The research, published in Science Advances, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial life because it gives researchers a new clue to look for, said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers.

Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.

“Scientists believe that sometime between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years ago there was a tipping point, something that kickstarted the change from prebiotic chemistry — molecules before life — to living, biological systems,” Nanda said. “We believe the change was sparked by a few small precursor proteins that performed key steps in an ancient metabolic reaction. And we think we’ve found one of these ‘pioneer peptides’.”

The scientists conducting the study are part of a Rutgers-led team called Evolution of Nanomachines in Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors (ENIGMA), which is part of the Astrobiology program at NASA. The researchers are seeking to understand how proteins evolved to become the predominant catalyst of life on Earth.

When scouring the universe with telescopes and probes for signs of past, present or emerging life, NASA scientists look for specific “biosignatures” known to be harbingers of life. Peptides like nickelback could become the latest biosignature employed by NASA to detect planets on the verge of producing life, Nanda said.

An original instigating chemical, the researchers reasoned, would need to be simple enough to be able to assemble spontaneously in a prebiotic soup. But it would have to be sufficiently chemically active to possess the potential to take energy from the environment to drive a biochemical process.

To do so, the researchers adopted a “reductionist” approach: They started by examining existing contemporary proteins known to be associated with metabolic processes. Knowing the proteins were too complex to have emerged early on, they pared them down to their basic structure.

After sequences of experiments, researchers concluded the best candidate was Nickelback. The peptide is made of 13 amino acids and binds two nickel ions.

Nickel, they reasoned, was an abundant metal in early oceans. When bound to the peptide, the nickel atoms become potent catalysts, attracting additional protons and electrons and producing hydrogen gas. Hydrogen, the researchers reasoned, was also more abundant on early Earth and would have been a critical source of energy to power metabolism.

“This is important because, while there are many theories about the origins of life, there are very few actual laboratory tests of these ideas,” Nanda said. “This work shows that, not only are simple protein metabolic enzymes possible, but that they are very stable and very active — making them a plausible starting point for life.”

To overcome the resolution limitation, various super-resolution microscopy techniques based on diverse principles have been proposed. Yet these techniques commonly acquire super-resolution at the expense of reduced imaging speed, so achieving high-speed super-resolution imaging that can detect fast dynamics with fine structures has remained a great challenge.

Recently, a research team from East China Normal University, Shenzhen University, and Peking University resolved the contradiction between the spatial resolution and imaging speed. As reported in Advanced Photonics, they achieved high-speed super-resolution by developing an effective technique termed temporal compressive super-resolution microscopy (TCSRM). TCSRM merges enhanced temporal compressive microscopy with deep-learning-based super-resolution image reconstruction. Enhanced temporal compressive microscopy improves the imaging speed by reconstructing multiple images from one compressed image, and the deep-learning-based image reconstruction achieves the super-resolution effect without reduction in imaging speed. Their iterative image reconstruction algorithm contains motion estimation, merging estimation, scene correction, and super-resolution processing to extract the super-resolution image sequence from compressed and reference measurements.

Their studies verified the high-speed super-resolution imaging ability of TCSRM in theory and experiment. To demonstrate the imaging capability of TCSRM, they imaged flowing fluorescent beads in a microchannel, achieving a remarkable frame rate of 1200 frames per second and spatial resolution of 100 nm.

According to corresponding author Shian Zhang, Professor and Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy at East China Normal University, “This work provides a powerful tool for the observation of high-speed dynamics of fine structures, especially in hydromechanics and biomedical fields, such as microflow velocity measurement, organelle interactions, intracellular transports and neural dynamics.” Zhang adds, “The framework of TCSRM can also offer guidance for achieving higher imaging speed and spatial resolution in holography, coherent diffraction imaging, and fringe projection profilometry.”

A USC-led team of scientists has made a drool-worthy discovery about how tendons and salivary glands develop in the jaw. Their results are published in a new study in Developmental Cell.

