Now a follow-up study by the same group, published in Science Translational Medicine, has found that the 2-dose vaccines still provide protection against lung disease in rhesus macaques one year after they had been vaccinated as infants.

The co-senior authors of the paper are Kristina De Paris, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at the UNC School of Medicine, Sallie Permar, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Koen K.A. Van Rompay, DVM, PhD, leader of the Infectious Disease Unit at the California National Primate Research at the University of California, Davis. Co-first authors are Emma C. Milligan at the Children’s Research Institute in the UNC School of Medicine and Katherine Olstad at the California National Primate Research Center.

To evaluate SARS-CoV-2 infant vaccination, the researchers immunized two groups of eight infant rhesus macaques at the California National Primate Research Center at 2 months of age and again four weeks later. Each animal received one of two vaccine types: a preclinical version of the Moderna mRNA vaccine or a vaccine combining a protein developed by the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health with a potent adjuvant formulation. Consisting of 3M’s molecular adjuvant 3M-052 formulated in a squalene emulsion by the Access to Advanced Health Institute (AAHI), the adjuvant formulation stimulates immune responses by engaging receptors on immune cells.

“Following up on our SARS-CoV-2 infant rhesus macaque study, we gave the animals a high-dose challenge with a SARS-CoV-2 variant one year later to assess durability of vaccine-induced immune responses and their efficacy,” Dr. De Paris said. “We found that both vaccines protected against lung disease, despite the fact that the challenge SARS-CoV-2 variants acquired numerous mutations in their spike protein that differed from the vaccine immunogen.”

Overall, the adjuvanted protein vaccine candidate maintained higher levels of neutralizing antibodies and provided superior protection compared to the mRNA vaccine, Dr. De Paris said. These data imply that these vaccines are safe and highly effective when given to young infant macaques. Furthermore, the results inform the optimization and development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in a way that may reduce the need for frequent boosters and protect special populations that don’t have fully developed immune systems, such as young children.

“With COVID-19, young infants are one of the most vulnerable pediatric populations. This fall, we are seeing a sharp rise in hospitalizations due to respiratory virus disease in infants as the result of a confluence of SARS-CoV-2, flu, and RSV circulation,” said Dr. Permar, who is also the Nancy C. Paduano Professor in Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “We should take every opportunity to provide safe and effective vaccine immunity to our youngest patients, including considering COVID-19 vaccination earlier than the currently recommended 6 months of age.”

“This study emphasizes the need to get human infants immunized against SARS-CoV-2 as much as possible, as the benefits are clear and long-lasting. It also highlights the value of animal models in infectious disease research,” Dr. Van Rompay said. “The lessons we learned and the resources and tools that were developed in the current study will be very valuable for future pandemic preparedness, to more effectively combat outbreaks with novel coronaviruses or other respiratory viruses in pediatric populations.”

This research was funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health (P01AI117915-06S1), (U54 CA260543), (P510D11107), (UM1 AI068618-15: HVTN/HPTN, CoVPN), (P30AI050410: UNC Center for AIDS Research), and (P30 CA016086: UNC-LCCC Flow Cytometry Core Facility).

Other authors are Caitlin A. Williams, Michael Mallory, Patricia Cano, Kaitlyn A. Cross, Jennifer E. Munt, Carolina Garrido, Lisa Lindesmith, Jennifer Watanabe, Jodie L. Usachenko, Lincoln Hopkins, Ramya Immareddy, Yashavanth Shaan Lakshmanappa, Sonny R. Elizaldi, Jamin W. Roh, Rebecca L. Sammak, JoAnn L. Yee, Savannah Herbek, Trover Scobey, Dieter Miehlke, Genevieve Fouda, Guido Ferrari, Hongmei Gao, Xiaoying Shen, Pamela A. Kozlowski, David Montefiori, Michael Hudgens, Darin K. Edwards, Andrea Carfi, Kizzmekia S. Corbett, Barney S. Graham, Christopher B. Fox, Mark Tomai, Smita S. Iyer, Ralph Baric, Rachel Reader, and Dirk P. Dittmer.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the coronavirus has been constantly changing. The biggest leap seen in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 to date was observed by researchers a year ago, when a variant was discovered that differed from the genome of the original virus by more than 50 mutations. First detected in a patient in South Africa in mid-November 2021, the variant later named Omicron BA.1 spread to 87 countries around the world within just a few weeks. By the end of December, it had replaced the previously dominant Delta variant worldwide.

