Cell Biology

Sweden Bucked Conventional Wisdom, and Other Countries Are Following – National Review

A man wearing a protective face mask walks near people sitting on the stairs at the Royal Dramatic Theater during the coronavirus outbreak in Stockholm, Sweden April 22, 2020. (TT News Agency/Janerik Henriksson via Reuters)No lockdown, no shuttered businesses or elementary schools, no stay-at-home. And no disaster, either.

Spring is in the air, and it is increasingly found in the confident step of the people of Sweden.

With a death rate significantly lower than that of France, Spain, the U.K., Belgium, Italy, and other European Union countries, Swedes can enjoy the spring without panic or fears of reigniting a new epidemic as they go about their day in a largely normal fashion.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organizations Emergencies Program, says: I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model if we wish to get back to a society in which we dont have lockdowns.

The Swedish ambassador to the U.S., Karin Ulrika Olofsdotter, says: We could reach herd immunity in the capital of Stockholm as early as sometime in May. That would dramatically limit spread of the virus.

A month ago, we first wrote about Swedens approach, which we said relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown.

A fortunate constellation of circumstances ensured that Dr. Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist of Sweden, was in charge of that countrys response to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the misgivings of many Swedish politicians and foreign observers. Tegnell heroically bucked the conventional wisdom of every other nation and carefully examined the insubstantial evidence that social-isolation controls would help reduce COVID-19 deaths over the full course of the virus.

As Tegnell told NPR in early April: Im not sure that there is a scientific consensus on, really, about anything when it comes to this new coronavirus, basically because we dont have much evidence for any kind of measures we are taking.

Well, a month later we now know more.

Myth No. 1: Swedens policy was not carefully thought out or well considered.The number of cases in Sweden and other countries is still rising, but in Sweden one-third of intensive-care beds remain empty. Tegnell has looked at other nations that are loosening their lockdowns. To me it looks like a lot of the exit strategies that are being discussed look very much like what Sweden is already doing, he told Canadas Globe & Mail.

Tegnell and his colleagues recognized that the decision to shut down a country was not solely a medical decision based only on the virus The economic costs and health impacts caused by lockdowns are enormous, they realized, so they factored into their analysis the broader societal effects of any restrictions. The saw, for instance, that there is no evidence that children easily transmit the virus. Tegnell told NPR:

We look at other consequences for public health, like closing schools. That causes enormous problems, not least for the health of the children. I mean, children that already are disadvantaged, if you close down the schools, this is the one good thing they have sometimes in life. This is where they get their food. This is where they get their social context. So closing schools is not a good thing.

Jan Albert, a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Tumor, and Cell Biology at Swedens Karolinska Institute, told CNN that strict lockdowns only serve to flatten the curve, and flattening the curve doesnt mean that cases disappear they are just moved in time. He added: And as long as the health-care system reasonably can cope with and give good care to the ones that need care, its not clear that having the cases later in time is better.

Myth No. 2: Sweden did much worse than the U.S. or other countries in managing COVID-19 cases and deaths.Sweden has about 2,200 reported COVID-19 cases per million population. This is lower than the number in the U.S. (3,053 per million), the U.K., France, Spain, Italy, and also lower than in many other EU countries. Its slightly above the number in Germany, which has been hailed for its approach to the virus.

Sweden has 265 reported COVID-19 deaths per million population. That is somewhat higher than in the U.S. (204 per million) but lower than the number in many other EU countries.

Tegnell admits that his country failed to contain the initial outbreak in crowded senior homes. Something like 50 percent of our death toll comes from the rather small population living in care homes, he said. We know that we have had a problem with the elderly homes, this has been a discussion for years.

As elsewhere, Swedish COVID-19 deaths are overwhelmingly among the frail elderly and those with serious chronic disease. Over half of Swedish deaths are in nursing homes. Of those who died, 90 percent were over 70 and half were over 86, with just 1 percent younger than 50.

It is ironic that half of the Swedish deaths are in people over the age of 86. Life expectancy in Sweden is 83, whereas its 79 in the U.S., so it isnt surprising that there are relatively more frail elderly in Sweden. Out of every 100,000 births, about 10,000 more Swedes are still alive at age 85 than Americans are, so Swedens slightly higher COVID-19 death rate, compared with ours, mostly reflects the fact that a larger percentage of Swedes live well past 79.

So, on an age-adjusted basis, Sweden has done significantly better than the U.S. in terms of both cases per million and deaths per million and with no lockdowns.

