography and paleoecology."

Leibach, who switched his major from biology to geology after volunteering to work with the invertebrate paleontology collections at the University of Kansas, began this project as an undergraduate student by analyzing a box of about a dozen fossils in the collections of the KU Biodiversity Institute. Initially, Leibach and one of his co-authors, Anna Whitaker, who was a graduate student at KU at the time and now is at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, analyzed each fossil using a light microscope, which identified at least one of the fossils to be a palaeoscolecid.

Leibach worked with Julien Kimmig, who was at the KU Biodiversity Institute at the time and is now at Penn State University, to determine that, in order to be able to confirm their initial findings, he would need the help of additional analyses provided by sophisticated microscopy equipment located at the MU X-ray Microanalysis Core, which is directed by Schiffbauer. Using the core facility at MU, Leibach focused his analysis on the indentations left in the fossil by the ancient animal's microscopic plates, which are characteristic of the palaeoscolecids.

"These very small mineralized plates are usually nanometers-to-micrometers in size, so we needed the assistance of the equipment in Dr. Schiffbauer's lab to be able to study them in detail because their size, orientation and distribution is how we classify the organism to the genus and species levels," Leibach said.

Leibach said the team found a couple reasons about why this particular fossil may be found in limited quantities in North America as compared to other parts of the world. They are:
 

• Geochemical limitations or different environments that may be more predisposed to preserving these types of organisms.
• Ecological competition, which may have driven this type of organism to be less competitive or less abundant in certain areas.

The new taxon is named Arrakiscolex aasei after the fictional planet Arrakis in the novel "Dune" by Frank Herbert, which is inhabited by a species of armored worm and the collector of the specimens Arvid Aase.

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Some coral reefs are keeping pace with ocean warming

Some coral communities are becoming more heat tolerant as ocean temperatures rise, offering hope for corals in a changing climate.

After a series of marine heatwaves hit the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) in the central Pacific Ocean, a new study finds the impact of heat stress on the coral communities lessened over time.

While a 2002-2003 heatwave devastated coral communities in PIPA, the reefs recovered and experienced minimal losses during a similar event in 2009-2010. Then, in 2015-2016, a massive heatwave put twice as much heat stress on the corals, yet the die-off was much less severe than expected, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU's journal for high-impact reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

The authors of the new study suspect heat-tolerant offspring from the surviving corals are repopulating the reefs, allowing the community to keep pace with warming seas, at least for the time being.

The new study could help coral reef managers identify coral communities most likely to survive in the warming ocean, improving conservation and restoration outcomes.

"It's easy to lose faith in coral reefs," said first author Michael Fox, a postdoctoral scientist and coral reef ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). "But in PIPA, which is protected from local stressors, and where reefs have enough time to recover between heatwaves, the coral populations are doing better than expected."

UNDERWATER HEATWAVES

Just like on land, heatwaves underwater are becoming more frequent and intense as the world warms, putting stress on ocean ecosystems. High temperatures hit coral reefs especially hard by causing widespread bleaching events, where corals eject the symbiotic algae in their tissues, further weakening the animals. With continued ocean warming, coral reefs face a dim future.

In the new study, researchers monitored coral communities at four islands within PIPA, an area encompassing over 400,000-square-kilometers of coral reef and deep-sea habitat. The Republic of Kiribati established the reserve in 2008, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated PIPA as a World Heritage Site in 2010. "The protected area gives us a rare opportunity to study pristine and isolated coral reef ecosystems, a privilege for which we thank the people of Kiribati," said co-author Anne Cohen, a marine scientist at WHOI.

The team used daily satellite data and temperature loggers to examine how each heatwave impacted the corals. They ruled out 11 environmental factors that might explain the higher-than-expected survival following the 2009-2010 and 2015-2016 heatwaves, such as greater cloud cover or more gradual warming.

After the 2002-2003 heatwave, the surveyed sites lost more than three-quarters of their coral cover. The reef was beginning to recover when the 2009-2010 heatwave hit, sparking fears of widespread bleaching, but two years later, coral cover had increased by more than 5%. Following the "Super El Niño" in 2015-2016, which raised ocean temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the loss of coral cover was 40% -- about half of the 2002 losses, despite causing twice the level of thermal stress.

A SOURCE OF HOPE FOR CORAL REEFS

Many of the reef-building species survived the heatwaves. "We're seeing areas that were devoid of corals after 2002-2003 that are now flourishing with most of the original species," Fox said.

At other reefs worldwide, sometimes only a handful of especially hardy or fast-growing species recover after a bleaching event. Coral larvae can float long distances on ocean currents, but due to PIPA's isolation, the researchers hypothesize that local heat-tolerant individuals are repopulating the reefs.

Now that the researchers have shown that some coral communities have the potential to keep up with ocean warming, their next step is to figure out how they are doing it.

The findings are "important for giving us hope for the future of coral reefs, and also for helping to maintain support for protecting reefs, including efforts to reduce local threats, like pollution, sedimentation and overfishing that undermine the reefs' ability to adapt," said Lizzie McLeod, the Global Reef Systems Lead at the Nature Conservancy, who was not involved in the study.

