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Writing in the July 7, 2022 online issue of Nature, scientists and physicians at University of California San Diego and Scripps Research, with local and federal public health officials, describe how wastewater sequencing provided dramatic new insights into levels and variants of SARS-CoV-2 on campus and in the broader community — a key step to public health interventions in advance of COVID-19 case surges.
Importantly, the authors said the approach, deployed by UC San Diego as part of its Return to Learn efforts and then more broadly in the surrounding region, is a scalable, cheaper and faster way for communities and regions to detect the coronavirus and take appropriate actions.
“The coronavirus will continue to spread and evolve, which makes it imperative for public health that we detect new variants early enough to mitigate consequences,” said co-senior study author Rob Knight, PhD, professor and director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego.
“Before wastewater sequencing, the only way to do this was through clinical testing, which is not feasible at large scale, especially in areas with limited resources, public participation or the capacity to do sufficient testing and sequencing. We’ve shown that wastewater sequencing can successfully track regional infection dynamics with fewer limitations and biases than clinical testing to the benefit of almost any community.”
Persons with COVID-19 shed the virus in their stool, whether or not they have symptoms. In the summer of 2020, Knight and colleagues leveraged that fact to begin robotic sampling of wastewater on the UC San Diego campus.
“The university’s Return to Learn program was conceived and built on three pillars: viral detection, risk mitigation and intervention,” said UC San Diego Chancellor and study co-author Pradeep K. Khosla. “Nothing like this had been done before. Sampling and detection efforts began modestly, but grew steadily with increased research capacity and experience. Currently, we’re monitoring almost 350 buildings on campus.”
The program has been a success. Students began returning to campus in mid-2020, with COVID-19 case rates far lower than in surrounding communities. In March 2021, wastewater surveillance went regional, with multiple samples sequenced each week from San Diego County’s primary wastewater treatment plant at Point Loma, with a catchment size of 2.3 million people.

For more affordable, sustainable drug options than we have today, the medication we take to treat high blood pressure, pain or memory loss may one day come from engineered bacteria, cultured in a vat like yogurt. And thanks to a new bacterial tool developed by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, the process of improving drug manufacturing in bacterial cells may be coming sooner than we thought.
For decades, researchers have been eyeing ways to make drug manufacturing more affordable and sustainable than pharmaceutical makers’ current processes, many of which depend on either plant crops or petroleum. Using bacteria has been suggested as a good organic alternative, but detecting and optimizing the production of therapeutic molecules is difficult and time-consuming, requiring months at a stretch. In a new paper out this week in Nature Chemical Biology, the UT Austin team introduces a biosensor system, derived from E. coli bacteria, that can be adapted to detect all kinds of therapeutic compounds accurately and in mere hours.
“We’re figuring out how to give bacteria ‘senses,’ similar to olfactory receptors or taste receptors, and use them for detection of the various compounds they might make,” said Andrew Ellington, a professor of molecular biosciences and corresponding author on the paper.
Many of the medicines we take are made with ingredients extracted from plants (think, for example, morphine, the narcotic painkiller that comes from poppies, or galantamine, a drug treatment for dementia that comes from daffodils). Extracting drugs from these plants is complicated and resource-intensive, requiring water and acreage to grow the crops. Supply chains are easily disrupted. And crops can be damaged by floods, fires and drought. Deriving similar therapeutic components using synthetic chemistry brings problems, too, since the process depends on petroleum and petroleum-based products linked to waste and expense.
Enter the humble bacteria, a cheap, efficient and sustainable alternative. The genetic code of bacteria can be easily manipulated to become factories for drug production. In a process called biosynthesis, the bacteria’s biological systems are harnessed to produce specific molecules as part of the natural cellular process. And bacteria can replicate at high speed. All they need to do the job is sugar.
Unfortunately, manufacturers have not had a way to quickly analyze different strains of engineered bacteria to identify the ones capable of producing quantities of a desired drug at commercial volumes — until now. Accurately analyzing the thousands of engineered strains on the way to a good producer can take weeks or months with current technology, but only a day with the new biosensors.
