Publisher Health

As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in radiology, researchers caution that it’s essential to consider the environmental impact of AI tools, according to a focus article published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Health care and medical imaging significantly contribute to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fueling global climate change. AI tools can improve both the practice of and sustainability in radiology through optimized imaging protocols resulting in shorter scan times, improved scheduling efficiency to reduce patient travel, and the integration of decision-support tools to reduce low-value imaging. But there is a downside to AI utilization.
“Medical imaging generates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, but we often don’t think about the environmental impact of associated data storage and AI tools,” said Kate Hanneman, M.D., M.P.H., vice chair of research and associate professor at the University of Toronto and deputy lead of sustainability at the Joint Department of Medical Imaging, Toronto General Hospital. “The development and deployment of AI models consume large amounts of energy, and the data storage needs in medical imaging and AI are growing exponentially.”
Dr. Hanneman and a team of researchers looked at the benefits and downsides of incorporating AI tools into radiology. AI offers the potential to improve workflows, accelerate image acquisition, reduce costs and improve the patient experience. However, the energy required to develop AI tools and store the associated data significantly contributes to GHG.
“We need to do a balancing act, bridging to the positive effects while minimizing the negative impacts,” Dr. Hanneman said. “Improving patient outcomes is our ultimate goal, but we want to do that while using less energy and generating less waste.”
Developing AI models requires large amounts of training data that health care institutions must store along with the billions of medical images generated annually. Many health systems use cloud storage, meaning the data is stored off-site and accessed electronically when needed.
“Even though we call it cloud storage, data are physically housed in centers that typically require large amounts of energy to power and cool,” Dr. Hanneman said. “Recent estimates suggest that the total global GHG emissions from all data centers is greater than the airline industry, which is absolutely staggering.”
The location of a data center has a massive impact on its sustainability, especially if it’s in a cooler climate or in an area where renewable energy sources are available.

To minimize the overall environmental impact of data storage, the researchers recommended sharing resources and, where possible, collaborating with other providers and partners to distribute the expended energy more broadly.
To decrease GHG emissions from data storage and the AI model development process, the researchers also offered other suggestions. These included exploring computationally efficient AI algorithms, selecting hardware that requires less energy, using data compression techniques, removing redundant data, implementing tiered storage systems and partnering with providers that use renewable energy.
“Departments that manage their cloud storage can take immediate action by choosing a sustainable partner,” she said.
Dr. Hanneman said although challenges and knowledge gaps remain, including limited data on radiology specific GHG emissions, resource constraints and complex regulations, she hopes sustainability will become a quality metric in the decision-making process around AI and radiology.
“Environmental costs should be considered along with financial costs in health care and medical imaging,” she said. “I believe AI can help us improve sustainability if we apply the tools judiciously. We just need to be mindful and aware of its energy usage and GHG emissions.”

Cooking on your gas stove can emit more nano-sized particles into the air than vehicles that run on gas or diesel, possibly increasing your risk of developing asthma or other respiratory illnesses, a new Purdue University study has found.
“Combustion remains a source of air pollution across the world, both indoors and outdoors. We found that cooking on your gas stove produces large amounts of small nanoparticles that get into your respiratory system and deposit efficiently,” said Brandon Boor, an associate professor in Purdue’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering, who led this research.
Based on these findings, the researchers would encourage turning on a kitchen exhaust fan while cooking on a gas stove.
The study, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, focused on tiny airborne nanoparticles that are only 1-3 nanometers in diameter, which is just the right size for reaching certain parts of the respiratory system and spreading to other organs.
Recent studies have found that children who live in homes with gas stoves are more likely to develop asthma. But not much is known about how particles smaller than 3 nanometers, called nanocluster aerosol, grow and spread indoors because they’re very difficult to measure.
“These super tiny nanoparticles are so small that you’re not able to see them. They’re not like dust particles that you would see floating in the air,” Boor said. “After observing such high concentrations of nanocluster aerosol during gas cooking, we can’t ignore these nano-sized particles anymore.”
Using state-of-the-art air quality instrumentation provided by the German company GRIMM AEROSOL TECHNIK, a member of the DURAG GROUP, Purdue researchers were able to measure these tiny particles down to a single nanometer while cooking on a gas stove in a “tiny house” lab. They collaborated with Gerhard Steiner, a senior scientist and product manager for nano measurement at GRIMM AEROSOL.

