By giving mice a human gene that helps fight infections, Oregon State University scientists have made a new model to show the impacts of vitamin D on staph infections.

Research from Oregon State University has shown a new model suggesting vitamin D treatment can dramatically reduce the quantity of disease-causing bacteria in skin wounds.

OSU scientist Adrian Gombart and his collaborators in the past have examined the vitamin's role in fighting infection, but in their new study mice were given a human gene that provides a barrier against infections and is promoted by the bioactive form of vitamin D.

Mice naturally have a similar gene, but vitamin D does not trigger it. The scientists replaced the mouse gene, called Camp, with the human gene, called CAMP, which gave the mice increased resistance to gut and staph infections, caused by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, when vitamin D was introduced.

Vitamin D3 regulates the expression of the CAMP, and Staphylococcus aureus is an important human pathogen that causes skin infections, Gombart said in a news release. With our mouse model, we showed that treating a skin wound infected with S. aureus with the bioactive form of vitamin D significantly reduced the number of bacteria in the wound.

Vitamin D, which is fat-soluble and present in very few foods, promotes calcium absorption in the gut and is needed for bone growth. Vitamin D, manufactured by the body when triggered by sunlight, is also important for cell growth, neuromuscular function, and reduction of inflammation.

The scientists believe their new model will be useful as research into vitamin D-induced expression of CAMP progresses, involving diseases caused by microorganisms and also conditions that are non-pathogenic, such as inflammatory bowel disease.

The finding, Gombart said, suggests vitamin D can be used to increase protection against infection by increasing CAMP levels. Those findings recently were published in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

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OSU scientists replace mice genes to study vitamin Ds effects on infections - The Register-Guard

Prachi Bari

PUNE: Scientists from across the world who use the common fruitfly Drosophila as a model organism to address basic and applied questions in life sciences, will be participating in the 5th Asia Pacific Drosophila Research Conference (APDRC5) and Indian Drosophila Research Conference here next week.

Two Nobel laureates, Eric Wieschaus and Michael Rosbash, renowned for their work in development biology and chronobiology respectively, will be among the 100 international and 330 Indian participants in this five-day conference. It is being organised for the first time in the country by the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER).

IISERs Professor (Biology) Sutirth Dey, who is using Drosophilia for research in Ecology and Evolution said this common fruitfly is one of the most widely-used model organism in the world for research in life sciences over the last 100 years.

Its genome is entirely sequenced and there is enormous information available about its biochemistry, physiology and behaviour. That is why it is one of the most preferred model organisms in Biology, said Dey.

He noted that IISER, Pune, has a strong focus on Drosophila research with five professors and 30 PhD scholars using this organism to answer questions in developmental biology (Prof LS Shashidhara), cell biology (Prof Richa Rikhy), gene regulation and immunity (Prof Girish Ratnaparkhi) and neurobiology (Prof Aurnab Ghose).

IISER scientist and head, research communications, Shanti Kalipatnapu said, some of the biggest names in neurobiology, cell biology, developmental biology and evolutionary biology will be attending the conference. Krishnaswamy Vijay Raghavan, principal scientific adviser to the Government of India, will be one of the nine plenary speakers at the event.

Held previously in Taipei, Seoul, Beijing and Osaka, one of the highlights of this conference is that we are explicitly encouraging undergraduates from various institutes of the world to participate, said Dey.

A total of 57 talks and 240 posters covering topics such as Gametogenesisand Stem Cells, Pattern formation, Morphogenesis and Mechanobiology, Hormones and Physiology, Cellular Neurobiology, Behavioural Neurobiology, Infection and Immunity and Ecology and Evolution, will be covered in the conference.

One pre-conference symposium called Signals from the gut will be held in collaboration with the city-based National Centre for Cell Sciences (NCCS) with 70 participants.

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Fruitfly Drosophilia at the heart of global conference in Pune - Hindustan Times

Protein structure solved by study. Credit: University of Sheffield

Scientists have solved the structure of one of the key components of photosynthesis, a discovery that could lead to photosynthesis being redesigned to achieve higher yields and meet urgent food security needs.

The study, led by the University of Sheffield and published in the journal Nature, reveals the structure of cytochrome b6f the protein complex that significantly influences plant growth via photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is the foundation of life on Earth providing the food, oxygen, and energy that sustains the biosphere and human civilization.

