110/26/18Name Student number
Anesthetics have the same effects on plants as they have on animals and humans
A new study published in Annals of Botany shows that plants react to anesthetics similarly to the way animals and humans do, suggesting plants are ideal objects for testing anesthetics actions in future.
Anesthetics were first used in the 19th century when it was discovered that inhaling ether gas stopped patients feeling pain during surgery. Since then many different chemicals have been found to induce anesthesia.
However, despite the fact that many anesthetics have been used over a 150-year period, little is known about how these different compounds with no structural similarities behave as anesthetic agents inducing loss of consciousness.
Remarkably, as found in the new study, anesthetics also work on plants. Researchers found that, when exposed to anesthetics, a number of plants lost both their autonomous and touch-induced movements. Venus flytraps no longer generate electrical signals and their traps remain open when trigger hairs were touched, and growing pea tendrils stopped their autonomous movements and were immobilized in a curled shape.
The results of this study suggest that the action of anesthetic at cellular and organ levels are similar in plants and animals.
This study suggests that plants are emerging as model objects to study general questions related to anesthetics, as well as to serve as a suitable alternative test system for human anesthesia.
The paper "Anaesthetics stop diverse plant organ movements, affect endocytic vesicle recycling and ROS homeostasis, and block action potentials in Venus flytraps" is available at: .
Endometriosis: One woman's painful journey to diagnosis
"It feels like hot knives stabbing through me, like fireworks going off inside me, like something twisting and stretching and taking over me."
This is Jaimee Rae McCormack's description of the pain of endometriosis.
The condition, where cells like the ones in the lining of the womb are found elsewhere in the body, can cause chronic pain, painful sex and lead to depression and infertility.
Here the 27-year-old from Cardiff tells of the impact it has on her life and her 13-year fight for a diagnosis.
"I've suffered with endometriosis since I was 12 but it wasn't until I was 25 that I was finally diagnosed. "The condition has had a huge impact on my life.
I haven't been able to have a career because there are days I'm in too much pain to leave the house and I have hospital appointments sometimes four times a week."If it wasn't for my supportive family I would be lost and in huge financial trouble.
Hypochondria to food poisoning:Jaimee was given a range of diagnoses before discovering she had endometriosis
"It means sex is painful and and I have physiotherapy to help in that department. "I won't know how it has affected my fertility until I start trying for a baby."I have certainly felt depressed at times which has really got me down as I love to smile."
When Jaimee first became unwell she was frequently at her GP's surgery but felt she was getting nowhere: "Tests were coming back clear and I was being told there was nothing wrong with me."
She was eventually prescribed a series of different contraceptive pills and then fitted with a coil which "helped massively".
But it was short lived: "By the time I got to 18 things were really bad," she said.
"It really affects my bowel movements so I have diarrhoea all the time.
"Because of that I was constantly being told it was irritable bowel syndrome ."
By the age of 21, Jaimee had graduated with a degree in contemporary textiles and was working in Sweden as an au pair.
But she was very unwell: "One time I had terrible sickness and diarrhoea for 12 hours, to the point where I couldn't breathe," she said.
"I flew home to Wales and saw my GP who told me I was homesick. I was told to finish my contract in Sweden and come home - which is what I did."After returning home my quest to get to the bottom of my illness really began."
She underwent allergy testing, and was tested for coeliac disease: "Everything kept coming back clear all the time and everybody thought I was wasting their time."
She paid privately for an endoscopy and a colonoscopy and this led to the discovery of two chronic duodenal ulcers.
"We thought we'd found what had been going on with me all these years," she said - but it turned out to be a red herring.
By the age of 23 her health had hit an all-time low: "I was sick for so long and so weak as I blacked out and had to be rushed into hospital," she recalled.This time she was told she had food poisoning.
Before long she was back in hospital, this time for a month of tests. She left without a diagnosis. But she was determined to get to the bottom of her illness. She started having acupuncture and it was her acupuncturist who first suggested it could be endometriosis.
"I started looking into it," she said."It took two years of pestering GPs and requesting referrals before I was finally given the diagnosis in December 2015."It made a huge difference to know it wasn't all in my head."
Since her diagnosis Jaimee has had three operations and the endometriosis has been removed from her liver, appendix, colon, rectum, fallopian tubes, uterus and bowel.
"The pain lower down has got so much better," she said.
"The cramps used to be so strong, almost like I was in labour. I've looked into it and for centuries it was called "suffocation of the womb" and sufferers were executed because people thought they were witches.
"I can understand that, sometimes it is almost like I am possessed."
