The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses climate and agricultural data from Brazil. It finds that climate change has a cascading effect on farming, leading to increased loan defaults for one of the nation’s largest public sector banks. Over the next three decades, climate-driven loan defaults could increase by up to 7%, according to the study.

The projections in the paper revealed that although temperatures are rising everywhere, there is substantial variation in what that looks like from region to region, which underscores the need to build distinct types of physical and financial resilience.

For example, parts of northern Brazil are predicted to have more dramatic seasonal swings around 2050, with heavier rainfall in winter and drier summers, so policymakers should be thinking about the need for water storage by building dams and reservoirs as well as increasing groundwater storage capacity. Conversely, central Brazil may have fairly steady weather, but will have higher overall temperatures, pointing to a need for heat-resistant crops.

The authors of the paper used a statistical approach pairing past climate data in Brazil with information on crop productivity, farm revenue and agricultural loan performance. They combined this data with climate simulations to predict future weather conditions and their impacts on farming and how those changes will affect financial institutions.

“A difficulty in studying climate impacts on agriculture is that there are all sorts of adaptations happening all the time that aren’t easily observed, but are really important for understanding vulnerability and how risk is changing,” said coauthor Jennifer Burney, professor of environmental science at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We were able to distinguish signals from different types of climate impacts and which ones led to this larger financial risk.”

Systematic thinking about building resilience against climate change around the globe

A key objective of the research is to support resilient food security under a changing climate, which requires understanding of when small climate shifts might have outsized impacts, spilling across regions or into other sectors through institutions like trade and banking.

Understanding the systemic risk posed by climate change is especially helpful for policymakers and disaster relief agencies, as climate change has increasingly become a national security threat. To that end, the statistical approach developed in the study could be applied around the globe.

“The technique we developed will help populations identify where they are most vulnerable, how climate change will hurt them the most economically and what institutions they should focus on to build resilience,” said study coauthor Craig McIntosh, professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy.

For example, some governments in the Western Pacific region buy extra food on the global market in emerging El Niño years, when their own crop productivity suffers. The statistical approach used in the study could help governments around the world understand their own climate conditions and whether local, regional or international institutions will be best placed to address them.

The research could be especially helpful with the development of the loss and damage fund established by the United Nations in 2022. The fund is designed to help compensate developing nations that have contributed the least to the climate crisis but have been facing the brunt of its devastating floods, drought and sea-level rise.

“Our technique could help countries think about where the resilience returns would be highest for the money spent,” said Krislert Samphantharak, professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. “This technique also helps to identify where international reinsurance might be needed.”

The “Empirical Modeling of Agricultural Climate Risk” study was also coauthored by Bruno Lopez-Videla, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from UC San Diego in 2021 and Alexandre Gori Maia of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil.

Heart attack is a common disease with risks of serious complications. It has long been unclear what the best strategy is for treating narrowings in coronary arteries separate from the specific vessel that caused the infarction.

A new large Swedish study has investigated whether it is sufficient to treat only the coronary artery that caused the infarction, or whether long-term results are better if other narrowed vessels are also treated with balloon dilation as a preventive measure.

The clinical randomized study included 1542 patients from 32 hospitals in 7 countries. In the Swedish part, the SWEDEHEART registry was used to conduct the randomization and collect data. Patients were followed up for five years after the procedure.

The results show no difference between the groups in terms of new heart attacks, new unplanned balloon dilations or the total number of all-cause deaths.

“This is somewhat surprising. Our hypothesis was that it would be beneficial to do preventive angioplasty,” says Felix Böhm, a senior physician at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study.

However, when it comes to problems with angina, the study shows that it is possible to avoid patients coming back for new balloon dilations through preventive treatment. According to Felix Böhm, this suggests that we should still aim for complete treatment of all vessels.

“But for those patients where there is some circumstance that makes a complete revascularization complicated, one might choose to wait, since there was no difference in the most serious complications — new heart attack and death,” says Felix Böhm.

If problems with angina occur, these patients can then come back later for a new treatment, according to Felix Böhm.

“A positive finding of the study was that most patients do not come back with new problems, regardless of the treatment strategy chosen. “Nowadays, heart attack patients are so well treated with drugs that it is difficult to find other interventions that provide further significant risk reduction,” says Felix Böhm.

The researchers will now go on to investigate how angina and other quality of life parameters in the patients were affected by the different treatment strategies, as well as health economic aspects of the chosen strategy.

