Research Highlights

Arkansas NSF EPSCoR funds collaborative research and education at colleges all over the State. Due to the nature of our work, the pandemic has presented a number of challenges for our program, but also some unique opportunities. Participants were unable to carry out normal research activities on campus, classes were cancelled or moved to virtual instruction, conferences were postponed, and administrative offices transitioned to telework. The lessons we have learned and new tools we have used are helping to inform a blended, safe, and rich educational experience for college students in this difficult time.

Last summer, we introduced our biggest Arkansas Summer Research Institute (ASRI), a professional development experience for STEM undergrads, ever- all online. We extended the event from one week to two weeks, and developed a schedule that was part synchronous and part asynchronous. Each day the students would log in for the day’s Zoom sessions, taught as interactively as possible, by a group of faculty researchers from around the state. We held Zoom office hours during the 2-hour lunch break to provide opportunities for 1-on-1 interaction in breakout rooms with students. We tried to make the most of the time we had everyone together, and used tools like Zoom polls, Pear Deck, and Labster to keep the students engaged. After the Zoom sessions, the students would work solo on assignments that were due the next day

We are now planning our second-ever virtual ASRI for the summer of 2021, and are working with new technology partners to provide an even better experience for this year’s attendees. We are grateful to have our health, and to be looking at the horizon of the end of this horrible pandemic that has affected so many families.

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Army researchers are eyeing a promising new wound-care technology that could allow soldiers to seal hemorrhaging trauma wounds on parts of the body where pressure bandages can't stop bleeding.

The Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, is providing technical oversight on a new hemostatic gel, known as StatBond, that stops uncontrolled bleeding in noncompressible areas of the body such as the groin, armpit, neck and internal organs.

A research and development firm known as Hybrid Plastics, along with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Vanderbilt University and Ichor Sciences, developed StatBond through an effort funded by the Defense Health Agency Small Business Innovation Research program.

Hybrid has been actively involved with the Mississippi NSF EPSCOR grants.

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The color of a person’s eyes, the thickness of a potato’s skin, and the shape of a flower: what do these seemingly disparate elements have in common? They are all shaped by DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encodes and carries the genetic instructions that shape life. But what if it could encode more than genetic information, such as digital archival data?

It might sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but in a novel study published in Nature Communications, members of Boise State’s Nucleic Acid Memory Institute revealed that the future of digital memory storage may be found in utilizing the programmable qualities of chemically synthesized DNA.

Led by Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering professor Hughes, and research scientist George Dickinson, the team was able to encode digital information into DNA, read it back using an optical microscope, and perform error correction on the data to ensure the integrity of the information. Additionally, this technique did not require sequencing technology, which historically has been necessary to read DNA information. The team’s research was published on April 22 in Nature Communications and can be viewed at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22277-y

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Clemson University, located in Clemson, South Carolina, has joined a new alliance led by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help guide the future of engineering research and innovation.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Engineering has launched the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance (ERVA), the first engineering research-visioning organization of its kind. Clemson joined the alliance as a member of the EPSCoR IDEA Foundation, one of ERVA’s founding organizations.

“The mission of the Alliance aligns well with our strengths and goals as a Carnegie R1 research institution: pursue transformative research that will have the greatest impact on society and quality of life,” said Tanju Karanfil, Clemson vice president of research. “I enthusiastically support this effort to bring together all interested parties in shaping the future of engineering research.”

Clemson’s Daniel Noneaker, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences, will serve as an ERVA liaison to interact with and recruit people and organizations interested in participating in the ERVA collaborative.

“The culture of excellence we strive for in the College’s research and academic enterprise is the result of productive partnerships with academic collaborators, government entities and industrial alliances,” said Anand Gramopadhye, dean of the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences. “It is exciting to contemplate how ERVA will allow us to expand these partnerships.”

Using copper foil, glass containers and a conventional household microwave oven, University of Wyoming researchers have demonstrated that pulverized coal powder can be converted into higher-value nano-graphite.

The discovery is another step forward in the effort to find alternative uses for Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal, at a time when demand for coal to generate electricity is declining due to concerns about climate change.

In a paper published in the journal Nano-Structures & Nano-Objects, the UW researchers report that they created an environment in a microwave oven to successfully convert raw coal powder into nano-graphite, which is used as a lubricant and in items ranging from fire extinguishers to lithium ion batteries. This “one-step method with metal-assisted microwave treatment” is a new approach that could represent a simple and relatively inexpensive coal-conversion technology.

“This method provides a new route to convert abundant carbon sources to high-value materials with ecological and economic benefits,” wrote the research team, led by Associate Professor TeYu Chien, in UW’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Read the full story from University of Wyoming

Understanding the immune systems of oysters and clams is important in monitoring the effects of pollution and climate change on the health of molluscan species and the potential impacts on the aquaculture industry. Their immune responses also can serve as indicators of changes in ocean environments.

A new study involving the University of Maine assessed immune responses in four economically important marine mollusc species — the blue mussel, soft-shell clam, Eastern oyster, and Atlantic jackknife clam — and identified new biomarkers relating to changes in protein function involved in novel regulatory mechanisms of important metabolic and immunological pathways.