She recommends reef conservationists prioritize the conservation of heat-tolerant reefs, because they can act as climate refuges that repopulate other sites decimated by heatwaves.

The study's authors caution that even these remarkable corals have their limits and reversing climate change remains paramount. As heatwaves become more frequent or intense, even heat-tolerant communities could die out.

Read more at Science Daily

Threat of catastrophic supervolcano eruptions is ever-present

Curtin scientists are part of an international research team that studied an ancient supervolcano in Indonesia and found such volcanoes remain active and hazardous for thousands of years after a super-eruption, prompting the need for a rethink of how these potentially catastrophic events are predicted.

Associate Professor Martin Danišík, lead Australian author from the John de Laeter Centre based at Curtin University, said supervolcanoes often erupted several times with intervals of tens of thousands of years between the big eruptions but it was not known what happened during the dormant periods.

"Gaining an understanding of those lengthy dormant periods will determine what we look for in young active supervolcanoes to help us predict future eruptions," Associate Professor Danišík said.

"Super-eruptions are among the most catastrophic events in Earth's history, venting tremendous amounts of magma almost instantaneously. They can impact global climate to the point of tipping the Earth into a 'volcanic winter', which is an abnormally cold period that may result in widespread famine and population disruption.

"Learning how supervolcanoes work is important for understanding the future threat of an inevitable super-eruption, which happen about once every 17,000 years."

Associate Professor Danišík said the team investigated the fate of magma left behind after the Toba super-eruption 75,000 years ago, using the minerals feldspar and zircon, which contain independent records of time based on the accumulation of gasses argon and helium as time capsules in the volcanic rocks.

"Using these geochronological data, statistical inference and thermal modelling, we showed that magma continued to ooze out within the caldera, or deep depression created by the eruption of magma, for 5000 to 13,000 years after the super-eruption, and then the carapace of solidified left-over magma was pushed upward like a giant turtle shell," Associate Professor Danišík said.

"The findings challenged existing knowledge and studying of eruptions, which normally involves looking for liquid magma under a volcano to assess future hazard. We must now consider that eruptions can occur even if no liquid magma is found underneath a volcano -- the concept of what is 'eruptible' needs to be re-evaluated.

"While a super-eruption can be regionally and globally impactful and recovery may take decades or even centuries, our results show the hazard is not over with the super-eruption and the threat of further hazards exists for many thousands of years after.

"Learning when and how eruptible magma accumulates, and in what state the magma is in before and after such eruptions, is critical for understanding supervolcanoes."

Read more at Science Daily

Insect protein has great potential to reduce the carbon footprint of European consumers

Researchers at the University of Helsinki and LUT University, Finland, have analysed the extent to which insect protein could help to reduce global warming associated with food consumption in Europe. They have especially focused on insect protein use and soybean-protein use in the production of broilers.

The results support previous research suggesting that insect protein has the greatest potential to reduce the food-related carbon footprints of European consumers, if edible insects -- such as crickets, flies, and worms -- are consumed directly or processed as food. Preparation methods include eating them fresh, or drying and processing them into flour for use in bread or pasta.

"Our results indeed suggest that it is more sustainable to use insect protein for food rather than to use it to replace soybean meal in animal feed. Yet we found that a shift to using low-value food industry side stream products -- such as catering waste or by-products, for example, from fish processing -- in insect production for chicken feed is key to decisively increasing the carbon footprint benefits of using insect protein over soybean meal protein," says Professor Bodo Steiner from the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Finland.

All this is important and timely, because as a part of the current climate change debate, concerns have been raised over the increasing deforestation associated with the rapid expansion of global soybean cultivation, which is a major protein source for feeding livestock raised to be food for humans.

From Science Daily

Study illuminates origins of lung cancer in never smokers

A genomic analysis of lung cancer in people with no history of smoking has found that a majority of these tumors arise from the accumulation of mutations caused by natural processes in the body. This study was conducted by an international team led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and describes for the first time three molecular subtypes of lung cancer in people who have never smoked.

These insights will help unlock the mystery of how lung cancer arises in people who have no history of smoking and may guide the development of more precise clinical treatments. The findings were published September 6, 2021, in Nature Genetics.

"What we're seeing is that there are different subtypes of lung cancer in never smokers that have distinct molecular characteristics and evolutionary processes," said epidemiologist Maria Teresa Landi, M.D., Ph.D., of the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch in NCI's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, who led the study, which was done in collaboration with researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, another part of NIH, and other institutions. "In the future we may be able to have different treatments based on these subtypes."

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Every year, more than 2 million people around the world are diagnosed with the disease. Most people who develop lung cancer have a history of tobacco smoking, but 10% to 20% of people who develop lung cancer have never smoked. Lung cancer in never smokers occurs more frequently in women and at an earlier age than lung cancer in smokers.

