However, fecal microbial transplants have also been given to alter a recipient’s metabolism to reduce obesity or alter immunity to fight cancer, and in those transplants recipients are not given suppressive antibiotics to eliminate the microbial community prior to the transplant. In these cases, the initial gut community after transplant is a consortium of donor and recipient microbes that have to compete as new microbial strains are introduced into an established community.

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers now report in the journal PLOS One that there is a lack of predictability for fecal microbial transplants to change the gut microbial community to correspond to that of the donor when there is no preconditioning to reduce the recipient microbe community. This contrasts with the C. difficile fecal microbial transplants after suppressive antibiotic therapy, where stable long-term colonization of donor strains is seen as long as two years post-transplant.

“The practical translation of our analysis suggests the use of pre-fecal microbial transplant treatments to reduce recipient microbial communities to facilitate a donor microbial strain-dominated gut microbial community following fecal microbial transplant,” said UAB researchers Hyunmin Koo, Ph.D., and Casey Morrow, Ph.D. “In addition, longitudinal sampling of individual fecal microbial transplant patients in combination with strain tracking analysis to monitor the status of the post-fecal microbial transplant microbial community would also be important to assess the stability and, ultimately, the success of the fecal microbial transplant.”

Koo and Morrow analyzed metagenomic sequencing published by Davar et al. in Science in 2021, using two established strain tracking methods, the WSS strain-tracking method developed at UAB and the strain-level population genomics tool StrainPhlAn. WSS can detect whether a donor strain or recipient strain of a particular species of gut microbes is dominant after fecal microbial transplants, and StrainPhlAn provides a phylogenetic tree of donor-related microbes or recipient-related microbes.

The Davar group gave fecal microbial transplants from patients who responded to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy for melanoma to recipient patients who were resistant to the immunotherapy, since it had been seen that the composition of the gut microbiota correlates with efficacy of anti-PD-1 therapy in animal models and cancer patients. Six out of 15 patients benefited.

Koo and Morrow analyzed five fecal microbial transplants by the Davar group where the recipient microflora was sampled multiple times for as long as 535 days post-fecal microbial transplant. This published metagenomic data allowed a time-series strain tracking analysis.

The UAB researchers found that three Alistipes bacterial species and one Parabacteroides species all had patterns, post-fecal microbial transplant, of either dominant donor or dominant recipient strains in the feces.

In contrast, Bacteroides uniformis and Bacteroides vulgatus showed inter-individual oscillation over time with the appearance of either donor or recipient fecal strain dominance. Adding further to the complexity, there were some instances of dominant strains of the two Bacteroides species that were unrelated to either the donor or the recipient strains. Also, one Bacteroides vulgatus strain showed a possible genetic recombination event between the donor and recipient strains.

“The complex oscillating patterns of the appearance of fecal dominant donor, recipient or unrelated strains following extended times post-fecal microbial transplant provide new insights into the dynamics of the microbial community interactions with the recipients following fecal microbial transplant,” Morrow said. “The result from our analysis has implications for the use of fecal microbial transplant to predictably change the biological functions of the gut community in metabolism and host immunity.”

Morrow is professor emeritus of the UAB Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, and Koo is bioinformatician in the UAB Department of Genetics. Both departments are in the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine.

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Materials provided by University of Alabama at Birmingham. Original written by Jeff Hansen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Research from Dr. Stuart Fogel, a cognitive neuroscientist, professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology, and researcher at the Royal’s Institute for Mental Health Research, is shedding light into how the impact of a person’s daily rhythm and activity levels during both wake and sleep relate to human intelligence. Contrary to the adage “the early bird gets the worm,” previous work suggests that evening types, or “owls,” have superior verbal intelligence.

Yet, “once you account for key factors including bedtime and age, we found the opposite to be true, that morning types tend to have superior verbal ability,” says Stuart Fogel, Director of the University of Ottawa Sleep Research Laboratory. “This outcome was surprising to us and signals this is much more complicated that anyone thought before.”

Fogel’s team identified individual’s chronotype — their evening or morning tendencies — by monitoring biological rhythms and daily preferences. A person’s chronotype is related to when in the day they prefer to do demanding things, from intellectual pursuits to exercise.

