Publisher Health

Cells possess an innate immune system that defends against invasive pathogens such as bacteria and viruses. Previous studies have mapped out the cytoplasmic cGAS-STING pathway in the cytoplasm, known for responding to foreign nucleic acids, such as double-stranded DNA.
Micronuclei — or MN, abnormal intracellular structures containing the cell’s DNA — have also been suspected of triggering the pathway. However, no conclusive evidence exists of pathway activation by MN-induced cyclic GMP-AMP synthase, or cGAS.
Now, Kyoto University and the AIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology, or IFOM, have collaborated to develop the reporter cell line Fusion Visualization system 2 — FuVis2 — designed to help researchers visualize cellular nuclei with chromosome fusion and resulting MN. Using FuVis2, they examined whether MN influences the cGAS-STING response in live cells, where STING refers to stimulators of interferon genes.
“Our findings suggest cGAS more commonly recognizes MN during cell division without activating STING in the following cell cycle, contrary to the existing theory that cGAS-bound MN leads to STING activation,” says lead author Makoto Hayashi at the IFOM-KU Joint Research Laboratory at KyotoU’s Graduate School of Medicine.
The team also showed that cGAS-STING activation by gamma irradiation leads to mitochondrial DNA leakage into the cytoplasm and is not associated with MN formation. The observed MN inactivity against innate immune responses may suggest chromosomal abnormalities with severe consequences.
Radiation-generated MN had been reported to activate the cGAS-STING pathway, so the researchers began using MN as a model for cGAS activation.
“However, we were excited to obtain the opposite results,” says Yuki Sato at KyotoU’s Graduate School of Biostudies.
Previous correlative results have also suggested that an MN-mediated innate immune response may slow cellular senescence and suppress cancer. However, Hayashi’s team now feels the need to revisit this model.
“Given that these findings were derived specifically from the human colon cancer cell type HCT116, we should also conduct further analyses across different cell types and species before establishing theories about the MN-activated pathway,” concludes Hayashi.

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.
The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.
Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.
“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”
Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.
Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.
The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.
Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.
“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”
The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.
Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”
Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.
“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”

Scientists have discovered the specific enzyme that a species of sandfly uses to produce a pheromone attractant, which could lead to the creation of targeted traps to control them and reduce the spread of the potentially fatal disease, Leishmaniasis.
The team from the University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry analysed the genome of the Lutzomyia longipalpis, a species of sandfly native to Brazil and South America that can spread a disease called Leishmaniasis.
The study identified the enzyme, called a Terpene Synthase that is responsible for making the terpene pheromone sobralene, that the insect uses to attract others for mating, a discovery that could lead to the development of commercial traps for targeting and controlling this type of sandfly. The research has been published today in PNAS.
Over 90 sandfly species are known to transmit Leishmania parasites that are spread to humans through being bitten, but Lutzomyia longipalpis is themajor carrier of the disease in South America. The most common symptoms of the disease are skin ulcers and lesions which can leave life-long scars, in more serious cases people can become very unwell with fever, weight loss, enlargement of the spleen and liver, and anaemia. The most serious form of the disease, known as visceral leishmaniasis, is invariably fatal within 2-years if untreated. Most cases of visceral leishmaniasis occur in Brazil, but the disease can be found in large parts of the tropics and subtropics.
Terpenes are widely used in nature for chemical communication, but understanding how these structurally diverse natural products are produced by insects is only now beginning to emerge. Males of the sandfly, Lutzomyia longipalpis, use terpene pheromones to lure females and other males to mating sites.
Terpene synthases are responsible for the biosynthesis of many chemicals used by plants and microorganisms for defense and communication. This research identifies the first insect terpene synthase (TPS) from the insect Lutzomyia. It offers the potential for sustainable production of this compound through biocatalysis.
Professor Neil Oldham from the University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry led the study, he said: “Finding this enzyme has been very difficult and we have been hunting for it for over 2 years., The Lutzomyia genome contains an unusually high number of candidate terpene synthase genes, but thanks to the persistence of Dr Charlie Ducker, a talented researcher on the team, we were able to find the one that makes the pheromone.”
“The beauty of the pheromone approach is that it is very specific for this insect and so the next stage of the project will be to engineer microorganisms to make the enzyme in a way that would produce the pheromone. If we can then find a way to scale this up for commercial use this would be a way to control the populations of these insects and hopefully reduce the spread of Leishmaniasis.”