Using a high-resolution structural model, the team found that the protein complex provides the electrical connection between the two light-powered chlorophyll-proteins (Photosystems I and II) found in the plant cell chloroplast that convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Lorna Malone, the first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the University of Sheffields Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, said: Our study provides important new insights into how cytochrome b6f utilizes the electrical current passing through it to power up a proton battery. This stored energy can then be then used to make ATP, the energy currency of living cells. Ultimately this reaction provides the energy that plants need to turn carbon dioxide into the carbohydrates and biomass that sustain the global food chain.

The high-resolution structural model, determined using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, reveals new details of the additional role of cytochrome b6f as a sensor to tune photosynthetic efficiency in response to ever-changing environmental conditions. This response mechanism protects the plant from damage during exposure to harsh conditions such as drought or excess light.

Dr. Matt Johnson, reader in Biochemistry at the University of Sheffield and one of the supervisors of the study added: Cytochrome b6f is the beating heart of photosynthesis which plays a crucial role in regulating photosynthetic efficiency.

Previous studies have shown that by manipulating the levels of this complex we can grow bigger and better plants. With the new insights we have obtained from our structure we can hope to rationally redesign photosynthesis in crop plants to achieve the higher yields we urgently need to sustain a projected global population of 9-10 billion by 2050.

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Reference: Cryo-EM structure of the spinach cytochrome b6fcomplex at 3.6 resolution by Lorna A. Malone, Pu Qian, Guy E. Mayneord, Andrew Hitchcock, David A. Farmer, Rebecca F. Thompson, David J. K. Swainsbury, Neil A. Ranson, C. Neil Hunter and Matthew P. Johnson, 13 November 2019, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1746-6

The research was conducted in collaboration with the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology at the University of Leeds.

Researchers now aim to establish how cytochrome b6f is controlled by a myriad of regulatory proteins and how these regulators affect the function of this complex.

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Experts Reveal Beating Heart of Photosynthesis Can Help Us Meet Urgent Food Security Needs - SciTechDaily

Our investment impulses are driven by the knowledge that, one day, we will be dead.This article is taken from our FREE daily investment email Money Morning.

Every day, MoneyWeek's executive editor John Stepek and guest contributors explain how current economic and political developments are affecting the markets and your wealth, and give you pointers on how you can profit.

Sign up free here.

This year, I published my first book. Its called The Sceptical Investor, and its about contrarian investing or, as Ive slightly cheekily rebranded it, sceptical investing.

My publisher, Harriman House, is offering a cracking deal on the book right now. You can get 40% off by ordering it here, and entering the code SCEPTIC40 at the check-out.

If youre not convinced by that fantastic value investment, let me share an extract with you in todays Money Morning its from Chapter 5, entitled You vs the crowd.

As with any complex system, you cant model the human mind perfectly. Were a morass of conflicting, shifting desires affected by changes in both our internal environment (our own biochemistry) and our interactions with our external environment (other people, the weather, whats on the telly).

But we dont need to go into complicated models of individual minds to get a good idea of how crowds work. There are just two key impulses to wrap your head around.

Theyre commonly described as greed and fear. But Im not so keen on those labels both have very negative connotations. I prefer to say we have an expansionary impulse and a contractionary one.

When you are in an expansionary mood, your focus is on growing your wealth, grabbing a bigger piece of the cake, empire-building. When you are in contractionary mode, you want to hunker down, build walls, protect what is yours.

These two impulses are in turn driven by one simple fact: the knowledge that, one day, you will be dead.

When evolutionary psychologists and behavioural economists talk about what drives our herding instincts, they often hark back to the days when we were dwelling in Stone Age tribes out on the African savannah, at constant risk of being picked off by lions, dying of dehydration, or nibbling on some poisonous vegetation.

The idea is that we are programmed to run with the crowd because its safer. But theres more to it than a simple evolutionary hangover. You really dont have to go back to the Stone Age to find unforgiving death lurking around every corner.

Vaccines and antibiotics only became widely available to most people (in developed countries at that) in the middle of the last century.

In 1924, four years before the discovery of penicillin, the 16-year-old son of one of the most powerful men in the world US president Calvin Coolidge died of septicaemia that resulted from a blister that developed on his toe while he was playing tennis in ill-fitting shoes.

Even today, and even in the most advanced societies, life is unpredictable and full of potentially lethal threats. And while all animals have a fight or flight instinct when faced with life- threatening situations, only humans (as far as we can tell) have a sufficiently evolved brain to bless us with an ever-present awareness of the inevitability of our own extinction.

