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Kellye Eversole has been involved with agricultural research and development since the early 1990s and is currently directing two international research consortia.
She explains these projects to listeners, covering along the way
Kellye Eversole specializes in agricultural genomics, biotechnology, and information technology. She directs the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium and the International Alliance for Phytobiomes Research.
The wheat genome sequencing effort is a way to build the foundation for a new paradigm in wheat breeding. She explains that while it generally takes 12 to 15 years to develop a new wheat variety, this consortium is providing tools breeders can use to bypass some of those years; those tools can only be developed through access to a high-quality sequence, she adds.
As with our advances in human genomics where we are targeting healthcare with a person's genetic makeup in mind, we can do the same thing in agriculture to create disease-resistant varieties of wheat before a disease wipes out a crop.
She also explains that the Phytobiomes Alliance addresses factors beyond genome sequencing in agriculture—regardless of how much you know about a plant, she remarks, growth will be influenced by what's in the immediate environment down to the specific site and farm—what works in Oklahoma won't work In New York, for example. Examining the phytobiome is a holistic system approach that strives to understand all the factors that impact a plant in a particular field or forest, so we can use the best crop genetics and management practices for a particular area.
For more see www.wheatgenome.org/and www.phytobiomesalliance.org/ as well as the web site for Kellye Eversole's company, www.eversoleassociates.com.
Award-winning author and journalist David Quammen revisits his book Spillover in the wake of our current pandemic. He talks about
David Quammen has specialized in how viruses leave animals that are in close proximity with us. He wrote his 2013 book Spillover about Ebola, bird flu, SARS, and other diseases. It raised concerns over the next spillover virus and future pandemics. He describes how he got interested in the subject after covering a national geographic expedition across the Congo through the Ebola habitat. His interest progressed into research of the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases.
He comments that he tried to highlight patterns in his book, and in fact ten years ago had a conversation with a researcher that predicted that exact scenario of the covid-19 eruption, down to the Wuhan market. What has surprised him therefore about this spillover virus has actually been the surprise of the global community rather that the virus itself.
He talks more about these past predictions as well as what information and sources he trusts today. He adds thoughts about how he sees the virus progressing and remarks he expects it to take on behavior similar to the measles model rather than influenza and why. He adds that there are going to be other spillover viruses and we need the political will to invest in more investigating, testing, preventing, ventilator capacity, ICU capacity, and more in order to prepare.
To find out more, see his website, https://www.davidquammen.com/, and follow his articles in publications like the New Yorker as well as his books such as Spillover. He's currently working on a book about Covid-19.
Aquatic ecotoxicologist Marco Vighi is studying the water cycle in agriculture and presence of plastics. He shares vital information with listeners such has
Former professor and researcher Marco Vighi works with the IMDEA Water Institute studying acute aquatic toxicity and ecology risk assessment. He's following the water cycle in agriculture, from rivers to irrigation to agricultural application and back to surface water. He begins by explaining it is better to understand in general the origin of micro plastics and consider that nano plastics are the unknown—we don't know anything about their presence because we don't have the tools to measure them or know if they are crossing cell barriers.
He explains to listeners that there are two types of micro plastics: first, ones that are intentionally produced at a micro level for products like cosmetics and toothpaste; and second, non-intentionally produced micro plastics derived from the fragmentation of bigger plastics, from synthetic clothing fibers, and from roadside products like tire pieces. He adds that while regulations are in play for the first type, which is less concerning, there is little in the way to control the second type. He explains more about the technical aspects of how these plastics fragment, how ubiquitous they are, and additional struggles with understanding nano plastic activity.
For more information, he urges listeners to comb through information with care, learning what is accurate and what isn't. Finally, he says that packaging makes up the majority of harmful plastic and is a source that we can replace with alternate materials and must tackle.
For more about Marco Vighi, see https://www.water.imdea.org/about-us/people/researchers/marco-vighi.
Todd Adams is a professor of physics at Florida State University, and a member of the High Energy Physics Group that is working on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.
He joins the show to discuss the details of this fascinating work, such as the following:
The Large Hadron Collider is the "world's largest scientific experiment," says Adams. It is a particle accelerator that was built underground in Geneva, Switzerland, and is about 17 miles in circumference. It accelerates protons in a circle at a speed close to that of light, with the purpose of observing what happens when protons collide.
These collisions are the highest energy collisions ever created in a lab. As many people know from the famous equation E= MC2, energy can be converted to mass, which is the goal at the Hadron Collider; the creation and study of new particles from these high-energy collisions.
