A simple blood test could allow doctors to determine whether a person may be at higher risk for stroke or cognitive decline during their lifetime, according to a new UCLA Health study.
The study, published in the journal Stroke, found that measuring concentrations of a network of inflammatory molecules in the blood could allow doctors to calculate a risk score for susceptibility for cerebral small vessel disease — a common cause of stroke and a contributor to cognitive decline found especially among the elderly.
Currently, the only way to determine a person’s risk for cerebral vascular diseases has been to use a combination of imaging such as an MRI scan, family history, demographic variables and other risk factor evaluations, said study lead author Dr. Jason Hinman of the UCLA Comprehensive Stroke and Center and the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Care at UCLA. In clinical practice, neurologists may only find a patient is at risk after they have had a stroke or a cerebral event that warns of one, Hinman said.
The new study found that by measuring the concentrations of this network of inflammatory molecules in the blood of patients who have not had a cerebrovascular event, medical providers may be able to quantitatively assess a person’s risk for cerebral small vessel disease and future stroke.
“The same way one uses cholesterol tests to evaluate one’s future risk for heart attack, we don’t have such a thing to estimate future risk for stroke,” Hinman said. “I believe we can do that by something as simple as a blood test which in theory can enable broader access to the best level of care and not lock it behind advanced imaging studies and specialist evaluations.”
The study focused on a biologically-connected network of inflammatory molecules known as the interleukin-18, or IL-18, network, which includes proteins and signaling molecules used to fight various infections.
Past studies have linked individual molecules in the IL-18 network to cerebral small vessel disease and stroke risk. However, the concentration of these individual molecules can fluctuate in response to other ailments such as the flu or autoimmune disorders, making them unreliable predictors of stroke risk at an individual level, Hinman said.

In 2020, University of California researchers including Hinman found that six molecules in the IL-18 network were associated with the presence of vascular brain injuries during MRI scans.
Building off these findings, Hinman sought to determine in this latest publication whether IL-18 network could be used to assess a person’s susceptibility to stroke risk or cognitive decline.
To test this, the researchers used health data from a generations-long study known as the Framingham Heart Study. This study has tracked the medical history of thousands of residents in the city of Framingham, Massachusetts, throughout their lives since launching in 1948. Blood samples taken from participants had been tested for five of the six molecules later identified as being in the IL-18 network.
By using the blood samples and medical histories of the Framingham participants, Hinman and his coauthor were able to create a mathematical model that generates a risk score based on the concentrations of the IL-18 network molecules. Of the more than 2,200 Framingham residents included in Hinman’s study, those whose risk scores were in the top 25% had an 84% chance of having a stroke during their lifetime. Overall, elevated risk scores were associated with a 51% increased risk of stroke and resulted in diagnostic prediction compared to existing risk assessment tools.
What remains unclear and requires further study is how or if a person’s risk score can be modified or reduced, Hinman said.
“The real challenge is in the primary care space. Are you at risk before you have an event?” Hinman said. “That’s what we’re all interested in doing is preventing a stroke before it even happens.”