This fear may not always be at the forefront of our minds, but its never far away.

What does any fundamentally rational being crave in such an environment? Its not happiness or contentment (although these may be desirable side effects).

Its security and certainty.

I want to keep myself and my loved ones safe, and I also want to know that after I am gone, the things that I value will persist (it doesnt matter that Ill be gone at that point what matters is how I feel about that now, while Im alive).

To do that, I need to be able to do two things. I need to get out there and explore and master my environment in order to take advantage of opportunities that could make my life better and my situation more secure (the expansionary impulse).

But I also need to be highly alert to danger and ready to raise my defences in response to threats to that security (the contractionary impulse).

So how do we navigate an uncertain world? How do we impose order on the chaos around us? Its simple. We look for elements that appear to be predictable we seek patterns.

We look for cause-and-effect rules that govern outcomes and can be used to influence them. If we know (or at least think we know) that x causes y, then we can increase our level of certainty in our world view.

Some rules are governed by natural phenomenon dont fall off cliffs; dont eat poisonous mushrooms. Some are instinctive (social animals such as humans and apes have been found to have an inherent sense of fairness, even though the world itself is clearly not naturally fair).

But many of the most important ones are social (such as learning the conventions for crossing a road or transacting with one another).

And the critical point is that we dont formulate these worldviews alone. They are passed down from our parents, and reinforced by our schools, friends, co-religionists and colleagues.

In fact, historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his recent bestseller Sapiens, argues that this ability to create and believe in epic, society-spanning shared world views from religions to legal systems to money itself (which ultimately derives its value from our belief in it, and the social structures that give everyone the confidence to rely upon it) is key to our spectacular success as a species.

You can call them stories, as Harari does, or you can call them social structures, or you can think of them as rules for a particularly complicated board game.

But however you describe them, they are all systems that human beings have invented to enable us to cooperate in a more mutually bene cial way and our brains are wired to be receptive to information presented like this.

Which unfortunately, can be a real handicap in the world of investment.

Enjoyed this sample? Get the book for 40% off just enter SCEPTIC40 at the checkout.

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How the fear of death affects our investment processes - MoneyWeek

When did you last put pictures in a photo album? When did you last drop off a roll of film at a drugstore, then flip through the prints an hour later? It was probably some time before the last decade given that, at the start of 2013, more than 50 percent of American adults had a smartphone for the first time, and now more than 80 percent of us do.

Since we wrapped our fingers around the first touch-screen smartphones a decade ago, the family photo album has all but ceased to exist. But even as we no longer make albums of them, we are even more obsessed with taking pictures. We spend hours transcribing our entire lives into digits inside memory chips on our phones, and maybe posting some small percentage of them online.

These photos are our lives now we can all remember every important moment in an entire year in just a few minutes by scrolling through our camera roll. If it was notable, we took a picture. For the first time ever, we can visualize an entire life, including somebody else's.

My job is to recover these pictures and videos when things go wrong sometimes very wrong. Each day, people from all over the world reach out to the iPad Rehab Microsolderings team of former stay-at-home moms (and one dad) after one of lifes most gut-wrenching moments. They are staring at a dead phone, usually a loved one's, and realizing that the data they thought or hoped was backing up, wasnt.

It is a beloved privilege to be trusted with the responsibility to recover these memories. We get to tell families every day Great news, we got the pictures back!

But what will become of these now-recovered pictures? Will they be printed, hung up and cherished, or will they rot on a USB stick never to be seen again, after the joy of the initial reunion fades? Few of us will ever really get around to loading those pictures onto the digital frame we always mean to buy. Our pictures tend to sit there on our individual phones, unseen, secure inside a tiny chip, because we are too busy spending our lives capturing newer pictures of sushi, birthday parties and sunsets you can almost see.

On a recent trip to New York City, I signed up for the sunset viewing at the top of the Rockefeller Center and, like everyone else, I took a picture. The picture I took, though, was a picture of all the people taking pictures. Some people there never did see the sun actually set they just saw the view of the sunset through their phones, held high above their heads.

At my kids' recent holiday concert, like many a parent, I quietly ignored the principals request to turn off our cellphones and just enjoy the concert. Instead, I took a picture and posted it on social media right in the middle of the concert; the caption read, I am filled with holiday joy that the six parents near me who are secretly videotaping the concert are all holding their phones in landscape mode.

It is possible we were better off when we were restricted to 24 carefully chosen shots on a tangible roll of film.

