Cigarette smoke contains myriad compounds that are known mutagens and carcinogens, and the health risks associated with active smoking and secondhand smoke are well established. Nearly 10 years ago, researchers at Berkeley Lab identified another potentially hazardous source of tobacco exposure: “thirdhand smoke,” the toxic residues that linger on indoor surfaces and in dust long after a cigarette has been extinguished. A team led by Antoine Snijders, Jian-Hua Mao, and Bo Hang in Biosciences’ Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division have determined that early thirdhand smoke exposure is also associated with increased incidence and severity of lung cancer in mice.
New Machine Learning Method Sees the Forests and the Trees
While it may be the era of supercomputers and big data, without smart methods to mine all that data, it’s only so much digital detritus. Now researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have come up with a novel machine learning method that enables scientists to derive insights from systems of previously intractable complexity in record time.
Brown Fat Flexes its Muscle to Burn Energy—and Calories
A multidisciplinary team of bioengineers and metabolic researchers led Andreas Stahl, a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences & Toxicology at UC Berkeley, has figured out a new pathway that triggers brown fat to consume calories and radiate them away as heat. Sanjay Kumar, a faculty scientist in Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) and assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, was a co-author on the study published March 6 in Cell Metabolism. One unexpected finding was that muscle-like myosin is responsible for causing brown fat cells to stiffen in response to signals from the brain; it is this increased tension that triggers a biochemical pathway that ends with these cells burning calories for heat. “This study offers a remarkable example of how mechanical and other physical forces can influence physiology and disease in powerful, unexpected ways,” Kumar said. Understanding how brown fat is activated could unlock new ways to combat obesity. Read more from UC Berkeley News.
Scientists Engineer Plants to Thrive on 25% Less Water
Krishna Niyogi, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) and chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, identified a protein called Photosystem II Subunit S (PsbS) involved in regulating photosynthetic light harvesting and hypothesized that increasing the amount of this protein in a plant might make photosynthesis more efficient. In collaboration with researchers at University of Illinois, Urbana, he put this theory to the test. In field trials, the researchers found that increasing the expression of the gene for PsbS, which is found in all plants, improved crops’ water-use efficiency—the ratio of carbon dioxide entering the plant to water escaping—by 25 percent, without significantly sacrificing photosynthesis or yields. The extra PsbS protein tricks plants into partially closing their stomata, the microscopic pores in the leaf that allow water to escape. The study, published March 6 in Nature Communications, is part of an international research project, Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Read more at UC Berkeley News.
Modified Antibody Clarifies Tumor-Killing Mechanisms
At the Advanced Light Source (ALS), researchers studied an antibody that was modified to activate a specific pathway of the immune system, demonstrating its value in killing tumor cells. The work provides a platform for disentangling the effects of different immune-system pathways and could lead to the design of improved cancer immunotherapies. The protein crystallography data in the study, which showed how an extreme twist in the modified antibody structure led to its selectivity, was collected at ALS Beamline 5.0.3 , which is part of the Biosciences’ Berkeley Center for Structural Biology; and at the Advanced Photon Source. Go to the ALS website to learn more.
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