In order for our jaws to function, they require not only a precisely patterned skeleton, but also tendons that connect the jaw skeleton to muscles and salivary glands that lubricate the mouth. Remarkably, the skeleton, tendons, and glands all derive from the same population of stem cells, which arise from a cell population known as neural crest. How these neural crest-derived cells know to make the right type of cell in the right location has remained a mystery.

To begin answering this question, first author Hung-Jhen (Olivia) Chen from the lab of corresponding author Gage Crump, professor and vice-chair of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and colleagues examined all the genes that were active in the developing face of zebrafish. They then honed in on one particular gene, Nr5a2, that was active in a region of the face that makes tendons and glands, but not skeleton.

To understand the role of Nr5a2, the scientists created zebrafish lacking this gene. These mutant zebrafish generated excess cartilage and were missing tendons in their jaws.

The scientists also developed mice lacking this gene specifically in their neural crest cells. These mice not only had skeletal and tendon defects in their jaws, but also failed to develop salivary glands. Similar defects were also seen in the middle ear, reflecting a dramatic evolutionary transition in which part of the fish jaw became the mammalian middle ear.

To clarify how this was happening, the scientists examined the structure of the genome in zebrafish lacking Nr5a2. They found that Nr5a2 was essential for opening up regions of the genome that enable neural crest cells to maintain their stem cell features, while at the same time priming these cells to form tendons and salivary glands later in jaw development.

“Discovery of a very specific role of Nr5a2 in jaw patterning was unexpected, as this gene had previously been shown to be essential for maintaining embryonic stem cells,” said Crump. “Our work shows how a key stem cell factor can be used in a different way later in development to control how diverse cell types are made.”

Additional co-authors include Lindsey Barske, who completed her postdoctoral training at USC and is now a faculty member at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Jared Talbot from the University of Maine; Olivia Dinwoodie and Abigail Tucker from King’s College London; Ryan Roberts, Christian Jimenez, and Amy Merrill from USC; and D’Juan Farmer who completed his postdoctoral training at USC and is now a faculty member at UCLA.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Institute of Dental Craniofacial Research (grants R21DE029656 and R35DE027550), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Hannah H. Gray Fellows Program, and the King’s College London Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership.

The new device not only improves symptoms of breathlessness and quality of life for people with COPD, it also offers benefits for people dealing with stress and anxiety and those practicing mindfulness, meditation or yoga.

The research was published in the journal Respiratory Care.

The device, called PEP Buddy, was created by Muhammad Ahsan Zafar, MD, and Ralph Panos, MD. Zafar is an associate professor in the Department of Pulmonary Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the UC College of Medicine while Panos is a professor emeritus in pulmonary and critical care at the UC College of Medicine and is the director of national tele-ICU program for the U.S. Veterans Affairs.

“Dr. Panos and I both see patients with COPD, and it’s a huge population,” says Zafar. “Their life really changes when they have COPD. They were active individuals but now they’re debilitated and limited, so we wanted to come up with something easy that helps improve their life.”

For people with COPD, it takes longer to get inhaled air out of their lungs with each breath due to tighter air tubes. Therefore, when they breathe fast, like during physical activities, air is retained in the lungs. This air stacking or “dynamic hyperinflation” is the main reason for breathlessness and also leads to lower oxygen levels. As the breathing gets difficult during physical activity, people become less and less active and more isolated.

Panos and Zafar developed a hands-free device that is the size of a whistle. Zafar said he looked at positive-expiratory pressure (PEP) breathing devices on the market and they were handheld, big and bulky, so they tried to come up with something that is very simple, lightweight and easy to use. The device is designed to be worn around the neck with a lanyard for day-to-day use and inserted into the mouth when needed, during or after exertion.

In the study, they examined people with COPD who were short of breath and gave them two tasks. “We conducted a six-minute walk test with and without the device,” says Zafar. “They were given the device to take home and use in their daily routines. In two weeks, there was a follow-up to see how PEP Buddy use impacted their shortness of breath and quality-of-life scores.”