“There are currently no biosensors for most plant metabolites,” said Simon d’Oelsnitz, a research scientist in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and first author on the paper. “With this technique, it should be possible to create biosensors for a wide range of medicines.”
The biosensors developed by d’Oelsnitz, Ellington and colleagues quickly and accurately determine the amount of a given molecule that a strain of bacteria is producing. The team developed the biosensors for several types of common drugs, such as cough suppressants and vasodilators, which are used to treat muscle spasms. Molecular images of the biosensors taken by X-ray crystallographers Wantae Kim and Yan Jessie Zhang show exactly how they tightly grab onto their partner drug. When the drug is detected by the biosensor, it glows. Additionally, the team engineered their own bacteria to produce a compound found in several FDA-approved drugs and used the biosensors to analyze product output, in essence showing how industry might adopt biosensors to quickly optimize chemical manufacturing.
“While this is not the first biosensor,” d’Oelsnitz said, “this technique allows them to be developed faster and more efficiently. In turn, that opens the door to more medicines being produced using biosynthesis.”
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According to long-standing canon in evolutionary biology, natural selection is cruelly selfish, favoring traits that help promote reproductive success. This usually means that the so-called “force” of selection is well equipped to remove harmful mutations that appear during early life and throughout the reproductive years. However, by the age fertility ceases, the story goes that selection becomes blind to what happens to our bodies. After the age of menopause, our cells are more vulnerable to harmful mutations. In the vast majority of animals, this usually means that death follows shortly after fertility ends.
Which puts humans (and some species of whale) in a unique club: animals that continue to live long after their reproductive lives end. How is it that we can live decades in selection’s shadow?
“From the perspective of natural selection, long post-menopausal life is a puzzle,” said UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor Michael Gurven. In most animals, including chimpanzees — our closest primate brethren — this link between fertility and longevity is very pronounced, where survival drops in sync with the ability to reproduce. Meanwhile in humans, women can live for decades after their ability to have children ends. “We don’t just gain a few extra years — we have a true post-reproductive life stage,” Gurven said.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, senior author Gurven, with former UCSB postdoctoral fellow and population ecologist Raziel Davison, challenge the longstanding view that the force of natural selection in humans must decline to zero once reproduction is complete.
They assert that a long post-reproductive lifespan is not just due to recent advancements in health and medicine. “The potential for long life is part of who we are as humans, an evolved feature of the life course,” Gurven said.
The secret to our success? Our grandparents.

Name your emotions. Take action. Know your limits. These seven mindfulness-based strategies can help you stay grounded while caring deeply about the world.Following nonstop news in an era of gun violence, war, and political divide, can become overwhelming. And amid our many ongoing challenges — the pandemic, climate change, economic uncertainty — it’s understandable to feel sad, angry and anxious.As a clinical psychologist who specializes in giving people the tools to cope with intense emotions, I know how difficult it can be to remain positive — or simply balanced — while caring deeply about our world. Some of my clients say they can’t stop doomscrolling, others engage in unhealthy behaviors to tune it out and many bounce between the two extremes.But it is possible to anchor yourself if it feels as though you’re slipping into despair about the state of the world. I rely on these seven mindfulness-based strategies for myself and my clients to stay grounded.1. Label your feelings.If you can precisely label the emotion you’re experiencing in the moment, you can reduce its power in your body and brain. Name whatever emotion you are feeling, whether it is sadness, fear, anger, disgust or guilt — and how intensely you’re experiencing it. Say it aloud, use a mood tracking app such as Daylio, Reflectly or Moodnotes or write your feelings down in a journal.Try not to wait until your feelings have peaked, though. Make it a habit to name your emotions as they come. Tracking their intensity offers you a chance to slow down before you reach a boiling point and lose yourself in worrying or ruminating, snap at someone or reach for a substance mindlessly.2. Allow yourself to feel emotions too.If you try to avoid your feelings, they will get more intense, said Melanie Harned, a psychologist with the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and the author of “Treating Trauma in Dialectical Behavior Therapy.” When you’re emotionally affected by a news story, take a moment to notice what you’re thinking, doing and feeling