Environmental risk factors, such as exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke, radon, air pollution, and asbestos, or having had previous lung diseases, may explain some lung cancers among never smokers, but scientists still don't know what causes the majority of these cancers.

In this large epidemiologic study, the researchers used whole-genome sequencing to characterize the genomic changes in tumor tissue and matched normal tissue from 232 never smokers, predominantly of European descent, who had been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer. The tumors included 189 adenocarcinomas (the most common type of lung cancer), 36 carcinoids, and seven other tumors of various types. The patients had not yet undergone treatment for their cancer.

The researchers combed the tumor genomes for mutational signatures, which are patterns of mutations associated with specific mutational processes, such as damage from natural activities in the body (for example, faulty DNA repair or oxidative stress) or from exposure to carcinogens. Mutational signatures act like a tumor's archive of activities that led up to the accumulation of mutations, providing clues into what caused the cancer to develop. A catalogue of known mutational signatures now exists, although some signatures have no known cause. In this study, the researchers discovered that a majority of the tumor genomes of never smokers bore mutational signatures associated with damage from endogenous processes, that is, natural processes that happen inside the body.

As expected, because the study was limited to never smokers, the researchers did not find any mutational signatures that have previously been associated with direct exposure to tobacco smoking. Nor did they find those signatures among the 62 patients who had been exposed to secondhand tobacco smoke. However, Dr. Landi cautioned that the sample size was small and the level of exposure highly variable.

"We need a larger sample size with detailed information on exposure to really study the impact of secondhand tobacco smoking on the development of lung cancer in never smokers," Dr. Landi said.

The genomic analyses also revealed three novel subtypes of lung cancer in never smokers, to which the researchers assigned musical names based on the level of "noise" (that is, the number of genomic changes) in the tumors. The predominant "piano" subtype had the fewest mutations; it appeared to be associated with the activation of progenitor cells, which are involved in the creation of new cells. This subtype of tumor grows extremely slowly, over many years, and is difficult to treat because it can have many different driver mutations. The "mezzo-forte" subtype had specific chromosomal changes as well as mutations in the growth factor receptor gene EGFR, which is commonly altered in lung cancer, and exhibited faster tumor growth. The "forte" subtype exhibited whole-genome doubling, a genomic change that is often seen in lung cancers in smokers. This subtype of tumor also grows quickly.

"We're starting to distinguish subtypes that could potentially have different approaches for prevention and treatment," said Dr. Landi. For example, the slow-growing piano subtype could give clinicians a window of opportunity to detect these tumors earlier when they are less difficult to treat. In contrast, the mezzo-forte and forte subtypes have only a few major driver mutations, suggesting that these tumors could be identified by a single biopsy and could benefit from targeted treatments, she said.

A future direction of this research will be to study people of different ethnic backgrounds and geographic locations, and whose exposure history to lung cancer risk factors is well described.

"We're at the beginning of understanding how these tumors evolve," Dr. Landi said. "This analysis shows that there is heterogeneity, or diversity, in lung cancers in never smokers."

Stephen J. Chanock, M.D., director of NCI's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, noted, "We expect this detective-style investigation of genomic tumor characteristics to unlock new avenues of discovery for multiple cancer types."

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Conservation commitments should focus on the best places to protect rare species

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has pledged to protect 30% of land to support the recovery of nature, but a new study finds that much of the new land that has been allocated to meet this aspiration is not in the highest priority areas for biodiversity conservation.

Currently, only 9% of Britain's land area has a legal status that specifically mandates biodiversity protection.

The UK 30by30 commitment includes land that is currently designated as 'protected landscapes' in England, such as National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but these areas were not originally chosen nor managed for biodiversity.

New research by the University of York and Natural England finds that 58% of British 'protected landscapes' lie outside the highest 30% priority land for species conservation.

The study comes in response to the UK Government's pledge to protect 30% of land to support the recovery of nature by 2030, made last September.

The authors of the report say the 30by30 commitment is a positive step for UK conservation, but requires better planning and implementation if it is to deliver its intended goals.

They argue that designating areas with high landscape value does not offer efficient protection of high priority species (such as tree sparrows and white-letter hairstreak butterflies) and habitats. This is because many attractive landscapes are not in the right places to enhance the country's existing protected area network.

The team identified potential areas for nature recovery, which they say could improve species representation outcomes by 68%, compared to only 38% using the pledged landscapes

The study found the most important areas to prioritise, in a way that is likely to benefit the most species, are largely concentrated in southern and eastern England. Northern and upland areas of Britain have disproportionately larger areas protected for biodiversity, so the greatest gains in species representation can potentially be achieved by increased levels of protection and habitat restoration in southern and lowland areas.

Charles Cunningham, a PhD researcher from the University of York's Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity who is first author of the study, said: "Increasingly, ambitious conservation pledges that focus on large areas may draw attention away from where threatened species are actually located."

"Our findings show that including all of these landscapes is an inefficient way to expand the existing conservation network, and a mixture of landscapes inside and outside of protected landscapes would result in much better species protection."

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