Since then, speculations about the origin of this highly transmissible variant have centered around two main theories: Either the coronavirus jumped from a human to an animal where it evolved before infecting a human again as Omicron, or the virus survived in a person with a compromised immune system for a longer period of time and that’s where the mutations occurred. A new analysis of COVID-19 samples collected in Africa before the first detection of Omicron now casts doubt on both these hypotheses.

The analysis was carried out by an international research team led by Prof. Jan Felix Drexler, a scientist at the Institute of Virology at Charité and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF). Other key partners in the European-African network included Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the Laboratory of Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (LFHB) in Benin. The scientists started by developing a special PCR test to specifically detect the Omicron variant BA.1. They then tested more than 13,000 respiratory samples from COVID-19 patients that had been taken in 22 African countries between mid-2021 and early 2022. In doing so, the research team found viruses with Omicron-specific mutations in 25 people from six different countries who contracted COVID-19 in August and September 2021 – two months before the variant was first detected in South Africa.

To learn more about Omicron’s origins, the researchers also decoded, or “sequenced,” the viral genome of some 670 samples. Such sequencing makes it possible to detect new mutations and identify novel viral lineages. The team discovered several viruses that showed varying degrees of similarity to Omicron, but they were not identical. “Our data show that Omicron had different ancestors that interacted with each other and circulated in Africa, sometimes concurrently, for months,” explains Prof. Drexler. “This suggests that the BA.1 Omicron variant evolved gradually, during which time the virus increasingly adapted to existing human immunity.” In addition, the PCR data led the researchers to conclude that although Omicron did not originate solely in South Africa, it first dominated infection rates there before spreading from south to north across the African continent within only a few weeks.

“This means Omicron’s sudden rise cannot be attributed to a jump from the animal kingdom or the emergence in a single immunocompromised person, although these two scenarios may have also played a role in the evolution of the virus,” says Prof. Drexler. “The fact that Omicron caught us by surprise is instead due to the diagnostic blind spot that exists in large parts of Africa, where presumably only a small fraction of SARS-CoV-2 infections are even recorded. Omicron’s gradual evolution was therefore simply overlooked. So it is important that we now significantly strengthen diagnostic surveillance systems on the African continent and in comparable regions of the Global South, while also facilitating global data sharing. Only good data can prevent policymakers from implementing potentially effective containment measures, such as travel restrictions, at the wrong time, which can end up causing more economic and social harm than good.”

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Materials provided by Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, published this month in Frontiers in Psychology, drew from 10 years of data publicly available from Harvard University’s Project Implicit, a repository of information from more than 5 million people.

George Cunningham, professor and chair of the UF Department of Sport Management, and his co-author analyzed responses from people who identified themselves as managers and compared their assessments of racial, gender, disability and sexual orientation biases to those from people in 22 other occupational designations.

“Stereotypes and prejudices harm workplace experiences and advancement opportunities for people from minoritized and subjugated backgrounds,” said Cunningham, who also is director of the Laboratory for Diversity in Sport. “While people undoubtedly experience mistreatment from coworkers and customers, our work shows that managers are also likely to express bias, particularly in implicit forms.”

Cunningham explained that while a great deal of research exists using the Project Implicit data, he had not seen any that compared biases among the different professional categories. Because the web-based test provides occupational codes, he could compare people whose primary role is in management, like a CEO or varying types of mid-management, to people in other employment positions.

The study’s authors learned that claims of racial, gender and disability discrimination were the most frequently filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1997 and 2021. Because sexual orientation hadn’t been a federally protected employment characteristic, they drew data from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which reports that 45% of those who identify as LGBTQ+ have experienced some form of discrimination at work.