The study found 72% of the participants had a significant impact in reducing their shortness of breath and improving their quality of life. Among those who would drop their oxygen levels during walking, 36% of them did not drop oxygen levels when using PEP Buddy. This is the first mechanical device to show such an impact on oxygen levels in people with COPD.

Maja Flannery, a PEP Buddy user with chronic lung disease and airflow obstruction, says the device has changed her day-to-day living.

“I am so happy that I was lucky enough to be part of the study and able to use this great little device to breathe better,” Flannery says. “I use it when I get up in the morning. It helps with the air requirement when changing position from laying down to standing and exercises my lungs to get them more prepared for the day. I find it helpful in getting the trapped air out as I am active, so I can play longer points during tennis, and also recover between points more quickly. My friends at tennis laugh that it is my ‘magic whistle.'”

UC’s Zafar says the next step in this research is to conduct a long-term study to see the impact on the use of rescue inhalers, emergency department visits and long-term symptoms and functional capacity in people with COPD. PEP Buddy may also be a promising addition to pulmonary rehabilitation programs for faster improvement and sustaining better outcomes. They are also exploring other uses of PEP Buddy in health care.

“As a physician I feel gratified that we are providing something new that can actually improve people’s lives,” says Zafar. “That’s where my passion is. These people are really debilitated with not many tools in their hand to improve their symptoms right now. PEP Buddy will be one such tool.”

Color vision in insects differs from our own. Special genes allow many insects to see ultraviolet (UV) light as well as blue and green. New research led by Camilla Sharkey, a postdoctoral associate at the Wardill Lab in the College of Biological Sciences, investigated the complex evolutionary history of jewel beetles’ vision. The research team included Jorge Blanco, formerly with the Wardill Lab and now at University of Maryland, Nathan Lord of Louisiana State University, and Trevor Wardill, assistant professor at CBS.

Previous research by Dr. Sharkey has shown that before the evolution of modern beetles, their ancestors lost the ability to see blue light around 300 million years ago. This may have been the result of the beetle ancestor becoming nocturnal or living in low-light conditions. Later, as beetles diversified, they evolved duplicates of the ancestral genes that allow them to see the UV and green spectrum. These duplicate genes could further evolve, making new parts of the color spectrum visible and allowing more complicated and diverse color signals to be seen.

Researchers wanted to know if the duplicate genes have evolved, allowing beetles to see colors that their ancestors could not. Since jewel beetles are difficult to keep in a lab, they copied the genes and inserted them into fruit flies, replacing their normal visual genes. Using electrophysiology, they tested the color sensitivity each gene produced in the flies. They then looked for genetic changes that might underlie the shifts in color sensitivity using 3D protein modeling. The study found that:

• Jewel beetles have evolved additional blue and orange sensitivity by duplicating and evolving their UV and green visual genes.
• This enables complex tetra-chromatic color sensitivity to UV, blue, green and orange wavelengths of light, similar to the color sensitivity of colorful birds.
• Newly evolved genetic changes related to color detection were not found to shift sensitivities as predicted when visual genes were modified and retested.

All jewel beetle species studied so far have the four differing gene types that were isolated in the research, suggesting that all jewel beetles probably have complex color sensitivity. According to Sharkey, “the next step is to determine if specific types of color vision can be predicted from genes and how color vision is used by insects to better manage pest and pollinator insects, thus improving crop production.” Researchers also hope to understand the molecular basis of jewel beetle color sensitivity, which would provide a basis for predicting insect color sensitivity from the gene sequence.

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and The University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences.

Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disease that causes vision loss and blindness due to a damaged optic nerve. More than 200,000 people are affected by glaucoma in the United States each year. Unfortunately, there is currently no treatment. In a newly published paper in Communications Biology, researchers found neurons use mitochondria for a steady source of energy, and restoring mitochondrial homeostasis in the diseased neurons can protect the optic nerve cells from being damaged.