Myth No. 3: Swedens relatively low number of intensive-care beds would spell disaster for its response to the virus.Initially, the main justification for the global lockdowns was that they were necessary to prevent a crush of patients from overwhelming hospital intensive-care units. But Sweden has shown that shutting down the economy and essentially imprisoning the young and healthy are not necessary to avoid ICU overcrowding. Despite no lockdowns and few social-isolation controls other than proper spacing in restaurants and a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, the Swedish hospital system never experienced anything remotely like the crush of ICU patients in Italy, Spain, and New York City. Swedens ICU COVID-19 patient census (updated nationwide daily) peaked in early April, with about 50 new admissions daily. Now it is gradually declining to about 35 new ICU cases a day.

Unlike its Nordic neighbors and everywhere else, Sweden doesnt have to worry about when to reintroduce its vulnerable isolated population to social mixing and risk their exposure to the virus. That has been already happening naturally and has generated a defensive reservoir of population viral resistance to COVID-19 that puts it just like SARS, MERS, and the seasonal flu in Swedens rearview mirror.

Sweden doesnt have to worry about when and how to end social isolation. They dont have to decide who to keep locked down and who to let out. They dont have to get into civil-liberty arguments over involuntary restrictions or whether to fine people for not wearing masks and gloves.

Of course, Sweden paid a price during the pandemic. But whatever price the Swedes paid for their COVID-19 policy, they will tell you it was worth it. And it is easy to figure out that price. They never cratered their economy or blocked nonemergency surgeries. They had more deaths than their Nordic neighbors, but nothing even close to the 650 deaths per million the U.S. suffered during the 1968 Hong Kong flu, a pandemic that was handled with few social-isolation controls and no lockdowns.

Now many countries and U.S. states are beginning to follow Swedens lead. But California and other states continue to pile up isolation-induced health costs and blow gigantic holes in their budgets with lockdowns that, nationwide, have generated more than 30 million newly unemployed.

John Fund is a columnist for National Reviewand has reported frequently from Sweden. Joel Hay is a professor in the department of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy at the University of Southern California; the author of more than 600 peer-reviewed scientific articles and reports, he has collaborated with the Swedish Institute for Health Economics for nearly 40 years.

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Sweden Bucked Conventional Wisdom, and Other Countries Are Following - National Review

Cell Biology

Researchers Find New Immune Cell Type in Breast Cancer That Could Suggest New Treatments – Clinical OMICs News

Breast cancer researchers in Australia have discovered a new type of immune cell in breast tissue that helps to keep mammary ducts healthy. Using advanced three-dimensional imaging techniques, the scientists, headed by a team at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, discovered that these ductal macrophages (DMs) monitor for threats in the mouse mammary ducts and help to maintain tissue health by clearing away dying milk-producing cells once lactation stops. As well as being the sites where milk is produced and transported, mammary ducts are also where most breast cancers arise.

The authors suggest that understanding how these immune cells function could provide valuable insights into potential new approaches to treating breast cancer. We discovered an entirely new population of specialized immune cells, which we named ductal macrophages, squeezed in between two layers of the mammary duct wall, said Caleb Dawson, PhD, co-senior and first author of the teams paper, which is published in Nature Cell Biology, in a report titled, Tissue-resident ductal macrophages survey the mammary epithelium and facilitate tissue remodeling.

Dawsons colleagues on the research included Walter and Eliza Hall Institute scientists Geoff Lindeman, PhD, Jane Visvader, PhD, along with Anne Rios, PhD, who is now based at the Princess Mxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, in the Netherlands.

The mammary gland is a dynamic organ that undergoes dramatic remodeling throughout life, the authors explained. The branching ducts bloom to form milk-producing alveoli during lactation, which must then be eliminated once milk production stops. Mammary ducts are of particular interest to breast cancer researchers because this site is prone to cancer development.

Most organs in the body including the brain, liver, lung, skin, and intestine have their own population of macrophages, immune cells that play important roles in regulating infection, inflammation, and organ function within their sites of residence. But while macrophages in breast tissue have been implicated in mammary gland function, their diversity has not been fully addressed, the investigators continued.

Using techniques including high-resolution three-dimensional imaging and flow cytometry, Dawson and colleagues discovered a type of ductal macrophage that hadnt previously been identified. The cells exhibited a distinct gene expression profile that implied a phagocytic function, and proliferated during pregnancy and lactation. DMs were highly enriched for lysosomal genes, which is indicative of a phagocytic role, they wrote. Although DMs were rare in adult mammary glands (0.64% of total cells), they expanded 40-fold during pregnancy and constituted 25.7% of total cells in lactation.

Further investigation suggested that the DMs phagocytose the alveolar cells during early involution. We were excited to find that these cells play an essential role at a pivotal point in mammary gland function called involution when lactation stops, milk-producing cells die, and breast tissue needs to remodel back to its original state, Dawson said. We watched incredulously as the star-shaped ductal macrophages probed with their arms and ate away at dying cells. The clearing action performed by ductal macrophages helps redundant milk-producing structures to collapse, allowing them to successfully return to a resting state.

