In a study in the Journal of Cataracts & Refractive Surgery, researchers from the University of Rochester created computational eye models that included the corneas of post-LASIK surgery patients and studied how standard intraocular lenses and lenses designed to increase depth of focus performed in operated eyes. Susana Marcos, the David R. Williams Director of the Center for Visual Science and the Nicholas George Professor of Optics and of Ophthalmology at Rochester, says the computational models that use anatomical information of the patient’s eye provide surgeons with important guidance on the expected optical quality post-operatively.

“Currently the only pre-operative data used to select the lens is essentially the length and curvature of the cornea,” says Marcos, a coauthor of the study. “This new technology allows us to reconstruct the eye in three dimensions, providing us the entire topography of the cornea and crystalline lens, where the intraocular lens is implanted. When you have all this three-dimensional information, you’re in a much better position to select the lens that will produce the best image at the retinal plane.”

The future of optical coherence tomography

Marcos and her collaborators from the Center for Visual Science, as well as Rochester’s Flaum Eye Institute and Goergen Institute for Data Science, are conducting a larger study to quantify in three dimensions the eye images using the optical coherence tomography quantification tools they’ve developed to find broader trends. They are using machine-learning algorithms to find relationships between pre- and post-operation data, providing parameters that can inform the best outcomes.

Additionally, they have developed technology that can help patients see for themselves what different lens options will look like.

“What we see is not strictly the image that is project on the retina,” says Marcos. “There is all the visual processing and perception that comes in. When surgeons are planning the surgery, it is very difficult for them to convey to the patients how they are going to see. A computational, personalized eye model tells which lens is the best fit for the patient’s eye anatomy, but patients want to see for themselves.”

With an optical bench, the researchers use technology originally developed for astronomy, such as adaptive optics mirrors and spatial light modulators, to manipulate the optics of the eye as an intraocular lens would. The approach allows Marcos and her collaborators to perform fundamental experiments and collaborate with industry partners to test new products. Marcos also helped develop a commercial headset version of the instrumentation called SimVis Gekko that allows patients to see the world around them as if they had had the surgery.

In addition to studying techniques to help treat cataracts, the researchers are applying their methods to study other major eye conditions, including presbyopia and myopia.

The authors argue that we could transform arid ecosystems into efficient carbon-capture systems with improved soil health, enhanced photosynthetic efficiency, and larger root biomass by engineering ideal combinations of plants, soil microbes, and soil type to facilitate a naturally occurring biogeochemical process called the oxalate-carbonate pathway to create below-ground carbon sinks.

“Re-greening deserts by restoration of ecosystem functions, including carbon sequestration, should be the preferential approach,” writes the research team, led by senior author and plant scientist Heribert Hirt of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. “The advantage of reclaiming arid regions for re-greening and carbon sequestration is that they do not compete with lands used in agriculture and food production.”

The method takes advantage of arid-adapted plants that produce oxalates — ions containing carbon and oxygen that might ring a bell if you’re unlucky enough to suffer from kidney stones or gout. Some soil microbes use oxalates as their sole carbon source, and in doing so, they excrete carbonate molecules into the soil. Carbonate usually breaks down quickly, but if these plant-microbe systems are grown in alkaline- and calcium-rich soils, the carbonate reacts with calcium to form stable deposits of calcium carbonate.

Carbon naturally cycles between the atmosphere, oceans, and terrestrial ecosystems, but human actions have resulted in the accumulation of excess CO₂ in the atmosphere. Even if we can reduce CO₂ emissions, the researchers write that the .” ..climate effects of elevated CO₂ will remain irreversible for at least 1,000 years unless CO₂ can be sequestered from the atmosphere.”

Trees are considered an ideal system for carbon capture, but reforestation competes directly with agriculture for arable land. In contrast, arid lands, which constitute approximately one-third of terrestrial surfaces, are not utilized for agriculture.

Currently, arid ecosystems support very little plant life, with the lack of water being the biggest limiting factor. However, some plants have adapted to arid life by evolving different mechanisms for coping with the lack of water and extreme temperatures. Some arid-adapted plants have special root systems for reaching deep into the soil to tap hidden water sources while others use different forms of photosynthesis that allow them to minimize water loss during the hottest parts of the day. Yet others, so-called “oxalogenic” plants, produce large amounts of oxalates that they can convert into water during times of drought. Some of the carbon from these oxalates is deposited below-ground as carbon deposits when oxalogenic plants are grown under certain conditions, and it’s this mechanism that the authors want to exploit for carbon sequestration.

“Overall, in this form of carbon sequestration, one out of every sixteen photosynthetically fixed carbon atoms might be sequestered into carbonates,” the authors write.

