New type of skeletal tissue has big potential

Researchers have discovered a new type of skeletal tissue that offers great potential for advancing regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.

Most cartilage relies on an external extracellular matrix for strength, but “lipocartilage,” which is found in the ears, nose, and throat of mammals, is uniquely packed with fat-filled cells called “lipochondrocytes” that provide super-stable internal support, enabling the tissue to remain soft and springy—similar to bubbled packaging material.

The study in the journal Science describes how lipocartilage cells create and maintain their own lipid reservoirs, remaining constant in size. Unlike ordinary adipocyte fat cells, lipochondrocytes never shrink or expand in response to food availability.

“Lipocartilage’s resilience and stability provide a compliant, elastic quality that’s perfect for flexible body parts such as earlobes or the tip of the nose, opening exciting possibilities in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, particularly for facial defects or injuries,” says corresponding author Maksim Plikus, a University of California, Irvine professor of developmental and cell biology.

“Currently, cartilage reconstruction often requires harvesting tissue from the patient’s rib—a painful and invasive procedure. In the future, patient-specific lipochondrocytes could be derived from stem cells, purified, and used to manufacture living cartilage tailored to individual needs.

“With the help of 3D printing, these engineered tissues could be shaped to fit precisely, offering new solutions for treating birth defects, trauma, and various cartilage diseases.”

Franz Leydig first recognized lipochondrocytes in 1854, when he noted the presence of fat droplets in the cartilage of rat ears, a finding that was largely forgotten until now. With modern biochemical tools and advanced imaging methods, UC Irvine researchers comprehensively characterized lipocartilage’s molecular biology, metabolism, and structural role in skeletal tissues.

They also uncovered the genetic process that suppresses the activity of enzymes that break down fats and reduce the absorption of new fat molecules, effectively locking lipochondrocytes’s lipid reserves in place. When stripped of its lipids, the lipocartilage becomes stiff and brittle, highlighting the importance of its fat-filled cells in maintaining the tissue’s combination of durability and flexibility.

In addition, the team noted that in some mammals, such as bats, lipochondrocytes assemble into intricate shapes, like parallel ridges in their oversized ears, which may enhance hearing acuity by modulating sound waves.

“The discovery of the unique lipid biology of lipocartilage challenges long-standing assumptions in biomechanics and opens doors to countless research opportunities,” says lead author Raul Ramos, a postdoctoral researcher in the Plikus laboratory for developmental and regenerative biology.

“Future directions include gaining an understanding of how lipochondrocytes maintain their stability over time and the molecular programs that govern their form and function, as well as insights into the mechanisms of cellular aging.

“Our findings underscore the versatility of lipids beyond metabolism and suggest new ways to harness their properties in tissue engineering and medicine.”

Support for the work came, in part, from the W.M. Keck Foundation, UCI Beall Applied Innovation; the LEO Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Horizon Europe, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. Additional backing came from Simons Foundation, the Yoshida Scholarship Foundation, a Howard A. Scheiderman Fellowship Award, the Ben F. Love Chair in Cancer Research at Baylor College of Medicine, the UC Riverside School of Medicine Dean’s Postdoc to Faculty Program, and the Danish Cancer Society.

Source: UC Irvine

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These frogs seem to ‘walk on water,’ but there’s more to it

The way cricket frogs move across the surface of water has long been thought to resemble walking on water, but researchers have discovered a different reality.

Several species have fascinated observers with their abilities to skip side-to-side and leap into the air from the surface of a pond as if the water were land. One such breed native to Virginia and North Carolina is the cricket frog. The way these frogs move in the water could bring insights to tools for the future of robotics, watercraft, and more.

“It’s fascinating how easily we can be fooled by fast animal movements.”

Jake Socha, a professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, leads a research team that studies the cricket frog’s unique ability to “skitter,” another name for jumping multiple times in succession. The team’s findings appear in the Journal of Experimental Biology, with graduate researcher Talia Weiss serving as first author.

“Skittering is not actually a well-defined word for this behavior—one naturalist used it to describe a ‘jumping on water’ behavior in frogs in 1949, and since then, it’s been used for this type of locomotion in all the following literature,” Weiss says.

“Part of this research is not only studying this behavior in cricket frogs, but to try and give ‘skittering’ a more precise, scientific definition.”

How do they do it? In their studies, Socha’s team members found that popular opinions generally state that the frog crosses the water without sinking, but doing so might still require a highly specialized anatomy. What does this frog have that other frogs don’t?

