Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco partnered with Valley Verde, a community-based urban garden organization in Santa Clara County, California, to better understand participants’ perceptions of the health benefits and acceptability of urban home gardening programs. Interest in such programs has been on the rise, and this is a critical next step before beginning large-scale trials of how effective they are.

“This home-based model can play a vital role in urban agriculture and has the potential to directly impact health by tying the garden to the household,” said lead author Kartika Palar, PhD, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA. She added that home and community gardens are complementary approaches to urban agriculture, together promoting a more resilient local food system.

Researchers followed 32 participants — mostly Hispanic/Latinos and women — in Valley Verde’s gardening program for one year. The program serves a predominantly low-income and immigrant population, providing them with the knowledge, skills and tools needed to grow their own organic vegetable gardens.

Valley Verde staff provided 10 monthly workshops for each participant focused on organic gardening skills building as well as nutritional education, like strategies to increase vegetable, fruit and whole-grain intake; healthy shopping strategies; and culturally preferred healthy recipes.

Participants were interviewed before, during and after the program to track what they learned and how they were implementing it. Nearly every participant indicated they ate more vegetables and fruits because of the program, citing increased affordability, accessibility, freshness, flavor and convenience of the garden produce.

“We had some delicious meals with lots of peas because the winter peas were doing really well, and then we could just draw on that when you’re out of options,” a 47-year-old female participant said in the study, describing how the garden helped during times of the month when money ran low. “[Fruits and vegetables] are a more steady supply. Yeah, it isn’t like, ‘Oh guess what? In this pay period we can actually afford some salad.’ Now we just go and just harvest it and just have it all the time.”

“I value more the things that I cook, and the things that I get from my garden, over the things I buy,” a 34-year-old male participant said in the study. “There’s a big difference….I feel good that I grew it and I am eating something that I grew. So for me, it’s priceless.”

Participants also frequently described having less stress, as well as a rise in exercise and drop in sedentary behavior both for adults and children. Tending the garden led to more physical activity because of the need to water, weed, harvest and plant at regular intervals.

The study suggests an urban gardening model that integrates home gardening with culturally appropriate nutrition and gardening education has the potential to improve a range of health behaviors that are critical to preventing and managing chronic disease, especially among low-income, urban Hispanic/Latino households.

“Urban agriculture is an important community resource that may contribute not only to nutrition and health, but also to urban development and social connection,” said Dr. Sheri Weiser, MD, the senior author of the study. She added that combining urban home gardening with nutrition education is an innovative strategy to help to reduce the burden of preventable diseases, such as diabetes, in low-income populations with limited access to healthy food.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Elsevier. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In today’s Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences, scientists describe how they transformed stem cells into functioning Leydig cells — the cells in the testes that produce the male sex hormone.

“Our study provides a way to generate possible transplantation materials for clinical therapies, as well as a path toward testing and developing new drugs,” said Vassilios Papadopoulos, dean of the USC School of Pharmacy, who led the research.

Millions of men have low testosterone, or hypogonadism, which impacts mood, fertility, sexual function, obesity and bone density — and testosterone replacement therapy is a multibillion-dollar industry. Testosterone tapers off naturally with age but can also decrease suddenly due infections like mumps, or cancer treatment during childhood.

Testosterone replacement therapy — injected, taken orally or applied as a gel — reverses many of these symptoms.

“You feel better, you lose weight, erectile function returns,” Papadopoulos said. “Men love testosterone.”

However, treatment for “low T” is linked to side effects such as infertility, increased risk of prostate cancer and cardiovascular diseases. In addition, topical treatments can rub off on close contacts, inadvertently exposing others to the drug. A transplant of lab-grown testosterone-producing cells, perhaps injected into fatty tissue, could potentially bypass those side effects, researchers say.

Previous attempts to cultivate Leydig cells have come up short. In one study, the lab-grown cells produced cortisol, not testosterone, Papadopoulos said. Other experiments have involved stem cells from bone marrow or the umbilical cord; harvesting these cells is more labor-intensive and they do not multiply as well in the lab.

In Papadopoulos’s experiment reported today, researchers started with stem cells called human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which come from human skin or blood and can be developed into any type of cell needed for treatment purposes.

On a hunch, Papadopoulos added human collagen to his soup of nutrients, genes and other ingredients needed to transform stem cells into Leydig cells. Collagen is a common growth matrix ingredient; previously, Papadopoulos used bovine or rat collagen, which are cheaper and mostly interchangeable with other forms of collagen, at least in early-stage experiments.

This time, the lab-grown Leydig cells produced testosterone — and the cells even looked the same as their naturally occurring counterparts under the microscope.

“It was none of the things we thought. We had tried different genes, chemicals, everything — nothing!” he said. “The human collagen was the secret sauce.”

Next, Papadopoulos wants to test how well lab-grown Leydig cells function, and for how long, when they are transplanted into animal models of hypogonadism. He’s also eager to compare Leydig cells cultivated from skin cells from men with and without hypogonadism, to better understand the condition.

Human transplantation of Leydig cells is at least “a few years away,” he said.

In addition to Papadopoulos, the paper’s other authors are Lu Li, Yuchange Li, Chantal Sottas, Martine Culty, Yiman Hu and Garett Cheung of USC; Jinjiang Fan of McGill University in Montreal; and Hector Chemes of Hospital de Ninos in Buenos Aires.

The work was supported with funds from the USC School of Pharmacy and the John Stauffer Dean’s Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences at USC.