A brief episode of anger triggered by remembering past experiences may negatively impact the blood vessels’ ability to relax, which is essential for proper blood flow, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access, peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association.
Previous research has found that impairment of blood vessels’ ability to relax may increase the risk of developing atherosclerosis, which may, in turn, increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
“Impaired vascular function is linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke,” said lead study author Daichi Shimbo, M.D., a professor of medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. “Observational studies have linked feelings of negative emotions with having a heart attack or other cardiovascular disease events. The most common negative emotion studied is anger, and there are fewer studies on anxiety and sadness, which have also been linked to heart attack risk.”
In this study, the researchers investigated whether negative emotions — anger, sadness and anxiety — may have an adverse impact on blood vessel function compared to a neutral emotion. The 280 adults in the study were randomly assigned to one of four emotional tasks for 8 minutes: recalling a personal memory that made them angry; recalling a personal memory of anxiety; reading a series of depressing sentences that evoked sadness; or repeatedly counting to 100 to induce an emotionally neutral state. This protocol, “Putative mechanisms Underlying Myocardial infarction onset and Emotions (PUME),” was described by the researchers in a previous paper.
Researchers assessed the cells lining each study participant’s blood vessels before the tasks and at several points after, looking for evidence of impaired blood vessel dilation, increased cell injury and/or reduced cell repair capacity. The measurements taken before the emotional tasks were repeated after tasks were completed.
Measurements were taken for each participant at baseline (0 minutes) and at four different timepoints after experiencing the assigned emotional task: 3 minutes, 40 minutes, 70 minutes and 100 minutes. The analysis found: Tasks that recalled past events causing anger led to an impairment in blood vessel dilation, from zero to 40 minutes after the task. The impairment was no longer present after the 40-minute mark. There were no statistically significant changes to participants’ blood vessel linings at any time points after experiencing the anxiety and sadness emotional tasks.”We saw that evoking an angered state led to blood vessel dysfunction, though we don’t yet understand what may cause these changes,” Shimbo said. “Investigation into the underlying links between anger and blood vessel dysfunction may help identify effective intervention targets for people at increased risk of cardiovascular events.”
According to an American Heart Association 2021 scientific statement, Psychological Health, Well-Being, and the Mind-Heart-Body Connection, mental well-being can positively or negatively impact a person’s health and risk factors for heart disease and stroke.

“This study adds nicely to the growing evidence base that mental well-being can affect cardiovascular health, and that intense acute emotional states, such as anger or stress, may lead to cardiovascular events,” said Glenn Levine, M.D., FAHA, writing committee chair of the scientific statement, and master clinician and professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and chief of the cardiology section at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, both in Houston.
“For instance, we know that intense sadness or similar emotions are a common trigger for Takatsubo cardiomyopathy, and events such as earthquakes or even as a fan watching a world soccer match, which provoke stress, may lead to myocardial infarction and/or to arrhythmias. This current study very eloquently shows how anger can negatively impact vascular endothelial health and function, and we know the vascular endothelium, the lining of blood vessels, is a key player in myocardial ischemia and atherosclerotic heart disease. While not all the mechanisms on how psychological states and health impact cardiovascular health have been elucidated, this study clearly takes us one step closer to defining such mechanisms.”
Study background and details: The Putative mechanisms Underlying Myocardial infarction onset and Emotions (PUME) study is a randomized controlled experimental study conducted from August 2013 to May 2017. Participants were recruited from the community surrounding Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Participants were ages 18 or older and healthy. In this study, healthy was defined as no history of heart disease, stroke, bypass surgery or stents, transient ischemic attack, peripheral arterial disease, heart failure, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Type 2 diabetes or self-reported diagnosis of a mental health disorder; not taking any prescription medications or dietary supplements; and not currently smoking. The average age of study participants was 26 years. Approximately 50% of participants self-identified as women. About 40% of participants self-identified as white adults; 29% as Hispanic/Latino adults; 19% as Asian adults; and 14% as Black adults. Participants’ blood vessel health was assessed before and after completing the emotional tasks with finger probes that detect changes in blood flow in arteries. Before completing the emotional tasks, participants were seated in a comfortable chair in a temperature-controlled room and instructed to relax for 30 minutes, during which time they were not allowed to talk, use their phones, read any documents or sleep. After the participants had relaxed for 30 minutes, researchers measured participants’ blood pressure with a cuff and corresponding heart rate. Two blood pressure measurements were taken one minute apart, then the dilation of participants’ blood vessels was measured, and blood samples were collected for testing. Repeat measurements of blood pressure and dilation were conducted, and blood samples were collected again after the assigned emotional task was completed. Researchers determined the extent to which participants’ blood vessels were unable to dilate by measuring the blood flow in the participants’ non-dominant forearm. They assessed the injury to participants’ blood vessels by counting the number of circulating blood vessel lining biomarkers in the blood and assessed the regenerative ability of participants’ vascular cells by measuring their circulating levels of bone-marrow-derived cells, which are essential for repair.The study’s limitations included that participants were young and apparently healthy, “making it unclear whether the results would apply to older adults with other health conditions, who would most likely be taking medications,” Shimbo noted. In addition, participants were observed in a health care setting, rather than in real-world situations, and the study only assessed the short-term effects of evoked emotions.
Co-authors, disclosures and funding sources are listed in the manuscript.

