Improvements in a technique for making “three-parent babies” could reduce the risk of passing on faulty mitochondria, the energy-producing organelles in cells.
Less than 2 percent of mitochondria were defective in most human embryos created from this refined “pronuclear transplantation” procedure, researchers report online June 8 in Nature.
Pronuclear transplantation is one of two ways to transfer nuclear DNA from a mother’s egg that has faulty mitochondria to a donor egg with healthy mitochondria. After fertilization, the mother’s and father’s chromosomes don’t merge but are encased in separate membranes inside the mother’s egg. In pronuclear transplantation, researchers remove both of these DNA packages, known as pronuclei, and inject them into an empty donor egg. Any resulting children would inherit DNA from three parents: most from their mother and father, with a small amount of mitochondrial DNA from the egg donor. DNA transplant techniques may prevent mothers from passing mitochondrial diseases to their children. Such diseases, which result from mutations in mitochondrial DNA, particularly affect energy-hungry organs, including the brain and muscles.
Last month, researchers reported that even small amounts of defective mitochondria carried into the healthy egg might propagate and negate the effect of the therapy (SN Online: 5/19/16).
In the new study, flash-freezing the mother’s egg, removing pronuclei soon after they form (about eight hours after fertilization) and other refinements greatly reduced the amount of defective mitochondria transplanted into donor eggs. Of embryos created, 79 percent carried less than 2 percent of defective mitochondria, report reproductive biologist Mary Herbert of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Mitochondrial Research in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and colleagues.
That decrease in defective mitochondria doesn’t eliminate the risk of disease resurgence, but greatly reduces it, says Herbert. “The focus of our current research is to get that carryover as close to zero as we possibly can.”
SAN DIEGO — A clue about why life on Earth chooses only one mirror-image form of certain molecules might lie in a gas cloud tens of thousands of light-years away.
For the first time, researchers have detected a chiral molecule, propylene oxide, in interstellar space. Chiral molecules, which come in two mirror-image versions, show up in many of life’s building blocks, such as the amino acids that make up proteins as well as sugars. The finding may be a step toward understanding why life prefers one of these versions over another. The results were presented June 14 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society and published online the same day in Science.
Chiral molecules are like opposing hands. Left hands and right hands mirror each other, but no amount of turning will get them to match when overlaid. Matching configurations of a chiral molecule are labeled as either left-handed or right-handed.
Amino acids and sugars come in both styles of handedness. But life on Earth exclusively uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars. “This is one of the longest standing mysteries in the origin of life,” Brett McGuire, a chemist at Caltech, said at a news briefing.
Chiral molecules have shown up in meteorites with a slight preference for one configuration. McGuire and colleagues went looking for chiral molecules in space to see whether some interstellar intervention could preferentially seed a solar system with one handedness. The researchers sifted through radio observations from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia of a gas cloud dubbed Sagittarius B2. The nebula sits near the center of the galaxy and has historically been a rich hunting ground for interstellar molecules.
McGuire and colleagues found that the cloud was loaded with the chiral molecule propylene oxide. The stockpile has a mass equal to about 80 percent of Earth’s mass, said McGuire, and if compressed into a liquid blob, it would occupy a volume over five times that of our planet. The observations don’t reveal whether the cloud has a preference for one handedness over another; that will have to wait for future observations. But “we’re in the best position we could possibly be,” said McGuire, to figure out if life’s chiral exclusivity has an interstellar origin.
Scientists have created giant molecules — the size of bacteria — that may be useful in future quantum computers.
The molecules of unusual size are formed from pairs of Rydberg atoms — atoms with an electron that has been boosted into a high-energy state. Such electrons orbit far from their atom’s nucleus and, as a result, can feel the influence of faraway atoms.
To create the molecules, researchers cooled cesium atoms nearly to absolute zero, hitting them with lasers to form Rydberg atoms that bound together in pairs. These molecules are about one thousandth of a millimeter in size — a thousand times the size of a typical molecule — scientists report August 19 in Physical Review Letters. “I think it’s fundamentally interesting and important because it’s such a curious thing,” says physicist David Petrosyan of the Institute of Electronic Structure & Laser at the Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas in Heraklion, Greece. “The size of these molecules is huge.”
This is not the first time such molecules have been created, but the previous evidence was not clear-cut. “Before, maybe it wasn’t clear if this is really a molecule in the sense that it’s vibrating and rotating. It could have been just two atoms sitting therewith very weak interactions or no interactions,” says Johannes Deiglmayr, a physicist at ETH Zürich and a coauthor of the study.