Called the Purdue zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) lab, the tiny house has all the features of a typical home but is equipped with sensors for closely monitoring the impact of everyday activities on a home’s air quality. With this testing environment and the instrument from GRIMM AEROSOL, a high-resolution particle size magnifier — scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS), the team collected extensive data on indoor nanocluster aerosol particles during realistic cooking experiments.
This magnitude of high-quality data allowed the researchers to compare their findings with known outdoor air pollution levels, which are more regulated and understood than indoor air pollution. They found that as many as 10 quadrillion nanocluster aerosol particles could be emitted per kilogram of cooking fuel — matching or exceeding those produced from vehicles with internal combustion engines.
This would mean that adults and children could be breathing in 10-100 times more nanocluster aerosol from cooking on a gas stove indoors than they would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.
“You would not use a diesel engine exhaust pipe as an air supply to your kitchen,” said Nusrat Jung, a Purdue assistant professor of civil engineering who designed the tiny house lab with her students and co-led this study.
Purdue civil engineering PhD student Satya Patra made these findings by looking at data collected in the tiny house lab and modeling the various ways that nanocluster aerosol could transform indoors and deposit into a person’s respiratory system.
The models showed that nanocluster aerosol particles are very persistent in their journey from the gas stove to the rest of the house. Trillions of these particles were emitted within just 20 minutes of boiling water or making grilled cheese sandwiches or buttermilk pancakes on a gas stove.

Even though many particles rapidly diffused to other surfaces, the models indicated that approximately 10 billion to 1 trillion particles could deposit into an adult’s head airways and tracheobronchial region of the lungs. These doses would be even higher for children — the smaller the human, the more concentrated the dose.
The nanocluster aerosol coming from the gas combustion also could easily mix with larger particles entering the air from butter, oil or whatever else is cooking on the gas stove, resulting in new particles with their own unique behaviors.
A gas stove’s exhaust fan would likely redirect these nanoparticles away from your respiratory system, but that remains to be tested.
“Since most people don’t turn on their exhaust fan while cooking, having kitchen hoods that activate automatically would be a logical solution,” Boor said. “Moving forward, we need to think about how to reduce our exposure to all types of indoor air pollutants. Based on our new data, we’d advise that nanocluster aerosol be considered as a distinct air pollutant category.”
This study was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER award to Boor. Additional financial support was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Chemistry of Indoor Environments program through an interdisciplinary collaboration with Philip Stevens, a professor in Indiana University’s Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Bloomington.

A group led by researchers at Nagoya University and Meijo University in Japan has developed a disinfection technology that uses low-temperature plasma generated by electricity to cultivate environmentally friendly hydroponically grown crops. This innovative technology sterilizes the crops, promoting plant growth without the use of chemical fertilizers. Their findings appeared in Environmental Technology & Innovations.
In hydroponic agriculture, farmers cultivate plants by providing their roots with a nutrient solution. However, the nutrient solution can become infected with pathogenic E. coli strains, contaminating the crop and leading to foodborne illnesses.
To avoid this problem, farmers use chemical treatment to sterilize the nutrient solution before and during cultivation. In this process, the nutrient solution is replaced. Unfortunately, this can harm the environment because the chemicals can contaminate water and produce greenhouse gas emissions in their production process.
“Our results suggest a completely new way of disinfecting,” author Professor Masafumi Ito of Meijo University said. “Our technology can potentially reduce the production of pesticides that use fossil fuels, pollution of the environment, and residuals.”
Instead of agrochemicals, the team’s technique performed sterilization using plasma. Plasma is gas with small electric charges, known as ions and electrons, and electrically neutral reactive particles in it. The team created the low-temperature plasma using a plasma generator.
Their method targets the amino acid tryptophan in fertilizer, which is vital for plant growth and development. When the nutrient solution is irradiated with plasma, the electrons of the plasma generate oxygen radicals, highly unstable oxygen particles, that then produce tryptophan radicals.
Although the plant can still use the altered tryptophan in its metabolism, the radicals inactivate the enzymes involved in carbon metabolism in E. coli. Metabolomic analysis revealed the inactivation of the glycolytic and tricarboxylic acid circuits, which are essential for the bacteria’s survival, and inactivation of the key enzyme GAPDH. The result is sterile crops in a shorter period, a major advantage over conventionally used chemical-based techniques.
“We developed a sterilization technology using oxygen radicals, which is promising as a hygiene control technology for nutrient solution in modern hydroponic cultivation,” said lead author, Professor Kenji Ishikawa of the Nagoya University Center for Low-temperature Plasma Sciences. “As the use of chemical pesticides is restricted under the SDGs and the Green Strategy, our innovative technology can be used for sterilization simply by converting the atmosphere containing nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor into low-temperature plasma based on electrical energy obtained from natural energy. This technology is expected to promote technological development toward the goal of eliminating fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gases.”

