Plant diversity in nature is generally highest in tropical regions around the equator, with decreasing diversity closer to the poles. FSU Department of Geography Assistant Professor Xiao Feng and Purdue University Assistant Professor Daniel Park showed that the plant specimens housed in herbaria in Europe and North America are more comprehensive and diverse than the collections housed in the countries with more natural plant diversity.

By comparing modern finds with collection specimens, researchers can examine how a species has changed over time.

“People can’t travel back in time to observe what plants look like 100 years ago, but herbaria collections give us a way to examine the past,” Feng said. “If you’re a researcher from Brazil, for example, and you want to study what native plants were like a century ago, you may have to travel to another country to examine certain species.”

The researchers analyzed more than 85 million records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and surveyed herbaria collections from around the world to document the origins and destinations of specimens collected between 1600 and 2021.

Their data suggest that between 1600 to 1945, Europe and North America were responsible for the majority of intercontinental collecting activities, amassing large amounts of specimens from Africa, Asia and South America.

The trend mostly persisted in the era after World War II, when decolonization efforts increased and more countries in Africa and Asia gained autonomy. Despite the growth of collections in South America, Oceania and Asia, the discrepancy of biodiversity collections persists. The international collections by Europe and North America continued to expand, and today they remain larger than those on other continents.

The discrepancy between where plant diversity exists in nature and where it is preserved and catalogued by scientists is a legacy of colonialism, the researchers said. The movement of plant specimens from the biodiverse tropics to temperate regions runs counter to the natural gradient of biodiversity, in which biodiversity increases as we move from polar to equatorial regions.

“Biodiversity is probably best studied where it occurs, and that’s not what has happened historically,” Park said. “A lot of the science that happens with these specimens is very globally relevant; however, as we note in our paper, the means of contributing to this science is not distributed globally, at least not yet.”

Some efforts are underway to address the disparities in access. One way collections have become more accessible is through digitization — gathering data and images from specimens for storage and sharing in a digital format. Regional, national and international groups are improving databases and increasing the amount of digitized specimens shared online. One example is iDigBio, a project organized by FSU, University of Florida and other institutions.

But digitization is still in its infancy, and there are many cases where access to physical specimens is necessary for the work researchers want to complete. Investments in infrastructure and training in previously colonized countries would also help to address disparities.

Park said acknowledging the role Indigenous people played in the collection and study of specimens and improving the information herbaria have about their plants is a good starting place. In many cases, herbaria don’t have a full accounting of their collections. Understanding exactly how many items exist and their origin is key, he said.

This paper was an effort to better understand the scope of the issue and to involve researchers from places where herbaria collections are lacking. Feng and Park led a team of more than 50 authors from 39 countries for this work.

The research team interviewed 320 households about their use and the benefits of the main types of land. These include virgin forests, fragments of forest, vanilla agroforestry systems, woody fallow land, herbaceous fallow land and rice fields. The interviews show that virgin forests and forest fragments are important for water regulation, for example. Fallow land and vanilla agroforestry systems provide food, medicine and fodder. People collect the most plants from woody fallow areas, which are then used for firewood and charcoal, for instance. In contrast, they use plants from forest fragments for building and weaving. Fallow land — contrary to the widespread belief that it is of little value — makes a major contribution to rural households in Madagascar in terms of health, food and energy supply, as well as animal feed and as a source of building materials.

The results have important findings for nature conservation: “It is important not just to consider the conservation of the impressive diversity of species on Madagascar, but also the benefits of this species richness for the local population,” says first author Dr Estelle Raveloaritiana, whose PhD research was part of this project. Dr Annemarie Wurz, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Marburg, and Professor Teja Tscharntke, at Göttingen University’s Agroecology Group, add: “Nature conservation should take into account the interests of the local population, at the same time as biodiversity-friendly, diverse land management, when designing conservation and development strategies.”

The findings led by Dr Roberto Feuda, from the Neurogenetic group in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology and other colleagues from the University of Leicester and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), have now been published in Nature Communications.

Dr Feuda said: “We’ve known for a long time that monoamines like serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline act as neuromodulators in the nervous system, playing a role in complex behaviour and functions like learning and memory, as well as processes such as sleep and feeding.

“However, less certain was the origin of the genes required for the production, detection, and degradation of these monoamines. Using the computational methods, we reconstructed the evolutionary history of these genes and show that most of the genes involved in monoamine production, modulation, and reception originated in the bilaterian stem group.

“This finding has profound implications on the evolutionary origin of complex behaviours such as those modulated by monoamines we observe in humans and other animals.”

The authors suggest that this new way to modulate neuronal circuits might have played a role in the Cambrian Explosion — known as the Big Bang — which gave rise to the largest diversification of life for most major animal groups alive today by providing flexibility of the neural circuits to facilitate the interaction with the environment.

Dr Feuda added: “This discovery will open new important research avenues that will clarify the origin of complex behaviours and if the same neurons modulate reward, addiction, aggression, feeding, and sleep.”