Deiglmayr and collaborators measured the molecules’ binding energies — the energy that holds the two atoms together. Additionally, the scientists made detailed calculations to predict the molecules’ properties. These calculations were “extensive and seemed to match really well with their measurements,” says physicist Phillip Gould of the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
The result has practical implications, Petrosyan notes. In quantum computers that use atoms as quantum bits, scientists perform computations by allowing atoms to interact. Rydberg atoms can interact with their neighbors over long distances, and when bound together, the atoms stay put at a consistent distance from one another — a feature that may improve the accuracy of calculations.
Previously, researchers have used rubidium atoms to make another type of large molecule, formed from Rydberg atoms bonded with normal atoms. But these wouldn’t be useful for quantum computation, Petrosyan says, as they rely on a different type of bonding mechanism.
Where you live and what you eat can rapidly affect the types of friendly bacteria inhabiting your body. To see how the microbes that inhabit the mouth and intestines change over time, Duke University computational biologist Lawrence David zealously chronicled his microbiome for an entire year. (For more on David and this experiment, see “Lawrence David’s gut check gets personal.”)
A stream plot (below, top graph) shows the ebb and flow of phyla of bacteria in his gut over time. The thickness of each stream indicates a bacterial group’s relative abundance in daily fecal samples. David peered closer at the data in a horizon plot (above, bottom graph; colored squares at left indicate the phylum of the bacteria represented in each row). He first determined each type of bacteria’s normal abundance in his gut, then calculated how much they differed from the median abundance. Warmer colors (red, orange, yellow) indicate that bacteria in that group increased in abundance, and cooler colors (blue, green) indicate a decrease in abundance. Living abroad from day 71 to day 122 had a dramatic — but short-lived — effect on David’s microbiome.
Using records unearthed from library storage vaults, researchers recently revealed that the sugar industry paid nutrition experts from Harvard University to downplay studies linking sugar and heart disease. Although the incident happened in the 1960s, it appears to have helped redirect the scientific narrative for decades.
The documents — which include correspondence, symposium programs and annual reports — show that the Sugar Research Foundation (as it was named at the time) paid professors who wrote a two-part review in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine. That report was highly skeptical of the evidence linking sugar to cardiovascular problems but accepting of the role of fat. The now-deceased professors’ overall conclusion left “no doubt” that reducing the risk of heart disease was a matter of reducing saturated fat and cholesterol, according to researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, who published their report online September 12 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“Why does it matter today? The sugar industry helped deflect the way the research was developing,” says study coauthor Cristin Kearns, a dentist at UCSF’s Institute for Health Policy Studies. The Harvard team’s scientific favoritism had a role in directing research and policy attention toward fat and cholesterol. And in fact, the first dietary guidelines published by the federal government in 1980 said there was no convincing evidence that sugar causes heart disease, stating “the major health hazard from too much sugar is tooth decay.” Following the publication of the Harvard report, fat and cholesterol went on to hijack the scientific agenda for decades, and even led to a craze of low-fat foods that often added sugar. Kearns points out that it was only in 2015 that dietary guidelines finally made a strong statement to limit sugar. Researchers writing this year in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases note that current studies estimate that diets high in added sugars carry a three times higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease. (For its part, the Sugar Association says in a statement on its website that “the last several decades of research have concluded that sugar does not have a unique role in heart disease.”)
The level at which the food industry continues to influence nutrition research is still a much-debated topic. The Sugar Association’s statement acknowledged the secret deal occurred, but pointed out that “when the studies in question were published, funding disclosures and transparency standards were not the norm they are today.” Journals now require all authors to list conflicts of interest, especially funding from a source has a vested interest in the outcome.
That doesn’t mean that trade groups and industry associations no longer have an influence on scientists, says Andy Bellatti, cofounder and strategic director of Dietitians for Professional Integrity, which has campaigned to push the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to sever its ties with industry, While a modern researcher could not take corporate money, even for speaking fees, without disclosure, the influences may be more subtle, he says. “We’re not talking about making up data, but perhaps influencing how a research question is framed.”
In a commentary published with the JAMA study, Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher at New York University, wrote that industry influence has not disappeared. She cited recent New York Times investigations of Coca-Cola–sponsored research and Associated Press stories revealing that a candy trade group sponsored research attempting to show that children who eat sweets have a healthy body weight.
Bellatti says that researchers don’t necessarily want to be cozy with industry, but sometimes turn to commercial sources because non-biased research money is lacking. “The reason the food industry is able to do this is because there is such little public funding for nutrition and disease,” Bellatti says. For that reason, the scientific community should not reject industry money wholesale, says John Sievenpiper, a physician and nutrition researcher at the University of Toronto. A study of his was once ridiculed on Nestle’s blog because the disclosures covered two full pages. He believes that any scientist who takes industry money should adhere to an even higher standard of openness, including releasing study protocols ahead of time so reviewers can make sure the research question was not changed midstream to favor a certain conclusion.