in your body. Choose what would be most helpful in the moment — whether that’s creating a window to feel your emotions for a few minutes, without trying to change them, or, if you’re in the middle of a pressing task, plan to revisit painful news at a time you can grieve.One way to improve your ability to sit with emotions is to remember that they can quickly fluctuate. An exercise that helps my clients to stop worrying about getting stuck in their feelings is to watch several brief, emotional scenes in succession — the deathbed scene from the film “The Champ” followed by a snippet of the music video for Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” If you try this, you may find yourself tearing up at one moment, then dancing or smiling in your chair the next. The goal is to understand how that same transience can apply to the variety of emotions you experience when you remain present throughout your day.Understandably, in the aftermath of a tragedy, it can also feel tempting to shrink the scope of your life to avoid painful emotions. For example, after learning of mass violence at a supermarket, as we did in the horrific Boulder and Buffalo shootings, it’s natural to feel uneasy about going grocery shopping. Keep in mind that allowing yourself to experience your emotions, including fear, as you return to a routine will ultimately improve your anxiety, Dr. Harned said.3. Practice different types of empathy.You can feel driven to make a difference and help without overly identifying with another person’s pain. “We are taught that the way to help others is through empathy, but that can be a trap,” said George Everly Jr., a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who specializes in crisis intervention and resilience.In his work to reduce burnout among humanitarian aid workers, Dr. Everly encourages perspective taking, or trying to understand the world from another’s point of view in the moment, instead of absorbing yourself in their emotions, blurring the line between what they are experiencing and your experience.“There’s a difference between being aware and getting immersed and enveloped,” said Sharon Salzberg, a leading mindfulness teacher and the author of “Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.”One study of more than 7,500 physicians found that understanding and acknowledging patients emotions reduced burnout, while overly identifying with their patients’ experiences predicted emotional exhaustion among doctors. It takes practice, but if you observe yourself feeling engrossed, try taking a few breaths and then shifting into a more cognitive form of concern, as opposed to fully participating in suffering.4. Take action.By considering ways to help others, you’ll take back some control in a world that can feel overwhelming while improving your own well-being. Purposefully and repeatedly doing work like donating, volunteering or engaging politically has been shown to reduce a person’s risk of slipping into depression and boosts happiness.“When we mobilize and rise up with a positive, tangible action, it is almost impossible to fall into despair,” said Shelly Tygielski, an activist and the author of “Sit Down to Rise Up.”Invest some time thinking about ways you want to contribute around causes that are meaningful to you. While working toward improving injustices in the world, “we need to balance compassion and our effort with the wisdom that things can take time. They can take a long time, but sometimes our efforts are planting a seed,” Ms. Salzberg said.5. Rethink your words.It can feel natural to use dramatic statements like “I’m broken” when something terrible happens in the world. That is especially true on social media, where extreme language might be validated by other people’s “likes” or comments. But our words and interpretations have a powerful impact on how we feel and behave.While it’s helpful to allow ourselves to honor our feelings, our emotions escalate in intensity when we overstate circumstances that are already painful. Catastrophic thinking can either trigger or exacerbate negative emotions in many people. So consider replacing thoughts or phrases like, “The world is falling apart,” with “I need to do something to improve X.”6. Invest in a joy practice.Resilience, the ability to function after a stressful event, often hinges on adding positive emotions and actions to your day to improve your ability to cope with challenges. Connect with people who inspire you and schedule hobbies that may excite you. Protecting your mental health isn’t selfish; it enables you to be the best version of you, not the burned-out version, said Dr. Everly, who carves out time to exercise even when he’s on disaster relief missions.Beyond adding activities that foster happiness, practice attending to the moments when positive emotions naturally arise in your day, whether that’s your morning coffee or spending time with someone you love.