Science

The bias groups have to view their own actions as driven predominantly by love while viewing the actions of their rivals as driven more by hate has been explained by recent research conducted by a team from Northwestern University. The researchers found that in reality conflicts were driven by the same motivations, but the view from each side of a conflict was skewed–partially by psychological bias, partly by experience. The researchers also found that the bias could be removed by incentivizing a more considerate understanding using a time-honored cooperative tool–money.

“People are surprisingly motivated by the same things in conflict–wanting to do right by their own group, and wanting to show loyalty and affiliation toward their own group,” Dr Adam Waytz, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellog School of Management and lead author of the study, told The Speaker.

“The Palestinian and Israeli conflict provides the clearest example,” Waytz told us. “I think most cases where a country decides on a violent or aggressive strategy to address conflict with another country means that they are assuming the other country is driven by hate.”

3,000 people were involved in the NU study, which included Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and Republicans and Democrats in the US.

The research team found that each side of a conflict felt that their group was motivated by love more than hate, but each also felt that the other group was motivated by hate more than love.

“We think people misinterpret others’ motives for two related reasons. One, they are motivated to see their own group as loving and their outgroup as barbaric,” Waytz told us, referring to a theory called motive attribution asymmetry. “Two, they simply encounter less instances of their outgroup engaged in acts of love, and therefore are blind to these motives,” said Waytz.

The researchers found evidence that each group regularly saw its own members engaging in acts of “love, care and affiliation,” but rarely saw rival group members acting from similar motives. In large part, this is because groups more often notice each other’s actions during moments of heated conflict.

Rival groups often can’t see eye to eye on possible solutions or find grounds for compromise because they can’t agree on the way they perceive each other. This creates an error or bias.

“If they believed that the other country was driven by in-group love, they would see diplomacy as a more effective tactic,.” said Waytz.

“It’s interesting to see that people can be blind to the source of behavior on the other side, that you can go from saying you are motivated by love of your own group and you can’t seem to apply that to reasoning about the other side,” Liane Young, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston College and co-author of the research article commented in a press release.

“What’s interesting to me is there’s so much work on social psychology suggesting we first think about who we are and what motivates us and we tend to apply that other people,” said Young. “What we’re seeing here is just the opposite where I say one thing for me and instead of extrapolating that it would be the same for you, I say it’s just the opposite for you, that you’re motivated by your hatred of my group. That’s pretty striking to me.

“What we also found was that these attributions tend to also track with other sorts of consequences so if you think that the people on the other side are motivated by their hatred of your group, you also are unwilling to negotiate with that group,” continued Young. “You tend to think they’re more unreasonable, suggesting that people’s misattributions of other groups may be the cause of intractable conflict.”

The NU team found that biases towards motive attribution asymmetry could be removed by incentivizing more considerate judgement.

When money was offered, study participants were able to correctly assess an opponent’s motivation. The promise of money for finding the right answer seemed to help study participants find that “right answer.”

“We just simply told people they would get a bonus for getting the answer right so they had to buy into this idea that there was a right answer,” said Young. “It seems like we can at least move around people’s judgments and that people aren’t so hopelessly lost that they can’t get it right when they are motivated to get it right.”

The report, “Motive Attribution Asymmetry For Love vs. Hate Drives Intractable Conflict,” was authored by Adam Waytz of Northwestern University, Jeremy Ginges of the New School of Social Research, and Liane Young of Boston College, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

People are unaware that various innocuous-sounding things are actually affecting them on a regular basis, according to new research by Bayer College of Medicine. Newspapers, radio and tv can influence the way people act by using words that trigger powerful emotions, the researchers found–clean words cause clean thoughts, which produce ethical actions, and dirty words produce disgusted thoughts and immoral actions.

“People don’t know it, but these small emotions are constantly affecting them.” said Vikas Mittal, J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing Adjunct Professor of Family & Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, and lead researcher on the study.

“What we found is that unless you ask people, they often don’t know they’re feeling disgusted,” Mittal said. “Small things can trigger specific emotions, which can deeply affect people’s decision-making. The question is how to make people more self-aware and more thoughtful about the decision-making process.”

This is because disgust is an emotion that causes people to protect themselves–that is, focus on their self.

However, lessening disgust causes people to behave more ethically again. This can be done by causing people to think of clean things–cleaning products such as Kleenex or Windex, for example. When disgust is lessened, the likelihood of cheating goes away.

The study involved two sets of randomized experiments with 600 participants. The researchers randomly disgusted their participants in three ways.

In one, participants evaluated antidiarrheal medicine, diapers, cat litter, feminine care pads and adult incontinence products. In another experiment, participants wrote out their most disgusting memory. In a third, a disgusting scene from the film “Trainspotting” was played for the participants. The scene shows a man diving into a dirty toilet.

The disgusted participants engaged in consistently self-interested behaviors at a significantly heightened rate.

