A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrates just how much promise some well-equipped gut-friendly bacteria hold for improving treatments of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Led by Quanyin Hu, a biomedical engineer and professor in the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy, the research builds on technology the team had previously designed. That prior technology encases beneficial bacteria within a very thin protective shell to help them survive an onslaught of stomach acids and competing microbes long enough to establish and multiply in the guts of mice.

While the technology makes orally administered probiotics more effective, IBD is a complex disease that usually involves more than gut microbial communities that are out of whack.

“IBD is a complicated disease, and you need to attack it at different angles,” says Hu.

So, Hu and his colleagues devised specialized nanoparticles to neutralize molecules implicated in IBD. They’ve also figured out a way of attaching these nanoparticle “backpacks” to beneficial bacteria after encasing them in the protective coating.

Combined with the probiotics themselves, these nanoparticle backpacks could significantly improve — and simplify — IBD treatments.

While the root causes of IBD are complex and still being studied, one culprit involves the overproduction of molecules known as reactive oxygen species. These molecules are crucial for certain human body functions, but too many of them in the gut can fuel damaging inflammation along the lining of intestines.

Enter the nanoparticle backpacks. The tiny particles are part sulfide and part hyaluronic acid. The acid is powerfully anti-inflammatory, and the sulfide directly targets the reactive oxygen species.

Conducted in mice, Hu’s latest research shows that probiotic bacteria Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 encased in a protective shell and outfitted with the nanoparticle backpacks are significantly better at relieving IBD symptoms than their counterparts without the additional gear. The findings were reported Nov. 11 in the journal Science Advances.

The researchers estimated the effects of the treatments in two ways: by measuring changes in weight and changes in the colon length of mice with IBD that did and did not receive the treatment.

Like humans, mice with IBD commonly experience weight loss and colon shortening as the disease progresses. Hu and his colleagues found that mice that received the full treatment experienced the least amount of weight loss and much less colon shortening than their counterparts that received partial or no treatments.

Current treatment options depend on the stage and severity of disease, whereas Hu and his colleagues say they have sought a more holistic treatment that could be effective at any stage.

“That’s the most exciting part of this research for me,” says Hu. “We didn’t want to target a specific IBD stage. We wanted to select the most important factors that contribute to curing or treating the disease at whatever stage.”

Additionally, the treatment is administered orally, which could make it a palatable alternative to other more invasive forms of IBD treatment such as partial or complete remove of the colon.

While the results are promising, it will be some time before the treatments are tested in humans.

Next in Hu’s sights is testing whether the nanoparticle backpacks work well with other probiotic bacteria species and documenting whether the treatment has any unwelcome side effects. Simplifying the process of creating and attaching the nano-backpacks will also be crucial for making the treatments clinically feasible.

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Materials provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison. Original written by Will Cushman. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Can you move to the beat, or do you have two left feet? Apparently, how well we can time our movement to music depends somewhat on our innate genetic ability, and this skill was previously thought to be a uniquely human trait. While animals also react to hearing noise, or might make rhythmic sounds, or be trained to respond to music, this isn’t the same as the complex neural and motor processes that work together to enable us to naturally recognize the beat in a song, respond to it or even predict it. This is referred to as beat synchronicity.

Only relatively recently, research studies (and home videos) have shown that some animals seem to share our urge to move to the groove. A new paper by a team at the University of Tokyo provides evidence that rats are one of them. “Rats displayed innate — that is, without any training or prior exposure to music — beat synchronization most distinctly within 120-140 bpm (beats per minute), to which humans also exhibit the clearest beat synchronization,” explained Associate Professor Hirokazu Takahashi from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. “The auditory cortex, the region of our brain that processes sound, was also tuned to 120-140 bpm, which we were able to explain using our mathematical model of brain adaptation.”

But why play music to rats in the first place? “Music exerts a strong appeal to the brain and has profound effects on emotion and cognition. To utilize music effectively, we need to reveal the neural mechanism underlying this empirical fact,” said Takahashi. “I am also a specialist of electrophysiology, which is concerned with electrical activity in the brain, and have been studying the auditory cortex of rats for many years.”