August 2021 Miles to nearest clinic offering abortions after 6 weeks 50150250350450 Source: Caitlin Myers, Middlebury College

“Indian Idol,” the Hindi version of “American Idol,” is a pleasant distraction from life’s more trying predicaments.Every family has its archetypes, so here’s mine: My dad and my brother and I are all miserable. None of us are quick to experience joy, and all for different reasons — my dad is irritable, my brother is anxious and I’m bitter. The three of us combined could make one moderately unwell person. Instead, we are planets that orbit a sun more optimistic than we could ever be, and we hope that some of that shine rubs off on us periodically.My mother believes in a positive ethos: that things invariably will improve, that everyone is trying their best, that it’s better to be surprised by harm than anticipating it all the time. In April 2023, I was laid off from my job, and she reassured me immediately. “Everything always works out,” she said. But for the first time, I noticed a slash of worry run across her face. It looked as if she was losing her radiance.I later learned that my mother had been hiding something important from my brother and me for a month: She’d had a biopsy to determine if she had breast cancer. Within weeks of her 69th birthday, she had a lumpectomy. The doctors told her she would need an exhausting surgery, and then exhaustive radiation. For a little under a year, she went through treatment, and steadily she changed — she became sour, nihilistic and impenetrably dark, just like the rest of us. I had never seen it before, and I didn’t know what to do with it other than try to change her mind. Who was this woman? Every few weeks I’d fly home to find my mother again.Cancer robbed my mom of most pleasures. Food was rendered tasteless at best and inedible at worst; she’d push a plate of cheese and crackers away like a child, pantomiming vomiting at every meal. Radiation gave her brain fog, so it was challenging for her to follow along in a book or a movie. She didn’t find anything on TV funny anymore. She didn’t find me very funny either. She was morose and weepy no matter what the day looked like. In her displeasure, she found only blips of joy. Rummy after lunch, a heating pad on the breast, wearing a mastectomy bra that I lied about and said was given to me free in order to avoid arguing about the cost. But nothing brought her consistent pleasure like the Hindi version of “American Idol.” New episodes aired twice a week, and we would record it and watch after dinner. Only during “Indian Idol” was she upright, eyes peeled, singing along. I was grateful for the absence of conflict. We tuned in to a world where everyone was a winner.Having just wrapped its 14th season, “Indian Idol” has been on since 2004 and has aired 179 episodes. On the South Asian TV channel my parents paid a premium for (“This,” I used to grumble as a kid, “but not Cartoon Network?”), reruns seemed to play daily, for months. “How come no one is getting kicked off?” I asked my mom after seeing the same contestants on the show for three weeks straight. “Oh, it takes a while,” she said, which was a big deal. It was always a big deal when she spoke at all. “Everyone always seems to get the same number of votes.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Common household products containing nanoparticles — grains of engineered material so miniscule they are invisible to the eye — could be contributing to a new form of indoor air pollution, according to a Rutgers study.
In a study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, a team of Rutgers researchers found people walking through a space, where a consumer product containing nanoparticles was recently sprayed, stirred residual specks off carpet fibers and floor surfaces, projecting them some three to five feet in the air. A child playing on the floor nearby would be more greatly affected than the adult, experiments showed.
“If an adult is walking in a room, and steps on some of these deposited particles, we found that the particles will be re-suspended in the air and rise as high as that person’s breathing zone,” said Gediminas Mainelis, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, who led the study. “A child playing on the floor inhales even more because the concentrations of particles are greater closer to the ground.”
While it’s still too early to gauge the long-term effects of these particles on people’s health, Mainelis said the results are important to contemplate. “At this point, it’s more about increasing awareness so that people know just what they are using,” he said.
A nanoparticle is a fleck of material ranging in size approximately between 1 and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. The human eye only can see particles larger than ~50,000 nanometers. A sheet of office paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
Nanoparticles are in a wide range of popular household products such as cleaners, disinfectants, sunscreen, hairsprays, and cosmetic mists and powders.
Nanomaterials, often made from silver, copper or zinc, have become widely used in industry because of the unusual properties they exhibit when manipulated on a microscopic level.

