Knowledge Update

New York, March 29 (IANS) Using a nanoparticle that delivers a drug and then glows green when cancer cells begin dying, Indian origin researchers have found a way to detect the effectiveness of cancer treatment much sooner than currently available clinical methods.

Being able to detect early on whether a cancer therapy is working for a patient can influence the course of treatment and improve outcomes and quality of life. 

However, conventional detection methods -- such as PET scans, CT and MRI -- usually cannot detect whether a tumour is shrinking until a patient has received multiple cycles of therapy. 

The new approach can read out on the effectiveness of chemotherapy in as few as eight hours after treatment, and can also be used for monitoring the effectiveness of immunotherapy, the study said.

"Using this approach, the cells light up the moment a cancer drug starts working. We can determine if a cancer therapy is effective within hours of treatment," said co-corresponding author Shiladitya Sengupta from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US.

"Our long-term goal is to find a way to monitor outcomes very early so that we don't give a chemotherapy drug to patients who are not responding to it," Sengupta noted.

The findings were published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new technique takes advantage of the fact that when cells die, a particular enzyme known as caspase is activated. 

The researchers designed a 'reporter element' that, when in the presence of activated caspase, glows green. 

The team then tested whether they could use the reporter nanoparticles to distinguish between drug-sensitive and drug-resistant tumours. 

Using nanoparticles loaded with anti-cancer drugs, the team tested a common chemotherapeutic agent, paclitaxel, in a pre-clinical model of prostate cancer and, separately, an immunotherapy in a pre-clinical model of melanoma. 

In the tumours that were sensitive to paclitaxel, the team saw an approximately 400 percent increase in fluorescence compared to tumours that were not sensitive to the drug. 

The team also saw a significant increase in the fluorescent signal in tumours treated with the anti-PD-L1 nanoparticles after five days.

"We've demonstrated that this technique can help us directly visualise and measure the responsiveness of tumours to both types of drugs," co-corresponding author Ashish Kulkarni, BWH, noted.

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Do you have a workplace atmosphere sans motivation and constant cribbing from your boss about performance? The negative feedback from seniors may lead to endorsement of immoral behaviour in employees, warns a study.

"Strongly held professional goals, when combined with public criticism of our potential in that field, can have unintended effects on ethical behaviour for some," said lead researcher Ana Gantman from New York University.

For the study, researchers conducted three experiments with students intending to enter business, law and STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.

In the first study, business students took a mock aptitude test which purported to measure their potential in the field, with some told they performed well on the exam and others informed they did poorly. 

The results, appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that those highly motivated to enter the business world and who were told they did poorly on the test were more likely to endorse the immoral act -- breaking the contract -- than were those who were informed they did well.

Similarly, in the second research, students who were determined to enter the legal field and told they performed poorly on the test, were comparatively more likely to say they performed these "immoral" behaviours.

The researchers conducted a third experiment involving students, who were told they were taking a test measuring their potential to successfully major in business or STEM fields.

Similar to the results for the first two experiments, those highly motivated to pursue business or STEM majors -- and informed that they lacked the potential to excel in these majors -- indicated that their personality was very similar to the successful example -- in this case, possessing personality traits associated with immoral behaviour.

"If we can better understand the triggers of these behaviours such as when negative professional feedback leads to the compensatory endorsement of immoral behaviour, we might even prevent incidents of large-scale fraud in the future," Gantman noted.​

​New York, March 30 (IANS) Astronomers have created a virtual Earth-space radio telescope more than 100,000 miles across -- a super-high resolution that reveals new details of a quasar and our Milky Way.

The researchers were surprised when their Earth-space system revealed a temperature hotter then 10 trillion degrees.

“Only this space-Earth system could reveal this temperature, and now we have to figure out how that environment can reach such temperatures," said Yuri Kovalev, the RadioAstron project scientist.

“This result is a significant challenge to our current understanding of quasar jets,” he added.

Using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes, the team achieved the highest resolution of any astronomical observation ever made.

The feat produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

The scientists combined the Russian RadioAstron satellite with the ground-based telescopes to produce a virtual radio telescope.

