The African continent has seen its average monthly temperatures rise by .5 — 2 degrees Celsius over the past century, with up to another two degrees of warming projected for the next 100 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. It is also well known that the changing climate will disrupt historical precipitation patterns — but which of these, temperature or rainfall, will have the most impact on a species, like white and black rhinos, that have long been the target of conservation efforts?

The question is especially important for rhinos because they don’t sweat, and instead cool themselves off by bathing and finding shade.

“Generally speaking, most, if not all, species will, in one way or another, be negatively affected by the changing climate,” says lead author Hlelowenkhosi S. Mamba, who completed this research as part of her graduate studies at UMass Amherst. “It is therefore important for conservationists to conduct macroecological assessments over large areas to catch trends and model futures for some of the world’s most vulnerable species to prepare to mitigate climate change’s effects, hence minimizing global biodiversity losses.”

To understand how our changing climate will affect rhino populations, Mamba and senior author Timothy Randhir, professor of environmental conservation at UMass Amherst, focused their efforts on the five large national parks in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Botswana, Tanzania and eSwatini that are home to most of the rhinos. The parks represent diverse landscapes.

Mamba and Randhir then modelled two scenarios for each of the parks: the IPCC’s high-emissions scenario and a more moderate emissions scenario. They projected temperature and precipitation for each of the scenarios out to 2055 and 2085 to arrive at a probability that each park would remain suitable for the rhinos.

They found that each park will see approximately 2.2 ºC warming by 2055 and 2.5 ºC by 2085 under the moderate emissions scenario. Under the high emissions scenario, each park will be warmer by approximately 2.8 ºC in 2055 and 4.6 ºC in 2085.

Nearly every park will become increasingly drier as emissions increase, with the exception of one, Tsavo West National Park in Kenya, which will see more rainfall.

This is all very bad news for the rhinos, because the team also found that, though the change in precipitation will not be ideal for the rhinos, the changes in temperature are greater than what the species can bear.

“The temperature conditions in all study parks will become increasingly unsuitable for both species, but it is predicted that white rhinos will be affected earlier than black rhinos,” the authors write. “All the parks are showing drastic changes in the occurrence probability of rhinos.” And under the high-emissions scenarios, the probability of occurrence of either species shrinks to zero by 2085.

The worst news involves Etosha National Park, in Namibia, and Hlane National Park, in eSwatini, both of which will become too warm for rhinos in either scenario.

But to be forewarned is to be forearmed. “This paper highlights the importance of using climate predictions for both park and rhino management,” says Randhir. “We propose that park managers think now about increasing water supplies, tree cover, watching for stress and planning to allow rhino migration as the world warms.”

Antibodies that target the fusion peptide can neutralize diverse strains of HIV in vitro, that is, in a test tube or culture dish outside of a living organism. The NIAID VRC isolated a fusion peptide-directed human antibody, called VRC34.01, from a person living with HIV who donated blood samples for research. They also isolated two antibodies from rhesus macaques — a species of monkey with immune systems like humans’ — who previously had received a vaccine regimen designed to generate fusion peptide-directed antibodies. Demonstrating that these antibodies protect animals would validate the fusion peptide as a target for human vaccine design. SHIV challenge — administering an infective dose of SHIV — to rhesus macaques is a widely used animal model for assessing the performance of HIV antibodies and vaccines.

In this study, rhesus macaques in each of four groups received a single intravenous infusion of one type of antibody — a 2.5 or 10 mg/kg of bodyweight dose of VRC34.01, or one of the two vaccine-elicited rhesus macaque antibodies — and other monkeys received a placebo infusion. To determine the protective effect of the antibodies, each monkey was challenged five days after infusion with a strain of SHIV known to be sensitive to fusion peptide-directed antibodies.

All monkeys that received a placebo infusion acquired SHIV following the challenge. Among monkeys that received VRC34.01 infusions, none receiving the 10 mg/kg dose and 25% of those receiving the 2.5 mg/kg dose acquired SHIV. Of those that received the vaccine-elicited rhesus macaque antibodies, no monkeys receiving the antibody called DFPH-a.15 acquired SHIV, and 25% of those receiving the antibody called DF1W-a.01 acquired SHIV. Over time, the concentration of antibodies in the blood of animals that received DFPH-a.15 declined. Those animals were re-challenged 30 days later to see if the lower concentration of antibodies had a decreased protective effect, and half of them acquired SHIV.

The three antibodies studied each provided statistically significant protection from SHIV, and the effect was dose dependent, that is, highest in monkeys with greater antibody concentrations in their blood.