“When the news cycle is so dominated by horrific things, we can lose sight of the good in the world and in our own lives,” Dr. Harned said.But if you are struggling to find moments of peace and find yourself experiencing sadness or anxiety that is impacting your ability to function, reach out to a therapist who can offer you evidence-based tools to improve your well-being.7. Honor your limits without losing sight of the problems and the pain.Think about specific times of day, say morning and midafternoon, when you want to keep up with the news, rather than endlessly scrolling or keeping it on in the background. Taking a break doesn’t mean you don’t care; it’s about hitting pause so you can return to facing challenges in the world and trying to make a real difference.It’s also important to stay attuned to the causes that matter to us in times of relative quiet. “We feel pain acutely, then we forget,” said Ms. Salzberg. She suggests finding ways to attend to causes that matter to us, even when they’re not at the top of our news feed.Give yourself permission to feel pain and joy, without getting stuck. That is how to let your emotions contribute to real healing. Dr. Harned reminded me of an analogy that Marsha Linehan, a psychologist and pioneer in mindfulness-based behavioral therapy, teaches: You can visit a cemetery without building a house there.Jenny Taitz is an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of several books, including a forthcoming one on stress.

Published13 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, ReutersThe only abortion clinic in Mississippi has shut as a near-total ban on the procedure takes effect in the state.Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the clinic at the heart of the US Supreme Court case that reversed Roe v Wade, stopped giving abortions as a “trigger law” comes into force following the decision.The ruling has left individual states to decide on abortion rights.Battles over bans it triggered are now playing out in courts around the US.In Mississippi, the state ban that has been triggered prohibits abortions at any point of a pregnancy, forcing Jackson Women’s Health to stop giving the procedure.On Wednesday, its last day of operations, pro-choice and anti-abortion clashed outside the clinic as it sought to see as many patients as possible before ending its services.”It was crazy busy, for obvious reasons,” Dr Cheryl Hamlin, who worked at the clinic, told the BBC. “It was definitely a full day, and it was emotional on the way out.””Today is a little bit surreal. I don’t even know how I’m feeling right now,” she said.Outside the clinic, tensions ran high. Defiant signs were left by volunteers who had helped escort some of the 60 or so patients who came in on the last day for medical and surgical procedures.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Dr Hamlin said she was concerned that potential patients may now seek unsafe, unregulated abortions, or continue with potentially high-risk pregnancies that they may have otherwise aborted.Anti-abortion supporters, however, celebrated outside the clinic with music and shouted prayers. Some carried placards that read: “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind.”The Mississippi “trigger law” was passed in 2007 and written to go into effect ten days after a Supreme Court reversal of Roe v Wade. The law carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison for violations, and provides exceptions only in cases of danger to the life of the mother or rape that has been reported to law enforcement.How the US Supreme Court is reshaping America Biden vows to protect women travelling for abortionMississippi judge refuses to block abortion ban The law was due to come into effect on Thursday, after a last-minute effort to block it failed.Some 13 states, primarily in the US south and mid-west, had similar laws designed to come into effect after Roe v Wade – which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion – was overturned.At least nine states have instituted a near-total ban, with the only exception being danger to the life of the mother.Other states are now scrambling to protect abortion access amid legal challenges, while clinics are struggling to navigate patchworks of new laws.States where abortion will remain legal are taking measures to protect those travelling from other jurisdictions. For instance, the Democratic governors of Colorado and North Carolina on Wednesday issued executive orders to protect abortion providers and patients from extradition to places that have banned the practice.Meanwhile, one of the largest abortion providers in Texas, Whole Woman’s Health, has said it is planning to move its operations to New Mexico, and has started a fundraising effort to help with the costs of moving equipment and supplies.More on this storyHow the US Supreme Court is reshaping America3 days agoBiden vows to protect women travelling for abortion6 days agoMississippi judge refuses to block abortion ban2 days ago

Clinical studies have demonstrated a strong association between Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and delirium. A change to the Tau protein, which can lead to the formation of tangles in brain, is one of the hallmarks of AD pathology, and Tau phosphorylation at threonine 217 (Tau-PT217) and threonine 181 (Tau-PT181) are new plasma biomarkers that can detect early-stage AD. A clinical study led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has shown that plasma Tau-PT217 and Tau-PT181 are associated with incidence and severity of postoperative delirium. The findings are published in Annals of Surgery.