“Age-related neurodegenerative disease, which includes glaucoma, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is the biggest global health problem,” said Arupratan Das, PhD, assistant professor of ophthalmology and principal investigator of the study. “The fundamental mechanisms that we discovered can be used to protect neurons in glaucoma and be tested for the other diseases. We have identified a critical step of complex mitochondrial homeostasis process, which rejuvenates the dying neuron, similar to giving a lifeline to a dying person.”

The research team, led by Michelle Surma and Kavitha Anbarasu from the Department of Ophthalmology, used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from patients with and without glaucoma as well as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) engineered human embryonic stem cells with glaucoma mutation. Using stem cell differentiated retinal ganglion cells (hRGCs) of the optic nerve, electron microscopy and metabolic analysis, researchers identified glaucomatous retinal ganglion cells suffer mitochondrial deficiency with more metabolic burden on each mitochondrion. This leads to mitochondrial damage and degeneration. Mitochondria are the tube like structures in cells which produce adenosine triphosphate, cell’s energy source.

However, the process could be reversed by enhancing mitochondrial biogenesis by a pharmacological agent. The team showed retinal ganglion cells are highly efficient in degrading bad mitochondria, but at the same time producing more to maintain homeostasis.

“Finding that retinal ganglion cells with glaucoma produce more adenosine triphosphate even with less mitochondria was astonishing,” Das said. “However, when triggered to produce more mitochondria, the adenosine triphosphate production load was distributed among more mitochondrion which restored the organelle physiology. It is similar to a situation where a heavy stone is carried by fewer people versus a greater number of people — each person will have less pain and injury, just like each mitochondrion will have less difficulty and damage.”

In the future, Das would like to test if these mechanisms protect the optic nerve in animal models under injury before testing in humans to hopefully lead to new clinical interventions.

Just as teams of elite athletes train alongside staffs of coaches, ensembles of neurons in the brain’s motor cortex depend on nearby astrocytes to help them learn to encode when and how to move, and the optimal timing and trajectory of a motion, the study shows. Describing a series of experiments in mice, the new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience reveals two specific ways that astrocytes directly impact motor learning, maintaining an optimal molecular balance in which the neuronal ensembles can properly refine movement performance.

“This finding is part of a body of work from our lab and other labs that elevate the importance of astrocytes to neuronal encoding and hence to behavior,” said senior author Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This shows that while the population coding of behaviors is a neuronal function, we need to include astrocytes as partners with them.”

Picower Institute Postdoc Jennifer Shih and former Sur Lab postdocs Chloe Delepine and Keji Li are the paper’s co-lead authors.

“This research highlights the complexity of astrocytes and the importance of astrocyte-neuron interactions in fine-tuning brain function by providing concrete evidence of these mechanisms in the motor cortex,” Delepine said.

Messing with motor mastery

The team gave their mice a simple motor task to master. When cued with a tone, the mice had to reach for and push down a lever within five seconds. The rodents showed they could learn the task over a few days and master it within a couple of weeks. They not only performed the task more accurately, but also their reactions quickened and the trajectory of their reaching and pushing became smoother and more uniform.

In some of the mice, however, the team employed precision molecular interventions to disrupt two specific functions of astrocytes in the motor cortex. In some mice, they disrupted the astrocytes’ ability to soak up the neurotransmitter glutamate, a chemical that excites neural activity when it is received at connections called synapses. In other mice they hyperactivated the astrocytes’ calcium signals, which affected how they function. In both ways, the interventions disrupted the normal process by which neurons would form or change their connections with each other, a process called “plasticity” that enables learning.

The interventions each affected the performance of the mice. The first one (a knockdown of the glutamate transporter GLT1) didn’t affect whether the mice pushed the lever or how quickly they did so. Instead it disrupted the smoothness of the motion. Mice with GLT1 disrupted remained erratic and shaky, as if unable to refine their technique. Mice subjected to the second intervention (activation of Gq signaling) showed deficits not only in the smoothness of their motion trajectory but also in their understanding of when to push the lever and their quickness in doing so.