Link:
Researchers Find New Immune Cell Type in Breast Cancer That Could Suggest New Treatments - Clinical OMICs News

Cell Biology

Scientists of the future at the 15th European Conference on Fungal Genetics – On Biology – BMC Blogs Network

Aspergillus fumigatus colony growth perturbed upon drug exposure. Are lncRNAs involved in antifungal drug response? (photo credit: Darren Thomson)

One of the greatest threats facing global wheat production is the disease, Septoria tritici Blotch, which is caused by the fungus Zymoseptoria tritici. In Europe alone, Z. tritici is responsible for up to 700 million worth of wheat yield loss annually, and an estimated 70% of the total annual fungicide usage is targeted against it. Z. tritici can rapidly evolve resistance in the field and so novel management strategies are urgently required.

Circadian clocks are molecular machineries which are entrained by environmental signals, such as light and temperature, and which regulate key life processes. The aim of this project is to understand whether the circadian clock regulates pathogenicity and development in Z. tritici.

Z. tritici is responsible for up to 700 million worth of wheat yield loss annually, and an estimated 70% of the total annual fungicide usage is against it, with consequent risk of resistance.

Our initial results demonstrated that Z. tritici can detect light, and that this signal influences vegetative growth. We therefore hypothesised that light could be a primary input which regulates the circadian clock of the pathogen.

In the model fungus Neurosopora crassa, the circadian clock is encoded by the three genes white collar-1 (wc-1), white collar-2 (wc-2) and frequency (frq). Our bioinformatic analyses identified homologs in Z. tritici to all three of the N. crassa genes, and these were designated ztwco-1, ztwco-2 and ztfrq. Yeast-two hybrid assays demonstrated that the ZTWCO-2 and ZTWCO-2 proteins interact; a result which is also similar to observations from N. crassa.

In order to understand the role of the putative circadian clock genes in Z. tritici, we generated deletion mutants. Our results to date show that deletion of some of these candidate genes causes defects in vegetative growth, but that the mutants are still able to infect the wheat host.

This is the first in-depth study of the circadian clock in Z. tritici, and our findings open up multiple avenues for future investigation. The long-term aim of this research is to inform future control strategies against Z. tritici, such as timing of fungicide application and identification of novel targets for future fungicide screens.

Anna Tiley is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow based in the School of Agriculture and Food Science at University College Dublin, Ireland. She holds a degree in Biological Science from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Molecular Plant Pathology from the University of Bristol. Anna has over seven years experience working with the wheat pathogen Zymoseptoria tritici, and her research focuses on the genetic basis of development and pathogenicity in this species. Follow on Twitter @tileyanna

I am fascinated by the way how diverse microbial species in the environment establish various modes of molecular interplay. That leads to the formation of complex microbial communities which make remarkable contributions to biogeochemical cycles, biotechnology and maintaining ecosystems.

Our group at the University of Tsukuba, steered under the guidance of Professor Norio Takeshita, contemplates the aspects of reciprocity in environmental microbial communities.

Bacterial-fungal interactions are crucial for understanding the microbial ecosystems that are closely related to agriculture, medicine and the environment.

Currently, our focus falls on fungi and bacteria which comprise a large fraction of the overall soil biomass. Bacterial-fungal interactions are crucial for the understanding of microbial ecosystems that is closely related to agriculture, medicine and the environment.

It is well known that microbial interactions are promoting the activation of cryptic biosynthetic pathways, thereby leading to the production of secondary metabolites. Those metabolites possess not only defense functions but also steer cell to cell communication and other interactive dynamics. However, the majority of studies based on the dynamics of microbiota have used monocultures.

Co-culturing has been proven to be an effective method to mimic conditions existing among microbial interactions within nature. Hence this approach may potentially facilitate the production of novel antimicrobials as well as facilitator molecules.

Together with Momoka Kuchira we were able to characterize the mutualistic relationship between the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans and the gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis (currently under review). Our studies provide evidence of their spatial and metabolic interaction that facilitate inter-species communication thereby exploring untraveled environmental niches and obtaining nutrients. It is understandable that there are extensive untraveled territories of microbial communities. Hence, our next milestone was to further exploit this prospect.

We conducted growth experiments of different combinations of fungal and bacterial species in coculture in selected nutrient rich and minimal conditions to observe the interactive dynamics of bacteria and fungi.

(I) Co-culture of Fungi and Bacteria on solid media. (II & III) Dispersal of bacterial cells (fluorescence) on fungal hyphae. (IV) SEM image denoting fungal-bacterial interaction.

Cocultures were incubated for 1 day up to 4 days prior to microscope imaging. An array of parameters such as velocity of the movement of bacterial cells, travel distance, colonization degree and growth rate were considered to define the specificity of interaction. According to the degree of these interactions and dynamics the combinations were classified into positive, negative and neutral genres.