The team had two alternate hypotheses: The first was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would be determined by the time constant of the body. This is different between species and much faster for small animals compared to humans (think of how quickly a rat can scuttle). The second was that the optimal tempo would instead be determined by the time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species. “After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain,” said Takahashi. “This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”

The rats were fitted with wireless, miniature accelerometers, which could measure the slightest head movements. Human participants also wore accelerometers on headphones. They were then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, at four different tempos: Seventy-five percent, 100%, 200% and 400% of the original speed. The original tempo is 132 bpm and results showed that the rats’ beat synchronicity was clearest within the 120-140 bpm range. The team also found that both rats and humans jerked their heads to the beat in a similar rhythm, and that the level of head jerking decreased the more that the music was sped up.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on innate beat synchronization in animals that was not achieved through training or musical exposure,” said Takahashi. “We also hypothesized that short-term adaptation in the brain was involved in beat tuning in the auditory cortex. We were able to explain this by fitting our neural activity data to a mathematical model of the adaptation. Furthermore, our adaptation model showed that in response to random click sequences, the highest beat prediction performance occurred when the mean interstimulus interval (the time between the end of one stimulus and the start of another) was around 200 milliseconds (one-thousandth of a second). This matched the statistics of internote intervals in classical music, suggesting that the adaptation property in the brain underlies the perception and creation of music.”

As well as being a fascinating insight into the animal mind and the development of our own beat synchronicity, the researchers also see it as an insight into the creation of music itself. “Next, I would like to reveal how other musical properties such as melody and harmony relate to the dynamics of the brain. I am also interested in how, why and what mechanisms of the brain create human cultural fields such as fine art, music, science, technology and religion,” said Takahashi. “I believe that this question is the key to understand how the brain works and develop the next-generation AI (artificial intelligence). Also, as an engineer, I am interested in the use of music for a happy life.”

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Materials provided by University of Tokyo. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Researchers from the Positron Lab in the UTA Department of Physics utilized a process called auger-mediated positron sticking (AMPS) to develop a novel spectroscopic tool to measure the electronic structure of the surface of materials selectively.

A new article, “Photoemission spectroscopy using virtual photons emitted by positron sticking: A complementary probe for top-layer surface electronic structures,” published in the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL), details the new technique. In addition, the online magazine Physics published a Viewpoint article on the publication, titled “Spectroscopy That Doesn’t Scratch the Surface,” which explains why the paper is important to the field. Viewpoint articles are commissioned by PRL editors for papers they believe will draw broad interest.

Alex Fairchild, postdoctoral scholar in the Positron Lab, is the study’s lead author. Co-authors include Varghese Chirayath, assistant professor of research; Randall Gladen, postdoctoral researcher; Ali Koymen, professor of physics; and Alex Weiss, professor and chair of the UTA Department of Physics. Bernardo Barbiellini, professor of physics at LUT University in Finland, also contributed to the project.

The AMPS process, in which positrons (antimatter of electrons) stick directly to surfaces followed by electron emission, was first observed and described by Saurabh Mukherjee, a graduate student, along with Weiss and other colleagues, in 2010 at UTA. Those results were published in a paper in PRL.

“Alex (Fairchild) and Varghese figured out how to use this phenomenon that we discovered in 2010 to measure the top layer and get information about the electronic structure and the behavior of the electrons in the top layer,” Weiss said. “That will determine a material’s many properties, including conductivity, and can have important implications for building devices.”

Fairchild said the AMPS process is unique because it uses virtual photons to measure the topmost atomic layer.

“This is different from typical techniques like photoemission spectroscopy, where a photon penetrates multiple layers into the bulk of a material and therefore contains the combined information of the surface and subsurface layers,” Fairchild said.

“Our AMPS results showed how virtual photons emitted following positron-sticking interact preferably with electrons that extend further into the vacuum than with electrons that were more localized to the atomic site,” Chirayath said. “Our results are thus essential to understand how positrons interact with surface electrons and are extremely important to understand other similarly surface-selective, positron-based techniques.”