It's hard to imagine that this has all changed so much in 10 years, but it has. We suffer from a near-constant digital information overload; there is too much choice, and way too much noise. The sum of the knowledge of humanity is stuffed into our back pockets, as is access to nearly anything it can create. In the past, buying a new lawn chair would mean standing at a store and deciding between one with green woven canvas strips and one with blue. Today, it means scrolling through endless chair variations, struggling to distinguish fake reviews from genuine, and then being haunted by nagging ads stalking us everywhere we go online. Sometimes we simply give up.

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We are part of a grand experiment: Never before have human brains been constantly exposed to the ceaseless parade of stimulation that pours from devices in our pockets.

In order to be heard above the cacophony of the internet, even our news media is forced to shout increasingly polarizing viewpoints. To deal with the sheer volume of information, our brains seek to bundle and categorize awesome or terrible and slowly lose the ability to notice and appreciate nuance. There is no longer a middle.

Through our phones, we stare into the lights of Las Vegas when we first wake up, and just before we try to sleep. How does this affect the biochemistry of our brain? We dont know for sure, but studies are already suggesting the answer is not good.

A few weeks ago, I finally decided to give it all up ... well, for one night a week. Our family started an evening of digital respite, when we turn off our phones, tablets, computers and even the television. It is just as hard as it seems, and just as amazing.

Life unplugged feels dry and brittle at first. It is painful; I dread it each week. Im dismayed to realize that feels emotionally identical to quitting smoking.

The amount of extra time, though, is phenomenal. Did you know that you can go sledding, stop by the library, make dinner and memorize all five verses of "Good King Wenceslas" before 7:00 p.m. on a Tuesday? In the second week, I laid on the bed feeling like a disgrace to my generation. What did we do with our time growing up without phones and computers? I couldnt remember. That day I spent an hour just talking with my husband about not work and not kids. When was the last time we did that?

In the third week I found myself saying yes, out of boredom, to things to which Id normally Id say no. Can we make cookies? Yes. Can we make a gingerbread house? Yes. Do you want to go cross-country skiing with me? Yes. Will you read this book with me for two solid hours tonight? Yes. Will I remember these times more than a few gigabytes of buried digital memories? Definitely.

I taught them things: We explored how to navigate without Google maps, how to live without looking up a weather forecast. They are now wholly convinced that, yes, it is indeed impossible for a human hand to break an intact egg; they know that teeth can do a fine job of it. I learned incredible details about the fabric of my childrens lives that I miss when obsessed with photo-documenting every moment.

Our phones are amazing. But we rely on them too much. We are addicted.

And, beyond that, the idea that they are helping us keep an incredible record of our lives that will persist for generations has more than a few caveats. Yes, our great-great-grandchildren will be able to get to "know" us in a way that is unprecedented if we back up our data and find ways to pass down accessing it; I'm not sure my parents' eight-tracks or boxes of slides will be so useful to my kids.

But with the increasing complexity of mobile phone security and data encryption, the ability of people like me to recover these precious memories will become more and more limited without the support of the manufacturers. Back up your data and support the right to repair, or all those pictures you're taking to show the truth of your life to your kids one day won't be worth the silicon on which they're embedded. Plus, you have to have conversations with your family or your friends about what will happen to your phone, your pictures and your entire digital footprint when you die or else large corporations and planned obsolescence will make those decisions for you in your absence.

In the meantime, though: Put your phone down. Watch a sunset. Enjoy your kid's school play as it happens. Make some cookies that exist only in your shared memories.

More from our decade reflections project:

THINKing about 2010-2019: Where we started, how we grew and where we might go

A decade of Black Lives Matter gives us a new understanding of Black liberation

College in the U.S. is at a crossroads. Will it increase social mobility or class stratification?

The success of the 'me too' movement took a decade of work, not just a hashtag

The decade in LGBTQ: Pop culture visibility but stalled political progress

Egg freezing and IVF in the 2010s brought us the next phase in women's lib

How Netflix, Star Wars and Marvel redefined Hollywood and how we experience movies

Opioids, pot and criminal justice reform helped undermine this decade's War on Drugs

Climate change became a burning issue in the past decade, but also an opportunity

Taylor Swift, Beyonc, Rihanna, Gaga, Pink and Kesha cleared the way for women in the 2010s

Celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow made the 2010s the decade of health and wellness misinformation

White Christian America ended in the 2010s

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How our phones became our whole lives in just 10 years, from a woman who resuscitates them - NBC News