Publisher Health

A UBC Okanagan researcher is cautioning that a person’s poor eating habits established during post-secondary studies can contribute to future health issues including obesity, respiratory illnesses and depression.
Dr. Joan Bottorff, a Professor with UBCO’s School of Nursing, is one of several international researchers who published a multi-site study looking at the eating habits of university students. Almost 12,000 medical students from 31 universities in China participated in the study that aimed to determine the association between eating behaviours, obesity and various diseases.
The point, says Dr. Bottorff, is that many poor eating habits begin at university and can continue for decades.
“We know many students consume high-calorie meals along with sugary foods and drinks and there is lots of evidence to show those kinds of eating behaviours can lead to obesity,” says Dr. Bottorff. “These are not the only habits that lead to obesity, but they are important and can’t be ruled out.”
The study, published recently in Preventive Medicine Reports, was led by Dr. Shihui Peng with the School of Medicine at China’s Jinan University. While there is well-established research that links unhealthy diets to many chronic diseases, this study aimed to show a relationship between poor eating habits and infectious diseases including colds and diarrhea.
Dr. Bottorff notes, due to the nature of the study, it was not possible to show cause and effect but the relationship between poor eating habits, obesity and respiratory illnesses were well supported.

“There has been biomedical research that also supports this link between obesity and infectious diseases, and most recently this has been related to COVID-19,” she adds. “We know from some of the recent publications related to COVID-19, obese people were more likely to have severe conditions and outcomes. Reasons that have been offered for this increased vulnerability include impaired breathing from the pressure of extra weight and poorer inflammatory and immune responses.”
A typical student diet of high-sugar or high-calorie foods can become a long-term issue as these habits can lead to obesity. Dr. Bottorff says there is evidence to show that stress and anxiety can cause overeating, but overeating can also lead to stress and depression.
“The bottom line here is that we shouldn’t be ignoring this risk pattern among young people at university. It is well documented that a significant portion of students have unhealthy diets,” she adds. “The types of foods they are eating are linked to obesity. And this can lead to other health problems that are not just about chronic disease but also infectious diseases.”
While Dr. Bottorff says students should be taught about healthy eating while at university the onus should be on the school to provide healthy, and affordable, food options for all students.
“We need to think about the food environment that we provide students. We need to ensure that in our cafeterias and vending machines, there are healthy food options so that they can eat on the go but also make healthy food choices.”
It’s not an issue going unnoticed. UBC Student Wellness and Food Services work together to address food security and food literacy and recognize that a lack of affordable food options, coupled with the stress of university life, can negatively impact students’ food choices.
Food insecure students have access to a low-barrier food bank and a meal share program. Meanwhile, UBCO Food Services’ culinary team prioritizes local, organic and sustainably-sourced ingredients, and works with a registered dietitian to ensure a wide variety of food options are available to all diners.
Dr. Bottorff agrees there have been improvements to food options in cafeterias and notes the drinks in many vending machines have been rearranging so healthier items are at eye-level and sugary choices are lower down.
“I know many post-secondary schools are trying to figure out how we can do better and are trying to address these problems,” she adds. “It’s great, because four or five years ago, we weren’t. So, I think we’re on the right road, but I think we’re a long way from finished.”

Researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso have successfully mapped specific regions in the brain that are activated in association with changes in blood sugar — also known as glucose — providing fundamental location information that could ultimately lead to more targeted therapies for people who struggle with conditions like diabetes.
The landmark 13-year study, published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, describes how the team used careful microscopic analysis to pinpoint specific cell populations in the brain that appear responsive to rapid changes in blood sugar.
Arshad M. Khan, Ph.D., UTEP associate professor in biological sciences, and a team from his laboratory, led by doctoral student Geronimo Tapia, spent the past decade continuing work first performed by student researchers at the University of Southern California (USC), where Khan worked prior to joining the faculty at UTEP. Together with the help of two additional team members — UTEP Research Assistant Professor Sivasai Balivada, Ph.D., and USC’s Richard H. Thompson, Ph.D. — the team discovered what they believe may be glucose-sensitive cell populations in the brain and carefully mapped their locations in an open-access brain atlas.
The results of the study represent a significant step toward uniform global brain mapping and the evaluation of cellular responses to blood sugar in diabetic patients, Khan explained.
“I am grateful to all my contributors’ hard work throughout the years, both when I was at USC and now here at UTEP,” Khan said. “Finally knowing the exact coordinates for these structures in an open-access brain atlas means this spatial knowledge can now be utilized by the scientific community for the refined targeting of future clinical or therapeutic interventions for individuals experiencing blood sugar fluctuations and prediabetes.”
Khan added, “Finding these cells is a bit like monitoring the fuel sensors in a car when its fuel levels rise or fall. The next step will be to find the wiring that connects these sensors to other parts of the brain, a task for which we are already hard at work.”
Khan’s team was able to track blood sugar changes in responsive regions of the brain in 15 minutes, a process that previously took hours due to limitations in the biomarkers used to detect these changes.
The locus coeruleus (Latin for “blue place”) — a brain region so named because of its unique tissue color — produces norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in arousal, attention and the body’s stress response. In the study, the locus coeruleus was found to be one of the few regions responsive early on during the blood sugar changes, suggesting it is an important arousal center for individuals with Type I and Type II diabetes when they experience life-threatening alterations in their blood sugar. Such alterations often occur when diabetics self-inject insulin, a hormone treatment which normalizes their high blood sugar levels, but which can also send them to dangerously low levels if incorrectly dosed.
The new knowledge of that region of the brain could ultimately help researchers monitor and intervene during the most dangerous effects of variations in blood sugar that arise as a common complication of diabetes management.
“This research is very important in our border region because there is a high prevalence of obesity and diabetes in our communities,” said Jessica Salcido Padilla, a UTEP graduate student from the Khan lab and study co-author. “Our goal is to identify exactly where certain processes happen in the brain so we can develop therapies, technologies or pharmaceuticals that help.”
Khan’s research was supported by three grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and by funds and imaging facilities available from UTEP’s Border Biomedical Research Center, which focuses on biomedical research relevant to the Paso del Norte region. The NIH funds included resources for microscopic imaging and analysis, mapping software and computational tools used by graduate student research assistants and research staff, and tuition support for students that produced the data for this study.
“This important work by Dr. Khan and his team exemplifies our college’s — and our University’s — commitment to the advancement of discovery of public value,” said Robert Kirken, Ph.D., dean of the UTEP College of Science. “I sincerely congratulate them on the fruitful conclusion of their study, and I am hopeful and enthusiastic about the clinical therapies their findings will enable.”

Neuroscientists at The University of Queensland have uncovered how vitamin D deficiency affects developing neurons in schizophrenia, using new technology.
Professor Darryl Eyles has built on past research out of his laboratory at the Queensland Brain Institute linking maternal vitamin D deficiency and brain development disorders, such as schizophrenia, to understand the functional changes taking place in the brain.
Schizophrenia is associated with many developmental risk factors, both genetic and environmental. While the precise neurological causes of the disorder are unknown, what is known is that schizophrenia is associated with a pronounced change in the way the brain uses dopamine, the neurotransmitter often referred to as the brain’s ‘reward molecule’.
Professor Eyles has followed the mechanisms that might relate to abnormal dopamine release and discovered that maternal vitamin D deficiency affects the early development and later differentiation of dopaminergic neurons.
The team at the Queensland Brain Institute developed dopamine-like cells to replicate the process of differentiation into early dopaminergic neurons that usually takes place during embryonic development.
They cultured the neurons both in the presence and absence of the active vitamin D hormone. In three different model systems they showed dopamine neurite outgrowth was markedly increased. They then showed alterations in the distribution of presynaptic proteins responsible for dopamine release within these neurites.

“What we found was the altered differentiation process in the presence of vitamin D not only makes the cells grow differently, but recruits machinery to release dopamine differently,” Professor Eyles said.
Using a new visualisation tool known as false fluorescent neurotransmitters, the team could then analyse the functional changes in presynaptic dopamine uptake and release in the presence and absence of vitamin D.
They showed that dopamine release was enhanced in cells grown in the presence of the hormone compared to a control.
“This is conclusive evidence that vitamin D affects the structural differentiation of dopaminergic neurons.”
Leveraging advances in targeting and visualising single molecules within presynaptic nerve terminals has enabled Professor Eyles and his team to further explore their long-standing belief that maternal vitamin D deficiency changes how early dopaminergic circuits are formed.
The team is now exploring whether other environmental risk factors for schizophrenia such as maternal hypoxia or infection similarly alter the trajectory of dopamine neuron differentiation.
Eyles and his team believe such early alterations to dopamine neuron differentiation and function may be the neurodevelopmental origin of dopamine dysfunction later in adults who develop schizophrenia.

We’ve heard it time and time again — the Mediterranean diet is great for our health. But despite the significant health benefits of this eating plan, a common deterrent is often the expected costs, especially when budgets are tight.
Now, new research from the University of South Australia shows that the Mediterranean diet is not only good for your health but also for your weekly budget, saving a family of four $28 per week (or $1456 per year) compared to the typical Western diet.
The study compared the nutrition profile and weekly costs of three food baskets based on: the typical Australian western diet, the Mediterranean diet, and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating (AGHE).
It found that the Mediterranean diet and the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating met recommendations for food groups, macronutrient distribution and key micronutrients associated with good health, but the typical Australian diet significantly lacked fibre, zinc, potassium, calcium, magnesium, vitamin E and vitamin B6, and had double the recommended salt intake.
The Mediterranean diet cost $78 per week for a single person household, $135 for a household of two, $211 for a family of three, and $285 for a family of four.
UniSA researcher and PhD candidate Ella Bracci says the research shows that a Mediterranean diet can be a viable and healthy option for cost-conscious families.

