Research Highlights

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.

Several years ago, while studying the environmental impacts of large-scale solar farms in the Nevada desert, Desert Research Institute (DRI) scientists Yuan Luo, Ph.D. and Markus Berli, Ph.D. became interested in one particular question: how does the presence of thousands of solar panels impact desert hydrology?

In the study, Luo, Berli, and colleagues Teamrat Ghezzehei, Ph.D. of the University of California, Merced, and Zhongbo Yu, Ph.D. of the University of Hohai, China, make important improvements to our understanding of how water moves through and gets stored in dry soils by refining an existing computer model.

The model, called HYDRUS-1D, simulates how water redistributes in a sandy desert soil based on precipitation and evaporation data. A first version of the model was developed by a previous DRI graduate student named Jelle Dijkema, but was not working well under conditions where soil moisture levels near the soil surface were very low.

To refine and expand the usefulness of Dijkema’s model, Luo analyzed data from DRI’s SEPHAS Lysimeter facility, located in Boulder City, Nev. Here, large, underground, soil-filled steel tanks have been installed over truck scales to allow researchers to study natural water gains and losses in a soil column under controlled conditions.

Read the full story from Desert Research Institute here.

The impact of sea surface temperature variations in the tropical Pacific on global climate has long been recognized. For example, the episodic warming of the tropical Pacific during El Niño events causes melt of sea ice in far-reaching parts of the Southern Ocean via its effect on the global atmospheric circulation. A new study, by an international team including University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Assistant Professor Malte Stuecker from the Department of Oceanography and International Pacific Research Center, published in Science Advances demonstrates that the opposite pathway exists as well.

Using a hierarchy of climate model simulations, the authors demonstrate the physical pathways through which polar climate variations can affect the trade winds in the tropics.

“Climate signals can propagate from the polar regions to the tropics either via the atmosphere or the ocean,” explained Stuecker. “Our climate model simulations were designed to investigate the relative role of these pathways and whether their importance differs for perturbations originating from the North pole or the South pole.”

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

A new study of airflow patterns inside a car's passenger cabin offers some suggestions for potentially reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission while sharing rides with others. The study, by a team of Brown University researchers, used computer models to simulate the airflow inside a compact car with various combinations of windows open or closed. The simulations showed that opening windows — the more windows the better — created airflow patterns that dramatically reduced the concentration of airborne particles exchanged between a driver and a single passenger. Blasting the car’s ventilation system didn’t circulate air nearly as well as a few open windows, the researchers found.

“Driving around with the windows up and the air conditioning or heat on is definitely the worst scenario, according to our computer simulations,” said Asimanshu Das, a graduate student in Brown’s School of Engineering and co-lead author of the research. “The best scenario we found was having all four windows open, but even having one or two open was far better than having them all closed.”

Das co-led the research with Varghese Mathai, a former postdoctoral researcher at Brown who is now an assistant professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Read the full story from Brown University here.

Twice as much freshwater is stored offshore of Hawai'i Island than was previously thought, according to a University of Hawai'i study with important implications for volcanic islands around the world. An extensive reservoir of freshwater within the submarine southern flank of the Hualālai aquifer has been mapped by UH researchers with the Hawai'i EPSCoR 'Ike Wai project. The groundbreaking findings, published in Science Advances, reveal a novel way in which substantial volumes of freshwater are transported from onshore to offshore submarine aquifers along the coast of Hawai'i Island.

This mechanism may provide alternative renewable resources of freshwater to volcanic islands worldwide. "Their evidence for separate freshwater lenses, stacked one above the other, near the Kona coast of Hawai'i, profoundly improves the prospects for sustainable development on volcanic islands," said UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) Dean Brian Taylor.

Through the use of marine controlled-source electromagnetic imaging, the study revealed the onshore-to-offshore movement of freshwater through a multilayer formation of basalts embedded between layers of ash and soil, diverging from previous groundwater models of this area. Conducted as a part of the National Science Foundation-supported 'Ike Wai project, research affiliate faculty Eric Attias led the marine geophysics campaign.

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

Two recently published studies from Kansas State University researchers led by Jürgen A. Richt, the Regents distinguished professor at Kansas State University in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and collaborators have led to two important findings related to the COVID-19 pandemic: Domestic cats can be asymptomatic carriers of SARS-CoV-2, but pigs are unlikely to be significant carriers of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19.

"Other research has shown that COVID-19-infected human patients are transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to cats; this includes domestic cats and even large cats, such as lions and tigers," said Richt. "Our findings are important because of the close association between humans and companion animals."

For the study involving pigs, the researchers found that SARS-CoV-2-infected pigs are not susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and do not appear to transmit the virus to contact animals.

"This research is important for risk assessment, implementing mitigation strategies, addressing animal welfare issues, and to develop preclinical animal models for evaluating drug and vaccine candidates for COVID-19," Richt said.

Richt is the senior author on the two recent collaborative publications in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections: "SARS-CoV-2 infection, disease and transmission in domestic cats" and "Susceptibility of swine cells and domestic pigs to SARS-CoV-2."

Read the full article here