Prior studies have shown remarkable electrical patterns in developing embryos, some of which act like blueprints of the tissues and organs that eventually take shape as the embryo matures. The electrical patterns are created by cells pumping charged ions into and out of the cell membrane, creating a voltage potential across the membrane barrier. In analogy to cells of the nervous system, the membrane voltage potentials spread via electrical synapses and provide a way for cells to communicate with their neighbors and coordinate activity.

The new study, conducted in mouse and chicken embryos, demonstrates that a voltage gated calcium channel (VGCC) embedded in the cell membrane, and triggered by voltage to allow calcium ions (Ca2+) to flow into the cell, sets off the expression of genes that guide differentiation to mature cells.

Voltage gated ion channels are known to have a role in the formation of tracheal cartilage, and mutations in VGCCs are also correlated with malformations in humans, including syndactyly (fusion of fingers) in Timothy syndrome patients. The study now points to a role for VGCCs in ‘reading out’ the bioelectric patterns of an embryo to set the genetic and protein expression machinery in play for body development.

The researchers looked at the developing limbs of both mice and chicken embryos and found that while the limb bud is initially hyperpolarized, with 1000-fold more calcium ions outside cells than inside, the core of the growing limb becomes depolarized as cartilage forms; (calcium ions flow into the cells to neutralize voltage). They found that the depolarization is mediated by VGCCs, allowing calcium ions to flow inward, which in turn activate a genetic transcription factor called NFATc1, which in turn initiates expression of other genes required for differentiation into mature cartilage cells. The VCGG studied (Cav1.2) was found to be essential for normal cartilage formation, while NFATc1 was confirmed to promote the differentiation of cartilage cells in vitro.

Looking at the role of Cav1.2 more closely, the researchers discovered that it primarily plays a part in the early stages of cell differentiation into cartilage. Other VGCCs may be involved at later stages of development, and other transcription factors may be activated by the increase in intracellular calcium during the process of cartilage and bone formation, according to the researchers.

“It’s clear that while we have discovered an essential role for voltage gated calcium channels in reading the embryo’s bioelectric pattern, we will need to continue work to understand the role of many different ion channels and genetic factors throughout all stages of development,” said Cliff Tabin, associate of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and chairman of the Depertment of Genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.

“We are just beginning to understand how the ‘software’ of embryonic development (the electrical patterns) are created and interpreted by the ‘hardware’ (the cells’ genes and proteins) to enable the cells to cooperate and organize into a highly-patterned body,” said Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. “Our collaboration with the genetics team in the Tabin lab extends this field to a very important model, the vertebrate limb, and is a great demonstration of how we get to a better understanding of physics in biology.”

Other authors of the study are: Yuji Atsuta, first author and post-doctoral fellow, and Reiko Tomizawa, research technician, both in the Tabin lab.

This work was supported by the Allen Discovery Center program through The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group and National Institutes of Health grant HD03443. Atsuta is a recipient of fellowships of the Naito Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Tufts University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

That’s the finding arising from research conducted by a team of scientists led by Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) and soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The phenomenon, known as a Seyfert flare, created two enormous ‘ionisation cones’ that sliced through the Milky Way — beginning with a relatively small diameter close to the black hole, and expanding vastly as they exited the Galaxy.

So powerful was the flare that it impacted on the Magellanic Stream — a long trail of gas extending from nearby dwarf galaxies called the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The Magellanic Stream lies at an average 200,000 light years from the Milky Way.

The explosion was too huge, says the Australian-US research team, to have been triggered by anything other than nuclear activity associated with the black hole, known as Sagittarius A, or Sgr A*, which is about 4.2 million times more massive than the Sun.

“The flare must have been a bit like a lighthouse beam,” says Professor Bland-Hawthorn, who is also at the University of Sydney.

“Imagine darkness, and then someone switches on a lighthouse beacon for a brief period of time.”

Using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers calculated that the massive explosion took place little more than three million years ago.

In Galactic terms, that is astonishingly recent. On Earth at that point, the asteroid that triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs was already 63 million years in the past, and humanity’s ancient ancestors, the Australopithecines, were afoot in Africa.

“This is a dramatic event that happened a few million years ago in the Milky Way’s history,” says Professor Lisa Kewley, Director of ASTRO 3D.

“A massive blast of energy and radiation came right out of the galactic centre and into the surrounding material. This shows that the centre of the Milky Way is a much more dynamic place than we had previously thought. It is lucky we’re not residing there!”

The blast, the researchers estimate, lasted for perhaps 300,000 years — an extremely short period in galactic terms.

In conducting the research, Professor Bland-Hawthorn was joined by colleagues from the Australia National University and University of Sydney, and, in the US, the University of North Carolina, University of Colorado and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

The paper follows on from research also led by Professor Bland-Hawthorn and published in 2013. The earlier work looked at evidence of a massive explosive event beginning in the centre of the Milky Way, ruled out a nuclear starburst as the cause and tentatively tied it to activity in SgrA*.

“These results dramatically change our understanding of the Milky Way,” says co-author Magda Guglielmo from the University of Sydney.

“We always thought about our Galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright centre. These new results instead open the possibility of a complete reinterpretation of its evolution and nature.

“The flare event that occurred three million years ago was so powerful that it had consequences on the surrounding of our Galaxy. We are the witness to the awakening of the sleeping beauty.”

The latest work firms up SgrA* as prime suspect, but, the researchers concede, there is still a lot more work to be done. How black holes evolve, influence and interact with galaxies, they conclude, “is an outstanding problem in astrophysics.”