The curl in drug molecules, a property that’s known as chirality, helps them to interact with similarly curved molecules in human cells. The molecule with the opposite curve is inactive or, in the worst case can be very toxic. Yet chemical processes usually give us both versions of chiral molecules, or enantiomers, in equal amounts.

“Chiral catalysts today have been optimized to work in liquids that are expensive and environmentally unfriendly. These catalysts can produce left- or right-enantiomers almost exclusively, but when we want to carry reactions in water, they are destroyed,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the team that designed and tested the new catalyst.

It would be cheaper and safer to run reactions in water. The catalysts developed by Kotov’s team can do this. They are assemblies of mineral nanoparticles, made chiefly from zinc oxide. They mimic nanoscale organs in bacteria, and they are at least 10 times better at selecting a particular version of a chiral molecule than earlier catalysts of this type.

“Our chiral selectivity is consistently above 20% while the previous reactions of similar type barely broke 1%,” said Kotov. “Twenty percent may not seem like much, but already it is technologically valuable because it substantially reduces the cost of the intended product.”

For instance, some medications — which currently contain equal amounts of the active and inactive enantiomers — could be produced more efficiently with these catalysts.

“Cost savings are already possible because the catalysts are inexpensive, stable and reusable. Replacing organic solvents with water also makes a large difference both for economics and the environment.”

This is how the catalysts work: the gaps between the chiral nanoparticles within the 0.0001-millimeter “supraparticle” are twisted, so they prefer to host molecules with a similar curve. The nanoparticles catch light and transform it into electrical charges, which are passed to the molecules in the gaps.

The molecules use the energy to form a new bond. The molecules with the correct twists spend more time inside the supraparticle, so they end up producing more of the twisted products.

The team is exploring how to improve the chiral selectivity further, perhaps by using twisted light.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications. It was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Department of Defense and Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center is among 32 institutions and foundations that sponsored the 296-page report, “Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being,” which investigates the causes of widespread clinician burnout and offers solutions to address the problem at its source.

“There’s an all too direct connection between clinician burnout and health care safety and quality. While clinician burnout isn’t a new problem, its worsening prevalence and impact are due to system factors inherent in the modern health care system,” said Matthew Weinger, MD, professor of Anesthesiology and Norman Ty Smith Chair in Patient Safety and Medical Simulation at VUMC, and a member of the NAM authoring committee for the new report.

“The Committee came to realize that addressing clinician burnout will require a deliberate and substantive health care system redesign with a focus on those activities that deliver the most value to patients while enabling and empowering clinicians to deliver high-quality care,” he said.

The report discusses key issues that need to be addressed:

• Clinician burnout needs to be tackled early in professional development and special stressors in the learning environment need to be recognized. Leaders in health care and health professions education have a responsibility to foster, monitor and continuously improve work and learning environments.
• While some health care technologies appear to contribute to clinician burnout (poorly designed electronic health record systems, for example), there is real potential for well-designed and implemented technologies to help reduce burnout.
• Federal and state governments, other payors and regulators and the health care industry itself have important roles to play in preventing clinician burnout. Increasing administrative burdens and distracting clinicians from the care of their patients can directly affect burnout.
• Medical societies, state licensing boards, specialty certification boards, medical education and health care organizations all need to take concrete steps to reduce the stigma for clinicians seeking help for psychological distress and make assistance more easily available.

The report concludes with goals and recommendations centered on creating more positive work and learning environments, reducing administrative burden, enabling technology solutions, providing more support to clinicians and learners, and investing in research to address clinician burnout.

The new report is the latest in a series that includes the landmark volumes, “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System” (2000) and “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century” (2001).

Report: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25521/taking-action-against-clinician-burnout-a-systems-approach-to-professional

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The research focuses on the tumor-suppressing function of SMAD4, a transcription factor protein normally involved in the regulation of cell growth processes. Its function is often turned off in breast cancer, which allows tumors to grow and metastasize. In this report, published online October 23, 2019, in Science Advances, the researchers found that BRK, a non-receptor protein tyrosine kinase, binds to and leads to SMAD4 breakdown. The study was done using human cell lines, including a panel of breast cancer cell lines.