She is now waiting to hear if she will be given a PET scan to see if she has endometriosis around her lungs and heart.
For the past four years, Jaimee Rae McCormack says medics have frequently encouraged her to have a baby - the condition can cause infertility and some women report pregnancy helps with symptoms.
Endometriosis symptoms:
- Lower tummy or back (pelvic) pain - usually worse during your period
- Period pain that stops you doing your normal activities
- Pain during or after sex
- Pain when going to the toilet during your period
- Feeling sick, constipation, diarrhoea, or blood in your pee during your period
- Difficulty getting pregnant
- The condition mainly affects girls and women of childbearing age and less common in women who have been through the menopause
But this is not something she is considering: "I've lost count how many times doctors have suggested I have a baby - probably over 20 times.
"It would be cruel to bring a child into the world when I'm sick so often.
"For some women having a baby helps but for others it doesn't.
"They've managed to get rid of the endometriosis from all of my uterus, so I'm hoping I have my fertility, but I won't know until I start trying for a baby.
"It's just not the right time now. It will be in the next couple of years and I hope I haven't missed my chance."
Image copyrightRobin French Image captionJaimee has been painting a wall of her house to raise awareness of the condition
Jaimee has found an unusual way to stay positive: By writing information and painting images images on a wall of her house and sharing the images on social media to raise awareness of the condition.
"I've drawn flowers with 10 petals, one black to represent the one in 10 women who have endometriosis."
Her work has had a mixed response: "One person said I was being disrespectful. Someone else called the police.
"But then I got a photographer in to photograph the work, and since then it has been really positive."
Jaimee's condition has left her feeling depressed and low at times but the painting has helped: "Since starting the wall, on my down days all the messages with other women struggling keeps me going and inspires me to keep shouting out and raising awareness for this awful condition."
Golden eagle migration out of sync with climate change
Golden eagles in North America may have the timing of their migration shifted out of step with a seasonal boom in food they need to raise their young, according to scientists.
By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News, New Orleans
A project to track the impact of climate change on migrating animals has revealed that adult golden eagles are unable to shift the timing of their migration. Lead researcher Scott LaPoint from Columbia University presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. He explained that day length, or photoperiod, appeared to give the great birds the cue to go "as far and as fast as possible".
When analysing tracking data, composed of 20 years' worth of tagging birds with satellite tags and following their seasonal migrations, DrLaPoint noticed an unusual pattern. Younger raptors would shift the timing of their journey, seemingly adapting to weather conditions and climate. "But the adults get this photoperiod trigger and it's 'Time to go!'," he told BBC News. "I would have expected an older, wiser bird to better time their migration," he added.
"But, with this [daylight] trigger, they don't have the luxury of deciding. They need to get [to their nesting site] as soon as possible to initiate a clutch. "They want to get their chicks as independent as possible by October, November."
Birds younger than five years are sub-adult. They do not reproduce, so they are able to wait for good thermals to take them on a less energy-intensive journey north. Northern-breeding golden eagles can travel thousands of miles to their wintering grounds.
And they have adapted to have their departure coincide with the first lasting snowfall or freeze and decreasing prey abundance.
If they're coming up at the same time every year, and if there's a change in that ecosystem due to climate change - whether that's a shifting of when spring arrives, or more extreme weather events - that time of arrival could be less optimal, said DrLaPoint. "We're potentially disrupting this synchrony. And if the birds aren't able to adapt, I'm not sure what to expect."
The immune cells that help tumors instead of destroying them
PDL1triggers a cascade of reactions in immune cells that shuts down their attack machinery, rendering them harmless to the tumor
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-associated deaths. One of the most promising ways to treat it is by immunotherapy, a strategy that turns the patient's immune system against the tumor.
n the past twenty years, immunotherapies have been largely based on the degree by which immune cells can infiltrate a lung tumor, which has become a major predictor of the patient's overall prognosis.
The problem is that lung tumors adapt to the attacks and find ways to evade them. One these ways involves a protein called "Programmed death-ligand 1 (PDL1)", which the tumor cells express on their surface. When immune cells, e.g. T cells, attack the tumor, PDL1 binds a protein on their own surface appropriately named "programmed cell death protein 1", or PD-1).
This interaction triggers an entire cascade of biological reactions in the immune cells that shuts down their attack machinery and renders them harmless to the tumor.
To deal with this, immunotherapeutic regimens often involve drugs that block PD-1, so as to cut off the tumors evading mechanism. But, unfortunately, this has not been enough. What we need is a fuller understanding of the immune circuits that are active in lung cancer; a knowledge that would allow us to optimize and increase the efficiency of current immunotherapies.