Scientists have found particles altered at the “nanoscale” can differ in important ways from the properties exhibited by the material in bulk. Some nanoparticles are stronger or have different magnetic properties compared with other forms or sizes of the same material. They can conduct heat or electricity more efficiently. They’ve been found to become more chemically reactive, reflect light better or change color.
Since nanoparticles differ substantially from the properties of the same material in aggregated form, researchers worry that nanoparticles may differ in terms of being more strongly toxic, with consequences for human health.
“There is very limited knowledge of the potential for exposure to nanoparticles from consumer products and resulting health effects,” said Mainelis, who has been studying these substances since 2012.
Scientists have long been familiar with the fact that pollutant particles deposited on flooring surfaces could be resuspended by walking, Mainelis said. What wasn’t known was whether particles from nanotechnology-enabled consumer sprays could be resuspended. Also, the factors affecting resuspension weren’t well understood.
To learn more, Mainelis and his team constructed an enclosed, air-controlled chamber in a section of his laboratory with both carpeting and vinyl flooring. They used a small robot to simulate the actions of a child. And, wearing Tyvek suits and respirators, they walked the surface after seven products containing nanoparticles of silver, zinc, and copper were sprayed into the air, and measured the results.
They confirmed nanoparticles were released by the tested sprays and reached the human breathing zone. They found children could be exposed to higher particle mass concentrations than adults during spraying and resuspension of deposited particles. The study also showed resuspension of particles from carpets produced a higher concentration of particles than from the vinyl flooring. The researchers also concluded that the concentration of particles resuspended by their motion depended on the product.
The research can guide individuals on approaches to protect health, Mainelis said.
“We can use this knowledge to minimize our exposures, in this case to various nanomaterials,” Mainelis said. “Overall, this work could help us understand the resulting exposures and support future studies on human exposure reduction.” Other researchers on the study included Jie McAtee, a postdoctoral associate, and Ruikang He, a doctoral student who graduated in 2023 and is now a postdoctoral associate in China, both in the Department of Environmental Science at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Science.

In an effort to improve delivery of costly medical treatments, a team of researchers in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has developed a stimulating method that could make the human body more receptive to certain gene therapies.
The researchers exposed liver cells to short electric pulses — and those gentle zaps caused the liver cells to take in more than 40 times the amount of gene therapy material compared to cells that were not exposed to pulsed electric fields. The method could help reduce the dosage needed for these treatments, making them much safer and more affordable. The research appears April 30 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Gene therapy is a promising medical technology: By replacing, altering or introducing new genetic material into a patient’s cells, doctors may be able to cure or compensate for genetic diseases, including cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell disease, hemophilia and diabetes.
One of the bottlenecks in gene therapy, however, is getting the right dose of genetic material into the target cells. The UW-Madison research suggests that applying a moderate electric field, which left no lasting damage to the cells that received it, could help in creating more effective therapies.
The project began almost a decade ago with Hans Sollinger, a transplant surgeon at UW-Madison. He had developed a gene therapy treatment for Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that attacks the pancreas, the organ that produces insulin.
Sollinger’s treatment strategy delivered the genetic code for insulin production into liver cells using an adreno-associated virus that assists in transporting the therapeutic genes across the cells’ membrane. This DNA can then take up residence in liver cells, producing insulin without being attacked by the immune system in the pancreas.
While Sollinger had a proof of concept that the therapy worked, he believed the future of the treatment hinged on delivery. He turned to Susan Hagness and John Booske, both UW-Madison professors of electrical and computer engineering who have experience treating human cells with electrical pulses.