A selected array of combinations was subjected to LC-MS and tandem spectroscopic analysis and the differences of chemical profiles of pure and co cultures have been analyzed to determine and contrast the production levels of bioactive compounds. By chemically defining the bioactive compounds we subsequently observed the transcriptomic and genomic expression to establish an inference of their genomic potential in the state of co-existence.

We are certain that this approach would gain a more reliable perspective on the ecological context of environmental microbiota in their natural setting. Moreover, it would aid in economical and societal aspects such as bio control and therapeutic value as well as in new possible avenues for yielding antimicrobial compounds.

Gayan Abeysinghe is a graduate student in Microbiology Research Center for Sustainability, Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Gayans research focus directs to impart insights on the microbial communication in the community setting and aims to the discovery and development of novel antimicrobials with better efficiency.

lncRNA remained relatively elusive until sequencing exploded, with the discovery of genomes with small numbers of genes and surprising amounts of junk being transcribed.

In the 1960s, DNA not coding for protein was termed junk DNA. It took another three decades before we begun to understand the gene regulatory potential of this so-called rubbish. In the 1990s, studies discovered small noncoding RNA able to silence gene translation via RNA interference. At this time, a group termed long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) were also uncovered.

Human lncRNAs such as the X chromosome-silencer, Xist, emerged first. Mechanisms included regulating gene expression by altering local epigenetics or by guiding proteins to distant genes. However, lncRNA remained relatively elusive until sequencing exploded, and we were suddenly faced with genomes with unexpectedly small numbers of genes and surprising amounts of junk being transcribed.

Aspergillus fumigatus colony growth perturbed upon drug exposure (photo credit: Darren Thomson).

We now know of numerous regulatory lncRNA which deploy a variety of mechanisms in animals, plants and fungi. For example, Neurospora crassa produces over 2500 lncRNA. However, in the human pathogen, Aspergillus fumigatus, only a handful are known. I sought to uncover A. fumigatus lncRNA and hypothesised that they could influence its response to antifungal drugs.

Using drug exposure RNAseq experiments and a bioinformatics pipeline, we identified over 3000 lncRNA candidates. I was surprised to find over 500 lncRNA were significantly expressed upon exposure to a frontline antifungal, itraconazole. Clustering analysis showed that the lncRNA display similar dose-responsive expression patterns to genes, suggesting these lncRNA are not transcriptional noise. Instead, they are co-ordinately regulated features which may play a role in the A. fumigatus drug response.

Further investigation into these novel lncRNA may inform our understanding of antifungal drug resistance mechanisms.

Danielle Weaver is a postdoctoral researcher at the Manchester Fungal Infection Group at the University of Manchester, UK. She completed her PhD on glycosylation in the foodborne bacterial pathogen, Campylobacter jejuni, but has since shifted focus to work on fungal pathogens. Her current research aims to harness next generation sequencing technologies to develop pathogen and drug resistance diagnostics and investigate RNA biology in Aspergillus fumigatus. Follow on Twitter@dan_weaver1@UofMMFIG

I have developed synthetic biology based-tools for scalable regulation or activation of transcriptionally silent secondary metabolite (SM) gene clusters in filamentous fungi.

Filamentous fungi produce a large variety of interesting SMs, molecules that are not essential for growth, but typically possess bioactivities that are of great value to medicine, agriculture and manufacturing. Many of these SM gene clusters are not expressed under laboratory conditions and may need to be activated or heterologously expressed before the desired products can be obtained.

Synthetic biology has revolutionized metabolic engineering and brings the exploitation of industrial microorganisms to a new level by enabling fine-tuning of gene expression allows the control of entire pathways.

Although filamentous fungi are attracting increasing interest as biotechnological production hosts, efficient genetic tools for their exploitation are limited.

Our work represents the development of synthetic gene regulatory devices, that enables scalable expression of a target gene, ranging from hardly detectable to a level similar to that of highest expressed native genes. Synthetic promoters, which were transcriptionally silent on their own, could be activated at desired level by the introduction of binding sites for the synthetic transcription factor (STF). A gene cluster may require expression levels tuned individually for each gene which is a great advantage provided by this system.

Fluorescence microscopy image of hyphae of a fungal strain expressing fluorescent reporters (STF-GFP-NLS, RFP-SKL).

In the STF, the DNA-binding domain of the qa-1F transcription factor from Neurospora crassa is fused to the VP16 activation domain. This STF controls the expression of genes under control of a synthetic promoter containing quinic acid upstream activating sequence (QUAS) binding elements. Control devices were characterized with respect to three main features: expression of the STF, number of QUAS elements, and the type of core promoter used downstream of the QUAS element.

The versatility of the control device was demonstrated by fluorescent reporters and its application was confirmed by synthetically controlling the penicillin gene cluster in Penicillium chrysogenum for antibiotic production. We anticipate that these well-characterized and robustly performing control devices will be useful tools for silent SM gene cluster activation and for development of filamentous fungi as production hosts.