While many parallels have been made between the food and tobacco industries, Sievenpiper believes those comparisons miss the complicated nature of the human diet. Tobacco is always bad, never good. Sugar, fat, cholesterol and other components of diet are some of both, making research into their effects much more nuanced, he says. And unlike with tobacco, the solution can’t be to never eat them. He believes solutions won’t involve turning single nutrients like fat or sugar into villains, but promoting better overall patterns of eating, like the Mediterranean diet.
Kearns, who has spent the past 10 years looking into the sugar industry’s influence on science, isn’t finished yet. She says her curiosity first arose during a conference on gum disease and diabetes in 2007, when she noticed a lack of scientific discussion of sugar. She started out simply Googling industry influences. The trail eventually led her to scour library archives, until she came across dusty boxes of records from a closed sugar company in Colorado. “The first page I looked at in that archive had a confidential memo,” she says. “I knew I had something no one else had never talked about before.”
She doesn’t see the research going sour any time soon. “This was their 226th project in 1965,” she says. “There’s a lot more to the story.”
Editor’s note: Science has retracted the study described in this article. The May 3, 2019, issue of the journal notes that a panel of outside experts convened by Kyoto University in Japan concluded in March 2019 that the paper contained falsified data, manipulated images and instances of plagiarism, and that these were the responsibility of lead author Aiming Lin, a geophysicist at Kyoto University. In agreement with the investigation’s recommendation, the authors withdrew the report.
A titanic volcano stopped a mega-sized earthquake in its tracks.
In April, pent-up stress along the Futagawa-Hinagu Fault Zone in Japan began to unleash a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. The rupture traveled about 30 kilometers along the fault until it reached Mount Aso, one of Earth’s largest active volcanoes. That’s where the quake met its demise, geophysicist Aiming Lin of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues report online October 20 in Science. The quake moved across the volcano’s caldronlike crater and abruptly stopped, the researchers found.
Geophysical evidence suggests that a region of rising magma lurks beneath the volcano. This magma chamber created upward pressure plus horizontal stresses that acted as an impassable roadblock for the seismic slip powering the quake, the researchers propose. This rare meetup, the researchers warn, may have undermined the structural integrity surrounding the magma chamber, increasing the likelihood of an eruption at Aso.
Growing planets carve rings and spiral arms out of the gas and dust surrounding their young stars, researchers report in three papers to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. And dark streaks radiating away from the star in one of the planet nurseries appear to be shadows cast onto the disk by the clumps of planet-building material close to the star. This isn’t the first time that astronomers have spied rings around young stars, but the new images provide a peek at what goes into building diverse planetary systems.
The three stars — HD 97048, HD 135344B and RX J1615.3-3255 — are all youthful locals in our galaxy. They sit between 460 and 600 light-years away; the oldest is roughly a mere 8 million years old. All the stars have been studied before. But now three teams of researchers have used a new instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile to see extra-sharp details in the planet construction zone around each star.
The new instrument, named SPHERE, was designed to record images, spectra and polarimetry (the orientations of light waves) of young exoplanet families. Flexible mirrors within the instrument adapt to atmospheric turbulence above the telescope, and a tiny disk blocks light from the star, allowing faint details around the star to come into view.
SAN FRANCISCO — Cell biologists are learning more about how the Zika virus disrupts brain cells to cause the birth defect microcephaly, in which a baby’s brain and head are smaller than usual. Meantime, several strategies to combat the virus show preliminary promise, researchers reported at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting. Among the findings:
Brain cell die-off Zika causes fetal brain cells neighboring an infected cell to commit suicide, David Doobin of Columbia University Medical Center reported December 6. In work with mice and rats, Doobin and colleagues found suggestions that the cells’ death might be the body’s attempt to limit spread of the virus.
The researchers applied techniques they had previously used to investigate a genetic cause of microcephaly to narrow when in pregnancy the virus is most likely to cause the brain to shrink. Timing of the virus’s effect varied by strain. For one from Puerto Rico, brain cell die-off happened in mice only in the first two trimesters. But a strain from Honduras could kill developing brain cells later into pregnancy. Microcephaly can lead to seizures, mental impairment, delays in speech and movement and other problems.
Enzyme stopper Disrupting a Zika enzyme could help stop the virus. The enzyme, NS3, causes problems when it gloms on to centrioles, a pair of structures inside cells needed to divvy up chromosomes when cells divide, Andrew Kodani, a cell biologist at Boston Children’s Hospital reported December 6.