“Once we saw that race, gender, disability and sexual orientation-based forms of mistreatment are all prevalent in the U.S. workforce, we determined this warranted examination of managers’ biases in these areas,” Cunningham said.

Implicit bias occurs automatically and unintentionally, but it affects judgements, decision-making and behaviors, Cunningham said. Research has shown that this unintentional discrimination has implications for many aspects of society, including in health care, policing, education and organizational practices.

With explicit bias, individuals are aware of their prejudices and attitudes toward certain groups.

In Cunningham’s study, implicit biases were assessed using the Implicit Association Test, or IAT.

Explicit attitudes were assessed using the Feeling Thermometer, where participants responded to items measuring their attitudes toward different groups.

“With respect to explicit biases, the scores as we calculated them indicated that people working in management occupations had an explicit bias in favor of people without disabilities, men relative to women working outside the home, White people and heterosexual people,” Cunningham said.

For implicit bias scores, the researchers used a previously established benchmark of degrees, including neutral, slight, moderate and strong and found managers held a moderate preference for the groups in the majority. The paper goes on to break down the results by explicit and implicit bias, by different occupations and in relation to each of the four targeted groups of people.

“Of the 176 comparisons, we found statistically significant differences in 58, or about a third of the time,” Cunningham said.

Respondents to the Project Implicit survey who identified as managers had similar levels of bias to those in what researchers called white collar occupations, like medical doctors and those in the business and financial sector. They had less bias than those working in physical labor and blue-collar jobs, like food production, transportation and protective services. Additionally, the managers expressed more bias than people whose job code involved bettering the human condition and protecting the environment, like educators, artists and social scientists, according to the study.

“It’s not that managers are more biased than everybody else or that they are less biased than everybody else, but it’s clustered,” Cunningham said. “Our original question was, do they have biases, do they vary from others with different occupation codes, and will that impact claims that employees make? This tells us, yes, they do, and the type of bias depends not only on the focus but whether it’s implicit or explicit.”

Cunningham said their study also showed there is a disconnect between managers’ explicit and implicit bias ratings, especially when it came to disability. Their responses indicated they explicitly didn’t believe they had biases regarding people with disabilities, while their implicit bias regarding this group was the highest of all the others.

The value in studies like this, Cunningham said, is to build awareness for our implicit biases.

“The more we’re aware of it, the more likely we are to take steps to help lessen the impact,” he said. “Training, equity advisors, checks and balances and other practices should be imbedded in the system — not once-a-year activities.

“The bigger issue, though, is to change the way our society operates,” he said. “Managers can’t do as much about how society functions, but they can do things about how their organizations function.”

That’s one of the surprising findings of a new study by UCLA undergraduates of orb-weaving spiders in Peru.

The study also revealed that when there are more females than males in colonies of orb-weaving spiders, males fight less with each other — and that females fight less in female-dominated colonies than in male-dominated ones, leading to colonies that are somewhat more peaceful. The spiders also showed little hostility to individuals from different colonies, a discovery that has not been previously documented for colonial spiders.

The research was published in the Journal of Arachnology.

“We’re used to thinking of animals like honeybees and elephants living cooperatively,” said the paper’s senior author, Gregory Grether, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “But spiders usually live solitarily, so we were excited to study these colonial spiders and find out how they interact with colony mates as well as with individuals from other colonies.”

Orb-weaving spiders spin webs connected to each other in vast networks anchored to surrounding vegetation. Within the colonies, individuals guard their own webs from intruders and often fight each other over food and mates. They retreat to common areas for protection when threatened, and some species defend common areas.

The four student authors — Catherine Wu, Chaiti Bhagawat, Modan Goldman and Nihal Punjabi — were taking part in a field course Grether led at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in southeastern Peru. Their four-day voyage to reach the field research station included a long and winding bus ride through the Andes and a boat trip down the Madre de Dios River and up one of its tributaries.