According to the authors, these findings represent the proof-of-concept that fusion peptide-directed antibodies can provide protection against SHIV and help determine the concentration of antibodies a vaccine would need to generate to be protective. They suggest that their findings on vaccine-elicited antibodies in some animals support further work to design preventive HIV vaccine concepts targeting the fusion peptide. They conclude that an effective HIV vaccine targeting the HIV fusion peptide likely will need to expand upon the concepts used in this study, by generating multiple varieties of fusion peptide-directed antibodies. This would increase the likelihood that the vaccine could maintain a preventive effect across the vastly diverse HIV variants in circulation.

In this retrospective study, the orthopaedic team at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine and Marshall Health performed 25 revision knee replacements with a robotic assisted computer system. The procedure involved placing new implants at the end of the thighbone and top of the shinbone with the computer’s aid to ensure the knee was stable and balanced throughout the range of motion. Researchers then carefully compared the initial positions of the primary implants with the final planned positions of the robotic revision implants for each patient, assessing the differences in millimeters and degrees.

The analysis found that exceedingly small changes in implant position significantly influence the function of the knee replacement. Robotic assistance during revision surgery has the potential to measure these slight differences. In addition, the computer system can help the surgeon predict what size implant to use as well as help to balance the knee for stability.

“Robotic-assisted surgery has the potential to change the way surgeons think about revision knee replacement,” said Matthew Bullock, D.O., associate professor of orthopaedic surgery and co-author on the study. “The precision offered by robotic-assisted surgery not only enhances the surgical process but also holds promise for improved patient outcomes. Besides infection, knee replacements usually fail because they become loose from the bone or because they are unbalanced leading to pain and instability. When this happens patients can have difficulty with activities of daily living such as walking long distances or negotiating stairs.”

The study underscores the importance of aligning the prosthesis during revision surgery. The research also suggests potential advantages, including appropriately sized implants that can impact the ligament tension which is crucial for functional knee revisions.

“These findings open new doors in the realm of revision knee arthroplasty,” said Alexander Caughran, M.D., assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery and co-author on the study. “We continue to collect more data for future studies on patient outcomes after robotic revision knee replacement. We anticipate that further research and technological advancements in the realm of artificial intelligence will continue to shape the landscape of orthopaedic surgery.”

In addition to Bullock and Caughran, co-authors from Marshall University include Micah MacAskill, M.D., resident physician; Richard Peluso, M.D., resident physician; Jonathan Lash, M.D., resident physician; and Timothy Hewett, Ph.D., professor.

Higher-order topological insulators, or HOTIs, have attracted attention for their ability to conduct electricity along one-dimensional lines on their surfaces, but this property is quite difficult to experimentally distinguish from other effects. By instead studying the interiors of these materials from a different perspective, a team of physicists has identified a surface signature that is unique to HOTIs that can determine how light reflects from their surfaces. As the team reports in the journal Nature Communications, this property could be used to experimentally confirm the existence of such topological states in real materials.

“The bulk or interior properties of HOTIs and other topological insulators have been discounted for a long time, but it turns out that a lot of interesting things are going on there as well,” said Barry Bradlyn, a physics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a project co-lead. “When we looked at the surfaces through a more careful lens, they immediately stood out as far from trivial or featureless.”

For a long time, topological insulators have been noted for their ability to carry electrical currents on their surfaces while having insulating interiors. HOTIs, though, would restrict electrical conduction to a one-dimensional edge, or “hinge,” rather than the entire two-dimensional surface.

“Charles Kane, who discovered topological insulators, introduced a good analogy,” said Benjamin Wieder, a faculty member at the Institut de Physique Théorique, Université Paris-Saclay and project co-lead. “We can think of standard topological insulators as Hershey’s Kisses™. A conducting metal foil wrapped around an insulator that doesn’t conduct electricity, the chocolate in this case, is a pretty good way to understand them. With HOTIs, though, it’s as though someone took the foil and crumpled it into a thin ring encircling the chocolate.”

While surface conducting states have been observed in standard topological insulators, resolving the hinge in HOTIs has proven to be exceptionally difficult. Bradlyn explained that this property can only exist in material samples that have an unusually high degree of symmetry, meaning that their crystal structures must be unrealistically perfect.

Instead, Bradlyn and his collaborators turned their attention from the hinge state to the interior, where the electrons tend to “delocalize” from individual atoms and spread through the entire material. Unlike past studies that treat all electrons the same, the researchers considered differences in spin — a property of electrons that allows them to behave as miniature magnets.