Young individuals are typically “evening types” while older individuals and those more regularly entrenched in their daily/nightly activities are likely “morning types.” The juxtaposition here is that morning is critical for young people, especially school aged children and adolescents, who have their schedules set by their morning-type parents and their routines. This might be doing youngsters a disservice.

“A lot of school start times are not determined by our chronotypes but by parents and work-schedules, so school-aged kids pay the price of that because they are evening types forced to work on a morning type schedule,” says Fogel.

“For example, math and science classes are normally scheduled early in the day because whatever morning tendencies they have will serve them well. But the AM is not when they are at their best due to their evening type tendencies. Ultimately, they are disadvantaged because the type of schedule imposed on them is basically fighting against their biological clock every day.”

The study enlisted volunteers from a wide age range, who were rigorously screened to rule out sleep disorders and other confounding factors. They outfitted volunteers with a monitoring device to measure activity levels.

Establishing the strength of a person’s rhythm, which drives intelligence, is key to understanding the results of this nuanced study, says Fogel, with a person’s age and actual bedtime proving important factors.

“Our brain really craves regularity and for us to be optimal in our own rhythms is to stick to that schedule and not be constantly trying to catch up,” adds Fogel.

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Materials provided by University of Ottawa. Original written by Paul Logothetis. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, published in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, Nov. 2, examined the relationship between heat exposure and mortality risks in Texas prisons, focusing on how these risks vary between prisons with air conditioning and those without it.

The researchers analyzed data gathered between 2001 and 2019 showing that 271 people died due to extreme heat exposure during that timeframe.

Even a 1 degree increase above 85 degrees Fahrenheit can elevate the daily risk of dying by 0.7%, the researchers found.

The research team — which in addition to Brown also included scholars from Harvard University, Boston University and the organization Texas Prison Community Advocates — combined data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics on mortality in Texas prisons with temperature data from NASA and used a novel epidemiologic analysis to arrive at its findings. The team reported that approximately 13% of mortality during warm months may be attributable to extreme in Texas prison facilities without air conditioning.

It is important to note that while an average of 14 people died each year from heat-related causes in Texas prisons without air conditioning, not a single heat-related death occurred in climate-controlled prisons, said lead study author Julie Skarha, who received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from Brown in June 2022.

“The majority of Texas prisons do not have universal air conditioning,” Skarha said. “And in these settings, we found a 30-fold increase in heat-related mortality when compared to estimates of heat-related mortality in the general U.S. population.”

Study co-author Dr. David Dosa, an associate professor of medicine, and health services, policy and practice at Brown, pointed out that heat is often a silent killer.

“We have seen similar situations in nursing homes, where heat isn’t reported on the death certificate,” said Dosa, a practicing geriatrician with dual appointments at the Providence V.A. Medical Center and Rhode Island Hospital. “It’s only after we run these analyses that we can determine how much of a role heat played in someone’s death.”

The findings, the researchers said, suggest that an air conditioning policy for Texas prisons may be an important part of protecting the health of people living and working in these facilities.

Other study authors included Dr. Josiah Rich and David Savitz from Brown, Amite Dominick from Texas Prison Community Advocates, Keith Spangler from Boston University and Antonella Zanobetti from Harvard. The study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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Materials provided by Brown University. Original written by Carl Dimitri, Senior Writer, School of Public Health. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The extraordinary work, just published in leading journal Cell Reports Medicine, has wide-ranging implications from improving our fundamental understanding of viral resistance to the potential design of therapies to treat infected people.

Between 1977-79 in Ireland, several thousand women were exposed to the hepatitis C virus through contaminated anti-D, which is a medication made using plasma from donated blood and given to Rhesus negative women who are pregnant with a Rhesus positive fetus. The medication prevents the development of antibodies that could be dangerous in subsequent pregnancies. Some of the anti-D used during the 1977-79 period was contaminated with hepatitis C.

From this outbreak, three groups of people were identifiable: those who were chronically infected; those who cleared the infection with an antibody response; and those who appeared protected against infection without making antibodies against hepatitis C.

Cliona O’Farrelly, Professor of Comparative Immunology in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, is the senior author of the research article. Cliona, who is based in the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute, said:

“We hypothesised that women who seemed to resist HCV infection must have an enhanced innate immune response, which is the ancient part of the immune system that acts as a first line of defence.