After the participants were disgusted, another set of experiments was conducted.

The researchers had some participants evaluate cleaning products–disinfectants, body washes, household cleaners. These participants were returned to a normal level of deceptive behavior.

Managers could use this information to understand how to impact decision-making and cause ethical or unethical behavior, Mittal said. He commented on office cleanliness and cleanliness in the workplace in general.

“At the basic level, if you have environments that are cleaner, if you have workplaces that are cleaner, people should be less likely to feel disgusted,” said Mittal. “If there is less likelihood to feel disgusted, there will be a lower likelihood that people need to be self-focused and there will be a higher likelihood for people to cooperate with each other.”

“If you’re making important decisions, how do you create an environment that is less emotionally cluttered so you can become progressively more thoughtful?”

The report, “Protect Thyself: How Affective Self-Protection Increases Self-Interested Behavior,” was authored by Mittal and Karen Page Winterich, associate professor of marketing at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, and Andrea Morales, a professor of marketing at Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, and will be published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

By Sid Douglas

 

The Speaker recently interviewed Dr Shane Gero, a marine biologist who has been studying sperm whales in the Caribbean for the past 10 years. We talked to Gero

about his research in Dominica as well as his current project, which represents many firsts in the science of sperm whale communication. Gero’s findings offer a greater understanding of what happens when sperm whales talk to each other.

The whales, Gero has found, are using language for many communicative purposes–including, it seems, greeting other whales using first and last names. Also, sperm whales from different parts of the world and from different social groups speak the differently. Not only do they speak their language differently, they also exhibit varying cultures depending on where they live and which social group they belong to.

“The focus of my study has been at the level of the individual whale.” Gero told us. “We’ve been able to follow these animals year after year–the same about two dozen families–some of them we’ve spent hundreds of hours wit.”

“We’ve collected a huge data set on who has spent time with who–but also, from a communications standpoint, who says what to whom. And that’s really a first: being able to look at individuals chatting with each other at a conversational level.

“This new study that’s happening in the next couple of years is, for the first time, going to be able to place those conversations into a context in the open ocean.”

The new project takes Gero’s previous decade of experience with sperm whales one step further, and will serve as a lead-up to a fuller understanding of what sperm whale language is.

“Previously we would record animals, and be able to figure out who was saying what, but we didn’t know where they were relative to each other, or the ‘when’ context… in terms of when they were actually talking to each other…

“We’ve done well in the last 10 years to answer the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ of these conversations. The ‘where’ and the ‘when’ are the subject of the current research. Hopefully this will lead us to one day answer the really interesting ‘why’ questions. ‘What are they saying to each other? What does it all mean?'”

Gero gave us some details about sperm whale society. These whales live in a hierarchical society, and spend their day to day life in what the researchers call “social units.” In Dominica, there are some 400 sperm whales, and all of them belong to one matriline–grandmothers, mothers and daughters–which spend their full lives together. The Dominica group spends most of their lives within 20 miles of the shore.

“These animals in the Caribbean are really island-associated animals,” said Gero of the group. “It’s really easy to call them families, because that’s what they are.”

“On the average day, there’s only one family off the coast of the island. But every now and again, two families will join up and spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days together socializing.

When talking about language, Gero told us that we must keep in mind that sperm whale language is very different from human language–and is also different from the language of other whales–including the language of the more familiar humpback whale.

“Language is a big question. Language comes with syntax and it comes with meaning and orders, and we haven’t figured all that out yet. But what we do know is that sperm whales use a system of clicks to communicate with each other.

“It’s kind of like Morse code. So, some calls sound like this: ‘tap-tap-taptaptap,’ where others sound like this: ‘taptaptaptaptaptaptap.’ And different rhythms are used at different times. Animals exchange these back and forth, kind of like you would using Morse code.”

Sperm whales throughout the world exhibit common features of communication, but also exhibit variation, Gero explained. The variation seemingly depends on the geographic origin of a particular whale, among other factors, and serves the whales as a social marker.

“So, what’s interesting about variation in the world is that animals in the Caribbean sound different from animals in the Mediterranean, and they sound different from animals in the Gulf of Mexico and so on.

“At least in the Atlantic, it seems like it’s geographic. So all the animals in the Caribbean sound very similar, but they sound different from the animals in the Med–that sound very similar.

“But in the Pacific it’s different. In the Pacific you actually have different sperm whale dialects living in the same area. So some of the animals off the Galapagos sound one way, and some of the animals sound differently. But what’s really neat about that is that they seem to use these dialects to segregate their society.

“So as a whale that means making a certain type of coda,” said Gero. Codas are patterns of clicks used by whales to communicate.

Gero offered an example of the individuals that live in these segregated sperm whale groups. “I only spend time with animals that make that same sound. It would be similar to living in a multi-cultural country like Canada or the United States, but then only socializing with anyone who speaks the same language as you.”