Gravitational lensing is a dramatic example of Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action. A celestial body such as a galaxy cluster is sufficiently massive to distort spacetime, which causes the path of light around the object to be visibly bent as if by a vast lens. Gravitational lensing can also magnify distant objects, allowing astronomers to observe objects that would otherwise be too faint and too far away to be detected.

It can also distort the images of background galaxies, turning them into streaks of light. The first hints of gravitational lensing are already visible in this image as bright arcs which mingle with the throng of galaxies in eMACS J1353.7+4329.

The data in this image are drawn from an observing project called Monsters in the Making, which used two of Hubble’s instruments to observe five exceptional galaxy clusters at multiple wavelengths. These multi-wavelength observations were made possible by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The astronomers behind these observations hope to lay the groundwork for future studies of vast gravitational lenses with next-generation telescopes such as the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.

In research published today in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers led by UNSW Sydney and the affiliated Black Dog Institute found that more than one in five participants achieved total remission from their symptoms after a month of bi-weekly injections, while a third had their symptoms improve by at least 50 per cent. The study was a collaboration between six academic clinical mood disorder units in Australia and one in New Zealand and was funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

“For people with treatment-resistant depression — so those who have not benefitted from different modes of talk-therapy, commonly prescribed antidepressants, or electroconvulsive therapy — 20 per cent remission is actually quite good,” lead researcher Professor Colleen Loo says.

“We found that in this trial, ketamine was clearly better than the placebo — with 20 per cent reporting they no longer had clinical depression compared with only 2 per cent in the placebo group. This is a huge and very obvious difference and brings definitive evidence to the field which only had past smaller trials that compared ketamine with placebo.”

How the trial worked

The researchers recruited 179 people with treatment-resistant depression. All were given an injection of either a generic form of ketamine that is already widely available in Australia as a drug for anaesthesia and sedation — or placebo. Participants received two injections a week in a clinic where they were monitored for around two hours while acute dissociative and sedative effects wore off — usually within the first hour. The treatment ran for a month and participants were asked to assess their mood at the end of the trial and one month later.

As a double-blind trial, neither participants nor researchers administering the drug were aware which patients received generic ketamine or placebo, to ensure psychological biases were minimised. Importantly, a placebo was chosen that also causes sedation, to improve treatment masking. Midazolam is a sedative normally administered before a general anaesthetic, while in many previous studies the placebo was saline.

“Because there are no subjective effects from the saline, in previous studies it became obvious which people were receiving the ketamine and which people received placebo,” Prof. Loo says.

“In using midazolam — which is not a treatment for depression, but does make you feel a bit woozy and out of it — you have much less chance of knowing whether you have received ketamine, which has similar acute effects.”

Other features of the recent trial that set it apart from past studies included accepting people into the trial who had previously received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

“People are recommended ECT treatment for their depression when all other treatments have been ineffective,” Prof. Loo says.

“Most studies exclude people who have had ECT because it is very hard for a new treatment to work where ECT has not.”

Another difference about this trial was that the drug was delivered subcutaneously (injected into the skin) rather than by drip, thus greatly reducing time and medical complexity. The study is also the largest in the world to date that compares generic ketamine with placebo in treating severe depression.

Much more affordable

Apart from the positive results, one of the standout benefits of using generic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression is that it is much cheaper than the patented S-ketamine nasal spray currently in use in Australia. Where S-ketamine costs about $800 per dose, the generic ketamine is a mere fraction of that, costing as little as $5, depending on the supplier and whether the hospital buys it wholesale. On top of the cost for the drug, patients need to pay for the medical care they receive to ensure their experience is safe — which at Black Dog Institute clinics, comes to $350 per session.

“With the S-ketamine nasal spray, you are out of pocket by about $1200 for every treatment by the time you pay for the drug and the procedure, whereas for generic ketamine, you’re paying around $300-350 for the treatment including the drug cost,” Prof. Loo says.

She adds that for both S-ketamine and generic ketamine treatments, the positive effects often wear off after a few days to weeks, so ongoing treatment may be required, depending on someone’s clinical situation. But the prohibitive costs of the drug and procedure make this an unsustainable proposition for most Australians.

“This is why we’re applying for a Medicare item number to fund this treatment now, because it’s such a powerful treatment.

“And if you consider that many of these people might spend many months in hospital, or be unable to work and are often quite suicidal, it’s quite cost effective when you see how incredibly quickly and powerfully it works. We’ve seen people go back to work, or study, or leave hospital because of this treatment in a matter of weeks.”

The researchers will next be looking at larger trials of generic ketamine over longer periods, and refining the safety monitoring of treatment.

Participating trial sites

• UNSW / Black Dog Institute
• Royal Prince Alfred Hospital / University of Sydney
• NeuroCentrix Research Institute
• Royal Adelaide Hospital / University of Adelaide
• Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre / Monash University
• University of Otago
• Gold Coast University Hospital

Institutions of non-site collaborators

• Deakin University
• University of Newcastle
• The George Institute for Global Health
• University of Western Australia