“We know that communication is helpful to all couples,” says Ronald Rogge, an associate professor of psychology and head of the Rogge Lab, where the research was conducted. “However, it is critical for couples in nonmonogamous relationships as they navigate the extra challenges of maintaining a nontraditional relationship in a monogamy-dominated culture. Secrecy surrounding sexual activity with others can all too easily become toxic and lead to feelings of neglect, insecurity, rejection, jealousy, and betrayal, even in nonmonogamous relationships.”

Past studies have attempted to gauge the success of nonmonogamous relationships. But the critical difference this time is that the Rochester team considered distinctions and nuances within various types of nonmonogamous relationships, and then assessed the success of each type independently. As a result, their findings draw no blanket conclusions about the prospects of nonmonogamous relationships; instead, the research, published in the Journal of Sex Research, suggests conditions under which nonmonogamous relationships tend to succeed, and those under which relationships become strained.

Rogge — together with his former undergraduate research assistant, Forrest Hangen ’19, now a graduate student at Northeastern University; and Dev Crasta ’18 (PhD), now a post-doctoral fellow at the Canandaigua VA Medical Center and the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry — analyzed responses from 1,658 online questionnaires. Among the respondents a majority (67.5 percent) was in their 20s and 30s, 78 percent of participants were white, nearly 70 percent identified as female, and most were in long-term relationships (on average nearly 4 ½ years). The team assessed three key dimensions for each relationship — applying what they call the “Triple-C Model” of mutual consent, communication, and comfort.

Significantly, they divided study participants into five distinct classes of relationships:

• Two monogamous groups, representing earlier- and later-stage monogamous relationships
• Consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships, marked by low interest in monogamy and high levels of mutual consent, comfort, and communication around commitment and sexual activity with a person other than the primary partner
• Partially open relationships, with more mixed attitudes toward monogamy and lower consent, comfort, and communication
• One-sided sexual relationships with a person besides the primary partner, in which one partner desires monogamy while the other partner engages in sex outside the existing relationship with low levels of mutual consent, comfort, and almost no communication between the couple about sex outside the relationship.

The findings

The team discovered that monogamous and consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) groups demonstrated high levels of functioning in their relationships and as individuals, whereas the partially open and one-sided nonmonogamous groups exhibited lower functioning.

People in both monogamous groups reported relatively healthy relationships, as well as some of the lowest levels of loneliness and psychological distress. Both monogamous groups and the consensual nonmonogamous group (CNM) reported similarly low levels of loneliness and distress, and similarly high satisfaction levels in regards to need, relationship, and sex.

Moreover, both monogamous groups reported the lowest levels of sexual sensation seeking, indicating fairly restrained and mainstream attitudes towards casual sex.

Overall, people in the three nonmonogamous relationships reported high levels of sexual sensation seeking, were more likely to actively look for new sexual partners, and to have contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

Yet, each of the three nonmonogamous groups varied in significant ways.

People in the consensual nonmonogamous group (CNM) were in fairly long-term relationships (and had the highest proportion among all five groups of people living with their partner, followed closely by the monogamous group with minimal recent sex outside their relationship).

The consensual nonmonogamous group also had the highest number of heteroflexible (primarily heterosexual but open to sex with same-sex partners) and bisexual respondents, suggesting that individuals in the LGBT community might be more comfortable with non-traditional relationship structures.

By contrast, people in partially open and one-sided nonmonogamous relationships tended to be in younger relationships, reported lower levels of dedication to their relationships, and low levels of affection. Few reported high sexual satisfaction, and they had the highest rates of condomless sex with new partners.

The groups of partially open and one-sided nonmonogamous relationships also showed some of the highest levels of discomfort with emotional attachment (also called attachment avoidance), psychological distress, and loneliness.

Overall, the one-sided group fared worst of all, with the highest proportion of people significantly dissatisfied with their relationships: 60 percent — nearly three times as high as the monogamous or the consensual nonmonogamous group.

Rogge cautions that the authors looked at cross-sectional data only, which meant they were unable to directly track relationships failing over time.

While the data clearly show that not all nonmonogamous relationships are equal — one rule applies to all:

“Sexual activity with someone else besides the primary partner, without mutual consent, comfort, or communication can easily be understood as a form of betrayal or cheating,” says Hangen. “And that, understandably, can seriously undermine or jeopardize the relationship.”