MIT chemists have designed a sensor that detects tiny quantities of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — chemicals found in food packaging, nonstick cookware, and many other consumer products.
These compounds, also known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down naturally, have been linked to a variety of harmful health effects, including cancer, reproductive problems, and disruption of the immune and endocrine systems.
Using the new sensor technology, the researchers showed that they could detect PFAS levels as low as 200 parts per trillion in a water sample. The device they designed could offer a way for consumers to test their drinking water, and it could also be useful in industries that rely heavily on PFAS chemicals, including the manufacture of semiconductors and firefighting equipment.
“There’s a real need for these sensing technologies. We’re stuck with these chemicals for a long time, so we need to be able to detect them and get rid of them,” says Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Other authors of the paper are former MIT postdoc and lead author Sohyun Park and MIT graduate student Collette Gordon.
Detecting PFAS
Coatings containing PFAS chemicals are used in thousands of consumer products. In addition to nonstick coatings for cookware, they are also commonly used in water-repellent clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, grease-resistant pizza boxes, cosmetics, and firefighting foams.

These fluorinated chemicals, which have been in widespread use since the 1950s, can be released into water, air, and soil, from factories, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. They have been found in drinking water sources in all 50 states.
In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency created an “advisory health limit” for two of the most hazardous PFAS chemicals, known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctyl sulfonate (PFOS). These advisories call for a limit of 0.004 parts per trillion for PFOA and 0.02 parts per trillion for PFOS in drinking water.
Currently, the only way that a consumer could determine if their drinking water contains PFAS is to send a water sample to a laboratory that performs mass spectrometry testing. However, this process takes several weeks and costs hundreds of dollars.
To create a cheaper and faster way to test for PFAS, the MIT team designed a sensor based on lateral flow technology — the same approach used for rapid Covid-19 tests and pregnancy tests. Instead of a test strip coated with antibodies, the new sensor is embedded with a special polymer known as polyaniline, which can switch between semiconducting and conducting states when protons are added to the material.
The researchers deposited these polymers onto a strip of nitrocellulose paper and coated them with a surfactant that can pull fluorocarbons such as PFAS out of a drop of water placed on the strip. When this happens, protons from the PFAS are drawn into the polyaniline and turn it into a conductor, reducing the electrical resistance of the material. This change in resistance, which can be measured precisely using electrodes and sent to an external device such as a smartphone, gives a quantitative measurement of how much PFAS is present.
This approach works only with PFAS that are acidic, which includes two of the most harmful PFAS — PFOA and perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA).

A user-friendly system
The current version of the sensor can detect concentrations as low as 200 parts per trillion for PFBA, and 400 parts per trillion for PFOA. This is not quite low enough to meet the current EPA guidelines, but the sensor uses only a fraction of a milliliter of water. The researchers are now working on a larger-scale device that would be able to filter about a liter of water through a membrane made of polyaniline, and they believe this approach should increase the sensitivity by more than a hundredfold, with the goal of meeting the very low EPA advisory levels.
“We do envision a user-friendly, household system,” Swager says. “You can imagine putting in a liter of water, letting it go through the membrane, and you have a device that measures the change in resistance of the membrane.”
Such a device could offer a less expensive, rapid alternative to current PFAS detection methods. If PFAS are detected in drinking water, there are commercially available filters that can be used on household drinking water to reduce those levels. The new testing approach could also be useful for factories that manufacture products with PFAS chemicals, so they could test whether the water used in their manufacturing process is safe to release into the environment.
The research was funded by an MIT School of Science Fellowship to Gordon, a Bose Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Park.