They pointed this system at a quasar called 3C 273, more than two billion light-years from Earth.

Quasars like 3C 273 propel huge jets of material outward at speeds nearly that of light. These powerful jets emit radio waves.

The observations also showed, for the first time, substructure caused by scattering of the radio waves by the tenuous interstellar material in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

“This is like looking through the hot, turbulent air above a candle flame,” added Michael Johnson from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“We had never been able to see such distortion of an extragalactic object before,” he noted in a paper appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The amazing resolution from RadioAstron working with the ground-based telescopes gives scientists a powerful new tool to explore not only the extreme physics near the distant supermassive black holes but also the diffuse material in our home galaxy.

The RadioAstron satellite was combined with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, The Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Effelsberg Telescope in Germany, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Signals received by the orbiting radio telescope were transmitted to an antenna in Green Bank where they were recorded and then sent over the internet to Russia.

Here, they were combined with the data received by the ground-based radio telescopes to form the high resolution image of 3C 273.​

Los Angeles, March 29 (IANS) Fungi will be sent for the first time to the International Space Station for the development of medicine, said researchers at the University of Southern California (USC).

The experiments, to be conducted jointly by scientists from the university and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will put specimen of Aspergillus nidulans in the high-radiation and micro-gravity conditions in space to develop new medicines for use in space and on the Earth, USC researchers announced on Monday.

The specimen will be carried by the SpaceX CRS-8 mission scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral on April 8. The launch will be the Hawthorne-based company's first cargo resupply service mission since CRS-7 exploded shortly after launch on June 28, 2015, Xinhua reported.

"Certain types of fungi produce very important molecules called secondary metabolites that are not essential for their growth or reproduction but can be used to make beneficial pharmaceuticals. Examples of secondary metabolites include the antibiotic penicillin and the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin," said a USC statement.

Researchers said the environment of space could trigger physiological changes in the fungi.

"The high-radiation, micro-gravity environment in space could prompt Aspergillus nidulans to produce molecules it doesn't create in Earth's less stressful conditions," Clay Wang, professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and chemistry at the USC school of pharmacy, was quoted as saying by the media.

"We've done extensive genetic analysis of this fungus and found that it could potentially produce 40 different types of drugs," Wang said.

"The organism is known to produce osteoporosis drugs, which is very important from an astronaut's perspective because we know that in space travel, astronauts experience bone loss."

Scientists also said that molecules from Aspergillus nidulans potentially may be useful in anti-cancer and Alzheimer's disease research.​

New York, April 29 (IANS) Researchers have identified four previously unknown genetic diseases that can be brought under the umbrella diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Cases associated with changes in each of the four genes were different from each other in terms of symptoms, intelligence level and other disease features, the researchers said.

"A common fallacy is that schizophrenia can be treated as a single disease," explained lead study author Dolores Malaspina from NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York.

"Our biologically driven study begins to answer longstanding questions in the field about why any two people diagnosed with schizophrenia may have drastically different symptoms. For the first time, we have defined four syndromes mechanistically,” Malaspina noted.

Patients with schizophrenia struggle to interpret reality, typically suffering from hallucinations, learning disabilities, emotional withdrawal and lack of motivation. 

In the current study, researchers analysed 48 ethnically diverse patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, looking at symptom sets in patients found to have rare or previously unknown changes in the DNA code of the four genes that disrupted brain function.

The four influential genes now tied by the study to specific conditions are all involved in the growth or regulation of nerve circuits. 

"Our results argue that new treatments should -- while addressing core psychoses -- also focus on processing speed in TGM5 cases, working memory in PTPRG, zinc augmentation in SLC39A13, and nerve cell protection in patients with ARMS/KIDINS220 mutations," first study author Thorsten Kranz, postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone, said.

The findings appeared online in the journal EbioMedicine.

"Perhaps as many as 30 percent of schizophrenic patients may now become candidates for more precise treatment based on the individual characteristics of these four genes, with the remaining cases becoming less mysterious as we pull these groups out of the mix," Malaspina said.​

​Brasilia, March 28 (IANS) Brazilian researchers have improved delivery of a medication to fight Alzheimer's by using a nanofibre to regulate the compound's release, the media reported on Monday.