“In the Caribbean we hear a lot of a one-plus-one-plus-three coda. So it sound like this: ‘tap-tap-taptaptap.’ And that’s the only place that it’s been recorded–in the Caribbean. And all the animals make it very similarly. So, we think that it acts as a marker of ‘I’m from the Caribbean.’ Whereas in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Galapagos, the coast of Chile and Ecuador–there are several different coda repertoires.”

Gero contrasted this five-part coda with the five-part codas used by other whales around the world.

“One of the groups makes very regularly timed codas. So, they’ll make a five-regular, which is five clicks that are very evenly spaced, so it sounds something like this: ‘tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.’ And they also make a six-regular and a seven-regular, and so on.

“But then there’s another dialect that’s all plus-one. So, rather than making a five-regular, they would make a four-plus-one, which sounds like this: ‘taptaptaptap-tap.’ And they also make a five-plus-one and a six-plus-one and so on.

Gero and his fellow researchers assume that the whales are using their calls to identify themselves on a first and last name basis. The assumption is based on the common usage of a one-plus-one-plus-three coda in a similar way, while each individual whale uses a five-R in a slightly different way. “It seems as though they sort of have this nested, hierarchical recognition, so there seems to be the five-R coda, which you hear everywhere in the world.”

Gero then explained the first names.

“It has the variability to function as an individual identifier,” said Gero. “It’s potentially used to mark differences between individuals. So if you’re looking within an family, you can actually tell the individuals apart by how they make that coda. So its kind of like a first name. And, at least in the Caribbean, it seems that they use different codas that are all four clicks in length, but each family unit has a different four click coda. So that’s sort of like a last name. And then we know for sure that the animals in the animals in the Caribbean use the one-plus-one-plus-three, and that’s the only place that has been recorded. So we think that it probably functions in a way of marking their geographic origin or their cultural group–the vocal dialect that they have. So they have this nested kind of first name-last name cultural group.

“In the same way, I would say that my first name is Shane, my last name is Gero, and I come from Canada.”

Gero told The Speaker that testing the function of these calls is a matter of his current research. They are looking at how the animals use the calls and when they use them. The whales may use the calls like the bottlenose dolphins being studied by the Sea Mammal Research unit at the University of St Andrews, which have been observed exchanging their calls when meeting at sea. “They actually say, ‘Hey it’s me’–‘Oh, hey, it’s you. Great,'” commented Gero.

Sperm whales not only vary in the languages they speak, they vary culturally based on what group they live among.“And the neatest part about them is that these vocal clans–these whale cultural groups that use these different dialects–don’t only segregate their society socially, but they also behave differently. They have different movement patterns and different foraging habits and reproductive success, as it turns out. And so they really are really equatable to human ethnic groups.”

When we asked Gero about whether different codas were used by the animals to represent various parts of their lives, he gave us an idea of where his research was headed.

“That’s really what I’m studying in Dominica, because it’s the first time we’ve been able to follow families over such a long period of time, and hear them communicate with each other in different contexts.”

Although the “why” of sperm whale calls is a matter of Gero’s future research, he was willing to offer some educated guesses.

“The ocean is mostly a dark space on a big-area scale of thousands of square kilometers in which there is not a lot of stuff. And the most important thing that you have with you is your family members. And so, keeping track of where your family members are as individuals–whether it’s your mom or your baby-sitter or your aunt or your grandmother–is important.

“But then even more importantly, its critical to figure out what family you’re coming up on. So if one family is swimming north and the other family is swimming south, they need to figure before it’s too late whether or not they want to spend time with each other or avoid each other, and whether or not they recognize that family group.

“So having that layer of recognition to recognize individuals and families and the society that they come from is really important when you live in a vast, dark ocean,” said Gero.

This has a lot to do with feeding habits, explained Gero.

“Sperm whales feed on squid, and squid is very patchily distributed in the ocean. And so, you don’t want to spend time in a bigger group with animals that you don’t know, in order to deplete that resource. So, we know that sperm whales–at least on the day to a week scale–travel around basically following the squid that they’re trying to eat. And so, in order to maximize the amount of food you get, you want to minimize the amount of animals that are eating that patch of squid.

“So, it’s important to find out who is there in order to maximize your foraging success in some respects.”

In order to study the language of sperm whales, Gero and his team use animal-borne sound and movement tags–technology from Dr. Peter Madsen’s world-leading Marine Bioacoustics Lab.

“D-tags were pioneered out of Woods Hole Oceanographic in the US. They are being heavily used at [Gero’s] lab at Aarhus University,” Gero told us.

“Basically, they’re about the size of your cell phone. And it works like your cell phone in some respects. It can measure the 3-d movement. So, it’s kind of like if you’re looking at a picture on your phone, and you turn your phone sideways: the picture orients itself and gets bigger. That’s because the phone knows that it’s being turned sideways. And these tags know that as well. So, we get 3-dimensional fine-scale movement by putting them out on the animal.