Lszl Mzsik is a fourth-year PhD student in the laboratory of Arnold Driessen at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Within the Horizon 2020 Marie Skodowska-Curie COFUND ALERT program, his project aims at developing new genetic tools for the discovery of novel antibacterial compounds in fungi to tackle the increasing problem of multi-drug resistant bacteria.

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Scientists of the future at the 15th European Conference on Fungal Genetics - On Biology - BMC Blogs Network

Cell Biology

Discovery heralds a new strategy in the hunt for antibiotics – News-Medical.net

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.May 3 2020

Scientists have identified a key process in the way bacteria protect themselves from attack - and it heralds a new strategy in the hunt for antibiotics.

The researchers from the University of Leeds have pieced together how bacteria build their outer, defensive wall - in essence, the cell's armor plating.

The research has focused on the gram-negative bacteria Escherichia coli, but the process they have discovered is shared by many pathogenic gram-negative bacteria - so it could have importance for tackling other gram-negative pathogens, including the top three on the World Health Organisation's list of priority pathogens.

The findings are published today (01/05) in the journal Nature Communications.

Our findings are changing the way we think about the way these cells constantly renew and replenish the proteins that make up the outer membrane.

Understanding that process of how bacteria build their cell wall in greater detail may identify ways we could intervene and disrupt it.

In doing so, we can either destroy the bacteria altogether or reduce the rate at which they divide and grow, making bacterial infections less severe.

We are at the start of a quest that could result in new, drug-based therapies that work either alone or with existing antibiotics to target these disease-causing bacteria."

Dr. Antonio Calabrese, University Academic Fellow in the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology

The research has focused on the role of a protein called SurA. Known as a chaperone, the job of SurA is to martial other proteins from where they are made, at the center of the cell, to where they are needed, in this case to bolster the bacterium's outer wall.

Proteins are long chains of amino acids that must adopt a defined structural shape in order to function effectively. Without the chaperone SurA, the essential proteins needed to build the cell wall run the risk of losing their structural integrity on their journey to the outer membrane.

Using advanced analytical techniques, the scientists mapped how the chaperone SurA recognizes proteins to transport them to the bacterial outer membrane.

Dr. Calabrese said: "For the first time we have been able to see the mechanism by which the chaperone, SurA, helps to transport proteins to the bacterial outer membrane. In effect it does this by cradling the proteins, to ensure their safe passage. Without SurA, the delivery pipeline is broken and the wall cannot be built correctly."

Professor Sheena Radford, FRS, Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology said "This is an exciting discovery in our quest to find weak spots in a bacteria's armory that we can target to stop bacterial growth in its tracks and build much-needed new antibiotics.

"It's early days, but we now know how SurA works and how it binds its protein clients. The next step will be to develop molecules that interrupt this process, which can be used to destroy pathogenic bacteria."

It was only through the work of a great team from across the Astbury Centre that we were able to finally understand how SurA shuttles proteins to the bacterial outer membrane."

Dr. David Brockwell, Associate Professor in the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology

The research was funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and used equipment funded by the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust.

Source:

Journal reference:

Calabrese, A.N., et al. (2020) Inter-domain dynamics in the chaperone SurA and multi-site binding to its outer membrane protein clients. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15702-1.

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Discovery heralds a new strategy in the hunt for antibiotics - News-Medical.net

Neuroscience

Gender Diversity and the New Discoveries It Brings to Neuroscience – Daily Nexus

In the last 100 years, science has made profound discoveries and expanded in all directions. Behind the scenes, however, there has been a silent struggle for gender equality. This has had far-reaching effects.

Courtesy of Frontiers for Young Minds

Emily Jacobs is a UC Santa Barbara professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences who studies the effects of menopause on the brain as women age. Jacobs recently penned an article in Frontiers for Young Minds to highlight the hurdles that women face in science and to argue that diversity in science drives innovation and can encourage school-aged children especially girls to pursue science.

When Jacobs and I talked on the phone, we chuckled at the fact that neuroscience, in its quest to study the impacts of aging on the brain, has taken so long to consider how menopause affects the brain, as it just seems so obvious to a woman. It illuminates an issue that is common in science and that is the underrepresentation of both female researchers and scientific studies about women.

For one thing, it limits the diversity of researchers that bring their own unique set of questions. It is evident that ones life experience may play a role in the questions that a scientist may ask.

Women have slowly edged their way into the workforce over the last century and science is no exception. In 1927, less than 100 years ago, the Fifth Solvay Conference in Belgium brought together 29 of the arguably most famous scientists of all time. All but one, Marie Curie, were male. Today, the gap has narrowed but still remains large in some areas of S.T.E.M., such as aerospace engineering where less than 12% of tenure/tenure-track faculty are female.

