Dr Christa Mulder – Understanding How Flowering Plants Respond to Climate Change
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Pulque: The Ancient Drink That Could Shape the Future of Health
Pulque, an ancient Mexican beverage, is making waves in the scientific community—not just as a cultural relic, but as a potential health-boosting powerhouse. A team of researchers, including Prof. Rogelio Valadez-Blanco, Dr. Yesica Ruiz-Ramírez, and Prof. Paula Guadarrama-Mendoza, from Universidad Tecnológica de La Mixteca, has been investigating the hidden potential of the bacteria found in this traditional drink. Their findings suggest that pulque’s naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria could play a key role in promoting gut health and even combating harmful pathogens that cause foodborne illnesses.
Lixiang Zhang | Seeing the Full Picture: The CPS-Merge Approach to Assess Complex Datasets
In the age of big data, and particularly in specialisations such as artificial intelligence, biology, and medicine, researchers often generate large and complex datasets that are challenging to analyse. This is particularly true for multi-view data, otherwise known as multimodal data, which are data that encompass multiple perspectives concerning a single entity or phenomenon. In the case of single-cell genomics, for instance, researchers can measure a huge range of different characteristics concerning an individual cell, such as RNA expression levels or protein levels. While multi-view datasets provide vast amounts of information, they are difficult to analyse because looking at each type of data within them provides only a small part of the overall picture. A new computational approach called Covering Point Set-merge analysis, or CPS-merge analysis for short, has been developed by Lixiang Zhang of Pennsylvania State University and colleagues, and it aims to assist researchers to merge the different types of data present in multi-view datasets into one coherent and meaningful set of results, without misrepresenting the individual contributions of each type of data.
Dr. Robert Kass | Beating arrhythmias with a heart in a dish
In the future, doctors will be able to create tiny replicas of your tissues in the lab, and then test them against a range of drugs, revealing exactly which treatments would work best for you before you even visit a drug store. This future of personalised medicine is driven by researchers such as Dr. Robert Kass of the Columbia University Medical Center. Kass and colleagues have pioneered the use of stem cells to develop personalized treatments for a genetic heart condition that disrupts normal heart rhythms. The researchers reprogrammed a patient’s skin cells into stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPSCs for short), and they then induced the iPSCs to turn into heart cells. This allowed the research team to study how genetic mutations in the resulting heart cells affect the heart’s ion channels. Their research revealed that a mutation in a specific sodium channel was causing dangerous heart rhythms and that combining the drug mexiletine with a pacemaker device to increase heart rate, provided an effective and personalised treatment.
Dr. Ellen Hoffmann | Rurbanity: How rural and urban phenomena intermingle worldwide
Over the next few decades, the Earth’s urban population is set to explode, with the large majority of growth happening in cities across the Global South. A team of researchers at the Universities of Kassel and Göttingen, led by Prof. Andreas Bürkert and Prof. Nikolaus Schareika, predicts that these changes will be widely characterized by a merging of rural and urban features: a concept defined as ‘rurbanity’ in a recent landmark publication authored by Dr. Ellen Hoffmann and colleagues. By studying this phenomenon closely, the team aims to support cities in the Global South in their efforts to better prepare for the challenges to come. The concept is comprehensive enough to allow researchers to also understand ongoing processes of change in more mature cities of the North, such as climate-smart and socially inclusive adaptations, through the lens of rurbanity.
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