“To test this we needed to make contact with women exposed to the virus over forty years ago and ask them to help us by allowing us to study their immune systems to hunt for scientific clues that would explain their differing responses.

“After a nationwide campaign over 100 women came forward and we have gained some unique and important insights. That so many women — many of whom have lived with medical complications for a long time — were willing to help is testament to how much people want to engage with science and help pursue research with the potential to make genuine, positive impacts on society. We are deeply grateful to them.”

The scientists ultimately recruited almost 40 women from the resistant group, alongside 90 women who were previously infected.

In collaboration with the Institut Pasteur in Paris they then invited almost 20 women in each group to donate a blood sample that they stimulated with molecules that mimic viral infection and lead to activation of the innate immune system.

Jamie Sugrue, PhD Candidate in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, is first author of the research article. He said:

“By comparing the response of the resistant women to those who became infected, we found that resistant donors had an enhanced type I interferon response after stimulation. Type I interferons are a key family of antiviral immune mediators that play an important role in defence against viruses including hepatitis C and SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19.

“We think that the increased type I interferon production by our resistant donors, seen now almost 40 years after the original exposure to hepatitis C, is what protected them against infection.

“These findings are important as resistance to infection is very much an overlooked outcome following viral outbreak, primarily because identifying resistant individuals is very difficult — since they do not become sick after viral exposure, they wouldn’t necessarily know that they were exposed. That’s why cohorts like this, though tragic in nature, are so valuable — they provide a unique opportunity to study the response to viral infections in an otherwise healthy population.”

The lab’s efforts are now focused on leveraging these biological findings to unpick the genetics of viral resistance in the HCV donors. Their work on HCV resistance has already helped ignite international interest in resistance to other viral infections, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

The O’Farrelly lab has expanded its search for virus-resistant individuals by joining in the COVID human genetic effort and by recruiting members of the public who have been heavily exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but never developed an infection.

Cellulose is a key structural component of plant cell walls and is the reason why trees can grow to such heights. But the secret of its material strength actually lies in its overlapping nanoscopic fibers. In recent years, many commercial products have used cellulose nanofiber (CNF) materials because their strength and durability make them a good replacement for polymer-based materials such as plastics that can be detrimental to the environment. But now and for the first time, a research team led by Professor Junichiro Shiomi from the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering has investigated previously unknown thermal properties of CNF, and their findings show these materials could be even more useful still.

“If you see plant-derived materials such as cellulose or woody biomass used in applications, it’s typically mechanical or thermally insulating properties that are being employed,” said Shiomi. “When we explored the thermal properties of a yarn made from CNF, however, we found that they show a different kind of thermal behavior, thermal conduction, and it’s very significant, around 100 times higher than that of typical woody biomass or cellulose paper.”

The reason yarn made from CNF can conduct heat so well is due to the way it’s made. Cellulose fibers in nature are very disorganized, but a process called the flow-focusing method combines cellulose fibers, orientating them in the same way, to create CNF. It’s this tightly bound and aligned bundle of rod-shaped fibers that allows heat to transfer along the bundle, whereas in a more chaotic structure it would dissipate heat more readily.

“Our main challenge was how to measure the thermal conductivity of such small physical samples and with great accuracy,” said Shiomi. “For this, we turned to a technique called T-type thermal conductivity measurement. It allowed us to measure the thermal conductivity of the rod-shaped CNF yarn samples which are only micrometers (a micrometer equaling one-thousandth of a millimeter) in diameter. But the next step for us is to perform accurate thermal tests on two-dimensional textilelike samples.”

Shiomi and his team hope that their investigation and future explorations into the use of CNF as a thermally conductive material could give engineers an alternative to some environmentally damaging polymers. In applications where heat transfer is important, such as certain electronic or computational components, it could greatly reduce the consequences of discarded electronic equipment, or e-waste, thanks to the biodegradable nature of CNF and other plant-based materials.

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

Klebsiella pneumoniae causes many respiratory, intestinal and urinary tract infections. Due to its resistance to most common antibiotics and its high virulence, some of its strains can be fatal for 40% to 50% of infected people. There is an urgent need to develop new therapeutic molecules to counter it. “Since the 1930s, medicine has relied on antibiotics to get rid of pathogenic bacteria,” explains Pierre Cosson, professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led this research. “But other approaches are possible, among which trying to weaken the bacteria’s defence system so that they can no longer escape the immune system. This avenue seems all the more promising as the virulence of Klebsiella pneumoniae stems largely from its ability to evade attacks from immune cells.”