The team dug deeper into how these deficits emerged. Using a two-photon microscope they tracked neural activity in the motor cortex in unaltered mice and mice treated with each intervention. Compared to what they saw in normal mice, the mice with GLT1 disrupted showed less correlated activity among neurons. Mice with Gq activation showed excessive correlated activity compared to the normal mice.

“The data suggest that an optimal level of neuronal correlation is required for the emergence of functional neuronal ensembles that drive task performance,” the authors wrote. “Meaningful correlations that carry information are what drive motor learning rather than the absolute magnitude of potentially non-specific correlations.”

The team dug even deeper still. They carefully isolated astrocytes from the motor cortex of mice, including some who were untrained in the motor task as well as ones who were trained, including mice who were unaltered and mice who underwent each intervention. In all these samples of purified astrocytes, they then sequenced RNA to assess how they differed in their expression of genes. They found that in trained vs. untrained mice, astrocytes exhibited greater expression of genes related to GLT1. In mice where they intervened they saw lowered expression. That evidence further suggested that the glutamate transporter process is indeed fundamental to training in motor tasks.

“Here we show that astrocytes have an important role in enabling neurons to encode information properly, both the learning and the execution of a movement for example,” Sur said.

Pierre Gaudeaux is a co-author of the paper. The research was funded by The National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation, and The JPB Foundation.

Leukaemia (blood cancer) is a group of malignant and aggressive diseases of the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. Very intensive chemotherapy and in some cases a bone marrow transplant are the only cure. Like all cancers, leukaemia is caused by changes in the DNA, the heredity material present in human cells in the form of 46 chromosomes. In many forms of leukaemia, large parts of these chromosomes are altered. People with Down syndrome, who have three copies of chromosome 21 (trisomy 21) are highly vulnerable: the risk of developing aggressive Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) in the first four years of their life is more than 100 times greater for children with Down syndrome. Down syndrome is the most common congenital genetic disorder, affecting about one in 700 newborn babies.

RUNX1 transcription factor is responsible

The research group led by Professor Jan-Henning Klusmann, Director of the Department of Paediatric and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Frankfurt, has now discovered how the additional chromosome 21 can promote AML. With the help of genetic scissors (CRISPR-Cas9), they examined each of the 218 genes on chromosome 21 for its carcinogenic effect. It emerged that the RUNX1 gene is responsible for the chromosome’s specific carcinogenic properties. In further analyses, the researchers were able to corroborate that only one particular variant — or isoform — of the gene promotes the development of leukaemia. Klusmann explains: “Other RUNX1 isoforms were even able to prevent the cells from degenerating. This explains why RUNX1 has so far not stood out — in several decades of extensive cancer research.”

The RUNX1 gene encodes a “transcription factor” — a protein responsible for regulating the activity of other genes. RUNX1 regulates many processes, including embryonic development and early and late haematopoiesis, or blood formation. Disruption of this important regulator is therefore a key event in the development of AML. “Thanks to our research results, we now have a better understanding of what happens in leukemogenesis,” explains Klusmann, an expert in paediatric cancer. “The study underlines how important it is to examine all gene variants in carcinogenesis. In many cases, certain mutations in cancer cells alter how these variants form,” he says.

Development of more sophisticated therapeutic approaches

These insights are important for a better understanding of the complex mechanisms of carcinogenesis, as Klusmann explains: “In this way, we have laid the groundwork for developing more sophisticated therapeutic approaches. Through our biochemical analyses, we now know exactly how the gene variant alters the blood cells. From there, we were able to use specific substances that block the disease mechanism.” The intention now is to further explore the effect of these substances for use in medical care. Klusmann: “On the basis of our expertise, we now want to develop therapies to correct this malfunction. Applying them in clinical practice will certainly take a few more years, but hopefully they will lead in the future to sparing our young patients from intensive chemotherapy.”