“But they also have two little microphones at the front, so we also get really high-resolution stereo sound.

“The tags get deployed with a really long pole, and they stick to the whales with four small suction cups. So they don’t implant into the whale. You basically poke the animal with a long stick, and the suction cups stick onto the back of the animal, and then they can last for about two days. And then they computer inside tells the suction cups it’s time to release, and it lets a little bit of water into the suction cup and the suction cup falls off, and the tag floats back to the surface.

“And then it has a little VHS transmitter in it, and that allows us to track it down. Just as other biologists in Africa tracking lions or elephants would.

“And what this gives us, if we put out three of them at the same time, or five of them at the same time on a family of whales… If the family of whales is only seven animals, we get all the relative positions of all the adult females in the family. And so we get all of the exchanges of the calls between them as well. So we know that Pinchy–a female–just dove and has left her calf, Tweak, at the surface, and is now calling to Fingers, whose coming back up from the deep, and so it gives us not only the context but also what they’re saying to each other.

“And the context is really important. So now we know that it’s a mother diving, leaving her baby at the surface, and communicating with the primary baby-sitter.

“And so its a lot easier to interpret what the meaning of that conversation was, because we know all of this background information about the animals, and now we know the physical relative position of them when they’re talking with each other.”

To be continued…

Look forward to part two of this interview, in which Dr Gero explains the dangers and concerns facing sperm whales and other marine life in our increasingly trafficked oceans. 

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Dr Shane Gero completed his doctoral studies at Dalhousie University, Canada, and is currently an FNU Research Fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark. Gero splits his time between Dr. Peter Madsen’s Marine Bioacoustics Lab in Denmark, his human family in Canada, and the sperm whale community off the island of Dominica in the Caribbean.

Photos: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Three Fish Sleeping, Jessie Hodge, Flying Kiwi Tours, Bing, Chelsea Leven

Montana State University environmental scientists have found conclusive evidence that hailstones originate in biological material. MSU researcher Alex Michaud turned travesty into understanding by peeling back the onionlike layers of the crystalline compositions he collected from the Bozeman and two other Rocky Mountain hailstorms, and the results promise to increase our understanding of the role of aerosol particles in atmospheric condensation and, as a part of the bigger picture, improve our model inputs to the Earth’s energy balance.

“A hailstone is a very complex weather phenomenon, Alex Michaud, MSU doctoral student and first author of the paper, told The Speaker. “It can tell us a lot about the properties of the clouds in which it was formed.”

Michaud, who normally studies Antarctic microorganisms, took up the subject of hailstones after storms pummeled Bozeman and other parts of southwest Montana in 2010.

“While they cause lots of damage there are many things to be learned from hailstones. They’re more than just a clump of ice falling from the sky,” Michaud told us.

“This is the first paper to really show that biological material makes hailstones,” commented John Priscu, a polar scientist and professor at MSU’s Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, with whom Michaud regularly works and who coauthored the report. “Despite the millions in dollars of damage the storm caused in Bozeman, the damaging hailstones provided us with a better understanding of hailstone formation, which will help us understand the role of aerosol particles in the formation of precipitation.”

After the Montana storm, Michaud collected and stored hailstones–averaging 1.5 inches in diameter. He also collected hailstones from two other local storms that year and the next.

Michaud peeled back the crystalline layers of the hailstones and found that they had formed around a biological embryo.

“We can assume–quite safely, except maybe in the dead of winter–that biological material is constantly being taken up into the air,” said Michaud. “Many surfaces give off biological material such as leaf surfaces, lakes, oceans, animals, my dandruff, etc. They are emitting bacteria, fungal spores, detritus, and so forth.”

Michaud elaborated to explain that biological material in the air was not the only thing required to create hailstones.

“Certainly the atmospheric and meteorological conditions need to fit a certain set of conditions in order for a hailstorm to occur and produce hailstones. These particular conditions are best answered by a meteorologist, but suffice it to say that you need a very strong thunderstorm conditions to generate a hailstorm. So not all biological material turns into hail because meteorological conditions need to be appropriate to support hailstone formation.”

In his research, Michaud was also able to gauge the temperatures at which the hailstone embryos formed by analyzing stable isotopes in water. The temperatures at which hail froze were warm, Michaud found.

“Warm freezing temperatures–warm, sub-zero temperatures–is indicative of ice nuclei that are efficient at catalyzing ice nucleation. Water needs a template or a nucleus in order to form an ice crystal, only once water reaches ~-40C does it spontaneously freeze. So for something to freeze at warm subzero temperatures means that it provides a good template of an ice crystal, which is found in biological material much more often than abiotic–dust, minerals, etc–material.”

The study builds on previous findings that warm temperature ice nucleation indicated that biological material was likely the nuclei of hailstones.