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) reveal that the Snhg11 gene is critical for the function and formation of neurons in the hippocampus. Experiments with mice and human tissues revealed the gene is less active in brains with Down syndrome, potentially contributing to the memory deficits observed in people living with the condition. The findings are published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Traditionally, much of the focus in genomics has been on protein-coding genes, which in humans constitutes around just 2% of the entire genome. The rest is “dark matter,” including vast stretches of non-coding DNA sequences that do not produce proteins but are increasingly recognized for their roles in regulating gene activity, influencing genetic stability, and contributing to complex traits and diseases.
Snhg11 is one gene found in the ‘dark matter’. It is a long non-coding RNA, a special type of RNA molecule that is transcribed from DNA but does not encode for a protein. Non-coding RNAs are important regulators of normal biological processes, and their abnormal expression has been previously linked to the development of human diseases, such as cancer. The study is the first evidence that a non-coding RNA plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of Down syndrome.
Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra copy of chromosome 21, also known as trisomy 21. It’s the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability, estimated to affect five million people globally. People with Down syndrome have memory and learning problems, issues previously linked to abnormalities in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory formation.
“The gene is particularly active in the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus crucial for learning and memory and one of the few brain regions where new neurons are continuously created throughout life. We found that abnormally expressed Snhg11 results in reduced neurogenesis and altered plasticity, which plays a direct role in learning and memory, thus indicating a key role in the pathophysiology of intellectual disability,” says Dr. César Sierra, first author of the paper.
The authors studied the hippocampus in mouse models which have a genetic makeup similar to Down syndrome in humans. The hippocampus has many different cell types, and the study aimed to understand how the presence of an extra chromosome 21 affects these cells.
The researchers isolated nuclei from the brain cells and used a technique called single nucleus RNA sequencing to see which genes are active in each cell. One of the most striking findings were in cells of the dentate gyrus, where the researchers detected an important reduction of the expression of Snhg11. The researchers also found lower levels of Snhg11 in the same types of tissues from human postmortem brains with trisomy 21, indicating the relevance for the human cases.

To understand the effects of the reduced Snhg11 expression on cognition and brain function, the researchers then experimentally reduced the activity of the gene in the brains of healthy mice. They found that low levels of Snhg11 were sufficient to reduce synaptic plasticity, which is the ability for neuronal connections to strengthen or weaken over time. Synaptic plasticity is crucial for learning and memory. It also reduced the mouse’s ability to create new neurons.
To understand the real-world impact of their findings, the researchers also conducted various behaviour tests with mice. These experiments confirmed that low levels of Snhg11 led to similar memory and learning problems as seen in Down syndrome, suggesting the gene regulates brain function.
Snhg11 has previously been linked to cell proliferation in different types of cancer. The researchers plan on carrying out further research to discover the exact mechanisms of action involved, information that could open potential avenues for new therapeutic interventions. They will also explore whether other genes involving long non-coding RNAs, many which are yet to be discovered, might also contribute to intellectual disabilities.
“There are many interventions to help people with Down syndrome live independently, but only few are pharmacological. Studies like this help lay the foundations to find strategies that can help improve memory, attention and language functions, or prevent cognitive decline associated with ageing,” says Dr. Mara Dierssen, co-author of the paper and Group Leader of the Cellular & Systems Neurobiology lab at the Centre for Genomic Regulation.

Living close to pubs, bars and fast-food restaurats may lead to a higher risk of heart failure, according to new research published today in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal.
These kinds of ready-to-eat food environments typically provide unhealthy foods and drinks, and have been linked to cardiovascular diseases, said study senior author Lu Qi, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the epidemiology department at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Heart failure is a condition in which the heart muscle can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs for blood and oxygen. Few studies have assessed the relationship between heart failure and food environment, the authors noted. This study is likely the first to assess the association between food environment and heart failure with long-term observation.
“Most previous research on the relation between nutrition and human health has been focused on food quality, while neglecting the impact of food environment,” Qi said. “Our study highlights the importance of accounting for food environment in nutrition research.”
Researchers evaluated the association using data from the UK Biobank — a large-scale database containing health information for more than 500,000 adults in the United Kingdom. They measured enrollees’ exposure to three types of food environments — pubs or bars, restaurants or cafeterias and fast-food restaurants. Exposure was determined by proximity (living within 1-kilometer/0.62 miles — or a within a 15-minute walk) and density (the number of ready-to-eat food outlets within the predefined 1-kilometer/0.62 miles).
The study documented nearly 13,000 heart failure cases during a 12-year follow-up period, recorded through national electronic health-related datasets.
The analysis found that a closer proximity and a greater density of ready-to-eat food outlets were associated with an elevated risk of heart failure.