A newly developed “GPS nanoparticle” injected intravenously can home in on cancer cells to deliver a genetic punch to the protein implicated in tumor growth and spread, according to researchers from Penn State. They tested their approach in human cell lines and in mice to effectively knock down a cancer-causing gene, reporting that the technique may potentially offer a more precise and effective treatment for notoriously hard-to-treat basal-like breast cancers.
They published their work today (March 11) in ACS Nano. They also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in this study.
“We developed a GPS nanoparticle that can find the site where it is needed,” said corresponding author Dipanjan Pan, the Dorothy Foehr Huck & J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor in Nanomedicine and professor of nuclear engineering and of materials science and engineering at Penn State. “Once there — and only there — it can deliver gene editing proteins to prevent the cancer cells from spreading. It was a difficult task, but we showed that the system works for basal-like breast cancers.”
Similar to triple-negative breast cancers, basal-like breast cancers may be less prevalent than other breast cancers, but they can be far more challenging to treat, largely because they lack the three therapeutic targets found in other breast cancers. They also tend to be aggressive, quickly growing tumors and shedding cells that spread elsewhere in the body. Those cells can seed additional tumors, a process called metastasis.
“Metastasis is a huge challenge, especially with cancers like triple-negative and basal-like breast cancers,” Pan said. “The cancer can be hard to detect and does not show up during a routine mammogram, and it primarily affects the younger or African American population who may not be receiving preventative care yet. The outcome can be very, very poor, so there’s a clear unmet clinical need for more effective treatments when the cancer isn’t caught early enough.”
The team fabricated a Trojan horse nanoparticle, disguising it with specially designed fatty molecules that look like naturally occurring lipids and packing it full of CRISPR-Cas9 molecules. These molecules can target the genetic material of a cell, identify a particular gene and knock it down, or render it ineffective. In this case, the system targeted human forkhead box c1 (FOXC1), which is involved in instigating metastasis.
Pan described the designer lipids as “zwitterionic,” meaning they have near neutral charge on the nanoparticle’s shell. This prevents the body’s immune system from attacking the nanoparticle — because it is disguised as a non-threatening, normal molecule — and can help release the payload, but only when the lipids recognize the low pH environment of the cancer cell. To ensure the lipids would only activate at that low pH, the researchers designed them to shift their charges to positive once they enter the more acidic tumor microenvironment, triggering the payload release.

But the body is a vast place, so how could the researchers ensure the CRISPR-Cas9 payload made it to the correct target? To ensure that the nanoparticle would bind to the right cells, they attached an epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM), which is known to attach to basal-like breast cancer cells.
“No one has ever attempted to target a basal-like breast like cancer cell with context-responsive delivery system that can genetically knockdown the gene of interest,” Pan said. “We’re the first to show that it can be done.”
Others have developed viral delivery systems, hijacking a virus particle to carry treatment to the cells, and non-viral delivery systems, using nanoparticles. The difference, Pan said, for his team’s approach is the surface lipid designed to respond only in the target environment, which reduces the potential for off-target delivery and harm to healthy cells. Also, he added, since the body doesn’t consider the lipids to be a threat, there’s less chance for an immune response, which they validated in their experiments.
The team first tested the approach in human triple-negative breast cancer cells, validating that the nanoparticle would deploy the CRISPR/Cas9 system in the correct environment. They confirmed that the nanoparticle could find its way to a tumor in a mouse model, deploy the system and successfully knock down FOXC1.
Next, Pan said, the researchers plan to continue testing the nanoparticle platform with the eventual goal of applying it clinically in humans.
“We are also exploring how else we might apply the platform technology,” Pan said. “We can customize the molecules on the surface, the payload it carries, and use it to encourage healing in other areas. There’s a lot of potential with this platform.”
First author Parikshit Moitra, was a research assistant professor of nuclear engineering in Pan’s laboratory at Penn State at the time of the study and is now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research at Berhampur; David Skrodzki, Matthew Molinaro, Nivetha Gunaseelan, all doctoral students at Penn State; Dinabandhu Sar, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Teresa Aditya, postdoctoral researcher in nuclear engineering at Penn State; Dipendra Dahal and Priyanka Ray, both postdoctoral researchers in Pan’s laboratory at his previous institution of the University of Maryland Baltimore.
Penn State, the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program funded this work.