Among past researchers in hailstones was Tina Santl Temkiv, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, with whom Michaud consulted.

“It was very coincidental that she published two hailstone microbiology papers two years before me and we ended up at the same university for a few month,” said Michaud. “Plus, we are the only ones to work on hailstone microbiology since a 1973 paper in Nature.”

Michaud also said that hailstones were a nice model for studying atmospheric ice nucleation and cloud processes because of the way hailstones grow.

“Hail is a good model system for understanding precipitation formation and nucleation,” said Michaud. “We can trace the life history of a hailstone all the back to the part of the hailstone that was present when it was first started, the embryo. This ability to trace a hailstones life back to its beginnings, and those life history stages are layers of ice that can be peeled away–sort of like an onion–we can be more definitive in saying what was present when the embryo of the hailstone formed.”

Michaud explained to us how the new evidence could contribute to our understanding of the role of aerosol particles in the formation of precipitation.

“Aerosols are a broad term for any particle that is aloft in the atmosphere. These aerosol particles play a large role in reflecting solar energy and in cloud formation–which also reflects solar energy. So understanding how aerosols form precipitation and/or clouds will help with meteorological models and the earth’s energy balance.

“Certainly the last one is a bit of a stretch for my work, but knowing that biological ice nuclei are active in forming clouds and precipitation–rain, snow, and, now, hail–will improve the model inputs to earth’s energy balance. It’s a piece to a much bigger puzzle.”

Michaud was uncertain if the results would have any immediate practical implications.

“On improving our use of aerosol particles, I’m not too sure. In California they are trying to perform cloud seeding to increase snowpack in the Sierras to decrease drought conditions, which is through the use of particular aerosols. I don’t think I am qualified to speak to how we–the royal we, humans–can improve our use of aerosol particles.”

The report, “Biological ice nucleation initiates hailstone formation,” was authored by Alexander B. Michaud, John E. Dore, Deborah Leslie, W. Berry Lyons, David C. Sands andJohn C. Priscu, and was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Photo: Alex Michaud, Andrew Slaughter and Kelly Gorham, MSU

Significant improvements in Ebola research have been made possible by researchers at the University of North Carolina. The researchers have not only bred a mouse that can be used to better investigate the way Ebola symptoms develop in a human host, but have also identified several key genes that account for a variety of Ebola symptoms–in particular one gene, Tek, which accounts for a large amount of the symptom variation in individuals within a species.

“Laboratory mice have traditionally been unable to be infected by wild-type Ebola virus,” Martin Ferris, research assistant professor of genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill and one of the researchers on the project, told The Speaker.

Typical lab mice do not develop Ebola in the way that humans do–mice infected with Ebola don’t develop the fatal symptoms that present in human victims. The team considered, however, that some mice might be more susceptible than others, and bred a new mouse strain that could be infected with an Ebola virus and which displayed symptoms like those displayed by human Ebola victims.

“A mouse adapted strain of Ebola has been used for in vivo studies of Ebola pathogenesis for over 15 years,” said Ferris. “This mouse adapted Ebola virus was used in our studies.” Ferris clarified for us that the team did not infect mice with the active human strain of Ebola that is currently epidemic in West Africa. Nevertheless, strict medical precautions were taken.

“In general, adaptation of viruses to small animal models results in attenuated viruses as measured on human cell types–obviously there are no studies showing primary human infection. Often this is due to viral changes to utilize host-species specific cell receptors. That said, it is not clear whether the mouse adapted Ebola virus used in these studies would cause disease in a human. Therefore, to be safe, this virus was still handled under Biosafety Level 4 conditions, just like other Ebola virus strains.”

Read more: Ebola Genome Sequencing Being Undertaken by Harvard Team to Discover Weaknesses in Virus Genome, Which Has Already Mutated Hundreds of Times

The team bred together eight genetic mouse variants to create the new strain that could be infected and develop symptoms similar to those experienced by humans.

Ferris elaborated on how the process worked.

“Just as host genetic variants can impact disease susceptibility, so too can viral genetic variants. In other words, just as there is no single human from a genetic standpoint, there is no single Ebola virus from a genetic standpoint.

“In some cases specific mutations in a virus can be identified and characterized which allow for improved infection of a different species (e.g. mice instead of humans). In other cases, there are only associations of sequence variants in different stages of an epidemic. For example, as viruses that have typically resided in wild animal populations spend more and more time spreading within the human population, and eventually are maintained by human to human contact, we can see genetic variants selected for in the virus population. This is illustrated by the SARS-coronavirus epidemic in 2002-2003, where changes in the virus over the course of the outbreak allowed it to interact more efficiently with its receptor on human cells. This likely allowed the virus to infect humans more efficiently, thereby worsening the outbreak.”

The UNC study will aid researchers in fighting Ebola by providing them with a better tool for understanding how Ebola Ebola infection manifests in the body of a host, and by pointing to a gene that researchers can target in their investigations.

