The University of Bristol-led study, published today in Nature Climate Change, deployed advanced modelling techniques to make the colossal calculations, which forecasted average annual flood losses would increase by 26.4% from US$32 billion currently to US$40.6 billion in less than 30 years.

By analysing nation-wide property asset data and detailed flood projections, the team of leading international flood risk scientists developed for the first time a comprehensive, high-resolution assessment of flood risk in the US. The estimates of financial loss, which include damage to homes, businesses and their contents, were based on 2021 dollar values so the actual numbers would likely be much bigger factoring in inflation.

While the research reveals poorer communities with a proportionally larger white population face the most danger at present, future growth in flood risk will have a greater impact on African American communities on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Predicted population change was also shown to have a have a huge effect on flood risk, resulting in four-fold increases compared to the impact of climate change alone and sending costs further spiralling.

Lead author Dr Oliver Wing, Honorary Research Fellow at the university’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, said: “Climate change combined with shifting populations present a double whammy of flood risk danger and the financial implications are staggering.

“Typical risk models rely on historical data which doesn’t capture projected climate change or offer sufficient detail. Our sophisticated techniques using state-of-the-science flood models give a much more accurate picture of future flooding and how populations will be affected.

“The mapping clearly indicates Black communities will be disproportionately affected in a warming world, in addition to the poorer White communities which predominantly bear the historical risk. Both of these findings are of significant concern. The research is a call to action for adaptation and mitigation work to be stepped up to reduce the devastating financial impact flooding wreaks on people’s lives.”

The research was carried out in partnership with experts from universities in New York, California, and Philadelphia.

Co-author Professor Paul Bates CBE FRS, Professor of Hydrology at the university’s Cabot Institute for the Environment and School of Geographical Sciences, said: “Current flood risk in western society is already unacceptably high, yet climate and population change threaten to inflate these losses significantly. The relatively short timescales over which this increase will take place mean we cannot rely on decarbonisation to reduce the risk so we have to adapt better, both to the situation now and for the future.”

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This barrage of information is processed by our sensory systems. Scientists have uncovered maps that depict how sensory neurons are arranged based on their function to effectively process such information. This kind of functional map, however, had not yet been identified for the sense of smell. University of California San Diego researchers have now described such a smell sensory map in fruit flies. On the surface of fly antennae, where odorous chemicals are detected, the scientists have discovered how the fly olfactory system is organized, and why.

This new map was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team lead by graduate student Shiuan-Tze Wu from the laboratory of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Chih-Ying Su. The study details how the fly’s olfactory receptor neurons, the components that sense smell, are organized within the sensory hairs.

“We are constantly being bombarded by hundreds of odorous chemicals in our environment,” said Su, the corresponding author of the study. “We have described a peripheral mechanism that has allowed the fly to make sense of such overwhelmingly complex stimuli.”

The researchers provide evidence that the fruit fly’s olfactory system, which Su described as simple yet elegant, is structured to give the insect the ability to make quick assessments of odors in an unusual way that circumvents synaptic communication, which is metabolically expensive. Rather, the insect’s olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) communicate through electrical interactions with nearby ORNs. This offers an energy-saving, “metabolically cheap” way to process “meaningful odor blends without involving costly synaptic computation,” the researchers note in the paper.

The study describes how compartments with two ORNs are arranged to detect cues with opposite meanings for the fly. Such cues either promote or inhibit certain behaviors — to quickly and efficiently assess complex odors in their environment.

“This arrangement provides a means to both evaluate and shape the countervailing sensory signals relayed to higher brain centers for further processing,” according to the paper.

In this study, the Su lab collaborated with UC San Diego Neurobiology Assistant Professor Johnatan Aljadeff, who built a mathematical model which explains how electrical interactions help in extracting relevant information.

“In asking questions about the functional meaning of this organization, we found that nature has chosen a specific way of structuring this sensory assay,” said Aljadeff. “If we can understand the principle of this type of processing, there could be future engineering applications.” Aljadeff is funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award to investigate such questions.

Wu, the first author of the study, is proud to be part of the team that made this fundamental discovery. He marvels at the elegance of the system by which fly ORNs compute countervailing cues and points to parallels in the way that visual systems contrast color shades to help us perceive the difference between red and green, for example.

The full author list is: Shiuan-Tze Wu, Jen-Yung Chen, Vanessa Martin, Renny Ng, Ye Zhang, Dhruv Grover, Ralph Greenspan, Johnatan Aljadeff and Chih-Ying Su.

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Materials provided by University of California – San Diego. Original written by Mario Aguilera. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

They published their results on Jan. 1 in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.

“Lankacidins have potential antitumor agents, however, their structural modification has somewhat problem due to the presence of complex bicyclic ring in lankacidin antibiotics,” said paper author Kenji Arakawa, associate professor at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life. “Structural modification of lankacidin C, as a mother compound, would be an excellent starting point for enhancing antitumor activity through computational prediction.”

The researchers preliminarily assessed how various components of lankacidin-group antibiotics may contribute to its antitumor activity using a computational model, finding that a structural ring of carbon atoms, called the delta-lactone ring, may not be essential. According to Arakawa, the implication was striking, since the ability to structurally modify lankacidins has been limited by the presence of the delta-lactone ring.

“In this study, we synthesized lankacyclinone C, a novel lankacidin C variant lacking the delta-lactone ring,” Arakawa said. “In doing so, we solved one major issue of structural function in the lankacidin skeleton, the bicyclic structure of the delta-lactone ring, for antitumor activity.”

They used a protein called Orf23 to convert the bicyclic structure with the delta-lactone ring to a monocyclic version. A computational model predicted that the resulting lankacyclinone C, with a simplified ring, would still prove cytotoxic to target cancer cells. Experimental results supported the prediction.

“Rather than bicyclic lankacidins, structurally simple and flexible monocyclic lankacidins may be better substrates for further structural redesigning to improve antitumor activity,” Arakawa said.

According to Arakawa, the researchers plan to further investigate the rational design of molecular compounds with the goal of creating the ultimate antitumor agents.

Other contributors include Rukman Muslimin, Natsumi Nishiura and Aiko Teshima, Unit of Biotechnology, Division of Biological and Life Sciences, Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life, Hiroshima University, Japan; Kiep Minh Do, Takeshi Kodama and Hiroyuki Morita, Institute of Natural Medicine, University of Toyama, Japan; Cody Wayne Lewis and Gordon Chan, Department of Oncology, Cross Cancer Institute and Cancer Researcher Institute of Northern Alberta, University of Alberta, Canada; and Ahmed Taha Ayoub, Medicinal Chemistry Department, Heliopolis University, Egypt.

Arakawa, Nishiura and Teshima are also affiliated with the Hiroshima Research Center for Healthy Aging, Hiroshima University.

The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Ministry of Scientific Research/Science and Technology Development Fund, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health and the Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education supported this work.