The growing popularity of video games is putting an increased focus on their accessibility for people with disabilities. While large productions are increasingly taking this into account by adding accessibility features, this aspect is usually completely absent in indie productions due to a lack of resources. To facilitate the implementation of accessibility features, Klemens Strasser developed a freely accessible toolkit for the Unity game engine as part of his master’s thesis at the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). It is available for free on GitHub. This makes it easy to integrate support tools for people with visual impairments into a games project. Together with his master’s thesis supervisor Johanna Pirker, Klemens Strasser has now published the toolkit and an action guide for more accessibility in games in a paper.
Help with orientation
When creating the “toolbox,” Klemens Strasser focused on four points: (1) support in operating menus, (2) perception of the game environment as well as (3) control on a fixed grid and (4) free navigation if the character can move in all directions. The first three points could be solved with a screen reader, but for the free navigation a so-called navigation agent had to be implemented. This guides the players to a destination they have specified via an audio signal after it has calculated the route to get there.
For the screen reader solution to facilitate menu operation, environmental perception and control on a grid, it was first necessary to capture all visible and usable objects and characters on the screen. A tool known as an accessibility signifier was used to recognise the elements and assign them a label, traits, value and description. The game transfers this information to the screen reader used by the players, which reads it out to them.
Developers with positive feedback
The toolkit was evaluated in a test with nine game developers, all of whom have a university background in software engineering. Their task was to implement it in a simple match-3 game in which the aim is to arrange three identical symbols or elements next to each other by moving them. The feedback from the developers was consistently positive. The implementation was described as simple, the task was easy to understand and they comfortably found their way around the toolkit. Before the test, only three of the developers had worked with accessibility features, but afterwards most of them wanted to use them for their next project.
“Games should be open to as many people as possible, which is why it is so important to make them more accessible for people with disabilities,” says Klemens Strasser. “With the Accessibility Toolkit for Unity, we want to make it as easy as possible for indie developers to implement these options. Since, according to the WHO, 253 million people worldwide live with a visual impairment, this would include a very large group. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to be done here, as there are numerous other impairments for which easy-to-implement solutions should be provided.” The Game Lab at TU Graz is constantly carrying out research on such solutions and other topics relating to accessibility in computer games.
Years of success as an independent game developer
Klemens Strasser himself has been working on the topic of accessibility for games for several years. Even during his studies and after completing his Master’s degree in Computer Science at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), he independently developed games that take accessibility into account. In 2015, he won the Apple Design Award in the Student category with his game Elementary Minute, and was nominated for the award in the Inclusivity category in 2022 with Letter Rooms and 2023 with the Ancient Board Game Collection. His games published for iOS have been downloaded over 200,000 times to date.
Link to the toolkit on GitHub: https://github.com/KlemensStrasser/KAP