The team found that a combination of genes was involved in producing a range of disease symptoms, and linked genetic variation to symptom variety. Not only that: the researchers were able to identify a single gene that accounted for much of the variation in symptoms–a gene that codes for the protein Tek.

“Our study not only in gives an improved mouse model which recapitulates more of the severe Ebola disease seen in humans,” said Ferris, “but also in pointing to a gene, Tek, which has sequence variants that are strongly associated with disease outcome in these mice. This helps in two ways.

“Therapeutics and vaccines need to be shown to be both effective against viral infection, and also safe for individuals. By developing a mouse model that shows many aspects of severe Ebola disease, we have a better platform for quickly assessing how effective treatments might be.”

“We now have a genetic target (Tek),” continued Ferris, “and its associated pathway of host response genes where we can focus studies on. Having a specific pathway that differentiates resistant and susceptible mouse lines provides us with a good host pathway that can be targeted to develop Ebola virus therapies.”

Of particular importance is the way that a disease, such as Ebola, infects individuals within a species differently, and that means variants in a species genetic code need to be identified in order to combat the disease–exactly what was accomplished in the research.

“Host genes have a major impact on susceptibility to infection, and not just between species,” said Ferris. “The mice we used were related to each other, yet some were resistant to infection and others got hemorrhage in a very controlled experiment. This means variants in their genes played a major role in determining their disease outcomes.”

The UNC team has been working on the study since before Ebola made headlines earlier this year, and Ferris pointed out that disease, if it is to be successfully fought, must be studied before it becomes a problem.

“I think another critical point is that we cannot wait for a major outbreak to start research on potential human pathogens,” said Ferris. “We have been part of this collaborative study for over 2 years, and therefore started well before the current outbreak. Only by identifying pathogens and studying them before they cause pandemics can we hope to develop the tools needed to combat infection.”

The report, “Host genetic diversity enables Ebola hemorrhagic fever pathogenesis and resistance,” was authored by Angela L. Rasmussen, Atsushi Okumura, Martin T. Ferris, Richard Green, Friederike Feldmann, Sara M. Kelly, Dana P. Scott, David Safronetz, Elaine Haddock, Rachel LaCasse, Matthew J. Thomas, Pavel Sova, Victoria S. Carter, Jeffrey M. Weiss, Darla R. Miller, Ginger D. Shaw, Marcus J. Korth, Mark T. Heise, Ralph S. Baric, Fernando Pardo Manuel de Villena, Heinz Feldmann, and Michael G. Katze, and was published in Science Magazine.

By Dan Jackson

The same bizarre worm-like clams that create holes in driftwood may be a game-changes for fuel supplies in America, according to a joint research team that has just published their finding that shipworms have a totally unique digestive system–hitherto unknown–and possess the ability to create enzymes that break plant matter down into sugar and other fuel products.

“You don’t hear about the discovery of new diges­tive strate­gies very often,” said Dr Dan Distel, Director at the Ocean Genome Legacy Center of New England Biolabs Marine Science Center, Northeastern University, and a lead researcher on the study. “It just doesn’t happen.”

“This is why it’s so impor­tant that we as researchers look at oceans,” Distel said. “It yields so many unex­pected benefits.”

Shipworms aren’t worms–they’re clams that look like worms, and they burrow holes through wood using enzymes made by bacteria. They use the broken down wood matter as nutrition, similar to termites.

How shipworms break down wood is the matter of the teams recent, groundbreaking discovery: the bacteria doesn’t come from shipworms’ guts.

The enzymes that break down wood are made by bacteria that lives inside special cells in the clam’s gills, and are transported to the gut.

No other animal in the world uses bacteria produced outside its digestive system, Distel said. No other intracellular bacterium produces enzymes that function outside of the host.

“This is really unusual in that the bacteria that produce the enzymes are located in an organ outside the digestive system and in fact appear to be intracellula,” Distel told The Speaker. “The vast majority of animals use extracellular bacteria in the gut to help them digest. The lumen of the gut, if you think about it, is really part of the outside of the animal. There are some examples of animals ingesting enzymes produced by bacteria or fungi in their food, but I have not heard of another animal that has a special organ outside of the gut designed to house enzyme-producing bacteria.”

Because the team could find around 45 genes inside the guts of the shipworms that matched the 1000 genes found in the gills, the team believes they can find the enzymes that could be used in commercial biofuel production.

“This was a key finding,” Distel said, “because we can iden­tify the small number of enzymes that are actu­ally involved in breaking down wood in gut, and that gives us a list of can­di­dates that you can start to look at to find commercially-​​viable enzymes.”

The enzymes convert plant biomass–cellulose–into sugar, and sugar can be used to make ethanol and other biofuels.