“Our lab has studied a range of animals, and many exhibit fascinating behaviors in navigating their environment,” Socha says.

“The humble cricket frog lives nearby, and yet it still surprised us with its abilities, further motivating our curiosity to understand the living world.”

Cricket frogs are one of the smallest frogs in North America, easily sitting on the thumb of an average adult’s hand. To observe the cricket frog in motion, team members used high-speed videography. They recorded how the frog leaps on land as well as in the water, watching the movement of their legs as they navigated both.

The team found that the frogs actually sink with each jump. While “skittering” gives a picture of the frogs freely leaping about while only their feet penetrate the water’s surface, the recordings showed a different picture.

Socha, Weiss, and their teammates saw that each time a frog came down from a leap, its entire body would submerge. The movement was less like a frog leaping and dancing across the water freely, and more like a plop and a jump. Their movements might more appropriately be called, “porpoising,” after the movement that a porpoise or dolphin uses: leaping into the air from beneath the surface of the water.

The reason that cricket frogs have previously appeared to dance across the water when viewed by eye is largely because of their rapid motion.

To record this ultra-fast motion, the team used a 20-gallon glass tank and released the frogs into it. High speed cameras shooting up to 500 frames per second were aimed from the side of the glass tank to capture the action above and below the water’s surface. As the frogs leapt, the team captured their getaway.

The footage was then slowed down to a small fraction of the original speed. When they watched the footage, team members made their surprising observation: The frogs did indeed sink.

“It’s fascinating how easily we can be fooled by fast animal movements,” says Socha. “Here, we’re fooled by a frog that appears like a skipping stone, but is actually jumping and dunking multiple times in a row. Frogs are great jumpers, but most of them don’t exhibit this porpoising behavior, and we still don’t know why. Is there something special about the frog’s leap, or is it simply a matter of small body size?”

By observing them in slow motion, team members could observe the motion of the frog as it retracted and extended its limbs. They also noticed that the angle of its body to the waterline played a factor, giving it the ability to balance itself in the water. They broke each jump cycle down to:

• Takeoff, from a submerged position
• Aerial, or time in the air following a jump
• Re-entry, back into the water
• Recovery, resetting for the next jump

In a little more than a single second, the frog would take off while completely submerged, extending its feet in an underwater push to propel its body above the surface. Its rear legs stayed extended while moving through the air, and its front legs moved from pressing against its body to reach forward. The extended front legs are the first to hit the water upon re-entry, and the back legs are still extended as it sinks. As it sinks, the back legs retract and bend back into a leaping position. Another jump is executed, repeating the movement.

It’s basically a belly flop.

The team observed frogs doing as many as eight jumps in a row, each being fully executed in less than a second.

Understanding skittering is an important discovery for the realm of biology, but it holds other keys as well. This discovery provides a new physical basis for the future of bio-inspired robotics. It could be applied to a water testing system that is needed to be rapidly deployed, or an amphibious drone taking water depth measurements. Those futuristic devices can take cues from nature to use well-tested methods that frogs have been using for centuries.

Support for this research came from the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences (ICTAS), the Biological Transport IGEP, and the National Science Foundation.

Source: Virginia Tech

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Chornobyl dogs aren’t different because of mutation

Radiation-induced mutation is unlikely to have led to genetic differences between dog populations in Chornobyl City and the nearby Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, according to a new study.

The study has implications for understanding the effects of environmental contamination on populations over time.

“We have been working with two dog populations that, while separated by just 16 kilometers, or about 10 miles, are genetically distinct,” says corresponding author Matthew Breen, a professor of comparative oncology genetics at North Carolina State University.

“We are trying to determine if low-level exposure over many years to environmental toxins such as radiation, lead, etcetera, could explain some of those differences.”

Previously, the team had analyzed genetic variants distributed across the genome and identified 391 outlier regions in the dogs that differed between the two populations. Some of these regions contained genes associated specifically with repair of DNA damage.

In this new study, the researchers conducted a deeper dive into the genomes of the dogs to detect evidence of mutations that may have accumulated over time.

“First, we contextualized the level of genetic differences between two dog populations, which indicated that the genetics of Chornobyl City dogs were very similar to dog populations in Russia, Poland, and the surrounding areas,” says Megan Dillon, a PhD candidate at NC State and lead author of the study.

“That way, we were able to use the Chornobyl City dogs as a representative control population to compare with the NPP [Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant] dogs.”