Specifically, the results include: Overall, participants in the highest density of ready-to-eat food outlets — defined as 1 kilometer/.62 mile area with 11 or more ready-to-eat outlets — had a 16% greater risk of heart failure compared to those with no ready-to-eat food environments near their homes. Those in the highest density areas of pubs and bars showed a 14% higher risk for heart failure; while those in the highest density areas for fast-food outlets had a 12% higher risk. Participants who lived closest to pubs and bars — less than 500 meters (.31 miles) — had a 13% higher risk of heart failure; while those closest to fast-food outlets had a 10% higher risk compared to those who lived the farthest away (more than 2,000 meters or 1.24 miles. Heart failure risk was stronger among participants without a college degree and adults in urban areas without access to formal physical activity facilities such as gyms.The findings were in line with expectations, Qi said, “because previous studies have suggested that exposure to ready-to-eat food environments is associated with risks of other disorders, such as Type 2 diabetes and obesity, which may also increase the risk of heart failure.”
Authors noted the findings suggest that improving access to healthier food environments and physical fitness facilities in urban areas, along with helping more people attain higher levels of education, could reduce the increased risk of heart failure linked to quick-meal options.
An accompanying editorial by Elissa Driggin M.D., M.S., and Ersilia M. DeFilippis, M.D., both of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, notes that more detailed analyses are needed in communities with more racially and ethnically diverse populations.
“Given the clear association between Black race and high incidence of heart failure as compared to white patients, as well as associations with worse heart failure outcomes, attention to food environment in this high-risk population is of the utmost importance,” they wrote.
“It has already been demonstrated that compared to predominantly white neighborhoods, there are significantly fewer supermarkets in predominantly Black neighborhoods, which are likely to be inversely associated with ready-to-eat food environments.”
The American Heart Association is working to improve access to healthy food among patients receiving treatment for chronic health conditions and people at high risk for such conditions. The Association’s Health Care by Food TM initiative is investing in research, advocacy and education to show clinical benefit and cost effectiveness of interventions that use food as medicine so that such interventions are covered by public and private health insurance.

A 2023 Association Presidential Advisory reviewing the landscape for food is medicine practice and research noted that one of the major challenges to eating healthier is the lack of a systemic focus on improving food environments and the food system. With few exceptions, taxes and financial incentives are not directed toward encouraging the purchase of healthy foods, improving the healthfulness of local food environments or ensuring the health of children and future generations, according to the advisory.
“Consuming a healthy diet is too hard for too many people,” said Eduardo Sanchez, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, the Association’s chief medical officer for prevention. “Structural racism and factors that contribute to poverty mean that historically excluded people suffer the consequences of poor-quality diets at disproportionate levels. For over a century, we’ve saved and improved lives at the American Heart Association and will continue to focus on initiatives like this in our next 100 years by ensuring everyone, everywhere enjoys their healthiest lives.”
Study background and details: Data came from UK Biobank entries for more than 500,000 adults, ages 37-73 years old recruited from 22 assessment centers in England, Scotland and Wales between March 2006 and October 2010, followed through May 2021. Heart Failure was based on self-reported information and hospital inpatient records. Participants, on average, were 56 years old, more than half were women and 94% were of white European ancestry. Participants had completed extensive questionnaires detailing personal information, such as age, sex, race, education, lifestyle habits and medical history. Within the 1-kilometer range of where participants lived, there were 3.57 ready-to-eat food outlets on average. The average street distance to pubs and bars was 692 meters (0.43 miles); 820 meters (0.50 miles) to restaurants and cafeterias; and 1,135 meters (0.70 miles) to fast-food restaurants. Participants included in the analysis were exposed to the highest density category of composite ready-to-eat food environments.Although the research used a large sample size, it may not represent the general population because most participants were white, skewed older and lived in the U.K. Other limitations include potential for exposure misclassification because of participants’ movements among neighborhoods during the follow-up period. The study did not rule out other factors that may involve a particular food environment that could affect heart failure and did not include nutrition insecurity data. In addition, it cannot show causality because the research is observational based on previously collected data.
The study emphasizes the importance of improving food environments to prevent heart failure, and the researchers noted that more studies are needed, particularly assessing nutrition insecurity, to enhance the robustness and applicability of this study’s conclusions.