Biofuel production is already a matter of US government policy. By 2022 36 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel should be produced in the country, according to a government mandate, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) expects that one-third of US transportation fuel could be met with cellulosic biomass.

The main obstacle to commercial success in cellulosic ethanol is finding the right enzymes to convert plant matter into sugar.

Distel told us that although it would be an overstatement to say that they had found the key to unlocking commerce in cellulosic ethanol, they had identified a new source of enzymes with potential commercial value.

Next for the research team is to investigate how shipworms’ digestive enzymes move from gills to gut, and to characterize each of the proteins the team found and evaluate their potential applications.

The research was a large cooperative effort undertaken with the help of colleagues at the Joint Genome Institute (DOE), New England Biolabs, and other collaborating institutions.

In addition to collaborative help, advances in science were also credited by Distel in the research.

“It has been known that bacteria are present in the gills since the 1970’s and it has been suspected for some time that they contribute to wood digestion by the host,” Distel told us, “but this is the first demonstration. I have been working on these critters for many years, but recently advances in genomics and proteomics have given us the tools to answer many questions that were previously tough to address. ”

Their research paper, “Gill bacteria enable a novel digestive strategy in a wood-feeding mollusk,” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday afternoon, and was authored by Roberta M. O’Connora of Tufts Medical Center, Jennifer M. Fung at Bolt Threads biotech company, Koty H. Sharp at Eckerd College, Jack S. Bennerd, Colleen McClungd, Shelley Cushing, Elizabeth R. Lamkin, Alexey I. Fomenkov, Bernard Henrissat, Yuri Y. Londer, Matthew B. Scholz, Janos Posfai, Stephanie Malfatt, Susannah G. Tringe, Tanja Woyke, Rex R. Malmstromh, Devin Coleman-Derrh, Marvin A. Altamia, Sandra Dedrick, Stefan T. Kaluziak, Margo G. Haygood, and Daniel L. Distel.

By Dan Jackson

Photos: Dan Distel, Korabel Cherv

New understanding has been gained into how densities within populations can affect outcomes for the species as a whole. Answers to how species populations can be manipulated to increase and properly manage fish yields, better eliminate unwanted pests, and other species-wide effects have been demonstrated by Princeton University researcher Anieke van Leeuwen and two European colleagues who asked, “Can less really be more?”

“When we think about dynamics in ecological systems, either in one population or through interactions between populations (for example predator-prey dynamics or competition) or in entire ecosystems (food webs), we have to consider the fact that individual organisms differ within a population (or stock or species),” Dr Anieke van Leeuwen, postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one of the three authors of the report, told The Speaker.

There was a significant benefit to understanding how differences among individuals within a species population affect outcomes for the whole, van Leeuwen told us.

“There are differences in sizes, and individuals need to grow and develop, which costs energy. In other words, we cannot think in terms of numbers of individuals (and therewith average all biological characteristics, such as size, over all individuals). We will have to count the biomass per individual organism and account for the energy that it takes to grow to that size and maintain that biomass.”

Van Leeuwen explained how this could be done.

“Consider a herring population that has grown to the maximum ‘capacity’ of its resource environment. In such a setting we would predict that all individuals in the population experience harsh competition for resources, resulting in slow growth and a population size-distribution that is hump-shaped. Or in other words, the population is stunted.

“When we are interested in harvesting in particular the large individuals, the presence of such large, mature individuals could be boosted by some source of mortality on this herring population. Through increased mortality the intra-specific (i.e. intra-population) competition can be released, which would allow individuals in the population to attain higher growth rates and reach larger individual sizes. In the scenario accounting for some source of mortality (which may be imposed by fisheries or caused by predatory marine species, such as cod) the population size-distribution would become bimodal (at least to a much stronger extent than in the previous scenario) and large individuals are present (at all, or in higher densities than before).”

Van Leeuwen pointed to an earlier research paper, “How cod shapes its world,” which provided illustrations of the overcompensation phenomenon as well as the collapsing pattern that can result from overfishing in a more complex species system. In this research, the scientists reviewed existing studies that showed positive population level impacts of mortality, and explained how this has been looked at in theoretical models: classically (i.e. mostly non-size-structured populations) vs when accounting for population size structure, and compared the essential assumptions and processes of such models with what is reported in empirical studies.

Logically extending their understanding, the researchers concluded that species could be decimated if imposed mortality surpassed a certain point.

“If fishing pressure in such a setting steadily increases, observations show and models predict that there is a maximum, above which the herring population collapses,” van Leeuwen explained. She offered an illustration from the world of art: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Big Fish Eat Little Fish” (1557).

“It shows the importance of size-structure and differentiation so beautifully, while at the same time pointing out that humans are overexploiting natural systems,” commented van Leeuwen.

In seeking to understand species dynamics, many ecological models have ignored differences in body size in development while predicting that modest gains in total species numbers could be achieved by imposing mortality. Considering these theories, in addition to research that has shown that mortality of individuals from certain life stages or size classes can have a positive effect, the researchers concluded that the overlap of these data showed that it was a division along lines of developmental stages that was key to understanding mortality benefits.