The research was conducted by Uppsala Clinical Research Center (UCR) at Uppala University. The legal sponsor was Karolinska University Hospital. The study was funded by the Swedish Research Council, Hjärt-Lungfonden, Region Stockholm, Abbott and Boston Scientific. The companies had no influence on study design, results analysis or article writing.

BeatProfiler, new tool to rapidly analyze heart cell function

Researchers at Columbia Engineering unveiled a groundbreaking new tool today that addresses these challenges head-on. BeatProfiler is a comprehensive software that automates the analysis of heart cell function from video data and is the first system to integrate the analysis of different heart function indicators, such as contractility, calcium handling, and force output into one tool, speeding up the process significantly and reducing the chance for errors. BeatProfiler enabled the researchers to not only distinguish between different diseases and levels of their severity but also to rapidly and objectively test drugs that affect heart function. The study was published on April 8 in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

“This is truly a transformative tool,” said project leader Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, University Professor and the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Sciences, and Dental Medicine at Columbia. “It’s fast, comprehensive, automated, and compatible with a broad range of computer platforms so it is easily accessible to investigators and clinicians.”

Software is open-source

The team, which included Barry Fine, assistant professor of medicine (in Cardiology) at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, elected not to file a patent application, and instead are offering the AI software as open source, so it can be directly used — for free — by any lab. They believe that this is important for disseminating the results of their research, as well as for getting feedback from users in academic, clinical, and commercial labs that can help the team to further refine the software.

The need to diagnose heart disease quickly and accurately

This project was driven, like much of Vunjak-Novakovic’s research, by a clinical need to diagnose heart diseases more quickly and accurately. This was a project that was several years in the making in which the team added different features piece by piece. While the overarching need was to develop a tool that could better capture the function of the cardiac models that the team was building to study cardiac diseases and assess the efficacy of potential therapeutics, the researchers had an urgent need to quickly and accurately assess the function of their cardiac models in real-time.

As the lab was making more and more cardiac tissues through innovations such as milliPillar and multiorgan tissue models, the increased capabilities of the tissues required the researchers to develop a method to more rapidly quantify the function of cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) and tissues to enable studies exploring genetic cardiomyopathies, cosmic radiation, immune-mediated inflammation, and drug discovery.

Collaborators in software development, machine learning, and more

In the last year and a half, lead author Youngbin Kim and his coauthors developed a graphical user interface (GUI) on top of the code so that biomedical researchers with no coding expertise could easily analyze the data with just a few clicks. This brought together experts in software development (for the GUI development), machine learning (for developing computer vision technology and disease/drug classifiers), signal processing (for processing contractile and calcium signals), engineering (translating pillar deflection on the cardiac platform to mechanical force), and user experience by lab members (to give feedback for improvements in the interface).

The results

The study showed that BeatProfiler could accurately analyze cardiomyocyte function, outperforming existing tools by being faster — up to 50 times in some cases — and more reliable. It detected subtle changes in engineered heat tissue force response that other tools might miss.

“This level of analysis speed and versatility is unprecedented in cardiac research,” said Kim, a PhD candidate in Vunjak-Novakovic’s lab at Columbia Engineering. “Using machine learning, the functional measurements analyzed by BeatProfiler helped us to distinguish between diseased and healthy heart cells with high accuracy and even to classify different cardiac drugs based on how they affect the heart.”

What’s next

The team is working to expand BeatProfiler’s capabilities for new applications in heart research, including a full spectrum of diseases that affect the pumping of the heart, and drug development. To ensure that BeatProfiler can be applied to a wide variety of research questions, they are testing and validating its performance across additional in vitro cardiac models, including different engineered heart tissue models. They are also refining their machine-learning algorithm to extend and generalize its use to a variety of heart diseases and drug effect classification. The long-term goal is to adapt BeatProfiler to pharmaceutical settings to speed up the testing of hundreds of thousands of candidate drugs at once.

This deeper understanding of the ovary means researchers could potentially create artificial ovaries in the lab using tissues that were stored and frozen before exposure to toxic medical treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. Currently, surgeons can implant previously frozen ovarian tissue to temporarily restore hormone and egg production. However, this does not work for long because so few follicles — the structures that produce hormones and carry eggs — survive through reimplantation, the researchers say.

The new atlas reveals the factors that enable a follicle to mature, as most follicles wither away without releasing hormones or an egg. Using new tools that can identify what genes are being expressed at a single-cell level within a tissue, the team was able to home in on ovarian follicles that carry the immature precursors of eggs, known as oocytes.

“Now that we know which genes are expressed in the oocytes, we can test whether affecting these genes could result in creating a functional follicle. This can be used to create an artificial ovary that could eventually be transplanted back into the body,” said Ariella Shikanov, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering and corresponding author of the new study in Science Advances.