A recent study by an international research team has unveiled an exciting discovery about how our cells defend themselves during stressful situations. The research shows that a tiny modification in the genetic material, called ac4C, acts as a crucial defender, helping cells create protective storage units known as stress granules. These stress granules safeguard important genetic instructions when the cell is facing challenges. The new findings could help shed light on relevant molecular pathways that could be targeted in disease.
Stress granules are an integral part of the stress response that are formed from non-translating mRNAs aggregated with proteins. While much is known about stress granules, the factors that drive their mRNA localization are incompletely described. Modification of mRNA can alter the properties of the nucleobases and affect processes such as translation, splicing and localization of individual transcripts. The researchers show that the RNA modification N4-acetylcytidine (ac4C) on mRNA associates with transcripts enriched in stress granules and that stress granule localized transcripts with ac4C are specifically translationally regulated. They also show that ac4C on mRNA can mediate localization of proteins to stress granules. Their results suggest that acetylation of mRNA regulates localization of both stress-sensitive transcripts and RNA-binding proteins to stress granules and adds to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for stress granule formation.
Stress granules are membrane-less assemblies of mRNA-protein complexes that arise from mRNAs stuck in translation initiation. RNA-protein complexes are important for their formation and the mechanisms promoting stress granule formation involve both conventional RNA-protein interactions and interactions that encompass intrinsically disordered regions of proteins. Stress granules have been extensively studied, and it is well-established that they form when translation initiation is limited and a variety of roles for stress granules within the cell have been proposed. While stress granule assembly and disassembly can be regulated by various post-translational modifications the impact of RNA modifications on their formation, dispersal and function remains largely unclear.
The RNA modification N4-acetylcytidine (ac4C) has recently been shown to be deposited on mRNA and regulate translation efficiency. ac4C is conserved through all kingdoms of life and is induced upon several different stresses. ac4C is less abundant than other RNA modifications on mRNA and due to difficulties in precise and quantitative mapping its function and occurrence on mRNA has remained controversial.
The researchers show in their publication that ac4C is enriched in stress granules and that acetylated transcripts are predominantly localized to stress granules in response to oxidative stress, proposing a model where acetylation of RNA can affect mRNA localization to stress granules, in part by affecting the translational release of mRNA from the ribosome, providing new insight into both the function and consequences of mRNA acetylation and mechanism of RNA localization to stress granules.
The findings will promote the understanding of how the cells react to stress and which role RNA modifications play in the process. Both stress and RNA acetylation have implications in disease and their findings could help shed light on relevant molecular pathways that could be targeted in disease.
The project was led by Ulf A.V. Ørom’s lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and the study involved collaboration with researchers from the University of Tartu, Norwegian Technical University, and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin.

In collaboration with their colleagues at the Donders Institute, researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have developed a simulator that enables artificial visual observations for research into the visual prosthesis. This open source tool is available to researchers and offers those who are interested insight into the future application.
Blindness affects approximately forty million people worldwide and is expected to become increasingly common in the coming years. Patients with a damaged visual system can be broadly divided into two groups: those in whom the damage is located in front of or in the photoreceptors of the retina; and those in whom the damage is further along in the visual system. Various retinal prostheses have been developed for the first group of patients in recent years and clinical tests are underway. The problems for the second group are more difficult to tackle.
A potential solution for these patients is to stimulate the cerebral cortex. By implanting electrodes in the brain’s visual cortex and stimulating the surrounding tissue with weak electrical currents, tiny points of light known as ‘phosphenes’ can be generated. This prosthesis converts camera input into electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex. In doing so, it bypasses part of the affected visual system and thus allow some form of vision. You could compare it with a matrix sign along the highway, where individual lights form a combined image.
How we can ensure that such an implant can actually be used to navigate the street or read texts remains an important question. Maureen van der Grinten and Antonia Lozano, from Pieter Roelfsema’s group, along with colleagues from the Donder’s Institute, are members of a large European consortium. This consortium is working on a prosthesis that focuses on the visual cerebral cortex. Maureen van der Grinten emphasizes: “At the moment there is a discrepancy between the amount of electrodes we can implant in people and the functionalities we would like to test. The hardware is simply not far enough yet. To bridge this gap, the process is often imitated through a simulation.”
Simulated Phosphene Vision
“Instead of waiting until blind people have received implants, we’re trying to simulate the situation based on the knowledge we have. We can use that as a basis to see how many points of light people need to find a door for example. We call this ‘simulated phosphene vision’. So far this has only been tested with simple shapes: 200 light points that are neatly-orientated, rectangular pixels of equal size on a screen. People can test this with VR glasses, which is very useful, but does not correspond to the actual vision of blind people with a prosthesis.”
“To make our simulation more realistic, we collected a whole load of literature, created and validated models and looked at the extent to which the results correspond to the effects that people reported. It turns out that the dots vary greatly in shape and size depending on the parameters used in the stimulation. You can imagine that if you increase the current, the stimulation in the brain will spread further, hit more neurons and therefore provide a larger bright spot. The location of the electrode also determines the size of the dots. By influencing the various parameters, we looked at how this actually changes what people see.”
Publicly Accessible
“The simulator is currently being used for research in Nijmegen, where they are investigating the impact of eye movements. With this article we hope to offer other researchers the opportunity to use our simulation as well. We would like to emphasize that the simulator is publicly accessible to everyone, with the flexibility to make adjustments where necessary. It is even possible to optimize the simulation using AI, which can assist you in identifying the necessary stimulation for a specific image.”
“We are now also using the simulator to give people an idea of where this research could go and what to expect when the first treatments are carried out in a few years. Using VR glasses we can simulate the current situation with 100 electrodes, which also highlights how limited vision through a prosthesis is: they may be able to find a door, but won’t have the ability to recognize facial expressions. Alternatively, we can show a situation with tens of thousands electrodes and what that will bring us when this technology is developed far enough.’