Adams explains the details of the CMS experiment, which uses a detector five stories in height and 12,000 tons in weight that's designed to detect the particles produced by the high-energy collision of protons. Once the particles have been identified, the goal is to reconstruct precisely what happened at the time of the collision.
So, what's the ultimate purpose of these experiments? Adams explains that the standard model of particle physics does an excellent job of explaining most of what we see in the world, but it leaves some compelling questions and observations unanswered, namely what's called "dark matter." One theory to explain dark matter is the presence of a particle that doesn't interact like normal matter in that it does not interact with light, with the exception of the gravitational effects of light.
Adams also discusses why it becomes harder to accelerate a particle to higher velocities as the particle approaches the speed of light, how protons are brought to such high speeds, the importance of the search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), the significance of the Higgs boson, the uncertainty principle from quantum physics, and so much more.
Learn more at http://www.hep.fsu.edu/~tadams/ and https://cms.cern/.
Prevalent Architecture has created a solar panel that collects solar energy and illuminates interior spaces. Founder and director Ben Berwick describes the technology and company goals regarding renewable energy sources, including
Ben Berwick founded his company three years ago with the goal of moving architecture out of the niche market and into use by a more general audience while engaging specifically with renewable energy sources. The Origami Screen is a way to bring architectural design and innovation to a larger audience while utilizing solar energy.
He describes the screen itself, which is about 20 millimeters deep. The solar cell is placed horizontally across the window and redirects light across the surface. An optical coating splits the light between infrared and visible light, reflecting the visible light back into the room and the infrared into solar energy.
He reminds listeners that health is related to natural illumination and therefore this product would have many applications from urban living to hospitals to work spaces. Currently they are hoping to go into production in the next three years with a prototype in the next year.
For more, see https://www.prevalent.archi/.
Dr. Nicolas Laos is a philosopher, religious visionary, mathematician, noopolitics expert, and author of many books including The Meaning of Being Illuminati.
He dives deep into his philosophical perspectives and explores the following questions:
"I am deeply and systematically concerned with the interplay between fundamental notions such as time and eternity, the relationship between a being or thing and its meaning, the source of the significance of the beings and things that exist in the world, as well as the ontological potential of the human being," explains Dr. Laos. He continues by expressing his concern for the sociopolitical ramifications of these issues, and the importance of philosophy in addressing these ideas.
Dr. Laos explains his idea of the meaning of spirituality, the tenets of Hegelian philosophy which is one of his main areas of research, and ontology, which he perceives to be a heavily under-researched issue in contemporary social life.
He also provides a brief analysis of the coronavirus pandemic from a biological, political, and economic perspective, explaining why he believes that at the political level, the coronavirus has "been mistreated" and "used as an opportunity to impose historical changes in a way that clashes with fundamental human freedoms."
Dr. Laos provides unique, compelling, and thought-provoking ideas for listeners to consider, so don't miss out.
Tune in and find out more about his work by visiting https://nicolaslaos.com/.
CEO and co-founder of Coapt, Blair Lock, discusses the focus of his work in the field of prosthetic control.
Tune in to learn the following:
Coapt is focused on the control of upper limb powered prosthetic devices. This means that they don't make anything that you necessarily see; they make the control system that operates behind the scenes.
The system is a finely-tuned neurological decoder that takes signals from the human body and converts them to control commands in real time for robotic hands, wrists, and elbows.
Lock explains the physiology of muscle contraction and movement, describing processes that emit a "concert of noise and information" at a low electrical level that is detected by the Coapt system and then used to teach algorithms to learn the personalized "music" of each wearer.
In fact, it is the user that teaches the device what is intuitive to them, making the prosthesis even more functional and tuned to the individual.
Interested in learning more? Press play and check out https://www.coaptengineering.com/announcement.html.
Phillip D. Zamore Bio: Phillip D. Zamore, Ph.D. has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2008. In 2016, he became the Chair of the RNA Therapeutics Institute, which was established at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2009. Dr. Zamore also is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, the department he joined in 1999, and he became the Gretchen Stone Cook Professor of Biomedical Sciences in 2005.
Dr. Zamore received his A.B. (1986) and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University. He then pursued postdoctoral studies on the role of the RNA binding proteins in Drosophila development at The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dr. Zamore's laboratory studies small RNA silencing pathways in eukaryotes and prokaryotes, including RNA interference (RNAi), microRNA, and PIWI-interacting RNA pathways. Dr. Zamore and his collaborators seek to use these insights to design therapies for human diseases, including Huntington's disease. Under Dr. Zamore's mentorship, the Zamore Lab has produced dozens of researchers working at top institutions both in the United States and abroad.