Early studies from the same research group at MGH have shown that the ratio of beta amyloid (which causes AD’s signature plaques) to Tau in cerebrospinal fluid is associated with postoperative delirium. Recent studies in other labs have reported that plasma Tau-PT181 concentration distinguishes AD dementia from other neurological disorders. Plasma levels of Tau-PT217 are associated with the changes in cerebrospinal fluid levels of Tau-PT217 and AD development.
In this current study, the team at MGH developed a novel method to measure Tau-PT217 and Tau-PT181 concentrations in plasma of patients, called nanoneedle technology, in collaboration with NanoMosaic (Woburn, MA). “The nanoneedle technology is ultrasensitive, requires a small volume, and can measure low concentrations of molecules, including Tau-PT217 and Tau-PT181,” says lead author Feng Liang, MD, PhD, in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at MGH. “More than 20,000 nanoneedles are integrated on a silicon substrate assigned to detect one analyte. Each nanoneedle is a single molecule biosensor functionalized with antibodies,” says Liang.
The group conducted experiments in 139 patients who had a knee replacement, hip replacement, or laminectomy (a type of back surgery) at MGH. They have discovered that preoperative plasma concentrations of Tau-PT217 and Tau-PT181 are associated with postoperative delirium. Moreover, Tau-PT217 is a stronger indicator of postoperative delirium than Tau-PT181. “These outcomes help diagnosis of postoperative delirium; identify intermediate outcomes that could facilitate clinical studies; and elucidate the insight into potential mechanisms of postoperative delirium, ultimately leading to better and safer postoperative outcomes in patients,” says senior author Zhongcong Xie, MD, PhD, the director of the Geriatric Anesthesia Research Unit in the MGH Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine. Xie is also Henry K. Beecher Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. “These data also suggest that Tau phosphorylation, contributes, at least partly, to the development of postoperative delirium,” says Xie.
Adds co-author Oluwaseun Akeju, MD, chair of the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine: “Postoperative delirium could be a clinical manifestation of preclinical AD and might serve as a useful early warning sign to patients.”
High preoperative plasma concentrations of Tau-PT217 or Tau-PT181 can predict the presence and severity of postoperative delirium, with Tau-PT217 being the more strongly associated with these outcomes. “We hope this work will promote more research to confirm these associations and to understand further the mechanisms underlying the interaction of delirium and AD, ultimately leading to better interventions for both,” says study co-author Edward R. Marcantonio, MD, SM, from the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Additional co-authors are Kathryn Baldyga, BS, Kathryn Cody, MPH, and Jeanine Wiener-Kronish, MD, from the MGH Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine; Qimin Quan, PhD, from NanoMosaic, Yuan Shen from the MGH Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine and Anesthesia and Brain Research Institute, Shanghai Tenth People’s Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine; Ashok Khatri, MS, and Shawn Choi, BS, from the MGH Endocrine Unit; and Brandon M. Westover, MD, from the MGH Department of Neurology.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institutes of Aging and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California San Diego, report a new method called untargeted metabolomics to identify the vast number of molecules derived from food that were previously unidentified, but that appear in our blood and our stool.
The method, described in the July 7, 2022 issue of Nature Biotechnology, matched all of the products of metabolism in a specimen to large databases of samples where chemical inventories were available, providing an unprecedented catalog of the molecule signatures created by consuming food or by processing it in our gut.
The authors said that, used broadly, the new approach could dramatically expand understanding of the sources of chemicals in many kinds of human, animal and environmental samples.