“The BRK kinase is present in more than 85 percent of breast cancer tumors,” said Sayem Miah, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in the laboratory of Michael Washburn, PhD, at the Stowers Institute. “Our research suggests that treatments targeting BRK may help keep SMAD4 function intact, therefore reducing or stopping tumor growth,” Miah says.

Miah began this research while he was a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada, working with Kiven Erique Lukong, PhD, whose lab studies BRK. “We’ve known for a while that BRK functions like an oncogene — a gene that has the potential to cause cancer when mutated or abnormally expressed — in breast cancer,” Miah explains. “Ultimately, we want to know whether BRK alone can drive breast cancer progression, and if so, by what mechanism.”

After he completed his PhD work at the University of Saskatchewan, Miah moved to Stowers where he joined the Washburn Lab, which focuses on using proteomic approaches to understand biological processes.

“It’s a good example of the type of research that’s possible at Stowers,” Washburn says. “We have the resources, freedom, and flexibility to allow scientists like Dr. Miah to follow up on intriguing results and finish research projects that produce results like this.” Washburn also notes that Miah was able to use a powerful mass spectrometer at Stowers to complete his research. “There’s value in this kind of serendipity in science. Dr Miah brings a totally different set of skills and insights to our group, and our lab offers new access to technology and expertise.”

Miah believes that these findings are an important step in understanding how cancer works and would like to find other molecules that work with BRK to degrade SMAD4. “If we can further increase our understanding of this protein network, these insights may reveal new targets for metastatic cancer intervention,” he said.

Other contributors to the research include Charles A.S. Banks, PhD, Anita Saraf, PhD, Gaye Hattem, Cassandra G. Kempf, Mihaela Sardiu, PhD, and Laurence Florens, PhD, from the Stowers Institute, and Yetunde Ogunbolude, PhD, Edward T. Bagu, PhD, Josh MacAusland-Berg, and Scott Napper, PhD, from the University of Saskatchewan.

This work was supported by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number RO1GM112639 to MPW. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

In addition, the work was supported by the 2017 College of Medicine Research Award (CoMRAD) offered by Office of the Vice Dean Research (OVDR) at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada to KEL, and by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada to SN.

Enter, the millets.

Close to 97% of millets grown worldwide are produced in developing countries. Millets are a diverse group of cereal crops. Importantly, they generally have high nutritional content.

“However, millets have been largely overlooked by modern genetics research,” says Matthew Johnson, a researcher at the University of Georgia. In a new study, Johnson, along with colleagues in India, have generated some of the first genetic resources for three different varieties of millets.

As genetic resources are created for less-studied crops, researchers can better leverage the genetic diversity within the crop family. This can lead to the development of new varieties of crops. “Our results will give researchers tools to develop better millet varieties for farmers,” says Johnson.

Most farmers who grow millets are smallholders (farming less than 5 acres). Millets are crucial for their livelihood. That’s because they can grow on marginal lands and need less water than most crops.

“Millets also grow much quicker than most other major crops,” says Johnson. That’s important because farmers can plant millets if weather or natural disasters cause initial plantings to fail. “So, with millets, the farmers can at least get some harvest,” he says.

Johnson’s team sequenced and analyzed DNA from three species of millets — kodo, little and proso. “These are three crops that have had relatively few resources developed for them,” Johnson explains.

The plant source materials were obtained from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in India. The researchers’ goal was to better understand the genetic diversity within and between each variety of millet. “Understanding this diversity is an important step in developing better varieties of the crop,” says Johnson.

They uncovered tiny differences in the DNA sequences of the various plants. These genetic differences may ultimately be connected to characteristics, such as drought tolerance and growth rate.

“Genetics and field testing go hand-in-hand,” says Johnson. Growing different kinds of millets can provide information about yield and flowering time, among other characteristics. “We need to pair these results with knowledge of the genetic relatedness of the millet plants,” he says.

By collating field results and genetic data, researchers identify desired traits and develop improved varieties. “We can continue improving these varieties year after year,” says Johnson.

An important part of breeding desirable varieties of a crop is understanding how existing ones are related to each other. “We were able to find evidence that the previous understanding of how the millet varieties are related to each other didn’t always reflect their genetics,” Johnson explains.

The existing classifications were done based on physical characteristics. But it turns out those may not be accurate reflections of close genetic relationships.