The researchers started to look for differences first at the chromosomal level, then at small genome intervals, and then at differences in single nucleotides. The team was looking for abnormalities and evidence of accumulated germ line DNA mutations, changes that occur in DNA of reproductive cells and are passed down from parent to offspring over time.

“Think of it like using the zoom function on your phone’s camera to get more details—we start with a wide view of a subject and then zoom in,” Breen says.

“We know that, for example, exposure to high doses of radiation can introduce instability from the chromosomal level on down. While this dog population is 30 or more generations removed from the one present during the 1986 disaster, mutations would likely still be detectable if they conferred a survival advantage to those original dogs. But we didn’t find any such evidence in these dogs.”

While no evidence of genetic mutation was found, the researchers add that it doesn’t rule out the role of selective pressures in explaining the differences between the two dog populations.

“In human terms, this would be like studying a population that is centuries removed from the one present at the time of the disaster,” Dillon says.

“It’s possible that the dogs that survived long enough to breed already had genetic traits that increased their ability to survive. So perhaps there was extreme selective pressure at the start, and then the dogs at the power plant just remained separate from the city population. Investigating that question is an important next step that we are now working on.”

The researchers point out that these findings are merely part of the bigger picture of the role that adverse environmental exposures can play in canine—and human—health.

“Most people think of the Chornobyl nuclear accident as a radiological disaster in an abandoned corner of Ukraine, but the potential adverse health implications are much wider,” says coauthor Norman Kleiman, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Columbia University School of Public Health.

“This is due to the many other toxins—including heavy metals, lead powder, pesticides, and asbestos—released into the environment during the ensuing cleanup and remediation over three decades.

“While no one lives at the NPP or in Pripyat anymore, up until the Russian invasion many thousands of people continued to work there every day on remediation and construction projects nearby,” Kleiman says. “Studying companion animals like these dogs offers a window into the kinds of adverse health risks that people may face.”

In addition to looking at the genetics of the dogs, the team also recently identified differences in ticks recovered from the dogs at the power plant and Chornobyl City and the prevalence of the pathogens they transmit. These results, published in the journal Parasites and Vectors, may reflect differential exposures to both ticks and microbes at the two locations.

“The importance of continuing to study the environmental health aspects of large-scale disasters like this cannot be overemphasized,” Kleiman says, “as it is certain, given our increasingly technological and industrial societies, there will invariably be other such disasters in the future, and we need to understand the potential health risks and how best to protect people.”

The research appears in PLOS ONE.

Additional coauthors are from NC State, Visiting Veterinarians International, and the University of South Carolina.

Source: North Carolina State University

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What ‘Abbott Elementary’ gets right about teaching and learning

TV sitcoms aren’t generally known for realism, but professor Natalia Ortiz says there’s actually a lot that Quinta Brunson’s hit show Abbott Elementary gets right about teaching and learning.

Ortiz is a clinical assistant professor and the director of the Office of School and Community Partnerships in NYU Steinhardt’s teaching and learning department.

Here, she digs into her favorite Abbott Elementary episode—”The Principal’s Office”—to show how the next generation of educators are exploring more inclusive and restorative models of classroom management and discipline:

Source: NYU

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Social media users are more likely to buy crypto

Hearing about cryptocurrencies online may affect people’s behavior, according to a new study.

Cryptocurrencies, or “crypto,” are digital currencies used for both payment and investment. They’ve seen a surge in popularity over the past decade, especially as more people learn about them through social media.

The study found that about half of social media users surveyed have invested in digital currencies. And the more social media platforms a user was active on, the more likely they were to invest.

Meanwhile, only 10% of non-social media users had invested in crypto.

YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Clubhouse users were the most likely to invest in digital currencies. Instagram users weren’t as keen on crypto.

The researchers believe this may be because longer YouTube videos and Reddit threads allow for more of discussion about crypto. Meanwhile, platforms like Instagram are more focused on visuals.

“When people think about investing in crypto, they should not just simply follow the crowd.”

“A lot of people talk about cryptocurrency on social media and how popular it has become,” says Lu Fan, an associate professor for the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences.

“There are a lot of celebrities talking about this. People are thinking, ‘Because my friends, families, and the celebrities I admire all invest in that, maybe I should too.'”

The researchers found men and those with a higher risk tolerance were more likely to invest in crypto. On the other hand, people with a higher education level were less likely.

Age was also a factor. Older people were less likely to invest in crypto.