“Untargeted mass spectrometry is a very sensitive technique that allows for the detection of hundreds to thousands of molecules that can now be used to create a diet profile of individuals,” said co-corresponding author Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, director of the Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego.
“The expanded ability to understand how what we eat translates into products and byproducts of metabolism has direct implications for human health. We can now use this approach to obtain diet information empirically and understand relationships to clinical outcomes. It is now possible to link molecules in diet to health outcomes not one at a time but all at once, which has not been possible before.”
Metabolomics involves the comprehensive measurement of all metabolites in a biological specimen. Metabolites are the substances, usually small molecules, made or used when an organism breaks down food, drugs, chemicals or its own tissues. They are the products of metabolism. The study also used a related technique, metagenomics, to measure genetic material in biological samples and characterize microbes present.

According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, Black, Hispanic and Asian communities are how much more likely to live in nature-deprived areas, or areas affected by urban sprawl, drilling, mining or logging, compared with white people?

A Michigan Medicine study finds that people with two pediatric-onset neurodevelopmental disorders are prescribed opioids at significantly higher rates than those without the conditions, raising concerns over addiction, overdose and mental health issues.
Researchers analyzed prescriptions of opioids from private insurance claims of over 22,000 patients with cerebral palsy or spina bifida, and more than 930,000 patients without the conditions.
They found that oral morphine equivalents, derived from medications such as oxycodone, codeine and morphine, were prescribed to patients with cerebral palsy and spina bifida at a rate up to five times higher than patients who do not have those conditions. The higher prescription patterns spanned across people with no pain, isolated and chronic pain, according to results published in Heliyon.
“Our findings are of great concern, given the known links between persistent opioid use and psychiatric conditions, as well as with overdose mortality,” said Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., lead author of the paper and an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at University of Michigan Medical School.
Chronic pain is the most commonly reported symptom among patients with cerebral palsy, a neurological condition caused by abnormalities in the brain, and spina bifida, a neural tube defect that can damage the spinal cord and nerves. Pain in these individuals may arise from several issues, including muscle spasticity, arthritis and invasive surgical procedures.
Previous studies found that more than 40% of all Medicaid beneficiaries with a disability took opioid pain relievers, with more than 20% reporting chronic opioid use. The research team raises concerns over whether long-term opioid use is appropriate for the treatment of non-cancer-related chronic pain.
Future studies must examine the effectiveness of non-opioid pain medications and alternative pain management strategies for adults living with cerebral palsy and spina bifida, says co-author Edward Hurvitz, M.D., chair of the U-M Health Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and a professor at U-M Medical School.
“Improving clinical pain screening strategies and developing efficient referral resources for appropriate pain management may help reduce the burden of opioid addiction and overdose in these populations by matching treatments to underlying pain mechanisms,” Hurvitz said.
Additional authors include: Neil Kamdar, M.A., Jeidi J. Haapala, M.D., Chad Brummett, M.D., all of Michigan Medicine
This research was developed in part under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR #90RTHF0001-01-00).
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Materials provided by Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan. Original written by Noah Fromson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Research led by the University of Otago in New Zealand has uncovered the strongest evidence yet that household overcrowding is a major risk factor for acute rheumatic fever and streptococcal infections of the skin.
Their research is published in two companion articles in the international medical journal The Lancet Regional Health — Western Pacific.
Lead researcher Professor Michael Baker of the University of Otago, Wellington, says it is the first time researchers have investigated risk factors for Group A streptococcal infections of the throat (strep throat) and skin (strep skin) that can cause rheumatic fever.
The studies found that both rheumatic fever and strep skin were linked with barriers to accessing primary health care and a family history of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, a serious illness which can develop if rheumatic fever is untreated.
Professor Baker says it is a major step forward to have identified a key pathway driving the risk of rheumatic fever.
“Finding a strong association between skin infection and rheumatic fever adds to evidence from other research conducted by our group about the importance of strep skin in triggering this disease. These results suggest that treating skin infections in young children may provide a way of preventing them developing rheumatic fever.