“Think of it as trying to classify genetic relationships among humans by hair color,” he says. “Hair color is genetically controlled. Everyone with blonde hair, for example, has some genetic relatedness.”

“But there is so much more than just hair color that determines who we are related to genetically,” says Johnson. “Sometimes siblings can have a different hair color. However, they will be more closely related to each other than to a stranger who happens to have the same hair color.”

Uncovering the underlying genetics, as in this study, can help plant breeders develop millet varieties with desired physical characteristics. “Millets are a great crop,” says Johnson. “I believe they can diversify our diet and contribute to food sources and security as our climate continues to change.”

This research was supported in part by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and the University of Georgia.

Earlier this year Amazon’s Echo made global headlines when it was reported that consumers’ conversations were recorded and heard by thousands of employees.

Now researchers at UTSA have conducted a review of the security holes that exist in popular smart-light brands. According to the analysis, the next prime target could be that smart bulb that shoppers buy this coming holiday season.

“Your smart bulb could come equipped with infrared capabilities, and most users don’t know that the invisible wave spectrum can be controlled. You can misuse those lights,” said Murtuza Jadliwala, professor and director of the Security, Privacy, Trust and Ethics in Computing Research Lab in UTSA’s Department of Computer Science. “Any data can be stolen: texts or images. Anything that is stored in a computer.”

Some smart bulbs connect to a home network without needing a smart home hub, a centralized hardware or software device where other internet of things products communicate with each other. Smart home hubs, which connect either locally or to the cloud, are useful for IoT devices that use the Zigbee or Z-Wave protocols or Bluetooth, rather than Wi-Fi.

If these same bulbs are also infrared-enabled, hackers can send commands via the infrared invisible light emanated from the bulbs to either steal data or spoof other connected IoT devices on the home network. The owner might not know about the hack because the hacking commands are communicated within the owner’s home Wi-Fi network, without using the internet.

This study, titled “Light Ears: Information Leakage via Smart Lights,” was coauthored by Anindya Maiti and published in the September 2019 issue of the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

Smart bulbs have moved beyond novelty to a lucrative mature market. Last year consumers spent close to $8 billion, and that amount is expected to more than triple to $28 billion in less than a decade.

“Think of the bulb as another computer,” adds Jadliwala. “These bulbs are now poised to become a much more attractive target for exploitation even though they have very simple chips.”

Jadliwala recommends that consumers opt for bulbs that come with a smart home hub rather than those that connect directly to other devices. He also recommends that manufacturers do a better job in developing security measures to limit the level of access that these bulbs have to other smart home appliances or electronics within a home.

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University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers repeatedly exposed bacteria to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin to force rapid evolution. As expected, the bacteria developed resistance to the drug, but surprisingly, their lifestyle affected which specific adaptations emerged, according to a study published today in eLife.

“What we’re simulating in the lab is happening in the wild, in the clinic, during the development of drug resistance,” said senior author Vaughn Cooper, Ph.D., director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at Pitt. “Our results show that biofilm growth shapes the way drug resistance evolves.” According to study lead author Alfonso Santos-Lopez, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Cooper’s lab, this finding could uncover vulnerabilities that may prove useful when treating drug-resistant infections.

“Antibiotic resistance is one of our main problems in medicine,” Santos-Lopez said. “We have to develop new treatments, and one idea is to take advantage of what the field calls ‘collateral sensitivity.’ When bacteria evolve resistance to one drug, it can expose a vulnerability to a different class of antibiotics that can effectively kill the bacteria.”

Knowing these evolutionary push-and-pull relationships could take the guesswork out of prescribing antibiotics, Santos-Lopez said.

In this experiment, when the biofilm evolved resistance to ciprofloxacin, it became defenseless against cephalosporins. The free-floating bacteria did not develop this same chink in their armor, even though they became 128 times more resistant to ciprofloxacin than the biofilm-grown bacteria.

According to study coauthor Michelle Scribner, a doctoral student in Cooper’s lab, these findings highlight the importance of studying bacteria as they naturally occur, in biofilms.

“Biofilms are a more clinically relevant lifestyle,” Scribner said. “They’re thought to be the primary mode of growth for bacteria living in the body. Most infections are caused by biofilms on surfaces.”

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