Interest in crypto has only been growing with time. In 2018, the National Financial Capability Study and Investor Survey found that only 15% of participants had invested in crypto. Just three years later, that number had almost doubled to 28%. The national study and survey measures demographics, investor behavior, and financial knowledge and capability.

The present publication relied on data from the 2021 version.

Cryptocurrencies are also more prevalent in people’s minds, even if they don’t invest themselves. Less than 20% of participants said they’d thought about investing in 2018 compared to more than one in three in 2021.

Investing in digital currencies comes with risks, though. Crypto can be volatile and unpredictable.

“When people think about investing in crypto, they should not just simply follow the crowd,” says Fan. “They should also ask themselves, ‘Is it a good investment for me?’

“It may be suitable for some investors who have high risk tolerance, but it’s important to ask yourself, ‘Does cryptocurrency work for me? Can it help me achieve my financial goals?'”

Social media shouldn’t be the go-to source for people looking to invest in crypto, as it’s often a hotbed of misinformation and fraud, the researchers say.

Many social media users overestimate their investment knowledge. And younger investors can be particularly vulnerable to online scammers and bad advice.

“Our study showed that the younger adults are more likely to invest in crypto now, and they’re also the majority users of social media,” says Fan.

“So, when serving those young adults who usually need to gain more financial literacy through life experience and age, there needs to be some guidance as well.”

The researchers encouraged policymakers to take this into account when developing guidelines and regulations for cryptocurrencies. They also urged an increase in media literacy education to make it easier for people to spot authentic information.

The study appears in International Journal of Bank Marketing. Kyoung Tae Kim of the University of Alabama coauthored the study.

Source: University of Georgia

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Sustainable wall coverings cut humidity indoors

Researchers have developed a climate-friendly covering for walls and ceilings that temporarily stores moisture, creating a comfortable environment in heavily used indoor spaces.

Whether it’s the meeting room of an office building, the exhibition room of a museum, or the waiting area of a government office, when many people gather the air becomes thick. This is partly due to the increased humidity.

Ventilation systems are commonly used in office and administrative buildings to dehumidify rooms and ensure a comfortable atmosphere. Mechanical dehumidification works reliably, but it costs energy and—depending on the electricity used—has a negative climate impact.

Against this backdrop, a team of researchers investigated a new approach to passive dehumidification of indoor spaces.

Passive, in this context, means that high humidity is absorbed by walls and ceilings and temporarily stored there. Rather than being released into the environment by a mechanical ventilation system, the moisture is temporarily stored in a hygroscopic, moisture-binding material and later released when the room is ventilated.

“Our solution is suitable for high-traffic spaces for which the ventilation systems already in place are insufficient,” says Guillaume Habert, professor for sustainable construction at ETH Zurich, who supervised the new research project.

Made from waste

Habert and his research team followed the principle of the circular economy in their search for a suitable hygroscopic material.

The starting point is finely ground waste from marble quarries. A binder is needed to turn this powder into moisture-binding wall and ceiling components. This task is performed by a geopolymer, a class of materials consisting of metakaolin (known from porcelain production) and an alkaline solution (potassium silicate and water).

The alkaline solution activates the metakaolin and provides a geopolymer binder that binds the marble powder to form a solid building material. The geopolymer binder is comparable to cement but emits less CO2 during its production.

In the new project, the scientists succeeded in producing a prototype of a wall and ceiling component measuring 20 × 20 cm and 4 cm thick. Production was carried out using 3D printing in a group led by Benjamin Dillenburger, professor for digital building technologies.

In this process, the marble powder is applied in layers and glued by the geopolymer binder (binder jet printing technology).

“This process enables the efficient production of components in a wide variety of shapes,” says Dillenburger.

Cutting humidity indoors

Combining geopolymer and 3D printing to produce a moisture reservoir is an innovative approach to sustainable construction.

Building physicist Magda Posani led the study of the material’s hygroscopic properties at ETH Zurich before recently taking on a professorship at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. The project is based on the doctoral theses of materials scientist Vera Voney, supervised by senior research associate Coralie Brumaud and architect Pietro Odaglia, who developed the material and the 3D printing machine at ETH.

“We were able to demonstrate with numerical simulations that the building components can significantly reduce humidity in heavily used indoor spaces,” says Posani, summarizing the main result of the research project.