The discovery will aid further biomarker identification to benefit the aquaculture industry and provides new understanding of how these pathways function in diverse ways in different animal species.

“These biomarkers reveal how several different physiological functions can be generated from a single protein sequence. This gives added value to an organism’s physiology,” says Tim Bowden, UMaine associate professor of aquaculture and co-author of the study published as the cover article in the December 2020 issue of the journal Biology.

Read the full story from University of Maine here.

Kyle Goerl, the medical director of Kansas State University's Lafene Health Center, is part of a collaborative team that is providing research-based guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team's latest research contributed to the updated quarantine guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Goerl is a co-author of the publication "Time from Start of Quarantine to SARS-CoV-2 Positive Test Among Quarantined College and University Athletes." The publication appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the CDC on Friday, Jan. 8, and involved researchers from multiple organizations and universities. The publication was one of many that the CDC considered for its update that provided shortened options for quarantine, Goerl said. In the publication, Goerl and collaborators describe findings among a sample of COVID-19-exposed collegiate athletes in 17 states from June to October 2020. Twenty-five percent of the athletes tested positive during quarantine and the positive test occurred an average of 3.8 days after their quarantine started. Yet, the probability of testing positive decreased as quarantine progressed. The probability of testing positive dropped from 27% after day five to less than 5% after day 10. "These findings show that after 10 days of quarantine, the risk of COVID-19 is relatively low," said Goerl, who is also the team physician for Kansas State University Athletics. "This helps to support a quarantine period that is shorter than 14 days. If the quarantine period is shortened, it may become more likely that people would follow important quarantine measures."

Read the full story from Kansas State University here.

University of New Hampshire (UNH) researchers recently used Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego and Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to identify new inhibitor binding/unbinding pathways in an RNA-based virus. The findings could be beneficial in understanding how these inhibitors react and potentially help develop a new generation of drugs to target viruses with high death rates, such as HIV-1, Zika, Ebola, and SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"When we first started this research, we never anticipated that we'd be in the midst of a pandemic caused by an RNA virus," said Harish Vashisth, associate professor of chemical engineering at UNH. "As these types of viruses emerge, our findings will hopefully offer an enhanced understanding of how viral RNAs interact with inhibitors and be used to design better treatments."

Similar to how humans encode their genome using DNA, many viruses have a genetic makeup of RNA molecules. These RNA-based genomes contain potential sites where inhibitors can attach and deactivate the virus. Part of the challenge in drug development is that variations or mutations in the viral genome that may prevent the inhibitors from attaching.

In their study, recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, Vashisth and his team created molecular dynamics simulations using the Comet and Stampede2 supercomputers to look specifically at an RNA fragment from the HIV-1 virus and its interaction with acetylpromazine, a small molecule that is known to interfere with the virus replication process.

Read the full story from Phys.org here.

A new University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa College of Engineering review article presents a breakthrough in multidisciplinary understanding of the airborne transmission of COVID-19 and researchers say they hope the findings will contribute to future public health guidance.

There have been more than 70 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide. However, despite the urgency of the pandemic, the physical modes of COVID-19 transmission are still poorly understood. In particular, transmission by aerosols has recently come under focus. Aerosols are microscopic airborne particles that, due to their small size, can remain suspended in air for a long time, instead of falling directly to the ground.

An integrated review published in ACS Nano by mechanical engineering Professor Yi Zuo and Assistant Professor William Uspal, together with Associate Professor Tao Wei from Howard University, covers the entire exhalation-to-infection pathway. Drawing on aerodynamics, thermodynamics, molecular biophysics and other fields, their review considers how infectious aerosols disperse in the air, deposit in the lung and interact with cell receptors.

“During our review of the previous research, we found that a lot of cutting-edge research has not yet been integrated into public health guidelines in understanding COVID-19 transmission,” Zuo said. “Furthermore, we realized just how much engineering perspectives still have to contribute to the effort against the pandemic.”

Zuo’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and Uspal’s research is funded by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.

Read the full story from University of Hawai’i here.

Upgrades representing a 40% increase in computing power have been made to the University of Hawaiʻi’s high performance computing (HPC) cluster, called Mana. It is a free computing resource that has been available to faculty, staff and students across all 10 UH campuses since 2014.

Three of Mana’s top users, UH Mānoa Assistant Professor Rui Sun, Associate Professor Philip von Doethinchem and Professor Garrett Apuzen-Ito, tested the new equipment on their current research applications in molecular dynamic simulations, cosmic rays and 3D simulations of Earth’s plate movements, respectively. In all three cases, the researchers reported improvements in computing performance with some applications running twice as fast compared to previous results.

Using around 5,000 CPU years of computational time, the team showed in their recently published Physical Review D article that if the existence of cosmic antihelium (the antimatter counterpart of helium) would be confirmed, it cannot be explained by conventional processes and would be a fundamentally new discovery with potentially profound impact for the understanding of dark matter or Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. According to NASA, “nucleosynthesis” refers to the formation of heavier elements, atomic nuclei with many protons and neutrons, from the fusion of lighter elements.

Read the full story from University of Hawai’i here.