Weiss noted that the UTA Positron Lab is currently the only place this technique could have been developed, due to the capabilities of its positron beam.

“At present, UTA probably has the only lab in the world that has a positron beam that can get down to the low energies needed to observe this phenomenon,” Weiss said.

The study was supported by funding from the Welch Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

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Materials provided by University of Texas at Arlington. Original written by Greg Pederson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The international team of researchers led by Elena Goun, an associate professor of chemistry at MU, discovered high levels of NR could not only increase someone’s risk of developing triple-negative breast cancer, but also could cause the cancer to metastasize or spread to the brain. Once the cancer reaches the brain, the results are deadly because no viable treatment options exist at this time, said Goun, who is the corresponding author on the study.

“Some people take them [vitamins and supplements] because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements only have positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work,” Goun said. “Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”

Following the death of her 59-year-old father only three months after being diagnosed with colon cancer, Goun was moved by her father’s passing to pursue a better scientific understanding of cancer metabolism, or the energy through which cancer spreads in the body. Since NR is a known supplement for helping increase levels of cellular energy, and cancer cells feed off of that energy with their increased metabolism, Goun wanted to investigate NR’s role in the development and spread of cancer.

“Our work is especially important given the wide commercial availability and a large number of ongoing human clinical trials where NR is used to mitigate the side effects of cancer therapy in patients,” Goun said.

The researchers used this technology to compare and examine how much NR levels were present in cancer cells, T cells and healthy tissues.

“While NR is already being widely used in people and is being investigated in so many ongoing clinical trials for additional applications, much of how NR works is a black box — it’s not understood,” Goun said. “So that inspired us to come up with this novel imaging technique based on ultrasensitive bioluminescent imaging that allows quantification of NR levels in real time in a non-invasive manner. The presence of NR is shown with light, and the brighter the light is, the more NR is present.”

Goun said the findings of the study emphasize the importance of having careful investigations of potential side effects for supplements like NR prior to their use in people who may have different types of health conditions. In the future, Goun would like to provide information that could potentially lead to the development of certain inhibitors to help make cancer therapies like chemotherapy more effective in treating cancer. The key to this approach, Goun said, is to look at it from a personalized medicine standpoint.

“Not all cancers are the same in every person, especially from the standpoint of metabolic signatures,” Goun said. “Often times cancers can even change their metabolism before or after chemotherapy.”

“A bioluminescent-based probe for in vivo non-invasive monitoring of nicotinamide riboside uptake reveals a link between metastasis and NAD+ metabolism” was published in the Journal of Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Funding was provided by grants from the European Research Council (ERC-2019-COG, 866338) and Swiss National Foundation (51NF40_185898), as well as support from NCCR Chemical Biology.

Other authors on the study are Arkadiy Bazhin, Pavlo Khodakivskyi, Ekaterina Solodnikova and Aleksey Yevtodiyenko at MU; Tamara Maric at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; Greta Maria Paola Giordano Attianese, George Coukos and Melita Irving at The Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Switzerland; and Magali Joffraud and Carles Cantó at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences in Switzerland. Bazhin, Khodakivskyi, Mikhaylov, Solodnikova, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mikhaylov, Yevtodiyenko and Goun are also affiliated with SwissLumix SARL in Switzerland.

In addition to cameras, astronomers also use instruments known as spectrographs to study celestial object. A spectrograph breaks the light from an object into its component colors, in other words it creates a precise rainbow. Studying the strengths of the different colors in the rainbow from an object can tell astronomers various details about the object such as its motion, temperature, and chemical composition.

This new instrument, called PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), breaks visible light rainbows into two components: the red side and the blue side. So it might be more correct to refer to the data sets as half-rainbows. Combined with a third kind of detector which can see the infrared light invisible to humans, that makes one-and-a-half rainbows for an object studied with all three types of detectors.

Together with a widefield camera (HSC: Hyper Suprime-Cam), PFS will help launch the Subaru Telescope 2.0 project which will reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy, structure formation in the Universe, and the physical processes of galaxy formation and evolution.

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Materials provided by National Institutes of Natural Sciences. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.