We all know that we ought to eat less meat and cheese and dig into more plant-based foods. But whilst perusing the supermarket cold display and having to choose between animal-based foods and more climate-friendly alternative proteins, our voices of reason don’t always win. And even though flavour has been mastered in many plant-based products, textures with the ‘right’ mouthfeel have often been lacking.
Furthermore, some plant-based protein alternatives are not as sustainable anyway, due to the resources consumed by their processing.
But what if it was possible to make sustainable, protein-rich foods that also have the right texture? New research from the University of Copenhagen is fueling that vision. The key? Blue-green algae. Not the infamous type known for being a poisonous broth in the sea come summertime, but non-toxic ones.
“Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are living organisms that we have been able to get to produce a protein that they don’t naturally produce. The particularly exciting thing here is that the protein is formed in fibrous strands which somewhat resemble meat fibers. And, it might be possible to use these fibres in plant-based meat, cheese or some other new type of food for which we are after a particular texture,” says Professor Poul Erik Jensen of the Department of Food Science.
In a new study, Jensen and fellow researchers from the University of Copenhagen, among other institutions, have shown that cyanobacteria can serve as host organisms for the new protein by inserting foreign genes into a cyanobacterium. Within the cyanobacterium, the protein organizes itself as tiny threads or nanofibers.
Minimal processing — maximum sustainability
Scientists around the world have zoomed in on cyanobacteria and other microalgae as potential alternative foods. In part because, like plants, they grow by means of photosynthesis, and partly because they themselves contain both a large amount of protein and healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids.

“I’m a humble guy from the country side who rarely throws his arms into the air, but being able to manipulate a living organism to produce a new kind of protein which organizes itself into threads is rarely seen to this extent — and it is very promising. Also, because it is an organism that can easily be grown sustainably, as it survives on water, atmospheric CO2 and solar rays. This result gives cyanobacteria even greater potential as a sustainable ingredient,” says an enthusiastic Poul Erik Jensen, who heads a research group specializing in plant-based food and plant biochemistry.
Many researchers around the world are working to develop protein-rich texture enhancers for plant-based foods — e.g., in the form of peas and soybeans. However, these require a significant amount of processing, as the seeds need to be ground up and the protein extracted from them, so as to achieve high enough protein concentrations.
“If we can utilize the entire cyanobacterium in foodstuffs, and not just the protein fibers, it will minimize the amount of processing needed. In food research, we seek to avoid too much processing as it compromises the nutritional value of an ingredient and also uses an awful lot of energy,” says Jensen.
Tomorrow’s cattle
The professor emphasizes that it will be quite some time before the production of protein strands from cyanobacteria begins. First, the researchers need to figure out how to optimize the cyanobacteria’s production of protein fibers. But Jensen is optimistic:
“We need to refine these organisms to produce more protein fibres, and in doing so, ‘hijack’ the cyanobacteria to work for us. It’s a bit like dairy cows, which we’ve hijacked to produce an insane amount of milk for us. Except here, we avoid any ethical considerations regarding animal welfare. We won’t reach our goal tomorrow because of a few metabolic challenges in the organism that we must learn to tackle. But we’re already in the process and I am certain that we can succeed,” says Poul Erik Jensen, adding:
“If so, this is the ultimate way to make protein.”