The ‘ultrasound-photoacoustic dual-modal imaging system’ combines molecular imaging contrast with ultrasound imaging, and it can visualize molecular and structural information inside the body in real-time without any ionizing radiation. This advantage gives it the potential to enhance medical diagnosis by providing diverse physiological and histological information, ensuring greater accuracy and safety for patients. However, optical and ultrasound pathway integration always reduces the system’s performance in conventional ultrasound transducers. Therefore, a novel transducer that can achieve simple and seamless integration is crucial for practical application.
Professor Chulhong Kim (Department of Electrical Engineering, the Department of Convergence IT Engineering, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the School of Convergence Science and Technology), Dr. Seonghee Cho (Department of Electrical Engineering), and Ph.D. candidate Minsu Kim (Department of Convergence IT Engineering) at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), addressed challenges inherent in conventional ultrasound-photoacoustic systems by developing a novel transparent ultrasonic transducer (TUT) showcasing high performance. Their research findings have been published in the ‘Nature Communications.’
An ultrasound transducer transmits or receives ultrasound. Conventional ultrasound transducers are typically made using multiple opaque layers to maximize acoustic performance, and they cannot be seamlessly integrated into light pathways. This fundamental limitation always diminishes the performance of both optical and ultrasound systems. While many recent research projects actively explore the use of transparent materials in TUTs to address this issue, achieving transparency and best acoustic performance across all transducer layers continues to be a problem.
This research demonstrates a transparent material using a silicon dioxide (SiO2)-epoxy composite and applies it to a novel TUT. The novel TUT exhibits exceptional optical transparency ( >80%) and maintains the same bandwidth (±30% at the center frequency) as conventional opaque ultrasound transducers.
Using the novel TUT in the ultrasound-photoacoustic dual-modal system resulted in depth-to-resolution ratios, surpassing 500 for ultrasound imaging and 370 for photoacoustic imaging. These ratios are three to six times higher than those of traditional photoacoustic single systems. Notably, this research breaks the conventional limit of a depth-to-resolution ratio 200 in photoacoustic research, achieving 370.
This imaging system also easily conducted intricate structural and functional imaging of live animals and humans.
POSTECH Professor Chulhong Kim expressed his optimism, stating, “The application of this technology extends across various medical devices, encompassing tasks like using light stimulation for cell manipulation, employing laser surgery for tumor removal, and employing ultrasound for the examination of residual tissue.” He added, “Our aspiration is that this research will be beneficial in diverse fields including those employing ultrasound and optical sensors such as mobile devices and robotics.”
The research was conducted with support from the Mid-Career Researcher Program, the Sejong Fellowship Program, the Governmental Medical Device R&D Program, the BK21, the BRIDGE project, and the Program for Key Research Institutes for Universities of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo got a valuable assist from artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help capture and analyze data from professional hockey games faster and more accurately than ever before, with big implications for the business of sports.
The growing field of hockey analytics currently relies on the manual analysis of video footage from games. Professional hockey teams across the sport, notably in the National Hockey League (NHL), make important decisions regarding players’ careers based on that information.
“The goal of our research is to interpret a hockey game through video more effectively and efficiently than a human,” said Dr. David Clausi, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Systems Design Engineering. “One person cannot possibly document everything happening in a game.”
Hockey players move fast in a non-linear fashion, dynamically skating across the ice in short shifts. Apart from numbers and last names on jerseys that are not always visible to the camera, uniforms aren’t a robust tool to identify players — particularly at the fast-paced speed hockey is known for. This makes manually tracking and analyzing each player during a game very difficult and prone to human error.
The AI tool developed by Clausi, Dr. John Zelek, a professor in Waterloo’s Department of Systems Design Engineering, research assistant professor Yuhao Chen, and a team of graduate students use deep learning techniques to automate and improve player tracking analysis.
The research was undertaken in partnership with Stathletes, an Ontario-based professional hockey performance data and analytics company. Working through NHL broadcast video clips frame-by-frame, the research team manually annotated the teams, the players and the players’ movements across the ice. They ran this data through a deep learning neural network to teach the system how to watch a game, compile information and produce accurate analyses and predictions.
When tested, the system’s algorithms delivered high rates of accuracy. It scored 94.5 per cent for tracking players correctly, 97 per cent for identifying teams and 83 per cent for identifying individual players.
The research team is working to refine their prototype, but Stathletes is already using the system to annotate video footage of hockey games. The potential for commercialization goes beyond hockey. By retraining the system’s components, it can be applied to other team sports such as soccer or field hockey.
“Our system can generate data for multiple purposes,” Zelek said. “Coaches can use it to craft winning game strategies, team scouts can hunt for players, and statisticians can identify ways to give teams an extra edge on the rink or field. It really has the potential to transform the business of sport.”