It promises new diagnostics tools and treatments for gastrointestinal disorders to address problems with bowel movements leading to constipation, diarrhea and pain, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Propulsion of intestinal contents is controlled by millions of neurons within the wall of the gut, known as the enteric nervous system. Capable of operating independently of the brain, a functioning enteric nervous system is essential for life — but exactly how it functions has been a mystery.

By unravelling the neural circuits of the enteric nervous system in guinea pigs and humans Professor Marcello Costa and colleagues are able to understand how the enteric nervous system ensures that food is slowly mixed and propelled along the digestive tube, allowing for absorption of nutrients and excretion of waste.

“For the first time we have combined video recording intestinal movements with a pressure-measuring manometric probe, enabling movements, pressures and electrical activities to be recorded all at the same time within the colon.

“This powerful combination of techniques applied to a guinea pig colon identified several distinct neural mechanisms involved in the propulsion of colonic contents.

“This answers the deceptively simple question of how neural mechanisms within the colon manage the propulsion of bowel contents” Professor Costa says.

“The findings also show how studies in human and animals can be complementary, identifying fundamental mechanisms that are shared across species — in this case guinea pigs and humans.

“Currently we treat intestinal disorders by addressing the symptoms, such a stopping-up diarrhea or softening stools to ease constipation, but as a result of this new understanding of the neural networks of the enteric system, clinicians may be able to develop treatments that treat the cause of the problems” Professor Costa says.

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“Humans have the unique ability to construct abstract concepts that have no anchor in the physical world, but we often take this ability for granted,” said Marcel Just, the D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology at CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and senior author on the paper. “In this study, we have shown that newly identified components of meaning used by the human brain that acts like an indexing system, similar to a library’s card catalog, to compose the meaning of abstract concepts.”

The ability of humans to think abstractly plays a central role in scientific and intellectual progress. Unlike concrete concepts, like hammer, abstract concepts, like ethics, have no obvious home in the parts of the brain that deal with perception or control of our bodies.

“Most of our understanding of how the brain processes objects and concepts is based on how our five senses take in information,” said Robert Vargas, a CMU graduate student in Just’s lab and first author on the paper. “It becomes difficult to describe the neural environment of abstract thoughts because many of the brain’s mental tools to process them are themselves abstract.”

In this study, Just and his team scanned the brains of nine participants using a functional MRI. The team sifted through the data using machine learning tools to identify patterns for each of the 28 abstract concepts. They applied the machine learning algorithm to correctly identified each concept (with a mean rank accuracy of 0.82, where chance level is 0.50).

Just said these abstract concepts are constructed by three dimensions of meaning in the brain. The first dimension corresponds to regions associated with language. For example, the concept of ethics might be linked to other words like rules and morals. A person must first understand the words to construct the additional meaning of ethics. The second dimension defines abstract concepts in terms of reference, either to self or an external source. For example, spirituality refers to self, while causality is external to the self. The final dimension is rooted in social constructs. There is an inherent social component to the concepts of pride and gossip.

“For me, the most exciting result of this study was that we were able to predict the neural activation patterns for individual abstract concepts across people,” Vargas said. “It is wild to think that my concept of probability and spirituality is neurally similar to the next person’s, even if their experience of spirituality is different.”

During the scan, each concept was presented visually and the participant was allowed to think about this idea for three seconds. The participants saw the set of words six times.

The 28 concepts covered in the study span seven categories: mathematics (subtraction, equality, probability and multiplication); scientific (gravity, force, heat and acceleration); social (gossip, intimidation, forgiveness and compliment); emotion (happiness, sadness, anger and pride); law (contract, ethics, crime and exoneration); metaphysical (causality, consciousness, truth and necessity) and religiosity (deity, spirituality, sacrilege and faith).

The work is based on nine adult brain scans from a culturally homogenous community on the CMU campus.

“It’s flashy to call this work mind reading,” Just said. “For me, it is proof that we have identified some of the elements of the brain’s indexing system — verbal representation, externality/internality and the social dimension — that our brains use to code concepts that have no physical manifestation in the world.”