Neutrophils help lung tumors hide
To do this, the lab of Etienne Meylan at EPFL used a mouse model of lung cancer to establish what the call an "immune signature" in lung cancer. The study shows that lung tumors can actually be helped by neutrophils - a type of immune cells that are normally at the first line of attack in infections, allergic reactions, and asthma. In short, neutrophils contribute to disease progression rather than stop it.
The scientists carried out what is known as "neutrophil depletion", which is a method for studying what happens in a tumor when neutrophil numbers are reduced. By depleting neutrophils in the mice, the researchers were able to deduce what effects they have on a lung tumor when they are actually present.
Surprisingly, depleting neutrophils caused a profound re-modeling of the immune compartment of the lung tumor, with T cells flooding it. This means that neutrophils actually help the tumor hide better from T cells - this is referred to as "immune exclusion".
On the contrary, neutrophil depletion sensitized tumors to anti-PD1 immunotherapies.
"Since neutrophils are important in fighting pathogens, neutrophil depletion is unlikely to be used in the clinic," says Meylan. "Instead, we must concentrate our efforts to understand exactly how neutrophils promote lung tumor development. This could lead to the identification of drugs that block this specific pro-tumor function of neutrophils."
Neutrophils help lung tumors grow
The data also showed that the presence of neutrophils leads to changes in the function of the tumor's blood vessels. The changes trigger hypoxia and cause the tumor cells to produce a protein called "Snail". This is important because Snail is widely known to help cancer cells resist drugs, as well as promote tumor recurrence and metastasis.
The researchers found that Snail in turn increased the secretion of the protein Cxcl2, augmenting neutrophil infiltration. This creates a positive loop that accelerates the progression of the cancer.
In short, the study shows that neutrophils promote tumor progression and can actually hamper the work of immunotherapy in lung cancer. The authors describe this as a "vicious cycle" between neutrophils and Snail that ultimately maintains a tumor microenvironment supporting tumor growth.
"Immunotherapies constitute new treatment options with important clinical success for this devastating disease," says Etienne Meylan. "But in up to two thirds of patients the lung tumors do not respond. We believe our work offers one explanation for this; finding new ways to break the vicious dialogue between neutrophils and tumor cells might impair tumor growth, and also increase the percentage of patients that benefit from immunotherapy."
Contributors CentreHospitalierUniversitaire Vaudois
University of Lausanne
Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (VITAL-IT and Bioinformatics Core Facility)
EPFL Flow Cytometry Core Facility
University of Bern
Funding Swiss National Science Foundation
National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Molecular Oncology
Swiss Cancer League
Chercher et Trouver Foundation
ISREC Foundation ("Molecular Life Sciences" grant)
Nuovo Soldati Foundation
ReferenceJulien Faget, Svenja Groeneveld, Gael Boivin, Martial Sankar, Nadine Zangger, Miguel Garcia, Nicolas Guex, Inti Zlobec, Loïc Steiner, Alessandra Piersigilli, IoannisXenarios, Etienne Meylan. Neutrophils and Snail orchestrate the establishment of a pro-tumor microenvironment in lung cancer. Cell Reports 12 December 2017.
Winter months most likely to lead to tragedy for men who disappear on a night out
Men are more likely to go missing on a night out and be found dead in December than at any other time of the year, according to a sobering new report from the University of Portsmouth.
Christmas revellers are being urged to look out for each other as researchers identify the winter months from December to February as a high risk period for party-going males.
Taking a route home near water poses a particular danger, with 89 per cent of missing fatalities being discovered later in canals, rivers, lakes or harbours.
The 'Men Missing On A Night Out' study, released by the university's Centre for the Study of Missing Persons, looked at 96 fatal disappearances of men in the UK who were last seen socialising on a night out. The winter months of December, January and February accounted for more than half (53 per cent) of fatal disappearances, with one fifth (22 per cent) going missing in December.
The purpose of the report is to help the police and search and rescue services to develop effective search strategies in these cases, but the researchers say it could also act as a reminder for people to take care during the festive period.
Researcher Geoff Newiss said: "We're always seeing lists of 'Dos and Don'ts' at this time of year - 'Don't chat up or insult the boss', that kind of thing. Making a fool of yourself at the office party is one thing; but I would say the most important thing is to make sure you get home safely - and that your friends get home safely too. A lot of these cases seem to happen when a group splits up, so perhaps it's important to try to stay together on the route home."