Grand-offspring of male frogs exposed to the pesticide linuron exhibited changes in their DNA that was linked to significant physiological impacts, a study from Stockholm University reveals. The research highlights the profound transgenerational consequences of environmental pollution on amphibian populations, which are already under threat of extinction. The study is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Amphibians, particularly frogs, play a crucial role in our ecosystem. However, nearly half of all amphibian species are facing the risk of extinction, with synthetic chemicals in the environment being a significant contributing factor. Among these chemicals, endocrine-disrupting pesticides like linuron pose serious threats to amphibian growth, metabolism, and reproductive systems. This study sheds light on the extensive and heritable changes induced by such pesticides, revealing that the effects of linuron exposure can span generations, through epigenetic inheritance.
Associate Professor Oskar Karlsson from the Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University, who is also a researcher at the Science for Life Laboratory, stated, “This is the first study to demonstrate that pesticides can cause transgenerational epigenetic effects in frogs. Our findings underline the complex interactions between environmental chemicals and species extinction, particularly frogs.”
Linuron exposure triggers DNA changes across generations
The study’s results are alarming, with the linuron-exposed frogs’ male offspring exhibiting altered spermatogenesis, increased body weight, and modifications in fat and carbohydrate metabolism. By employing advanced sequencing techniques, the researchers identified significant differences in DNA methylation across thousands of regions in both the brain and testis of the affected frogs. These epigenetic changes impact crucial genes involved in hormone signaling and germ cell development, as well as regulation of the epigenetic landscape, suggesting that environmental exposure can have lasting and hereditary effects on gene regulation.
Associate Professor Cecilia Berg, an ecotoxicologist involved in the study, and at the time of the study working at the Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, added, “The findings confirm our hypothesis that linuron exposure can lead to transgenerational changes in the epigenome, particularly affecting genes related to hormonal systems and germ cell development.”
How linuron’s effects move from parents to offspring
The transgenerational effects of pesticides like linuron are likely transmitted during fertilization via sperm, carrying not only genetic material but also epigenetic information reflecting the environmental exposures of previous generations. “A likely explanation is that the pesticide disrupts testosterone and thyroid hormone functions in the body, and that these effects are passed on to subsequent generations through sperm and epigenetic processes. This results in hereditary changes in the offspring’s gene regulation,” Karlsson explained.
According to Karlsson, the research not only provides new insights into the mechanisms of pesticide toxicity but also emphasizes the urgent need for incorporating transgenerational studies into chemical risk assessments to better protect future biodiversity.

More than a third of people who self-identify as having a smell disorder have had at least one gas safety scare in the last five years, according to new research.
The study, led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) in collaboration with the charity Fifth Sense, asked people who cannot smell well what safety concerns they had and if they had experienced any hazardous events.
A total of 432 people responded to the online survey, which was conducted from February 25 to September 28, 2022, and distributed via the charity.
It revealed that a significant majority of participants (85.9pc) are concerned about safety, particularly regarding gas leaks, smoke, and spoiled food.
The study highlights that over five years, a substantial number of respondents encountered hazardous events related to their condition, emphasising the impact of smell loss on personal safety and emotional wellbeing.
During the previous five years, 32.2pc of respondents had experienced a safety concern related to food, 14.8pc a gas incident in which someone was hurt, 34.5pc a gas scare and 18.5pc a safety incident at work.
Lead researcher Dr Liam Lee said: “This study underscores the critical importance of addressing safety concerns for individuals with olfactory dysfunction.