The majority of the follicles, called primordial follicles, remain dormant and are located in the outer layer of the ovary, called the cortex. A small portion of these follicles activate periodically and migrate into the ovary, to a region known as the growing pool. Only a few of those growing follicles go on to produce mature eggs that get released into the fallopian tube.

With the ability to guide follicle development and tune ovarian environment, the team believes that engineered ovarian tissue could function for much longer than unmodified implanted tissue. This means that patients would have a longer fertility window as well as a longer period in which their bodies produce hormones that help regulate the menstrual cycle and support muscular, skeletal, sexual and cardiovascular health.

“We’re not talking about utilizing a surrogate mother, or artificial insemination,” said Jun Z. Li, associate chair of U-M’s Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics and co-corresponding author of the study. “The magic we’re working toward is being able to trigger an immature cell into maturity, but without knowing which molecules drive that process, we’re blind.”

U-M’s team utilized a relatively new technology, called spatial transcriptomics, to track all of the gene activity — and where it occurs — in tissue samples. They do this by reading strands of RNA, which are like notes taken from the DNA strand, revealing which genes are being read. Working with an organ procurement organization, U-M researchers performed RNA sequencing of ovaries from five human donors.

“This was the first time where we could target ovarian follicles and oocytes and perform a transcription analysis, which enables us to see which genes are active,” Shikanov said.

“The majority of ovarian follicles, already present at birth, never enter the growing pool and eventually self-destruct. This new data allows us to start building our understanding of what makes a good egg — what determines which follicle is going to grow, ovulate, be fertilized and become a baby.”

U-M’s work is part of the Human Cell Atlas project, which seeks to create “maps of all the different cells, their molecular characteristics and where they are located, to understand how the human body works and what goes wrong in disease.”

Shikanov, Li and U-M collaborators such as Sue Hammoud, U-M associate professor of human genetics and urology, are mapping other parts of the female reproductive system, including the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. Other contributors include Andrea Suzanne Kuliahsa Jones, formerly of U-M and now at Duke University, and D. Ford Hannum, a U-M graduate student research assistant in bioinformatics.

The research was partially funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Additional financial support was provided by the National Institutes of Health.

In the new findings, which were published in Science on April 5, 2024, Scripps Research chemists show that it’s possible to convert feedstock chemicals into quaternary carbons using a single, inexpensive iron catalyst. This method could benefit drug developers by making molecules cheaper and easier to produce at small and large scales.

“Quaternary carbons are ubiquitous across various areas of research — from drug discovery to material science,” says co-first author Nathan Dao, a PhD candidate at Scripps Research. “The synthesis of quaternary carbons, however, is a long-standing challenge in the field of organic chemistry, typically requiring numerous steps and relying on harsh conditions or less accessible starting materials.”

In addition to Dao, the study’s co-first authors included Xu-Cheng Gan and Benxiang Zhang.

Catalysts are substances used to speed up the rate of a chemical reaction. Sometimes, several different catalysts are necessary to promote a certain reaction and obtain the desired result: a veritable ‘reaction soup’. But catalysts can be very expensive, and they don’t always react as intended — and the more catalysts used, the more waste that’s produced. But the Scripps Research scientists determined that a single catalyst could perform multiple crucial rolls.

“A difficult chemical reaction often requires many interacting components,” according to co-senior author, Ryan Shenvi, PhD, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research. “A benefit of this work is it’s incredibly simple.”

The team identified simple conditions to convert carboxylic acids and olefins, two major classes of chemical feedstocks — or raw materials that fuel a machine or industrial process — into quaternary carbons by using an inexpensive iron-based catalyst. In addition, these chemical feedstocks aren’t only abundant, but they’re also low cost.

“Similar reactions have been gaining traction lately, so this discovery was inevitable,” Shenvi explains. “The pieces were already in the literature, but no one had put them together before.”

Overall, the study, which was done in collaboration with the lab of senior co-author Phil Baran, PhD, the Dr. Richard A. Lerner Endowed Chair in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research, highlights the ongoing role of chemistry in the development of modern technology and pharmaceuticals.

“This work is yet another striking demonstration of the power of the collaborative atmosphere at Scripps Research to unearth new transformations that can have a dramatic impact on simplifying the practice of organic synthesis,” Baran adds.

This work and the researchers involved were supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (grants GM122606 and GM118176), the National Science Foundation (CHE1955922), Nanjing King-Pharm Co., Ltd), Pfizer and Biogen.