In 2015, Dr. Zamore was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for Excellence in Scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. To date, Dr. Zamore has more than 150 publications and has been among the most highly cited researchers for more than a decade. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals and is in demand as a presenter at conferences and institutions worldwide.
Dr. Zamore holds more than 20 patents, with other applications pending; he was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. In 2002, Dr. Zamore co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA), a publicly traded biotech company which now has more than 1000 employees and multiple drugs in clinical trials. Alnylam's first drug, ONPATTRO, a first-of-its-kind RNAi therapeutic, for the treatment of the polyneuropathy of hereditary transthyretin-mediated (hATTR) amyloidosis in adults, was approved by the FDA in 2018. In 2014, he co-founded Voyager Therapeutics in Cambridge, MA. Chair and Professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, Phillip Zamore, joins the show to discuss a new method of gene silencing called RNA interference (RNAi). Tune in to learn the following:
Zamore states that the world's diseases can be divided into two broad categories: those with mutations in the genome that can be addressed by turning off the gene forever, and those with mutations in the genome that can be addressed by lowering the amount of a gene product, as opposed to turning off the gene completely. The gene knock-out method is used for the first kind of disease, and the effects of the knock-out are irreversible. This makes the method a good tool for studying model organisms in the lab, but rather risky as a therapeutic intervention for humans. This is where a new method called RNA interference comes into play and holds promise for the future of medicine and the treatment of diseases.
RNA interference is a way of destroying messenger RNA (mRNA) in order to prevent the creation of a protein. Unlike other methods, RNA interference uses a natural cellular pathway, which makes it more effective than other mechanisms in turning off disease genes. And just like taking a drug, stopping this process means stopping any unwanted side effects, which means it's a lot safer and less risky than the knock-out method.
There are currently two RNAi drugs on the market, both of which direct small RNA (sRNA) to the liver where the protein in question is made. By way of preventing the creation of that protein, the disease gene is turned down (almost off). Zamore explains why the liver is particularly amenable to these drugs, and the ongoing research and development taking place for drugs that target proteins made in other areas of the body. He also discusses the near-term goal of bringing to market an sRNA drug that blocks the production of a protein in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway. This drug would function as a replacement for statins, and comes with fewer side effects and would only need to be taken by a patient twice per year.
Zamore brings an impressive amount of insight and information to the show, discussing a number of topics in depth but with enough clarity to follow along with ease. Learn more by visting his Google Scholar page at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xYLmV7YAAAAJ&hl=en.
UC Davis's One Health Institute (OHI) focuses on problem-solving for emerging infectious diseases and conservation challenges to address global health issues. Executive Director Jonna Mazet shares their Predict project's current findings, including
In addition to her work as Executive Director, Joanna Mazet is a Professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology at the UC Davis school of Veterinary Medicine. OHI has been working since 2009 to understand viruses that spill over from animals. For the COVID-19 version specifically, they've been using their Predict platform to help global communities predict, understand, and identify its spread.
OHI and their Predict project is especially looking ahead to prevention for future global health issues. She discusses the various approaches, from bringing together ministries of health, agriculture, and environment in countries with less resources to communicate and identify high transmission zones. She describes the factors they use to identify high risk zones and means for mitigation.
Dr. Mazet also describes the essential efforts to prevent future global health issues such as pandemics, including the need to understand as much about viruses as we do about bacteria. She explains that predicting a virus's harm potential is more about its ability to jump to multiple host species rather than its relatedness to other harmful viruses. In addition, they are testing species that weren't the target host to understand SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) better and figure out clues to help scientist fight other viruses.
To find out more, see the list of published literature on predict.global, where maps of their surveillance work with test results and affected species are also posted.
Sonja Schrepfer Bio: Sonja Schrepfer, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery, founded the Transplant and Stem Cell Immunobiology (TSI) Lab in 2009 in Germany. In 2015, she joined the faculty of the Department of Surgery at the University of California San Francisco and was Director of the TSI Lab at UCSF. Sonja is scientific co-founder of Sana Biotechnology Inc. which she joined as SVP in 2019.