Jacobs and I discussed some of the areas that progress could be made. Men faculty far outweigh women faculty in S.T.E.M. disciplines, so thats something we need to correct, Jacobs addressed.

Gender bias in S.T.E.M. often goes unseen but that doesnt mean that it doesnt exist. In one remarkable study, applications identical except for the random assignment of either a female or male name were mailed to hiring lab managers at research universities. Managers were asked to rate the applicants competence and suggest a starting salary based on the applicants application materials.

They found that the male CVs garnered more praise and were more likely to be hired to these lab manager positions. Now, of course the CVs were identical, Jacobs said.

It did not stop there, as the male applicants were also offered greater career mentoring and a higher starting salary. How could this have happened to identical applicants with the exception of the only difference of a male or female name?

Its these biases that exist at every stage of the game. It makes it way more difficult for a woman to succeed in an already hypercompetitive world not because shes not worthy, but because the chips are just stacked against her, Jacobs went on.

It raises the question: Where are our women and why is there not an even distribution in S.T.E.M.? It is a deep question society must ask itself. Perhaps the answer may lie in how children are raised. When it comes to this, there is no doubt a difference that gender plays in the psychology of youth.

Jacobs expressed her own frustrations from one experience she had with her young daughter in a toy store in Boston.

Jacobs recounted, I was floored at what I saw shirts that said Im A Princess were on one side and Im A Genius on the other side [for boys]. And actually my small moment of anarchy was just to take a rack of those clothes and just swap them.

Gender stereotypes such as these can profoundly shape the course of a young girls life if she believes that she doesnt have the capability to study math and science due to a lack of intelligence.

Interestingly, in one study by Lin Bian, a psychologist at Cornell University, children between the ages of five and seven were told to point to who they thought was more intelligent, a man or a woman. At the age of five, the children tended to point to their own sex but the six- and seven-year old girls were more likely to point to the man.

While it is unclear why this shift happens, the same study also found that girls who thought that men were smarter began avoiding games that are described as being for really smart kids. Potentially, it is those internal biases that we have that affect childrens choices and it can all propagate from if girls opt out of taking robotics classes or playing math games. These things can just grow with time, Jacobs said.

Gender stereotypes such as these can profoundly shape the course of a young girls life if she believes that she doesnt have the capability to study math and science due to a lack of intelligence. In a traditional upbringing, girls are often conditioned to be submissive.

You say yes, please and thank you, you have good manners, you dont question authority, you dont develop a healthy skepticism and thats what science requires, Jacobs mused.

She went on to add another interesting point, You have to be willing to read an article and tear it apart, talk about what was good but also recognize what was bad and I think there is a certain sort of hubris involved with being able to do that.

So how could underrepresentation of women affect science and neuroscience? Even within the disciplines themselves, the questions that we ask dont serve women equally, Jacobs said.

She shared a personal example of her quest to study the effects of menopause on the neurology of brain aging that, as it turns out, [shape] the brain in these really interesting ways.

Menopause is an event where a womans hormones change as she stops menstruating, usually between the ages of 45 and 55. It is often a huge transition in a womans life. Previously, no one had made the connection that it may play a role in Alzheimers, a disease in which a disproportionate number of the patients are women.

Why is it 2020 and we are just now getting a handle on how there may be sex-specific trajectories on how the brain ages and [how] that can be really important for understanding why, for example, two-thirds of the Alzheimers disease patients are women? It comes down to whos asking the questions, Jacobs stated.

There are other pivotal cases of the impact gender can have on science. For instance, rodents are often used in research to model the human body and can be noted as another glaring example of how gender has negatively impacted the discoveries of science. Until the work of Annaliese Beery, who reported in 2010 that male animals were predominantly used in neuroscience research, it was assumed that, due to the menstrual cycle, females were too variable. But that was an empirical assumption that never went tested until a follow-up study by Brian Prendergast, Jacobs stated.

In the end, the study proved that this assumption was, in fact, wrong. It just goes to show you that we have these cultural assumptions, like that the menstrual cycle makes women crazy and it makes us all variable. That is not actually true and you have to test your assumptions, Jacobs explained.

Overall, it seems like bad science to neglect data collection on an entire gender, regardless of the variables. Due to Beerys work, there has been a national movement for government-enforced policy to include female animals in research studies.

Thankfully, the future appears bright for women as more diversity is gained throughout all fields of S.T.E.M., bringing with them new discoveries and innovation.

Related

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Gender Diversity and the New Discoveries It Brings to Neuroscience - Daily Nexus

Neuroscience

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Market Overview:The report begins with this section where product overview and highlights of product and application segments of the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market are provided. Highlights of the segmentation study include price, revenue, sales, sales growth rate, and market share by product.