“When we divided the interior electrons into their two possible spin states, up and down, we saw that each state leaves a unique surface signature,” said Kuan-Sen Lin, a physics graduate student at the U. of I. and the study’s lead author. “Even though the surface of a HOTI seems uninteresting, when you look at what each spin is separately doing on the surface, an unmistakable new behavior emerges that we hope will soon be measured in experiment.”

Because electrons with different spins behave as magnets, they respond differently when electric voltage is applied to the material, causing the two spin states to accumulate on opposite sides. This accumulation can be detected by taking advantage of the magneto-optic Kerr effect, in which the polarization, or orientation of the light, changes when it reflects from the surface of a magnet. In the case of HOTIs, the researchers calculated the polarization change from each spin state, and they found it to be exactly half the change that would result from an ordinary insulator.

“In the Kiss analogy, we might expect that, because the foil has been crumpled, the chocolate is in direct contact with the air,” said Gregory Fiete, a physics professor at Northeastern University and a corresponding author on the study. “With the spin-dependent surface behaviors we found, we can say that there is in fact a transparent layer that keeps the chocolate separate from the rest of the supermarket.”

By building on first-principles calculations with the specialized theoretical toolkit the researchers developed for this study, they identified the metal bismuth bromide as a very strong candidate for observing this effect. They are currently working with U. of I. physics professor Fahad Mahmood and U. of I. materials science & engineering professor Daniel Shoemaker to design and perform the experiments proposed in this study.

“The properties of HOTIs that we identified here would be very useful in quantum computing and spintronic devices, but we need to see them in experiment first,” Bradlyn said. Wieder added, “We hope that our work shows that the insides and surfaces of topological materials still host many mysterious and advantageous features if you know how to look for them.”

The article, “Spin-Resolved Topology and Partial Axion Angles in Three-Dimensional Insulators,” is available online.

The first principles calculations on bismuth bromide were performed by Zhaopeng Guo and Zhijun Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Additional computational support was provided by Jeremey Blackburn of Binghamton University.

Giandomenico Palumbo of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Yoonseok Hwang of the U. of I. also contributed to this work.

Support was provided by the Center for Quantum Sensing and Quantum Materials, an Energy Frontier Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences; the European Union and European Research Council’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program; the National Science Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the Office of Naval Research; the National Natural Science Foundation of China; and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

One major challenge to this therapeutic approach is to accurately quantify tumor kinases in human biopsy samples. Many kinases are not abundantly present and are therefore more difficult to measure accurately. Although currently there are methods to quantify small amounts of kinases, measuring multiple kinases concurrently is cumbersome and impractical in a clinical setting where rapid data return is critical. It is crucial to develop methodologies to enrich kinases present in clinical samples, an important step toward effective personalized medicine.

In a study published in Clinical Proteomics, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions report the development of a kinase inhibitor pulldown assay (KiP) that can optimally enrich and quantify the small amounts of kinases present in biopsy samples in combination with mass-spectrometry techniques.

The researchers established the coverage and quantitative fidelity of the assay for kinases in a single-shot approach, optimized a 100-kinase targeted panel and determined the effectiveness of KiP in subtyping breast cancer patient-derived animal models and two breast cancer patient sample cohorts.

“Our study represents a convergence of advanced technologies, redefining basic medical research and paving the way for future clinical applications,” said first author Dr. Alexander Saltzman, senior bioinformatics analyst at the Mass Spectrometry Proteomics Core at Baylor.

“This paper emphasizes that new methods in protein mass spectrometry hold great promise for better definition of the individual druggable landscape present in each cancer and should be more widely used for research and, ultimately, clinical care,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Matthew Ellis, faculty at Baylor’s Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center.

“This methodology’s approach to identifying key kinases in cancer may even extend beyond these enzymes and into other low-abundance and biologically relevant targets,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Beom-Jun Kim, currently an associate director at AstraZeneca and an assistant professor at Baylor at the time of research.

Doug W. Chan, Matthew V. Holt, Junkai Wang, Eric J. Jaehnig, Meenakshi Anurag, Purba Singh and Anna Malovannayaalso contributed to this work. The authors are affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center and/or the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

This work was supported by CPTAC PTRC grant National Cancer Institute’s Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) (U01 CA214125) and a CPTAC PGDAC Award (U24 CA210954). Ellis received support from a CPRIT Established Investigator Award (RR140033) and from Ralph and Lisa Eads. Ellis also is a McNair Medical Institute Scholar. The BCM Mass Spectrometry Proteomics Core is supported in part by a Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center Award (P30 CA125123), CPRIT Core Facility Awards (RP170005 and RP210227) and an NIH High-End Instrumentation Award (S10 OD026804).