Over the course of 18 days, the students studied 34 colonies of a species called Philoponella republicana to learn if the location of the web, the ratio of male to female spiders, or the size of the web or of the spiders themselves affected the animals’ level of aggression. Their work was overseen by Grether as well as Debra Shier, a UCLA adjunct professor, and Roxana Arauco-Aliaga, a social insect and spider researcher who was the Cocha Cashu research coordinator and adjunct director at the time.

They observed spiders cooperating to construct their webs and wrapping prey in silk, although the spiders did not share their food — only one spider ate a given prey item.

The students staged intrusions by placing spiders in different places and relocating spiders from other colonies. Some spiders defended their own orb web against all intruders, but spiders did not cooperate to repel intruders.

When the colonies had more females than males, males fought with other males and females fought with males less than they did in male-dominated groups, resulting in somewhat more peaceful colonies.

However, if colonies had a lot of large and medium-sized females, those females snatched the most prey and fought the most over captured insects, making for somewhat more aggressive colonies.

After returning from the field, the students learned from previous research that group living is exceedingly rare in spiders — seen in fewer than 0.1% of species. Even so, several types of sociality are recognized by arachnologists. Nonterritorial spiders that cooperate in prey capture, web construction and brood care are the most similar to truly social animals, such as ants, honeybees and naked mole rats.

Territorial colonial spiders, which cooperate in web construction but also compete aggressively with other residents of their own colony for food and mates, appear to have evolved multiple times from solitary species, presumably when ecological conditions favored group living. They occupy a position on the sociality continuum that is similar to group-living primates, including humans.

The student researchers have all graduated from UCLA. Wu now works in outdoor education at UCLA Recreation, Bhagawat is pursuing a master’s degree at Ghent University, and Goldman and Punjabi are medical students at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University, respectively.

Grether has been leading groups of UCLA undergraduates to tropical rainforests for field research training since 2001. He plans to return to Cocha Cashu to unveil more of its secrets with a new group of students in January 2023.

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship — tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

The research, published on November 30 in Science Advances, was made possible by advances in geochemical analyses that enabled researchers to determine with high-level certainty that some of the tin originated from a prehistoric mine in Uzbekistan, more than 2,000 miles from Haifa, where the ill-fated ship loaded its cargo.

But how could that be? During this period, the mining regions of Central Asia were occupied by small communities of highlander pastoralists — far from a major industrial center or empire. And the terrain between the two locations — which passes through Iran and Mesopotamia — was rugged, which would have made it extremely difficult to pass tons of heavy metal.

Frachetti and other archaeologists and historians were enlisted to help put the puzzle pieces together. Their findings unveiled a shockingly complex supply chain that involved multiple steps to get the tin from the small mining community to the Mediterranean marketplace.

“It appears these local miners had access to vast international networks and — through overland trade and other forms of connectivity — were able to pass this all-important commodity all the way to the Mediterranean,” Frachetti said.

“It’s quite amazing to learn that a culturally diverse, multiregional and multivector system of trade underpinned Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age.”

Adding to the mystique is the fact that the mining industry appears to have been run by small-scale local communities or free laborers who negotiated this marketplace outside of the control of kings, emperors or other political organizations, Frachetti said.

“To put it into perspective, this would be the trade equivalent of the entire United States sourcing its energy needs from small backyard oil rigs in central Kansas,” he said.

About the research

The idea of using tin isotopes to determine where metal in archaeological artifacts originates dates to the mid-1990s, according to Wayne Powell, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Brooklyn College and a lead author on the study. However, the technologies and methods for analysis were not precise enough to provide clear answers. Only in the last few years have scientists begun using tin isotopes to directly correlate mining sites to assemblages of metal artifacts, he said.

“Over the past couple of decades, scientists have collected information about the isotopic composition of tin ore deposits around the world, their ranges and overlaps, and the natural mechanisms by which isotopic compositions were imparted to cassiterite when it formed,” Powell said. “We remain in the early stages of such study. I expect that in future years, this ore deposit database will become quite robust, like that of Pb isotopes today, and the method will be used routinely.”