Cyanobacteria such as spirulina are already grown industrially in several countries — mostly for health foods. Production typically occurs in so-called raceway ponds beneath the open sky or in photobioreactors chambers, where the organisms grow in glass tubes.
According to Jensen, Denmark is an obvious place to establish “microalgae factories” to produce processed cyanobacteria. The country has biotech companies with the right skills and an efficient agricultural sector.
“Danish agriculture could, in principle, produce cyanobacteria and other microalgae, just as they produce dairy products today. It would be possible to harvest, or milk, a proportion of the cells as fresh biomass on a daily basis. By concentrating cyanobacteria cells, you get something that looks like a pesto, but with protein strands. And with minimal processing, it could be incorporated directly into a food.”
CYANOBACTERIA PAVED THE WAY FOR THE REST OF US Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are not related to algae, despite the name. They belong to the bacterial kingdom. Their ability to photosynthesize makes them unique. In fact, cyanobacteria are believed to have invented photosynthesis around 3.8 billion years ago. As such, they have played an important role in Earth’s evolution by oxygenating our planet’s atmosphere. This paved the way for every organism that feeds on oxygen. (Source: Wikipedia). Certain cyanobacteria can produce toxins that can cause respiratory paralysis or destroy the liver, and are fatal to mammals, birds and fish. In rare cases, cyanobacteria have caused deaths in humans. In the research community, there is also great interest in using the cell walls of cyanobacteria as a biomaterial that could replace wood or cement. This is because cyanobacteria accumulate various polymers (macromolecules) that in principle, can be used as building blocks in bioplastics.

Since the turn of the century, Germany has made major strides in solar energy production. In 2000, the country generated less than one percent of its electricity with solar power, but by 2022, that figure had risen to roughly 11 percent. A combination of lucrative subsidies for homeowners and technological advances to bring down the costs of solar panels helped drive this growth.
With global conflicts making oil and natural gas markets less reliable, solar power stands to play an even larger role in helping meet Germany’s energy needs in the years to come. While solar technology has come a long way in the last quarter century, the solar cells in contemporary solar panels still only operate at about 22 percent efficiency on average.
In the interest of improving solar cell efficiency, a research team led by Prof. Wolf Gero Schmidt at the University of Paderborn has been using high-performance computing (HPC) resources at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) to study how these cells convert light to electricity. Recently, the team has been using HLRS’s Hawk supercomputer to determine how designing certain strategic impurities in solar cells could improve performance.
“Our motivation on this is two-fold: at our institute in Paderborn, we have been working for quite some time on a methodology to describe microscopically the dynamics of optically excited materials, and we have published a number of pioneering papers about that topic in recent years,” Schmidt said. “But recently, we got a question from collaborators at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin who were asking us to help them understand at a fundamental level how these cells work, so we decided to use our method and see what we could do.”
Recently, the team used Hawk to simulate how excitons — a pairing of an optically exited electron and the electron “hole” it leaves behind — can be controlled and moved within solar cells so more energy is captured. In its research, the team made a surprising discovery: it found that certain defects to the system, introduced strategically, would improve exciton transfer rather than impede it. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters.
Designing solar cells for more efficient energy conversion
Most solar cells, much like many modern electronics, are primarily made of silicon. After oxygen, it is the second most abundant chemical element on Earth in terms of mass. Around 15 percent of our entire planet consists of silicon, including 25.8 percent of the Earth’s crust. The basic material for climate-friendly energy production is therefore abundant and available almost everywhere.

However, this material does have certain drawbacks for capturing solar radiation and converting it into electricity. In traditional, silicon-based solar cells, light particles, called photons, transfer their energy to available electrons in the solar cell. The cell then uses those excited electrons to create an electrical current.
The problem? High-energy photons provide far more energy than what can be transformed into electricity by silicon. Violet light photons, for instance, have about three electron volts (eV) of energy, but silicon is only able to convert about 1.1 eV of that energy into electricity. The rest of the energy is lost as heat, which is both a missed opportunity for capturing additional energy and reduces solar cell performance and durability.
In recent years, scientists have started to look for ways to reroute or otherwise capture some of that excess energy. While several methods are being investigated, Schmidt’s team has focused on using a molecule-thin layer of tetracene, another organic semiconductor material, as the top layer of a solar cell.
Unlike silicon, when tetracene receives a high-energy photon, it splits the resulting excitons into two lower-energy excitations in a process known as singlet fission. By placing a carefully designed interface layer between tetracene and silicon, the resulting low-energy excitons can be transferred from tetracene into silicon, where most of their energy can be converted into electricity.
Utility in imperfection
Whether using tetracene or another material to augment traditional solar cells, researchers have focused on trying to design the perfect interface between constituent parts of a solar cell to provide the best-possible conditions for exciton transfer.