The project is being led by doctoral student Geisa Salles and professor Anderson Lobo, coordinator of Vale do Paraiba University's Research and Development Institute in Sao Jose dos Campos.

"We developed this nanomaterial that contains the drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's and we already tested it in vitro with cells mimicking the disease's behaviour. The results have been quite promising, and we believe we could make a great contribution in the treatment of this chronic pathology," Salles told Efe news.

The process, called nanotreatment, depends on a combination of polymers and proteins in nanomaterials to make a fibre that, once implanted under the skin, releases the medication into the blood stream continuously for quick and lasting absorption.

The fibre - 800 nanometers thick and almost invisible to the human eye - is filled with a medication imported from Britain.

The electro-wiring technique, in which a needle with the drug receives energy and light to release bits of the fibre, is used to make the nanodevice for implanting in patients.

In the laboratory, the technique adds a second efficiency testing phase that may extend the drug's duration by 30 percent.

"Hypothetically, it would be like a patch to stop smoking, but we still need more research to determine how to use it, and in which stage of Alzheimer's disease we should start fighting the action of amyloid beta, the protein, or peptide, found in the brains of patients with the disease," Lobo added.​

New York, March 28 (IANS) The disappearance of Arctic Sea ice due to massive climate change is causing the surface of Greenland's melt area to increase, thereby fuelling a steep rise in the sea-level, finds a study.

During summers, melting Arctic Sea ice favours stronger and more frequent "blocking-high" pressure systems.

The high pressure tends to enhance the flow of warm, moist air over Greenland, contributing to an increased extreme heat events and surface ice melting, which in turn fuels sea-level rise, a monstrous issue for coastal communities around the world. 

"Whenever there's a big melt year in Greenland, on the surface anyway, it's usually because there's either a blocking high or a large northward swing in the jet stream and both of those things tend to be long-lived features in the circulation," said one of the researchers, Jennifer Francis, professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US. 

Both transport a lot of heat, moisture and clouds over the Greenland ice sheet, leading to more melting, the researchers pointed out.

The study was published online in the Journal of Climate. 

The Greenland ice sheet holds an enormous volume of frozen water, and the global sea level would rise about 20 to 23 feet if it all melted. Surface melting of the ice sheet has increased dramatically since the relative stability and modest snow accumulation in the 1970s, the study said.

Sea-level rise is already "becoming very conspicuous and it's going to be bad. It's happening faster and faster," Francis said adding that the change is accelerating.​

New York, March 29 (IANS) Individuals who suffer from stiffening of the arteries and are in their 40s may experience subtle and structural damages in their brains, finds a new study.

The condition is also likely to advance towards cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease later in life.

The findings showed that among young healthy adults, higher aortic "stiffness" was associated with reduced white matter volume and decreased integrity of the gray matter, and in ages much younger than previously described.

"This study shows for the first time that increasing arterial stiffness is detrimental to the brain, and that increasing stiffness and brain injury begin in early middle life, before we commonly think of prevalent diseases such as atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease or stroke having an impact," said lead author of the study Pauline Maillard, from University of California, Davis in the US.

The study, published online in the American Heart Association journal Stroke, also noted that elevated arterial stiffness is the earliest manifestation of systolic hypertension and added that the results may be a new avenue of treatment to sustain brain health.

"Measures of arterial stiffness may actually be a better measure of vascular health, and should be identified, treated and monitored throughout the lifespan," Maillard said.

The large study involved approximately 1,900 diverse participants in the Framingham Heart Study in the US, who underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as arterial tonometry.

The tests measured the force of arterial blood flow, the carotid femoral pulse wave velocity or CFPWV -- the reference standard for noninvasive measurement of aortic stiffness -- and its association with subtle injury to the brain's white and gray matter. 

The research found that increased CFPWV was associated with greater injury to the brain.

However, with age high blood pressure causes the arteries to stiffen, further increasing blood pressure as well as increasing calcium and collagen deposits, which promotes atrophy, inflammation and further stiffening, decreasing blood flow to vital organs including the brain and promoting brain atrophy.

