The study, led by UBC faculty of forestry member Arthur Bass and using data generated by the Strategic Salmon Health Initiative, assessed dozens of pathogens in thousands of Chinook and Coho salmon sampled over a decade along the B.C. coast.

For the first time ever, researchers were able to identify the pathogens most closely linked to survival of free-ranging Pacific salmon in the ocean: Tenacibaculum maritimum, a bacterium that causes ulcerative disease in salmon and other cultured marine fish worldwide; and piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), a virus that causes disease in Pacific and Atlantic salmon worldwide, but whose impact on salmon in B.C. is vigorously debated.

“This is the first empirical evidence that PRV is negatively impacting wild Pacific salmon in B.C.,” says Dr. Bass, a postdoctoral researcher at UBC’s Pacific Salmon Ecology Conservation Lab. “These two pathogens are common on salmon farms in B.C., and recent studies provide evidence of transmission from farms to wild salmon.”

“Many studies show that high ocean temperatures impact salmon survival, but this new research shows that in some cases pathogen presence can be more important,” notes the study senior author Kristin Miller-Saunders, a molecular genetics scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and an adjunct professor of fisheries at UBC.

The research was funded by the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Genome BC and DFO and published today in FACETS.

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Materials provided by University of British Columbia. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Previously, scientists linked high-fat diets and elevated blood cholesterol with increased susceptibility to infection and lowered immune response. For example, obesity is a well-known risk factor for severe disease in COVID and influenza. But few studies have separated out the contribution of cholesterol in these infections, and none have delineated the effect of dietary cholesterol.

“We knew high serum cholesterol levels can lead to higher risk of sepsis in influenza infections and that statins — cholesterol-lowering medications — can improve survival during influenza pneumonia, SARS-CoV-2 infection, and sepsis. But it wasn’t clear whether or how dietary cholesterol was involved,” says Allison Louie, lead author on the Journal of Immunology study and doctoral student in the Neuroscience Program at Illinois.

Cholesterol is essential in the body. It’s part of our cell membranes, helps us make hormones and vitamin D, and allows for proper immune cell function. Our bodies manufacture it for us, requiring little to come in through dietary sources. In fact, for healthy people, dietary cholesterol does not substantially affect circulating cholesterol levels nor increase risk of cardiovascular disease. That’s part of the reason limits on cholesterol intake were lifted from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans in 2015.

But when it comes to infectious disease in mice, Louie’s study suggests dietary cholesterol may make a difference, even without increasing dietary fat.

Louie, along with co-authors Andrew Steelman and Joseph Tingling, fed mice a standard rodent chow or an identical diet supplemented with 2% cholesterol. After five weeks on the diets, mice were infected with a mouse-adapted human influenza A virus. The research team tracked disease progression, including weight loss, food intake, and sickness behavior. They also tracked serum cholesterol levels and immune responses and measured viral load in the lungs at multiple time points over the course of the infection.

“Across four cohorts, the cholesterol-fed mice had consistently higher morbidity,” Louie says. “They exhibited greater weight loss and sickness behavior.”

Because viruses also require cholesterol for cell entry and replication, there was a chance the high-cholesterol diet would boost viral load in the lungs. But that’s not what the researchers found.

“Our plaque assay did not show a significant difference in viral load in the lungs of the two groups of mice,” says Tingling, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Animal Sciences at Illinois. “It’s very important to consider not just the infectious agent, but the host immune system.”

Speaking of the host, the researchers determined mice fed a high-cholesterol diet were sicker because their immune systems went awry. Fat can have an immunosuppressive effect, which is detrimental during the course of an infection. But an underactive immune system is not what the researchers observed in the cholesterol-fed mice. Instead, cholesterol increased the number of cytokine-producing immune cells in the lungs.

“A so-called cytokine storm during severe disease results in excessive inflammation that can be damaging to the host. Along those lines, we found that more cytokine-producing cells had infiltrated the lungs of the mice fed cholesterol, which may have contributed to them being sicker,” Louie says. “It’s a double-edged sword. You want to be able to mount an effective immune response, but excessive inflammation is detrimental.”

Unfortunately, the effects of dietary cholesterol on influenza morbidity lasted long after mice stopped eating it. The researchers took mice that consumed a high-cholesterol diet initially and then gave them a normal diet for five weeks. When those mice were exposed to influenza, they still got sicker than mice that had never consumed a high cholesterol diet.

“We were thinking this dietary component is a highly modifiable factor. Perhaps it would only have a transient effect. But ultimately we found that five additional weeks on a normal diet was not enough time to fully reverse the detrimental effects of cholesterol,” Louie says.

Surprisingly, inflammatory changes in the lungs were detectable in the high-cholesterol mice even before they were infected with influenza.

“Some of the changes in the lungs’ immune function were already present before infection. It would be interesting to see exactly how dietary cholesterol increased inflammation prior to infection,” says corresponding author Steelman, associate professor in the Department of Animal Sciences, the Neuroscience Program, and the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Illinois.

“Nevertheless, our data collectively show that dietary cholesterol increased morbidity in influenza-infected mice. The response appeared to be a result of an aberrant immune response occurring in the lungs rather than an effect of the virus itself. These results demonstrate the need to consider how host factors contribute to disease outcome.”

Department of Animal Sciences and the Division of Nutritional Sciences are in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Led by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, the researchers published their sensor designs, which build on previous models, and results in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

The sensors monitor nitrogen dioxide, either from breath if attached under the nose, or from perspiration, if attached elsewhere on the body. Unlike taking blood samples, the direct skin attachment allows for continuous, long-term monitoring of the gas.

Cheng explained that while similar sensors exist, a key differentiator of the new design is breathability.

“The commonly used substrate materials for gas sensors are flexible, but not porous,” he said. “The accumulation of water moisture from the skin surface can potentially lead to irritation or damage to the skin surface. We need to make sure the device can be porous so that moisture can go through the sensor without accumulation on the surface.”

The researchers created the new sensors using a fabrication method known as laser direct writing.

“Laser direct writing is similar to additive manufacturing in that it is easy to set up and low cost, and the laser is widely available,” Cheng said. “The process is relatively robust, rapid and could be scaled up to large-scale manufacturing production.”

Cheng and his team integrated a type of material known as block copolymers with resin to laser write sensors with the desired breathability.

“Block copolymer integration goes beyond the materials we have been using, so we explored extending the substrate material from the typical thin film to virtually anything,” Cheng said. “That can give us breathability and tunability of the pore size.”

Cheng said that the sensor could monitor conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which nitrogen dioxide can cause or make worse. He also noted that while the sensors were developed specifically to detect nitrogen dioxide, they could potentially detect a variety of gases and biomarkers — to determine glucose levels to monitor diabetes, for example, or to identify hazards in industrial or combat settings.

“The sensors can also be useful for monitoring gas in the environment,” he said. “We could monitor air quality and inform patients of potential concerns about too much exhaust from cars, for example. Then, they could use that information to avoid certain areas on certain days.”

Other authors on this paper are Li Yang, Huadong Ji, Chuizhou Meng, Guanhao Zheng, Xue Chen, Guangyu Niu, Jiayi Yan, Ye Xue and Shijie Guo, all of Hebei University of Technology in Tianjin, China; and Yuhang Li of Beihang University in Beijing. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Key Research and Development Project of Hebei Province, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and Penn State funded this work.

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Materials provided by Penn State. Original written by Sarah Small. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.