Monday Toon Roundup 1- The CONvention

"Naked Darth Vader" approach could tame antibiotic resistant superbugs

Rather than trying to kill bacteria outright with drugs, Université de Montréal researchers have discovered a way to disarm bacteria that may allow the body’s own defense mechanisms to destroy them. “To understand this strategy one could imagine harmful bacteria being like Darth Vader, and the anti-virulence drug would take away his armor and lightsaber,” explained Dr. Christian Baron, the study’s lead author and Professor at the Department of Biochemistry.

“A naked Darth Vader would be an easy target and similarly, pathogenic bacteria without their virulence factors would be rendered harmless and eliminated by our immune system.” Virulence factors are what make certain bacteria harmful to our bodies and different from most bacteria that live on our body or inside the intestinal system, which are harmless or even useful for us. Baron’s research group will publish an article outlining the details of their findings tomorrow in Chemistry & Biology.

nfectious diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria were a major scourge of mankind, but thanks to the introduction of antibiotics beginning in the middle of the 20th century, most bacterial infections were largely controlled. It was a widely held belief that biomedical research had largely won the battle against these diseases. However, as antibiotics kill by targeting the essential cell functions of most (not always all) bacteria, this leads to survival of the most adaptable. “Bacteria have the capacity to develop resistance to antibiotics and they transfer this capacity to their offspring and to other bacteria. As a consequence, resistance began to emerge among the bacteria soon after the introduction of antibiotics,” Baron said. In their worst forms, “superbugs” have emerged, those resistant to all but a few or even to all antibiotics.”

Baron’s team has discovered small molecules that target proteins in a biological system (a type IV secretion system) that is required for many bacteria to be harmful. “As if we were pulling on a loose thread in Darth Vader’s cape, we have found a way to unravel the molecular details of the binding of these molecules to a target protein known as VirB8, a key part of the virulence mechanism of human and animal pathogenic Brucella species of bacteria,” Baron explained. This strategy has many advantages since resistance to such treatments would likely be slow or might not even occur. Virulent bacteria could be rendered as harmless as those that live in our gut.

The concept of anti-virulence drugs still has to be proven in the clinic, but in the new battles that will arise in our war on bacteria, such drugs could prove formidable new weapons.

more
http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20120823-naked-darth-vader-approach-could-tame-antibiotic-resistant-superbugs.html

A 30-year plan to study America’s ecology is about to begin

THE phrase “Big Science” brings to mind rockets, telescopes and particle accelerators. When it comes to grand scientific gestures—and the cash that goes therewith—those who wield field glasses and butterfly nets in the name of terrestrial ecology seldom get a look in. Which is surprising, as the habitat they study, namely dry land, is the one actually occupied by humanity. But a group of American ecologists, led by David Schimel, intend to correct this state of affairs. They plan to shake up terrestrial ecology, and introduce it to the scale and sweep of Big Science, by establishing NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network.

Finding the money for this project, which will be based in Boulder, Colorado, has not been easy, but after a decade of discussion and planning, America’s National Science Foundation managed to persuade Congress to earmark $434m, the price of a modest space probe, to set it up. The operating budget will be around $80m a year.

Dr Schimel’s team is thus now starting to wire up the landscape. Ground has already been broken at three sites—in Colorado, Florida and Massachusetts. Eventually, 60 places across the country will be covered simultaneously. Once this network is completed, in 2016 if all goes well, 15,000 sensors will be collecting more than 500 types of data, including temperature, precipitation, air pressure, wind speed and direction, humidity, sunshine, levels of air pollutants such as ozone, the amount of various nutrients in soils and streams, and the state of an area’s vegetation and microbes.

Crucially, these instruments will take the same measurements in the same way in every place. By gathering data in this standardised way, and doing so in many places and over long periods of time, Dr Schimel hopes to achieve the statistical power needed to turn ecology from a craft into an industrial-scale enterprise. The idea is to see how ecosystems respond to changes in climate and land use, and to the arrival of new species. That will let the team develop models which can forecast the future of an ecosystem and allow policymakers to assess the likely consequences of various courses of action.


more

http://www.economist.com/node/21560838

Astronomers find a rare, second kind of supernova

By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times


Astronomers have for the first time observed a nova-producing system turn into a supernova, a finding that indicates the universe has more than one way to create a nova. A normal Type Ia supernova is a rare event, occurring perhaps once or twice every century. The type of supernova observed by a team of astronomers led by astronomer Ben Dilday of UC Santa Barbara is estimated to occur about one time in every 1,000 supernovae. The findings are important because supernovae are generally all considered to have the same intrinsic brightness, making them what astronomers call "standard candles" used for estimating distances across the cosmos. If some supernovae have different brightnesses because they have a different origin, that could lead to errors in distance measurements.

The new supernova, called PTF 11kx, was discovered initially by the Palomar Transient Factory, which uses a robotic telescope on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory to scan the sky nightly looking for sudden increases in light that indicate the presence of a supernova or nova. Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory first observed PTF 11kx, which lies about 600 million light years away in the constellation Lynx, on Jan. 16, 2011. The signals were so unusual that Nugent and his Berkeley colleagues called for what is known as a "target of opportunity" observation with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. "We basically called up a fellow UC observer and interrupted their observations in order to get time-critical spectra," Nugent said. The team has been observing the system regularly ever since. "For several months, almost every new observation showed something we had never seen before," Dilday said.

Indirect evidence has previously suggested that the majority of Type Ia supernovae arise from the collision of two white dwarf stars, producing a massive burst of light and energy. Regular novae, which produce far less energy, are produced from systems in which a white dwarf star -- essentially the corpse of a sun-like star -- orbits a red giant. Gas emitted from the red giant is captured by the white dwarf. When the gas builds up to a high enough concentration, a brilliant explosion occurs: a nova. The white dwarf then goes quiescent, accumulating more gas until another nova erupts, typically about 20 years later. Because the recurrent novae cause the white dwarf to lose more mass than is gained from the red giant, it was thought that such a dwarf could never accumulate enough to produce a supernova. But this system did, the team reported this week in the journal Science.

PTF 11kx is close enough to Earth that researchers could study it in more detail than most supernovae. The team observed that the system is surrounded by several shells of gas that were expanding outward at a rate too fast to be the result of solar wind, but too slow to have been caused by a supernova. Researchers have observed similar shells of gas around other stars, but have not been sure of their origin. The team now believes that they are the remnants of previous novae. The researchers reasoned that the expanding shells were slowing down as they encountered solar winds from the red giant star. If that were the case, the more energetic gases from the new supernova should catch up and collide with them.


more

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-supernova-20120824,0,3571284.story

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Why Akin matters: Obama now leads Romney in Missouri

Yael T. Abouhalkah
Think Mitt Romney is a sure-fire winner in Missouri this November? Think again.

At least that’s the takeaway from the new survey, released Friday, by Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports.

President Barack Obama leads 47-46, wiping out Romney’s previous six-point lead.

Yes, I know, it’s one poll, completely at odds with months of other polls. Obama sure hasn’t been popular for a long time in this state. Then again, this survey ought to at least light a little spark under Obama-believers in Missouri.

And why is this happening?

Thank you, Todd Akin.

Read more here: http://voices.kansascity.com/entries/why-akin-matters-obama-now-leads-romney-missouri/

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