Amplifying this naturally occurring biogeochemical process in arid lands could convert these currently unproductive and degraded ecosystems into carbon sinks with healthier soil and plants, the authors say. They suggest beginning with “fertility islands” — small pockets of re-greened habitat from which the plants and microbes can spread to form a carpet of vegetation.

The authors estimate that these approaches could result in significant increases in both plant and soil carbon sequestration in less than ten years. However, they note that the success and speed of the proposed method will depend on the rate of plant growth (which tends to be slow under water-scarce conditions) and .” ..will also depend on the financial and political means to apply this technology in various arid countries.”

This work was supported by grants from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Lang and colleagues found that the presence of an enzyme isoform called α-tryptase, which is encoded by the TPSAB1 gene, correlates with increased prevalence of anaphylaxis or severe reaction to food as compared to subjects without any α-tryptase.

“Determining whether or not a patient with food allergies has α-tryptase can easily be done in clinical practice using a commercially available test to perform genetic sequencing from cheek swabs,” said lead author Abigail Lang, MD, MSc, attending physician and researcher at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “If the biomarker is detected, this may help us understand that the child is at a higher risk for a severe reaction or anaphylaxis from their food allergy and should use their epinephrine auto-injector if exposed to the allergen. Our findings also open the door to developing an entirely new treatment strategy for food allergies that would target or block α-tryptase. This is an exciting first step and more research is needed.”

Tryptase is found mainly in mast cells, which are white blood cells that are part of the immune system. Mast cells become activated during allergic reactions. Increased TPSAB1 copy number which leads to increased α-tryptase is already known to be associated with severe reactions in adults with Hymenoptera venom allergy (or anaphylaxis following a bee sting).

Dr. Lang’s study included 119 participants who underwent TPSAB1 genotyping, 82 from an observational food allergy cohort at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and 37 from a cohort of children who reacted to peanut oral food challenge at Lurie Children’s.

“We need to validate our preliminary findings in a much larger study, but these initial results are promising,” says Dr. Lang. “We also still need a better understanding of why and how α-tryptase makes food allergy reactions more severe in order to pursue this avenue for potential treatment.”

Rajesh Kumar, MD, MSc, from Lurie Children’s is the co-senior author on the study. Dr. Kumar is the Interim Division Head of Allergy and Immunology and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

This work was supported in part by the Midwest Allergy Research Institute (MARI) Food Allergy Pilot Research Award and NIAID-sponsored T32 grant AI083216. This project was funded in part with federal funds from the Division of Intramural Research of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. This project has also been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. 75N91019D00024.

In doing so, the method defines the scope of what scientists refer to as the northern Martian paleo-ocean in more detail.

The work was published in July in the journal Icarus, which is affiliated with the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

The research was led by Jaroslav Klokočník, professor emeritus at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Gunther Kletetschka, associate research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is among the three co-authors. Kletetschka is also affiliated with Charles University in the Czech Republic.

“A lot of people are excited about water on Mars because there may be life forms that once existed on Mars or maybe exist today in some bacterial form,” Kletetschka said. “We can use this gravity approach to look for water on Mars, because we have done it already on Earth.

“In an area of northern Africa, for example, this gravity approach found a shoreline of a long-ago lake, and its finding was consistent with the archaeological evidence indicating a shoreline of that lake,” he said.

The authors write that analyzing the gravity aspects of Mars to better understand the planet improves upon prior approaches. They note that it can “provide complete information with a better insight of the celestial body, applicable in geology, geophysics, hydrology, glaciology and other disciplines.”

The work by Kletetschka and colleagues differs from the traditional approach of mapping a surface based on gravity anomalies alone.

Gravity anomalies are areas of greater or weaker gravitational force exerted by a planetary body’s surface features. A mountain would exert a greater gravitational force because it has a higher concentration of mass than would be expected on a planet without surface features. Ocean basins and trenches would have less gravitational force.

In their Mars research, the authors used a process developed by Klokočník that analyzes gravity aspects calculated from gravity anomaly measurements. Gravity aspects are mathematical products that characterize the gravity anomalies.

They also used topographic data from the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, which launched in November 1996 and mapped the planet for 4 ½ years.

Klokočník used that approach to confirm earlier research about the existence of extensive paleolakes or paleoriver systems under the Saharan sands on Earth. His 2017 research paper also suggested a part of the Grand Egyptian Sand Sea as another candidate for a paleolake.

The gravity aspects method has also been used in a comparison of Earth’s geographic features to those of the cloud-shrouded Venus. That research is described in a July 2023 paper in the journal Scientific Reports in which Kletetschka is a co-author.