Science Daily February 20, 2024 Myotis bats are exceptionally species rich and have evolved viral tolerance. They also exhibit swarming, a cryptic behavior where large, multi-species assemblages gather for mating, which has been hypothesized to promote interspecific hybridization. An international team of researchers (USA – Texas A&M, Switzerland, France, Ireland) analysed 60 Old World Myotis genomes to resolve the coevolution of genome architecture and their unusual antiviral tolerance. They demonstrated an extensive history of introgressive hybridization that has replaced the species phylogeny across 17%−93% of the genome except for pericentromeric regions of macrochromosomes. They enriched introgression tracts on microchromosome regions […]
Tag Archives: Infectious diseases
Temperature, humidity may drive future transmission of parasitic worm infections
Phys.org February 26, 2024 Free-living stages of soil-transmitted helminths are highly susceptible to climatic drivers; however, how multiple climatic variables affect helminth species, and the long-term consequences of these interactions, is poorly understood. An international team of researchers (USA – Pennsylvania State University, Italy) used experiments on nine trichostrongylid species of herbivores to develop a temperature- and humidity-dependent model of infection hazard. Intestinal and stomach helminths exhibited contrasting climatic responses, with the former group strongly affected by temperature while the latter primarily impacted by humidity. According to the specific climatic responses of the two groups, climate change is expected to […]
Tiny magnetic beads produce an optical signal that could be used to quickly detect pathogens
MIT News August 25, 2023 Researchers at MIT have identified a new optical signature in a widely used class of magnetic beads, which could be used to quickly detect contaminants in a variety of diagnostic tests. They used Dynabeads coated with anti-Salmonella to bind and identify Salmonella enterica. Dynabeads presented signature peaks at 1000 and 1600 1/cm from aliphatic and aromatic C-C stretching of polystyrene, and 1350 1/cm and 1600 1/cm from amide, alpha-helix, and beta-sheet of antibody coatings of the Fe2O3 core, confirming with electron dispersive X-ray imaging. The Raman signature could be measured in dry and liquid samples. […]
Deadly virus structures point toward new avenues for vaccine design
Science Daily May 24, 2023 There are currently no widely approved treatments or vaccines for the Lassa virus. An international team of researchers (USA – The Scripps Research Institute, University of Georgia, Tulane University School of Medicine, UK, Germany, the Netherlands) determined the structure of LASV glycoprotein complex (GPC) which mediates viral entry and is the sole target for neutralizing antibodies. Scientists have also struggled to isolate Lassa glycoproteins — the spike-like proteins that surround the virus and are the target of most antibodies. In the infectious virus, these glycoproteins exist in complexes of three, called trimers. For decades, however, […]
Extinct Pathogens Ushered The Fall of Ancient Civilizations, Scientists Say
Science Alert August 6, 2022 The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking. An international team of researchers (Germany, Greece, USA – Temple University) presented genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site […]
Want to prevent pandemics? Stop spillovers
Nature 605, 419-422 (2022) According to a team of medical professionals and practitioners in the US spillover events, in which a pathogen that originates in animals jumps into people, have probably triggered every viral pandemic that’s occurred since the start of the twentieth century. An August 2021 analysis of disease outbreaks over the past four centuries indicates that the yearly probability of pandemics could increase several-fold in the coming decades, largely because of human-induced environmental changes. Fortunately, for around US$20 billion per year, the likelihood of spillover could be greatly reduced. This is the amount needed to halve global deforestation […]
COVID-19—lessons for zoonotic disease – Perspective
Science March 10, 2022 According to researchers in Australia zoonotic diseases have been part of the human experience since the origin of our species. The key issue is not that zoonotic diseases appear in humans, but that their emergence seems to be increasing in frequency. Major changes in land use, increasing urbanization, and global connectedness will accelerate the rate of zoonotic events. A core question is whether particular animal groups are common sources of zoonotic viruses. By understanding why and how zoonotic diseases emerge in humans, as well as the barriers to this process, it is possible to be better […]
‘Fingerprint’ machine learning technique identifies different bacteria in seconds
Phys.org March 4, 2022 Researchers in South Korea have demonstrated a markedly simpler, faster, and effective route to classify signals of two common bacteria E. coli and S. epidermidis and their resident media without any separation procedures by using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) analysis boosted with a newly proposed deep learning model named dual-branch wide-kernel network (DualWKNet). With outstanding classification accuracies up to 98%, the synergistic combination of SERS and deep learning serves as an effective platform for “separation-free“ detection of bacteria in arbitrary media with short data acquisition times and small amounts of training data. Universal and fast bacterial […]
Deconstructing the Infectious Biological Weaponry of the COVID-19 Virus
SciTech Daily August 8, 2021 The replication transcription complex (RTC) from the virus SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for recognizing and processing RNA for two principal purposes, propagation into new virus and for ribosomal transcription of viral proteins. The RTC will discontinuously transcribe specific sections of viral RNA to amplify certain proteins over others. A team of researchers in the US (University of Chicago, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Auburn) has conducted a systematic structural investigation of three components that make up the RTC: Nsp7, Nsp8, and Nsp12 and solved high-resolution crystal structures of the Nsp7/8 […]
Mapping zoonotic ‘hot spots’ where risk of coronaviruses jumping from bats to humans is highest
Phys.org June 1, 2021 The extent to which humans facilitate zoonotic transmission of infectious diseases is unclear. Human encroachment into wildlife habitats, cropland area and intensive animal farming is hypothesized to favour the emergence of zoonotic diseases. An international team of researchers (Italy, USA – UC Berkeley, New Zealand) analysed comprehensive, high-resolution datasets on forest cover, cropland distribution, livestock density, human population, human settlements, bat species’ distribution and land-use changes in regions populated by Asian horseshoe bats (>28.5 million km2)—the species that most commonly carry severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-related coronaviruses. They identified areas at risk of SARS-related coronavirus outbreaks, showing that […]