Competition by Company:Here, the competition in the Worldwide NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market is analyzed, By price, revenue, sales, and market share by company, market rate, competitive situations Landscape, and latest trends, merger, expansion, acquisition, and market shares of top companies.

Company Profiles and Sales Data:As the name suggests, this section gives the sales data of key players of the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market as well as some useful information on their business. It talks about the gross margin, price, revenue, products, and their specifications, type, applications, competitors, manufacturing base, and the main business of key players operating in the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market.

Market Status and Outlook by Region:In this section, the report discusses about gross margin, sales, revenue, production, market share, CAGR, and market size by region. Here, the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market is deeply analyzed on the basis of regions and countries such as North America, Europe, China, India, Japan, and the MEA.

Application or End User:This section of the research study shows how different end-user/application segments contribute to the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market.

Market Forecast:Here, the report offers a complete forecast of the global NEUROSCIENCE ANTIBODIES AND ASSAYS Market by product, application, and region. It also offers global sales and revenue forecast for all years of the forecast period.

Research Findings and Conclusion:This is one of the last sections of the report where the findings of the analysts and the conclusion of the research study are provided.

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Neuroscience

The Art of Crafting, Especially When You’re Sheltering in Place – Bowdoin News

When Seneca Ellis 22 is stressed or needs a break from people or her studies, she gets working on cross-stitching, needlepointing, or painting. She's been embroidering since she was twelve years old.

While crafting has always been an important part of her life, she's been turning to it more than usualduring the pandemic. "I have been plowing through projects!" the neuroscience major said. "It's very therapeutic. I don't have to think about anything going on around me."

Ellis also thinks crafting in general is having its moment, as people spend more time at home and look for things to doespecially activities that are distracting. Some friends of hers are picking up cross-stitching and needlepoint. At least one is getting wildly ambitious and is cross-stitchinga map of the United States.

Eugen Cotei 21 holds up two rocks he found in Costa Rica that he will turn into a necklace. He says crafting"helps me to do something creative with my mind, to let it escape."

Eugen Cotei 21, another Craft Center manager, has been knitting, crocheting, sewing, spinning wool, and baking since his grandmother taught him these skills as a little boy. He pursuedthese pastimes even though they weren't encouraged. "I am from Romania, and in Romania, a guy cannot have a sewing needle in his hand and he can't be in the kitchen. But I never followed those rules," he said.

Some of the objects Cotei, an earth and oceanographic science and Hispanic studies major, often creates are terrariumsglass-enclosed habitats that mimic the natural environments of plants and that in the right conditions can last decades.

Even in the desert climate where he lives (he's based right now in Las Vegas with his family), he finds enough plantsas well lustrous volcanic rocksto make his mini-ecosystems." When I started really exploring these mountain valleys, the more upstream areas with creeks and rivers, I found a lot of different species of moss," he said.

In the past few weeks since she headed home to Idaho, Madisen Miller 22who manages the Craft Center's pottery studiohas been working on painting projects. She and her friends are finding old record album covers and giving them new meanings by painting them.

"Art keeps me sane," said Miller, a government and history major. "Art is my only hobby that I do for the sake of pure enjoyment. Other things I do, like community service, I do for others, or I work on something to advance my career. But art is just for me, and it's meditativeyou dont think of anything else; its a good de-stresser."

Even before the novel coronavirus forced most people into their homes and afforded more free time for many, more students were crafting.

Membership increased from 132 in the fall of 2018 to 270 last fall.

Miriam Fraga, assistant director of student activities, said this may have to do in part with the Craft Center waiving the fee for students with financial hardship.

And part of the growing interest may have to do with the managers' efforts to make it easier for crafters to drop in to the center and get help with their projects.

The managing team of students established "office hours," where they would be available to lend their expertise with throwing pots, stitching, using the sewing machine, knitting, or whatever creations students had in mind. "We took on a bigger role," Ellis said. "If people are there, we help them with whatever theyre working on."

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The Art of Crafting, Especially When You're Sheltering in Place - Bowdoin News

Neuroscience

Subset of Retinal Neurons Communicates Differently From the Rest of the Eye – Technology Networks

The eyes have a surprise.

For decades, biology textbooks have stated that eyes communicate with the brain exclusively through one type of signaling pathway. But a new discovery shows that some retinal neurons take a road less traveled.

New research, led by Northwestern University, has found that a subset of retinal neurons sends inhibitory signals to the brain. Before, researchers believed the eye only sends excitatory signals. (Simply put: Excitatory signaling makes neurons to fire more; inhibitory signaling makes neurons to fire less.)

The Northwestern researchers also found that this subset of retinal neurons is involved in subconscious behaviors, such as synchronization of circadian rhythms to light/dark cycles and pupil constriction to intense bright lights. By better understanding how these neurons function, researchers can explore new pathways by which light influences our behavior.