Dr. Schrepfer's research career has been dedicated to making fundamental discovers in transplant and stem cell immunobiology. Pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-based approaches are effective in immunosuppressed/deficient animal models; but in humans, systemic immunosuppression cannot be justified, due to severe side effects and significant risk of infections and malignancies. So far, only a few immunological strategies have been proposed to overcome these hurdles. Work by Dr. Schrepfer is at the forefront of PSC immunobiology and paves the way for treatment of a wide range of diseases – from supporting functional recovery of failing myocardium to the derivation of other cell types to treat diabetes, blindness, cancer, lung, neurodegenerative, and related diseases. She spent many years examining in detail the fetomaternal interface for application to the envisioned cell therapy. Her work with one of the most antigenic phenotypes, antigen-presenting endothelial cells, demonstrates that hypo-immunogenic cells reliably evade immune rejection in allogeneic recipients that are entirely mismatched in their major histocompatibility complex profile, and further, these cells show long-term survival without immunosuppression in mice and humanized mice (published in Nature Biotechnology in 2019).
Sonja is currently Adjunct Professor at UCSF investigating the immunobiology in "tissue chips in space"; that is sending tissue chips to the international space station (ISS). She participated in three flight missions as collaborator and was the PI on the SpaceX16 mission (December 2019). This research will provide insight into what physiological effects time in outer space might have on astronauts, with potentially important implications for future longer-term missions, and has the possibility to open the door to fascinating new discoveries that could be used in earth-bound immunology research.
Tobias Deuse Bio:
Tobias Deuse, M.D. is a cardiac and heart and lung transplant surgeon internationally renowned for his pioneering work in the development of minimally-invasive techniques for mitral valve repair.
Dr. Deuse graduated the University of Stuttgart (Germany) in 1994 with a BS in Physics, and in 2000 earned an M.D. from University of Wuerzburg. Dr. Deuse thereafter received advanced training in cardiothoracic surgery at the University Hospital Munich-Grosshadern and University Heart Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. After obtaining his board certification in Germany in 2007 as a heart surgeon, Dr. Deuse completed a surgical fellowship in Lung and Heart-Lung Transplantation at Stanford and joined the UCSF faculty in 2015.
Dr. Deuse's laboratory at UCSF is working on the immunobiology of pluripotent stem cells. To circumvent rejection, techniques such as somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) into an enucleated oocyte (formation of a SCNT stem cell), fusion of a somatic cell with an embryonic stem cell (ESC; formation of a hybrid cell), and reprograming of somatic cells using certain transcription factors (induced PSCs, iPSCs) have been used. However, his work has shown that SCNT stem cells and iPSCs may have immune incompatibilities with the nucleus or cell donor, respectively, despite having identical nuclear DNA (published in Cell Stem Cell 2014). Further, he has demonstrated that mitochondrial (mt) DNA-encoded proteins as well as mtDNA mutations and genetic instability associated with reprograming and iPSC expansion can create minor antigens, producing rejection. His work also demonstrated that even autologous iPSC derivatives are not inherently immunologically inert for autologous transplantation (published in Nature Biotechnology in 2019). This has provided an important, promising avenue for selection of optimal stem cell therapeutics for future clinical applications ¾ via identifying the most compatible starter cell line and monitoring "near match" autologous iPSC products for mtDNA mutations and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) enrichments during the manufacturing process.
Director Sonja Schrepfer, M.D., Ph.D., and co-director Tobias Deuse, M.D., explain the lab's research towards understanding and overcoming transplant rejection. They touch on
Drs. Schrepfer and Deuse run the Transplant and Stem Cell Immunobiology Lab (TSI) at the University of California in San Francisco and specialize in heart and lung transplant issues through CRISPR, gene editing,and stem cell therapy. They begin by explaining the many complications a person taking immunosuppressant drugs faces and why their research seeks to address these issues and make for a safer system for patients. Further, they explain that patient-tailored stem cell therapy approaches are not suitable for large populations for several reasons, including the frequent need to treat a patient almost immediately for heart damage or other similar issues.
They explain that while they can generate cardiac cells that don't get rejected at first, these cells can develop mutant proteins that causes rejection later. They are following a couple of approaches to address the rejections including learning how fetuses survive the mother's immune system. A big leap forward for the lab was learning how to knock out the molecule that signaled to the immune system its foreignness through CRISPR: in other words, they are learning how to make these introduced cells silent to the immune system. Finally, they describe their "off the shelf" goal of producing non-immunogenic cells ready for injection for a majority of patients and alternatively generating a hypo-immunogenic environment in the patient to prevent long-term rejection.
For more, see the lab's web page at https://tsilab.ucsf.edu/
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