“What we started talking about was local, targeted delivery and whether there was a way of getting the treatment DNA directly into the liver without passing it through the entire body and triggering the immune system,” says Hagness. “And whether we could use electric pulses in order to make this delivery process more efficient and dramatically reduce the dose needed.”
Researchers have previously found that exposing cells to electric fields can often increase the ability of molecules to move through the cell membrane into the interior of a cell. So, in this latest study, PhD student Yizhou Yao sought to determine whether the technique would increase the penetration of virus particles into liver cells.
Using human hepatoma cells, a model system for studying the liver, Yao exposed batches of the cells to various concentrations of the gene therapy virus particles containing a fluorescent green protein. She used a pair of electrodes to deliver an 80-millisecond electric pulse to some samples, then incubated all the cells for 12 hours.
When she examined the results 48 hours later under a fluorescence microscope, Yao found that only a small percentage of the cells that had not received the electrical pulses glowed green. In stark contrast, those cells that had received a zap accumulated about 40 times the amount of the fluorescent green proteins delivered by the virus.
While results provided compelling evidence that the pulses helped facilitate the virus’s penetration of the cell walls, Booske says the team has yet to discover exactly how the process works at the molecular level.
“There’s enough known about electric pulsing that I think we could confidently state that it is opening nanopores through the cell membrane,” he says. “But then Yao got this remarkable result, and it dawned on us that virus particles are in general bigger and more complex than bare molecular particles and they already have their own way of getting inside cells. So, we don’t really know if it’s the pores opening that has anything to do with it directly or indirectly.”
Sollinger passed away in May 2023, but the team says his legacy will live on through the ongoing research on this project and the work of other groups. The electrical engineering researchers are pursuing next steps with external funding and are optimistic that ultimately the technique will translate into clinical trials.

Yao, who will graduate in 2024, says she knew the study would be transdisciplinary, but didn’t realize just how far it would go.
“I am an electrical engineer by training, and I don’t have a biology background,” she says. “Before this, the last time I used a microscope was in high school. It was quite a steep learning curve, learning to culture cells and carry out biology protocols. But I really enjoyed this project and liked its ultimate goal, which is to make the world a better place.”
Other authors include Robert W. Holdcraft of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

A new study has found that pancreatic cancer cells are different based on their location in the pancreas, providing new information about tumors that could lead to better targeted treatments.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive cancer, and the diagnosis has dramatically increased over the last decade. It is currently the seventh leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women globally and projected to be the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths world-wide by 2030. This increase is due to several factors such as an increase in obesity and diabetes.
Houston Methodist’s section chief of gastrointestinal medical oncology, Dr. Maen Abdelrahim, served as first and concept generating author for the article titled, “Comparative molecular profiling of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma of the head versus body and tail,” published in NPJ Precision Oncology, an online journal in the Nature family of publications. The research team discovered that the anatomical location of the pancreatic tumor is a contributing factor for the outcomes of systematic therapy interventions.
Abdelrahim and his collaborators established a hypothesis that there is a difference in microenvironments of tumors in the pancreatic head versus the body and tail, particularly the immunotherapy receptors found on each section of the pancreas.
“By focusing on biology around the tumor and taking its location on the pancreas into account we can better evaluate our treatment options,” said Abdelrahim. “Rather than treating patients under the umbrella of pancreatic malignancy, a shift to a tumor location-based model can seriously alter how clinicians set up preliminary treatment plans.”
The team hopes this finding will help clinicians develop a more specific treatment plan and improve patient outcomes.
Abdelrahim’s collaborators on this study were Benjamine A. Weinberg, Adbullah Esmail, Anup Kasi, Nestor F. Esnaola, Joanne Xiu, and Yasmine Baca.
The Cockrell Foundation and Houston Methodist Hospital Foundation support this research.