"These inhibitory signals prevent our circadian clock from resetting to dim light and prevent pupil constriction in low light, both of which are adaptive for proper vision and daily function," said Northwestern's Tiffany Schmidt, who led the research. "We think that our results provide a mechanism for understanding why our eye is so exquisitely sensitive to light, but our subconscious behaviors are comparatively insensitive to light."

The research will be published in the May 1 issue of the journal Science.

Schmidt is an assistant professor of neurobiology at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Takuma Sonoda, a former Ph.D. student in the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience program, is the paper's first author.

To conduct the study, Schmidt and her team blocked the retinal neurons responsible for inhibitory signaling in a mouse model. When this signal was blocked, dim light was more effective at shifting the mice's circadian rhythms.

"This suggests that there is a signal from the eye that actively inhibits circadian rhythms realignment when environmental light changes, which was unexpected," Schmidt said. "This makes some sense, however, because you do not want to adjust your body's entire clock for minor perturbations in the environmental light/dark cycle, you only want this massive adjustment to take place if the change in lighting is robust."

Schmidt's team also found that, when the inhibitory signals from the eye were blocked, mice's pupils were much more sensitive to light.

"Our working hypothesis is that this mechanism keeps pupils from constricting in very low light," Sonoda said. "This increases the amount of light hitting your retina, and makes it easier to see in low light conditions. This mechanism explains, in least part, why your pupils avoid constricting until bright light intensifies."

Reference:

Takuma Sonoda, Jennifer Y. Li, Nikolas W. Hayes, Jonathan C. Chan, Yudai Okabe, Stephane Belin, Homaira Nawabi, Tiffany M. Schmidt. A non-canonical inhibitory circuit dampens behavioral sensitivity to light. Science, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/science.aay3152

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Subset of Retinal Neurons Communicates Differently From the Rest of the Eye - Technology Networks

Neuroscience

Wider cost-benefit analysis will determine if WFH is a success – Livemint

NEW DELHI :The bandwagon of opinion that work-from-home is the amrit (nectar of immortality) that the covid manthan (churning) has yielded is growing and speeding down an implementation path that is long on profit-and-loss benefit and short on people-centricity. Corporates love the cost savings, but a fuller analysis will show that it is a double-edged sword to be handled with care, quickly accruing quantifiable savings for companies, but risking slowly accumulating costs for employees and organizations, perhaps not quantifiable early on but not un-measurable. Implement work from home (WFH) by all means, but after data-driven weighing of costs and benefits all around. We would like to see an equivalent level of discussion on the people dimension as we are seeing on cost savings.

Decision-makers, likely older, with older children, better paid, hence living in larger houses with better quality household help, are deciding on WFH from their own contexts, oblivious of employee contexts of smaller homes shared by more family members now also having to double as work spaces, small children demanding attention when they see a parent, and lower quality household help. As for it being a working womans dream, ask them and you will find not all women can manage expected productivity and WFHdisturbing her is the default option if she is at home (surprising how problems resolve themselves when you are at the office !)

People-centricity requires data from the other side and acceptance that there are segments and, so, a one-size policy doesnt fit all. Implicitly assuming that something is workable because it works for the five people who said it to me, or for the mancom, or even worse, that if it has worked in crisis times, it must work all the time, is irresponsible.

So, before jumping to the WFH saves rental cost and delights employees" conclusion and rushing to implement, we suggest a pause to get data on peoples home environments, family demographics, the pain points of WFH and, even more simply, an anonymous employee vote on the matter. Also needed is for HR to develop sound conceptual models on what improves or hampers WFH productivity based on the nature of work of employees in different grades and in different roles and to devise a whole new way of managing productivity.

Neuroscience shows that the chemical balance of the brain shifts when in isolation leading to lower feelings of psychological safety, affecting creativity and openness to change. Social interactions have more to them than video meeting the way they are currently done. Neuroscience theory of mirror neurons" suggests positive benefits of social interaction for teamwork, another holy grail of business leaders (The Star Factor, William Seidman et al and The Tell Tale Brain, V.S. Ramachandran).

Finally, it is also a business leaders responsibility to think about the implicit contract that employers have with employees to provide a work place" that is geared to work needs" (where you do not do meetings with your spouse, mother-in-law or toddler in attendance ). Also, work identity" is a very strong builder of self esteem and social standing, especially in India. Thats why money was spent in the first place on well-designed offices in specific locations that people feel proud to go to. WFH takes these away. Signalling caring for employees cannot be done while ignoring what WFH of the chief wage-earner does to the very structure of the family dynamics.

Rama Bijapurkar is an independent market strategy consultant, and Smita Affinwalla is founder of Illuminos HR Consulting.

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Wider cost-benefit analysis will determine if WFH is a success - Livemint