An amoeba as a model

To determine whether or not the bacteria were weakened, the UNIGE scientists used an experimental model with surprising characteristics: the amoeba Dictyostelium. This single-cell organism feeds on bacteria by capturing and ingesting them, using the same mechanisms that immune cells use to kill pathogens. “We genetically modified this amoeba so that it could tell us whether the bacteria it encountered were virulent or not. This very simple system then enabled us to test thousands of molecules and identify those that reduced bacterial virulence,” explains Pierre Cosson.

Weakening the bacteria without killing them

Developing a drug is a long and expensive process, with no guarantee of results. The UNIGE scientists therefore opted for a quicker and safer strategy: reviewing existing drugs to identify possible new therapeutic indications. The research team evaluated the effect on Klebsiella pneumoniae of hundreds of drugs already on the market, with a wide range of therapeutic indications. A drug developed to combat herpes, edoxudine, proved particularly promising.

“By altering the surface layer that protects the bacteria from their external environment, this pharmacological product makes it vulnerable. Unlike an antibiotic, edoxudine does not kill the bacteria, which limits the risk of developing resistance, a major advantage of such an anti-virulence strategy,” says the researcher.

Although the effectiveness of such a treatment in human beings has yet to be confirmed, the results of this study are encouraging: edoxudine acts even on the most virulent strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae, and at lower concentrations than those prescribed to treat herpes. “Sufficiently weakening the bacteria without killing them is a subtle strategy, but one that could prove to be a winner in the short and long terms,” concludes Pierre Cosson.

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Materials provided by Université de Genève. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

First developed by the World Health Organisation, Psychological First Aid (PFA) is the globally recommended training for people, such as healthcare workers, who support others during emergencies.

It offers guidance on delivering psychosocial care in the immediate aftermath of an emergency event.

Although PFA training was originally created for people to support others, scientists from Northumbria University and the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI) have now also identified it as a suitable way of helping care workers look after their own mental health and wellbeing.

As part of the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2020 the UK government introduced free to access online PFA training in an effort to support frontline staff, such the 1.8 million people working in care homes across the country.

Evaluating the effectiveness of this initiative, academics at Northumbria and UHI investigated the uptake of PFA training among healthcare workers in UK care homes and assessed its effects on their wellbeing.

Funded by the Royal College of Nursing Foundation, the study was the first of its kind and makes recommendations regarding further implementation of Psychological First Aid.

The researchers found that while the uptake of PFA training was low among healthcare workers — less than 10% of study participants had done the training — those who had undertaken PFA coped better.

The results suggest that PFA training helped in overcoming stress and coping via self-growth and improving relationships with others, but there was a concern around accessibility, which academics say could possibly explain the low uptake of training.

Some research participants described that it helped them cope better when thinking of giving up their job and promoted resilience, with one person commenting: “(PFA) has helped me cope better, it was a position I was thinking of giving up at one time and now I have the strength to carry on.”

Others described how it helped support them in their experiences of bereavement to overcome the trauma of the pandemic: “I found it (PFA) useful as it helped me cope with bereavement as well as the experience of seeing relatives affected by COVID-19.” Another participant went as far as to say that PFA training “should be made compulsory for all staff especially in nursing and care homes during the pandemic or not.”

Dr Mariyana Schoultz, the project lead and Associate Professor in Mental Health in Northumbria’s Department of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, said: “Findings suggest that PFA training has the potential to: strengthen resilience for staff in health and social care; promote anti-stigma messages and normalise help seeking behaviour; PFA holds the potential to minimise the risk of developing more serious psychological problems such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But we need more research in this area.

“We therefore recommend that consideration be given to funding an integrated programme of research and development to further develop, implement, and evaluate a co-produced iteration of PFA for use in the UK care home sector and beyond.”

Deepa Korea, Director of the RCN Foundation, said “Staff working in social care during the pandemic faced significant pressures which inevitably had an impact on their own mental health and emotional wellbeing. That’s why I am delighted that the RCN Foundation was able to commission this important study which adds to the body of evidence about the practical ways in which we can support health and social care staff.”

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