When Barbra Streisand posted a comment on social media about the actress Melissa McCarthy, it prompted a public conversation.On Monday, the actress Melissa McCarthy posted a photo to Instagram in which she was wearing a tiered, sea-foam-green gown at a gala she had attended alongside the director Adam Shankman. Though the photo itself didn’t cause much of a stir, one comment — which happened to be from the entertainer Barbra Streisand — did. It read, in part, “Did you take Ozempic?”Screenshots of the comment began circulating soon after, with many viewers criticizing Ms. Streisand for inquiring publicly whether another celebrity was taking a weight-loss medication. (Others wondered if Ms. Streisand realized the comment had been posted where others could see it.) The comment has since been deleted.On Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Streisand addressed the pushback. She had gone on Instagram to see photos of flowers she had received for her birthday, she wrote in a post on her Instagram and X accounts. “Below them was a photo of my friend Melissa McCarthy who I sang with on my Encore album,” Ms. Streisand wrote. “She looked fantastic! I just wanted to pay her a compliment. I forgot the world is reading!”Ozempic is part of a relatively new class of medications, used in treating diabetes and obesity, that have surged in popularity in recent years. While it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for diabetes, people have increasingly been using Ozempic off-label to lose weight. Researchers are investigating whether these medications can treat a range of other conditions, including sleep apnea, alcohol use disorder and chronic kidney disease.Melissa McCarthy with the director Adam Shankman at a theater group’s gala on Sunday.Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty ImagesAs the drugs have grown in popularity, so too has the pressure for public figures to disclose whether they’re using them. Some have made an event out of revealing they take medication — perhaps none more notably than Oprah Winfrey, who announced in People magazine that she was taking a weight loss drug and “done with the shaming.” She later hosted a prime-time special devoted to weight stigma and the new medications. Elon Musk was one of the earliest proponents, writing on Twitter in 2022 after being asked how he had become so “fit, ripped & healthy” that he was taking another drug, Wegovy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The inventors of a suite of tests that enable food packages to signal if their contents are contaminated are working to bring producers and regulators together to get their inventions into commercial products, with the goal of preventing illness and reducing food waste.
Though the tests would cost just a few cents per package, food producers are reluctant to add costs that consumers will ultimately have to bear, say the McMaster researchers behind an article published today in the journal Nature Reviews Bioengineering.
A system based on smart packaging, the researchers say, would save producers from reputational and practical costs associated with outbreaks, dramatically reduce food waste and reduce health-care and lost-time costs associated with outbreaks. In all, the paper says, society would save hundreds of billions of dollars globally each year, more than justifying the cost of adding the technology to food packaging.
“On the one hand, people want to have safe food to eat. On the other, they don’t want to pay more for their food, because prices are high already and seem only to be climbing higher,” says the paper’s corresponding author Tohid Didar, a biomedical engineer and entrepreneur. “We are eager to make people aware of the challenges that exist, and start a conversation between researchers, policy makers, corporations and consumers work together to come up with solutions for such challenges.”
The researchers write that public agencies recognize the value of the new technology, and though they’d like to put it into play, they also know that introducing it would require sweeping changes to food regulations and packaging practices — changes that may face resistance.
It’s a challenge the researchers recognize, but with so much potential benefit at stake, they say everyone will ultimately win once the technology comes into broad use.
The current practice of marking fresh foods with a “best before” or “consume by” date is arbitrary and far too conservative, the researchers say, often causing perfectly safe food to be wasted, which imposes huge costs that producers and consumers are already paying for, whether directly or indirectly.