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In the April issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution, a group of researchers including Emmanuel Noutahi, Virginie Calderon, Mathieu Blanchette, Nadia El-Mabrouk, and Bernd Franz Lang from the Universite de Montreal, Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montreal, and McGill University published an analysis of the mitochondrial genomes of 51 green algae and land plants (Noutahi et al. 2019). This analysis relied on a newly expanded version of the bioinformatics tool CoreTracker, which was previously developed by this group (Noutahi et al. 2017). CoreTracker identifies differences between a DNA sequence and the expected amino acid based on the amino acids often found at that position in closely related species. Using this tool, Noutahi and colleagues identified 14 new codon reassignments involving the replacement of one amino acid with another, the vast majority of which were found in a group of algae known as the Sphaeropleales. These algae have an unusual mitochondrial genome organization that appears to be intermediate between the larger, ancestral genomes and the compact, derived genomes of some of their relatives.

According to the authors, the field of genetic code evolution is being fueled by a rapid increase in genomics data (genomes plus respective transcriptomes). Because of this, “Comparative/evolutionary bioinformatics procedures such as CoreTracker are now in a position to not only predict deviations of the genetic code, but also provide clues with regard to the underlying mechanism.” Indeed, in light of their results, the researchers proposed that the genetic code deviations in the Sphaeropleales mitochondria actually contributed to their unusual genome organization. Based on this theory, after the migration of some mitochondrial genes to the nuclear genome during the genome reduction process, “UCA” (normally encoding the amino acid serine) was reassigned to a termination codon. This would have made it impossible for additional mitochondrial genes to be transferred to the nucleus, resulting in a mitochondrial genome that was intermediate in terms of size.

Before the publication of the article by Noutahi et al., researchers David Zihala and Marek Elias from the University of Ostrava had also independently discovered the large number of changes to the genetic code in the Sphaeropleales. Following the purely coincidental discovery of novel genetic codes in several protists by Elias’s research group, Zihala and Elias were motivated to “embark on a systematic screening to find possible additional cases of organisms with novel genetic code variants or previously missed departures from the standard genetic code.” Like Noutahi et al., their method involved the identification of discrepancies between DNA sequences and expected amino acids based on sequences present in related genomes, although they also performed a certain amount of manual curation. The analysis, published in the current issue of Genome Biology and Evolution (Zihala and Elias 2019), identified a few more codon reassignments in the Sphaeropleales, due to the fact that they included a broader sampling of this group. Otherwise, the results of the two studies were highly congruent, despite the somewhat different methods employed. In addition to the genetic code changes, Zihala and Elias also identified mutations in a mitochondrial release factor — a protein that recognizes termination codons — that, according to Elias, “may be linked to the intriguing ability of some sphaeroplealean mitochondria to terminate translation at codons that are normally read as coding for an amino acid. We thus offer the first specific hypothesis for the molecular underpinnings of this unusual ability.”

Overall, the findings of both studies highlight the need for a deeper awareness of genetic code discrepancies across the tree of life. Otherwise, use of an incorrect code when inferring protein sequences from DNA sequences could lead to inaccuracies in predicted protein sequences that are used for both phylogenetic and molecular biology analyses. Moreover, according to Noutahi and colleagues, “The two publications have been successful in predicting specific changes in the meaning of codons by using publicly available data, without biochemical experimentation, yet with high confidence.”

However, they also note that both studies are strictly computational in nature and that “this type of ‘paper biochemistry’ has its limitations. Only evolutionarily well-established instances of codon evolution may be inferred (i.e., not including cases of initial or incomplete stages), and although changes to the tRNA repertoire, structure, and specificity may be inferred to some degree, biochemical confirmation is critically required.” This limitation was also pointed out by Elias, who noted that his group plans to employ proteomics methods to verify some of their bioinformatic predictions concerning the various presumably reassigned codons. “Unfortunately,” continues Elias, “non-standard genetic codes are generally found in organisms that are difficult to study by direct biochemical or genetic approaches, so it remains a challenge to get a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms behind the observed changes in codon meaning.”

Future investigations will almost certainly uncover additional, as-yet-unidentified changes in the genetic code in various organisms. Indeed, notes Elias, “We are also analyzing some exciting new cases of genetic code modification in nuclear genomes of certain obscure protists that were uncovered by our survey of publicly available sequence data.” Furthermore, the authors of the Noutahi et al. study point out that, given “how rapidly this field is evolving, due to an ever increasing number of reports on deviations from the standard genetic code — particularly in eukaryotes and their organelles… the journey to understanding codon evolution with all of its mechanistic implications has just begun.”