For the simulation, it was assumed that the walls and ceiling of a reading room used by 15 people in a public library in Oporto, Portugal had been completely lined with hygroscopic components. Posani calculated how often and to what extent the humidity exceeded the comfort zone, i.e. 40 to 60% relative humidity in this virtual reading room over the course of a year.

From this, she calculated a discomfort index, a figure that expresses the loss of comfort caused by excessively high or low humidity. If the reading room were fitted with the moisture-binding components, the discomfort index could be reduced by 75% compared to a conventional painted wall. If components were used that were 5 cm thick instead of just 4 cm, the discomfort index fell by as much as 85%.

Move over, ventilation systems

The hygroscopic wall and ceiling components are climate-friendly, i.e. they cause significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions over a 30-year life cycle than a ventilation system that dehumidifies air quality to the same extent.

In the simulation calculations, the wall and ceiling components were also compared with a clay plaster that has been used since time immemorial and also passively regulates the air humidity in indoor spaces. This old technique proved to be even more climate-friendly than the hygroscopic components. However, the plaster has a lower storage capacity for water vapor.

The research shows that the combination of geopolymer and 3D printing can be used to produce wall and ceiling components for efficient moisture buffering. After this proof of concept, the technology is, in principle, ready to be further developed and scaled for industrial manufacture. At the same time, research continues.

In a project with Turin Polytechnic and Aalto University, ETH Zurich is working to produce wall and ceiling components with even lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The research appears in Nature Communications.

Source: ETH Zurich

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Kidney disease hampers immune response to the flu

A new study shows that advanced kidney disease compromises the survival of B cells and significantly reduces the immune response to the influenza virus.

B cells are a type of infection-fighting white blood cell that produces antibodies to kill microbes.

Fighting off infections when one has chronic disease is a common problem, and during the COVID-19 pandemic that scenario often turned out to be dangerous and deadly.

Comorbid health conditions are critical determinants of immune function. One comorbid condition associated with increased risk of severe infection and infection-related deaths is kidney disease. Infections are the second major cause of death in patients with kidney disease.

According to the International Society of Nephrology, an estimated 20% of patients with kidney disease die from infection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mortality rates were as much as 10 times higher for those who had kidney disease compared to those with normal kidney function.

Lead author Partha Biswas, a professor in the microbiology and immunology department in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and colleagues, set out to better understand why those who have kidney disease are unable to mount a protective immune response. The study centered on the condition experienced during kidney disease called uremia—the accumulation of toxic metabolites in the body in the absence of kidney filtration of the blood.

To date clinical studies often show a poor B cell-mediated antibody response after an infection or vaccination in those with kidney disease. Additionally, kidney disease is a known predisposing factor for infection complications, however the reasons are not clear.

“Most studies linking kidney disease with abnormal B cell response were either performed in kidney transplant patients or are correlative in nature. Since kidney transplant patients are immune compromised, it is difficult to assess the impact of kidney disease on B cell response per se,” explains Biswas.

The researchers used a multiple well-characterized murine model of kidney disease that progresses to renal dysfunction in the subjects. Healthy mice and those with kidney disease were immunized with model immunogens or infected with the influenza virus to trigger a germinal center (GC) response in the spleen, which is central to the development of protective antibody level and infection-fighting response.

They discovered several cellular changes that helps to illustrate the poor immune response in the kidney disease model:

• Kidney dysfunction leading to accumulation of toxic metabolites triggered cell death in GC B cells leading to poor antibody response during immunization.
• A previously unidentified role of uremic toxic metabolites hippuric acid (HA) is responsible for increased cell death of GC B cells.
• HA drove increased death of GC B cells via activating a specific G protein coupled receptor for niacin, which appears to further affect normal B cell response.
• Kidney disease had a negative impact on and inhibits GC and antibody response following influenza virus infection.

According to Biswas, the paper provides mechanistic insights on how kidney disease negatively impacts protective B cell response infection and immunization. He and his co-investigators believe that the knowledge gained from the laboratory study may shed light on how to generate protective antibody response following vaccination in individuals with kidney disease.

Currently, Biswas and colleagues are tooling up to use this experimental system to address the apparent lack of response to SARS-CoV 2 vaccination in kidney disease individuals, which may have broader implications for other respiratory virus and bacterial infections seen in these patients.

The findings appear in Nature Communications. Collaborators included scientists from numerous departments and facilities at the University of Pittsburgh and the Medical College of Georgia.

Support for the research came in part from numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including several to Biswas.

Source: Stony Brook University

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