Canada wastes $40 billion worth of food every year — more per capita than the US or UK, Didar says.
Discarding food unnecessarily also has significant social, economic and environmental costs, given concerns over scarcity and access to food, and the ecological impacts of throwing away unused food and packaging.
Since 2018, the group of McMaster engineers and biochemists behind the paper has invented and proven the viability of several packaging-based methods for detecting or halting spoilage, including: Sentinel Wrap: plastic wrapping that can detect and visibly signal when contents such as meat, cheese or produce has gone bad a hand-held test that produces real-time results that allow wholesalers and retailers using special readers to detect, isolate and withdraw specific lots of spoiled goods before they can be sold, avoiding huge recalls that affect entire categories of food Lab-on-a-package: a tiny, self-activating test incorporated into a tray of chicken, fish or meat, for example, which produces a visible signal when a product has gone bad a sprayable, food-safe gel composed of beneficial, organic bacteriophages, which eliminates harmful bacteria that cause food contamination.The monitoring technologies are made to read biochemical signals from common culprits in spoilage, such as Listeria, Salmonella and E coli, using readily adaptable platforms, but getting them into the marketplace has been challenging.
“It’s one thing to do research in the lab, publish papers and file patents, but it’s another to have a product that’s tangible — that people can use,” says the paper’s lead author Shadman Khan, a PhD candidate and Vanier Scholar in Didar’s lab. “We are building a collaborative network with government regulators and industrial partners. That is allowing us to see the big-picture issues and adapt to what we learn will and won’t work.”
The authors, who also include faculty members Yingfu Li, Zeinab Hosseinidoust and Carlos Filipe, have been working with producers in North America and Europe and government regulators including the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Changing the calendar-based food freshness and safety system to a detection-based system will be a huge effort, but in their paper, the inventors say it’s past time to bring the technology up to date.

As an undergraduate student in The University of Texas at Arlington’s Honors College, Hannah Selvarathinam knew she wanted to conduct research. Near the end of her first year at UTA, the Keller native reached out to the lab of biology Assistant Professor Piya Ghose.
“Hannah has been a very impressive scholar from Day 1,” Ghose said. “She had the foresight to reach out for research opportunities very early on.”
Ghose brought Selvarathinam in to work on one of the lab’s core projects related to the genetics of cell death, modeled in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. Selvarathinam’s work eventually led to her honors thesis, focused on brain health and behavior. The result is a new peer-reviewed publication detailing the genes affecting worm behavior that also are relevant to neurological disease in humans.
“Through combing the literature and discussing her findings with me, she was able to make connections between the genes she was already studying as part of her cell biology project with her undergraduate psychology major and interests in human health,” Ghose said. “Hannah drove this project and regularly communicated with me for guidance and to share her exciting results. She took on the brave task of adapting and optimizing a published behavioral protocol for her project, which is exceptional for such a young trainee.”
For her study, Selvarathinam leveraged the fact that worms have similarities in their genes to humans and predictable behaviors that are easy to study. She proceeded to optimize an experi-mental protocol that aimed to link the mental illness schizophrenia to neurodegenerative disease using worm behavior.
“Normally, worms spend much of their time eating. But if they are interrupted by physical insult, they briefly stop in a manner similar to the startle response in humans,” Selvarathinam said.
Schizophrenia has similar symptoms, and one hallmark is abnormal reactivity to a continued stimulus. Essentially, individuals with the illness take longer to become accustomed to a stimulus than those without.

“What we found in our study is that healthy worms, as expected, momentarily stopped eating when they were exposed to a stimulus, but soon continued to eat again,” Selvarathinam explained. “But for worms with mutations in many of the neurodegeneration genes, such as with those related to hereditary spastic paraplegia and Alzheimer’s disease, they continued to eat even after being exposed to the stimulus, which shows a heightened startle response.
“Our publication adds another building block to our understanding of brain disease in the hopes of finding a cure and also highlights C.elegans as a powerful model organism to pursue this goal.”
After completing her honors thesis and graduating in winter 2022, Selvarathinam began working as a technician in Ghose’s lab while preparing applications for medical school. She’s now on track with another peer-reviewed publication for work she has done assisting on one of the lab’s cell death projects.
“My research experience complements my goal to practice medicine by teaching me many transferable skills, such as reading scientific literature and applying my knowledge to solve problems and answer interesting questions,” Selvarathinam said. “I am grateful for the opportunities I have had at UTA and for the chance to work with the Ghose Lab team. I am also thankful to the Honors College for its wonderful capstone project program. I encourage students to reach out to professors and seek out research opportunities here at UTA.”