Schmidt and his team use ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations to study how particles interact and move within a solar cell. With access to Hawk, the team is able to do computationally expensive calculations to observe how several hundred atoms and their electrons interact with one another. The team uses AIMD simulations to advance time at femtosecond intervals to understand how electrons interact with electron holes and other atoms in the system. Much like other researchers, the team sought to use its computational method to identify imperfections in the system and look for ways to improve on it.
In search of the perfect interface, they found a surprise: that an imperfect interface might be better for exciton transfer. In an atomic system, atoms that are not fully saturated, meaning they are not completely bonded to other atoms, have so-called “dangling bonds.” Researchers normally assume dangling bonds lead to inefficiencies in electronic interfaces, but in its AIMD simulations, the team found that silicon dangling bonds actually fostered additional exciton transfer across the interface.
“Defect always implies that there is some unwanted thing in a system, but that is not really true in our case,” said Prof. Uwe Gerstmann, a University of Paderborn professor and collaborator on the project. “In semiconductor physics, we have already strategically used defects that we call donors or acceptors, which help us build diodes and transistors. So strategically, defects can certainly help us build up new kinds of technologies.”
Dr. Marvin Krenz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Paderborn and lead author on the team’s paper, pointed out the contradiction in the team’s findings compared to the current state of solar cell research. “It is an interesting point for us that the current direction of the research was going toward designing ever-more perfect interfaces and to remove defects at all costs. Our paper might be interesting for the larger research community because it points out a different way to go when it comes to designing these systems,” he said.
Armed with this new insight, the team now plans to use its future computing power to design interfaces that are perfectly imperfect, so to speak. Knowing that silicon dangling bonds can help foster this exciton transfer, the team wants to use AIMD to reliably design an interface with improved exciton transfer. For the team, the goal is not to design the perfect solar cell overnight, but to continue to make subsequent generations of solar technology better.
“I feel confident that we will continue to gradually improve solar cell efficiency over time,” Schmidt said. “Over the last few decades, we have seen an average annual increase in efficiency of around 1% across the various solar cell architectures. Work such as the one we have carried out here suggests that further increases can be expected in the future. In principle, an increase in efficiency by a factor of 1.4 is possible through the consistent utilization of singlet fission.”

Heart disease researchers have identified a group of patients in whom international guidelines on aspirin use for heart health may not apply.
In a study published in the medical journal Circulation, the findings of a review of data from three clinical trials challenge current best practice for use of the drug for primary prevention of heart disease or stroke — otherwise known as atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
The research examined the results from clinical trials involving more than 47,000 patients in 10 countries, including the US, the UK and Australia, which were published in 2018.
The analysis focused on findings for a subgroup of 7,222 patients who were already taking aspirin before the three trials commenced. Those studied were at increased risk for cardiovascular disease and were taking aspirin to prevent the first occurrence of a heart attack or stroke.
The data showed a higher risk of heart disease or stroke — 12.5% versus 10.4% — for patients who were on aspirin before the trials and who then stopped, compared to those who stayed on the drug.
Analyses also found no significant statistical difference in the risk for major bleeding between the two groups of patients.
The research was led by Professor J. William McEvoy, Established Professor of Preventive Cardiology at University of Galway and Consultant Cardiologist at Saolta University Health Care Group, in collaboration with researchers in University of Tasmania and Monash University, Melbourne.

Professor McEvoy said: “We challenged the notion that aspirin discontinuation is a one-size-fits-all approach.”
The research team noted results from observational studies which suggest a 28% higher risk of heart disease or stroke among adults who were prescribed aspirin to reduce the risk for a first heart attack or stroke, but who subsequently chose to stop taking the aspirin without being told to do so by their doctor.
Based in large part on three major clinical trials published in 2018, international guidelines no longer recommend the routine use of aspirin to prevent the first occurrence of heart attack or stroke.
Importantly, aspirin remains recommended for high-risk adults who have already had a heart disease or stroke event, to reduce the risk of a second event.
The move away from primary prevention aspirin in recent guidelines is motivated by the increased risk of major bleeding seen with this common medication in the three trials, albeit major bleeding is relatively uncommon on aspirin and was most obvious only among trial participants who were started on aspirin during the trial, rather than those who were previously taking aspirin safely.
These trials primarily tested the effect of starting aspirin among adults who have not previously been treated with the drug to reduce the risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Less is known about what to do in the common scenario of adults who are already safely taking aspirin for primary prevention.
Professor McEvoy said: “Our findings of the benefit of aspirin in reducing heart disease or stroke without an excess risk of bleeding in some patients could be due to the fact that adults already taking aspirin without a prior bleeding problem are inherently lower risk for a future bleeding problem from the medication. Therefore, they seem to get more of the benefits of aspirin with less of the risks.
“These results are hypothesis-generating, but at present are the best available data. Until further evidence becomes available, it seems reasonable that persons already safely treated with low-dose aspirin for primary prevention may continue to do so, unless new risk factors for aspirin-related bleeding develop.”