“Only theory predicting the life stage specific positive mortality effects accounts for fundamental aspects of individuals,” the researchers found. “Mortality-induced density increases that are specific to life-history stage are common in nature.”

We asked van Leeuwen about whether their findings could be applied to human populations to understand the world’s various demographics. The comparison of humans to other animal species was complicated, she said, because human existence involves much more complicated social relationships than the animal settings in the study systems the researchers looked at allow for (for example, laboratory settings or the simplifying assumptions made in mathematical models).

“This question is extremely hard to answer from our context,” said van Leeuwen. “I think it is reasonable to say that in general human populations are limited in a different fashion or by different kinds of resources than the simplified ‘one-resource’ by which consumers are limited in the studies we refer to.

“Moreover, the structure in human populations is very much determined by certain social constructs and social configurations. These would influence populations to a large extent, while the research we review discounts any such social structure.”

Van Leeuwen offered an alternative starting point.

“I think with respect to potential applications for human interest, we should rather think about how the concept of culling has been known and used for ages in forestry and agriculture; and also in recreative or sports fisheries this is a familiar phenomenon.”

The report, “When less is more: positive population-level effects of mortality,” was completed by first author Arne Schröder, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin and first author, and Tom Cameron, a lecturer in aquatic community ecology at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, in addition to van Leeuwen, and was supported by the Journal of Experimental Biology, the Swedish Research Council and the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, the University of Leeds, the National Environment Research Council and the European Commission Intra-European Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.

By Day Blakely Donaldson
Photos: the research team, Jørgen Schyberg, and The Speaker

A team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine has converted human skin cells directly into brain cells. This breakthrough research is complimented by other landmark findings within the study–including that the cells were able to form neurological connections, both axonal and dendritic. The research holds promise for sufferers of neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s disease.

“Our study shows that the transplanted human cells derived by direct conversion of skin cells could actually behave like normal neurons,” Dr Andrew Yoo, assistant professor of developmental biology at the Washington University School of Medicine and lead researcher on the study, told The Speaker.

“We have evidence for both dendritic and axon growth,” Yoo told us.

“For dendritic growth, we found the transplanted cells could elicit spontaneous postsynaptic potentials, meaning that the cell were wired into the existing neural circuit and receive inputs from neighboring cells.”

The transplanted cells also formed axonal projections from the transplanted skin cells. “These cells are known to extend projections into certain brain regions. And we found the human transplanted cells also connected to these distant targets in the brain. That’s a landmark point about this paper,” said Yoo.

The team used a particular combination of microRNAs and transcription factors to reprogram the skin cells to become a particular type of brain cell known as medium spiny neurons.

Yoo’s team had found in previous research that exposing skin cells to two small RNA molecules–miR-9 and miR-124–could transform the cells into different types of brain cells.

The team is not certain how the transformation takes place, but has hypothesized that the two small RNA molecules open up the DNA inside the cells. That DNA holds the instructions for making brain cells. The team achieved transformation of a skin cell into a particular type of brain cell by adding molecules called transcription factors that the team knew were present in the region of the brain where medium spiny neurons are abundant.

“They are priming the skin cells to become neurons,” said co-author Matheus B. Victor of the small RNA molecules. “The transcription factors we add then guide the skin cells to become a specific subtype, in this case medium spiny neurons. We think we could produce different types of neurons by switching out different transcription factors.”

The spiny neurons produced by the team are the main type affected by the neurodegenerative disease Huntington’s disease, an inherited disease that causes a gradual decline of mental ability, accompanied by involuntary movement.

The team plans to achieve further understanding of how their results could help people suffering from Huntington’s disease.

“We are currently doing experiments to figure out how these transplanted cells send out axons to proper sites,” Yoo told us.

Next for the team is research that will use cells from patients with Huntington’s disease. Whereas the current research transformed human skin cells into mouse brain cells, the next step will aim to convert skin cells from humans with Huntington’s into mice with the same disease, again trying to create medium spiny neurons.

“For any future implications of using reprogrammed cells for cell replacement-based therapeutic approaches, it is imperative to show that the human neurons directly converted from fibroblasts could integrate into the brain circuit,” Yoo told us.

The report, “Generation of Human Striatal Neurons by MicroRNA-Dependent Direct Conversion of Fibroblasts,” was authored by Matheus B. Victor, Michelle Richner, Tracey O. Hermanstyne, Joseph L. Ransdell, Courtney Sobieski, Pan-Yue Deng, Vitaly A. Klyachko, Jeanne M. Nerbonne, and Dr Yoo, was published in Neuron Magazine, and was funded by various bodies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

By Daniel Jackson
Photos: Yoo Lab, Dierk Schaefer