The study emphasises the need for primary and secondary prevention of vascular stiffness and remodelling as a way to protect brain health, early in life, the researchers concluded​

Tokyo, March 29 (IANS) Japanese researchers have discovered metabolites that are specifically related to aging and shed light on how the human body ages.

Metabolites, substances that are created during metabolism, can provide a wealth of information about an individual's health, disease, diet, and life-style. 

The results of the study identified some metabolites in the blood that increased or decreased in the older adults.

The researchers found 14 age-related metabolites. Half of these decreased in elderly people and the other half increased.

Antioxidants and metabolites related to muscle strength decreased in the elderly, whereas metabolites related to declining kidney and liver function increased.

"Of the 14 compounds, half of the them had decreased in elderly people. The decrease was found in antioxidants and in compounds related to muscle strength. Therefore, elderly people had less antioxidants and less muscle strength," said lead researcher Yanagida, professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan.

In addition, some of the age-related metabolites found on the same metabolic pathways have connected changes, which suggests that age affects them simultaneously.

"Functionally related compounds show the same tendencies to increase or decrease with age, or in other words, they show similar correlations," Yanagida noted, in the study published in the journal PNAS.

The decline in antioxidants and muscle strength suggest that it is important for individuals to consume foods high in antioxidants and to continue exercising, especially after the age of 65. 

This could help increase the levels of the related metabolites in the body and improve body conditions, the researchers stressed. 

"Longevity is a great mystery for us...We want to find how elderly people can live a happy final stage of life. This is the way we can contribute to human health," Yanagida maintained.

To find and analyse the metabolites, the team obtained blood samples, including red blood cells (RBCs), from 30 healthy individuals: 15 young adults and 15 older adults. 

Then, they used Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS), a technique that separates liquids and detects substances, to identify the metabolites within the blood. 

From there, they could calculate the coefficients of variation, or the standard deviation of metabolite abundance divided by the average, to identify which compounds had increased or decreased in the older adults.​

New York, March 29 (IANS) Unlocking the mystery behind eruptions on the icy moon of Saturn, scientists from the University of Chicago and Princeton University have revealed a mechanism by which cyclical tidal stresses exerted by Saturn drive Enceladus's long-lived eruptions.

The moon Enceladus -- 500 km in diameter and 1.272 billion km away from the Earth -- serves as a leading candidate for extra-terrestrial life. 

The data from NASA's Cassini probe has strongly indicated that the cryovolcanic plumes of Enceladus probably originate in a biomolecule-friendly oceanic environment.

“On Earth, eruptions don't tend to continue for long. When you do see eruptions that continue for a long time, they'll be localised into a few pipelike eruptions with wide spacing between them,” said Edwin Kite, assistant professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago.

But Enceladus, which probably has an ocean underlying its icy surface, has somehow managed to sprout multiple fissures along its south pole. 

These “tiger stripes” have been erupting vapour and tiny frost particles continuously along their entire length for decades and probably much longer.

What's needed is an energy source to balance the evaporative cooling. 

“We think the energy source is a new mechanism of tidal dissipation that had not been previously considered," Kite added in a paper appeared in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cryovolcanism may also have shaped the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. 

"Europa's surface has many similarities to Enceladus's surface, and so I hope that this model will be useful for Europa as well," Kite noted.

The Kite-Rubin model of the Enceladus plumbing system consists of a series of nearly parallel, vertical slots that reach from the surface down to the water below. 

They applied Saturn's tidal stresses to their model on a desktop computer and watched what happened.

Tidal pumping heats the water and the ice shell via turbulence. 

Kite and Rubin have proposed that new Cassini data can test this idea by revealing whether or not the ice shell in the south polar region is warm.

If the new mechanism is a major contributor to the heat coming from the fractures, then the south polar ice in between the fractures may in fact be cold. 

The jury is still on out on this until the results from the final Enceladus flybys of last year are fully analysed.

“The new work brings to the fore a process that had escaped notice - the pumping of water in and out of the deep fractures of the south polar ice shell by tidal action,” explained Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini's imaging science team.​