“The findings show that smell loss significantly affects personal safety and emotional wellbeing. But we can help by finding ways to make things safer for them.
“We could teach people about the risks and make tools like ‘scratch and sniff’ cards1 to help them recognise dangerous smells.”
Before 2020, more than three million people in the UK (5pc of the population) were estimated to be affected by smell loss.
Now around a further one million people are also thought to have persistent problems following a Covid-19 infection.
Some people lose their sense of smell completely (anosmia). Others may experience a reduced sense of smell (hyposmia), unpleasant distorted smells (parosmia) or smell hallucinations (phantosmia).
These changes may be accompanied by loss of or changes to the sense of taste.

A total of 95 people who responded to the survey (22pc) reported a Covid-19 infection as the cause of their olfactory dysfunction.
Co-author Professor Carl Philpott, of UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “While most respondents reported not experiencing any adverse events, it’s noteworthy that among those without any gas-related incidents, a common reason cited was the deliberate avoidance of living in environments with gas installations due to fear and anxiety of potential accidents.”
Prof Philpott helped to found Fifth Sense with Duncan Boak, who is chief executive of the charity which supports people affected by smell and taste disorders.
Mr Boak said: “This research highlights an important, yet unrecognised, public health issue with serious safety implications.
“Yet there are a lack of treatment options for these sensory impairments and only a handful of specialist smell and taste clinics in England, with none in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
“Another issue is that we don’t routinely test the sense of smell which means that these problems often get missed with people not getting the care they need, or support and information to help them stay safe at home.
“I hope that our research serves as a prompt for policymakers and the NHS to start working with us to address what is a major health inequality.”
In 2016, Hannah Martin experienced a gas scare that could have had serious consequences. The 32-year-old, who works in financial services and lives in Littlehampton, lost her sense of smell after a viral infection when she was 18.
However, she felt comfortable using all her family’s gas appliances as she had always cooked with her mum from when she was very young.
She said: “This particular evening I was preparing dinner for my mum and I, I ensured the eye-level grill had lit and then turned my back in order to prepare the next part of the meal.
“I’m unsure how much time passed but all of a sudden, my mum came running down the stairs and yelled ‘don’t touch anything that may cause an ignition, I can smell gas all the way on the next floor up’.”
When they checked they found the grill had gone out and Hannah had no idea, even though she had been in the kitchen the entire time.
Hannah said: “I felt horrified when this happened as if I had managed to blow up the kitchen, we have a household of five people on each side of us and there would’ve been no way to warn them at the time. The thought of injuring all those innocent people absolutely terrified me.
“The incident made me lose confidence in myself as from then on I always had to make sure that there was somebody in the kitchen with me if I planned to use any of our gas appliances to prevent it from happening again.”
The scare led to her family finding the Fifth Sense charity, whose safety information they followed diligently, such as ordering detectors to keep Hannah and everyone in the household safe. It helped her to regain her confidence in the kitchen and be able to cook independently again.
She said: “It has majorly impacted my mental health and Fifth Sense’s safety information has literally saved my life. My quality of life would not be what it is without the work that Duncan and his team do. My only regret is that I didn’t find them sooner.”
Fifth Sense is working in partnership with Cadent, the UK’s largest gas distribution network, to highlight this issue and ensure that people with a poor, altered or no sense of smell have the information and support they need to stay safe and well at home.
Mark Belmega, Director of Social Purpose and Sustainability at Cadent, said: “It’s really important that we help keep those with anosmia and other smell disorders, safe around gas.
“We know cases have increased following the Covid-19 pandemic and so we’re proud to work in collaboration with Fifth Sense to amplify key gas safety tips, including regularly servicing gas appliances, joining the Priority Services Register and getting gas and CO detectors fitted at home.”
The researchers noted a limitation of the study was that the data was self-reported and there could also be a sampling bias of charity members who are already seeking support.