Aslihan K. Yener, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and a professor emerita of archaeology at the University of Chicago, was one of the early researchers who conducted lead isotope analyses. In the 1990s, Yener was part of a research team that conducted the first lead isotope analysis of the Uluburun tin. That analysis suggested that the Uluburun tin may have come from two sources — the Kestel Mine in Turkey’s Taurus Mountains and some unspecified location in central Asia.

“But this was shrugged off since the analysis was measuring trace lead and not targeting the origin of the tin,” said Yener, who is a co-author of the present study.

Yener also was the first to discover tin in Turkey in the 1980s. At the time, she said the entire scholarly community was surprised that it existed there, right under their noses, where the earliest tin bronzes occurred.

Some 30 years later, researchers finally have a more definitive answer thanks to the advanced tin isotope analysis techniques: One-third of the tin aboard the Uluburun shipwreck was sourced from the Mušiston mine in Uzbekistan. The remaining two-thirds of the tin derived from the Kestel mine in ancient Anatolia, which is in present-day Turkey.

Findings offer glimpse into life 2,000-plus years ago

By 1500 B.C., bronze was the “high technology” of Eurasia, used for everything from weaponry to luxury items, tools and utensils. Bronze is primarily made from copper and tin. While copper is fairly common and can be found throughout Eurasia, tin is much rarer and only found in specific kinds of geological deposits, Frachetti said.

“Finding tin was a big problem for prehistoric states. And thus, the big question was how these major Bronze Age empires were fueling their vast demand for bronze given the lengths and pains to acquire tin as such a rare commodity. Researchers have tried to explain this for decades,” Frachetti said.

The Uluburun ship yielded the world’s largest Bronze Age collection of raw metals ever found — enough copper and tin to produce 11 metric tons of bronze of the highest quality. Had it not been lost to sea, that metal would have been enough to outfit a force of almost 5,000 Bronze Age soldiers with swords, “not to mention a lot of wine jugs,” Frachetti said.

“The current findings illustrate a sophisticated international trade operation that included regional operatives and socially diverse participants who produced and traded essential hard-earth commodities throughout the late Bronze Age political economy from Central Asia to the Mediterranean,” Frachetti said.

Unlike the mines in Uzbekistan, which were set within a network of small-scale villages and mobile pastoralists, the mines in ancient Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age were under the control of the Hittites, an imperial global power of great threat to Ramses the Great of Egypt, Yener explained.

The findings also show that life 2,000-plus years ago was not that different from what it is today.

“With the disruptions due to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, we have become aware of how we are reliant on complex supply chains to maintain our economy, military and standard of living,” Powell said. “This is true in prehistory as well. Kingdoms rose and fell, climatic conditions shifted and new peoples migrated across Eurasia, potentially disrupting or redistributing access to tin, which was essential for both weapons and agricultural tools.

“Using tin isotopes, we can look across each of these archaeologically evident disruptions in society and see connections were severed, maintained or redefined. We already have DNA analysis to show relational connections. Pottery, funerary practices, etc., illustrate the transmission and connectivity of ideas. Now with tin isotopes, we can document the connectivity of long-distance trade networks and their sustainability.”

More clues to explore

The current research findings settle decades-old debates about the origins of the metal on the Uluburun shipwreck and Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age. But there are still more clues to explore.

After they were mined, the metals were processed for shipping and ultimately melted into standardized shapes — known as ingots — for transporting. The distinct shapes of the ingots served as calling cards for traders to know from where they originated, Frachetti said.

Many of the ingots aboard the Uluburun ship were in the “oxhide” shape, which was previously believed to have originated in Cyprus. However, the current findings suggest the oxhide shape could have originated farther east. Frachetti said he and other researchers plan to continue studying the unique shapes of the ingots and how they were used in trade.

In addition to Frachetti, Powell and Yener, the following researchers contributed to the present study: Cemal Pulakat at Texas A&M University, H. Arthur Bankoff at Brooklyn College, Gojko Barjamovic at Harvard University, Michael Johnson at Stell Environmental Enterprises, Ryan Mathur at Juniata College, Vincent C. Pigott at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Michael Price at the Santa Fe Institute.

The study was funded in part by a Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award, in addition to a research grant from the Institute for Aegean Prehistory.