Zika, dengue and other related viruses, known as flaviviruses, all use a version of NS3 to chop joined proteins apart so they can do their jobs. (Before chopping, Zika’s 10 proteins are made as one long protein.) But once NS3 finishes slicing virus proteins, the enzyme moves to the centrioles, where it can mess with their assembly, Kodani and colleagues found. Something similar happens in some genetic forms of microcephaly.
A chemical called an anthracene can help fend off dengue, so Kodani and colleagues tested anthracene on Zika as well. Small amounts of the chemical can prevent NS3 from tinkering with the centrioles, the researchers found. So far the work has only been done in lab dishes. Protein face-off Another virulent virus could disable Zika. Work with cells grown in lab dishes suggests a bit of protein, or peptide, from the hepatitis C virus, could muck up Zika’s proteins.
The peptide interferes with HSP70, a protein that helps assemble complexes of other proteins, including ones involved in protein production. That peptide and other compounds were already known to inhibit hepatitis C replication, UCLA virologist Ronik Khachatoorian and colleagues had previously discovered. The hepatitis C virus peptide stops Zika virus proteins from being made and hampers assembly of the virus, Khachatoorian reported December 5.
Earth was momentarily ripe for the evolution of animals hundreds of millions of years before they first appeared, researchers propose.
Chemical clues in ancient rocks suggest that 2.32 billion to 2.1 billion years ago, shallow coastal waters held enough oxygen to support oxygen-hungry life-forms including some animals, researchers report the week of January 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the first animal fossils, sponges, don’t appear until around 650 million years ago, following a period of scant oxygen known as the boring billion (SN: 11/14/15, p. 18). “As far as environmental conditions were concerned, things were favorable for this evolutionary step to happen,” says study coauthor Andrey Bekker, a sedimentary geologist at the University of California, Riverside. Something else must have stalled the rise of animals, he says.
Microbes began flooding Earth with oxygen around 2.3 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event. This breath of oxygen enabled the eventual emergence of complex, oxygen-dependent life-forms called eukaryotes, an evolutionary line that would later include animals and plants. Scientists have proposed that the Great Oxidation Event wasn’t a smooth rise, but contained an “overshoot” during which oxygen concentrations momentarily peaked before dropping to a lower, stable level during the boring billion. Whether that overshoot was enough to support animals was unclear, though.
Bekker and colleagues tackled this question using a relatively new way to measure ancient oxygen. Rock weathering can wash the element selenium into the oceans. In oxygen-free waters, all of the selenium settles onto the seafloor. But in water with at least some oxygen, only a fraction of the selenium is deposited. And the selenium that is laid down is disproportionately that of a lighter isotope of the element, leaving atoms of a heavier isotope to be deposited elsewhere. If ancient coasts contained relatively abundant oxygen, the researchers expected to find more light selenium close to shore and more heavy selenium in deeper, oxygen-deprived waters. Analyzing shales formed under deep waters around the world, the researchers found just such an isotope segregation. These shales had an abundance of the heavier selenium, leading researchers to infer that the lighter version of the element was concentrated closer to shore.
Oxygen concentrations in coastal waters were at least nearly one percent of present-day levels and “were flirting with the limits of what complex life can survive,” proposes study coauthor Michael Kipp, a geochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. While the environment was probably suitable for eukaryotes, life hadn’t evolved enough by this point to take advantage of the situation, Kipp proposes. The appearance of eukaryotes in the fossil record would take hundreds of millions of years of more evolution (SN Online: 5/18/16), he says, and the first animals even longer. Tracking selenium is such a new technique, though, that “interpretations could change as we better understand how it works,” says Philip Pogge von Strandmann, a geochemist at University College London. Currently the method is “tricky,” he says, especially for precisely estimating oxygen concentrations.
Legos have provided the inspiration for small, fluid-ferrying devices that can be built up brick-by-brick.
Tools for manipulating tiny amounts of liquid, known as microfluidic devices, can be used to perform blood tests, detect contaminants in water or simulate biological features like human blood vessels. The devices are easily portable, about the size of a quarter and require only small samples of liquid.
But fabricating such devices is not easy. Each new application requires a different configuration of twisty little passages, demanding a brand new design that must be molded or 3-D printed.
Scientists from the University of California, Irvine created Lego-style blocks out of a polymer called PDMS. Their bricks contained minuscule channels, half a millimeter wide, that allowed liquid to flow from brick to brick with no leaks. New devices could be created quickly by rearranging standard blocks into various configurations, the scientists report January 24 in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