“Diet is one of the leading modifiable risks factors for chronic disease. Yet a significant number of Australians are still not consuming a balanced healthy diet,” Bracci says.
“Australians tend to eat a fair amount of food that’s high in fat, salt, and sugar, which reflects the Western diet. Unfortunately, this is also contributing to increased rates of type two diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and osteoporosis.
“To help combat unhealthy food choices, global agencies are increasingly endorsing plant-based diets such as the Mediterranean diet as their preferred guide to healthy eating. The challenge, however, has been for people to adopt these in Australia and one of the greatest barriers is perceived cost.
“The Mediterranean diet encourages eating fruits and veggies, whole grains, nuts, extra virgin olive oil, seeds and seafood, and there is a view that these foods are more expensive. And with cost of living being so high in Australia, it’s no surprise that people are being careful about where their hard-earned dollars go.
“This research shows how a Mediterranean diet can be a cost-effective option, letting people prioritise both their health and their hip pocket.”
The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends that a balanced, healthy diet comprises five food groups: fruit, vegetables and legumes, breads and cereals, dairy foods, and meat (and alternatives).

Only 8% of Australians eat the recommended 375g of vegetables per day, with the average Australian consuming up to 35% of their daily energy from foods high in salt, added sugars and unhealthy fat.
UniSA’s Associate Professor Karen Murphy says healthy food shopping is more affordable than some may expect.
“Eating a balanced healthy diet doesn’t have to break the bank, but eating unhealthy food can damage your body,” Assoc Prof Murphy says.
“Whether you prefer to follow the Australian Guidelines for Healthy Eating or the Mediterranean diet, both provide the necessary nutrients and energy, but as this study shows, the Mediterranean diet is generally less expensive.
“As with anything, shopping around, looking out for specials and mark-downs, purchasing in season, or stocking up on frozen, dried, and canned produce, can help reduce the costs of your weekly grocery shop. As can choosing home-brand or non-premium products.
“A $28 dollar saving may not seem like much a week, but over a year this is nearly $1500, which can make all the difference to your budget when times are tough.”

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are important immature blood cells in bone marrow that can be triggered to develop into any blood cell type. HSC transplants can be used to treat conditions where bone marrow is damaged and no longer able to produce healthy blood cells, but the widespread and safe use of HSCs is limited by barriers to cell growth and expansion in the lab (i.e. ex vivo). Now, a team led by researchers at the University of Tsukuba has established a novel culture system that supports long term ex vivo expansion of HSCs.
Human HSCs are frequently and easily obtained from umbilical cord blood, but this yields an insufficient number of HSCs for proper transplantation. Though ex vivo HSC expansion is clearly necessary, this goal has been difficult to achieve. In previous research, cell signaling molecules called cytokines and a protein called albumin have frequently been used to stimulate HSC expansion, but only have short-term success.
“Other teams have shown promising results using novel approaches for HSC ex vivo expansion, including the addition of small molecules, certain hydrogels, various growth factors, or small molecule inhibitors to the cell culture media” explains Professor Satoshi Yamazaki, senior author of the study.
Though cytokines were once believed to be indispensable for ex vivo HSC growth, the research team hypothesized other new approaches as suitable alternatives. Starting with mouse HSCs, they previously found that albumin could be replaced by a synthetic polymer. This not only overcame the albumin-related problem of variability between batches used in different experiments, but also prevented the negative effects of impurities that commonly arise.
When the research team applied this method to human HSCs, they noted less robust proliferation than in mouse HSCs. After molecular analysis, they observed decreased activity of vital signaling molecules called PI3K and AKT. To address this, they found that adding chemicals for activating PI3K and AKT could significantly improve human HSC growth.
“We also found that adding a receptor agonist chemical known as butyzamide could stimulate cell proliferation, providing a good alternative to cytokines that were commonly used in the past,” describes Professor Yamazaki.
Adding a compound called UM171, as well as a specific polymer, improved the results by supporting long-term HSC expansion. Using a technique known as RNA sequencing, the team confirmed the successful effects of this system on gene expression in individual cells. Furthermore, transplanting the HSCs into mice supported engraftment and growth of the cells that were expanded using their new culture system.
Given the importance of ex vivo expansion of human HSCs, the newly established system using an optimal chemically-defined cell culture medium provides a suitable alternative to systems using typical cytokine-containing media. This work may help advance various HSC-related therapeutics in clinical development and potentially save lives.

Repeatedly heading a soccer ball has been previously associated with negative long-term brain health for professional players. However, in a new study from researchers at the Minds Matter Concussion Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), a small number of repeated soccer headers equivalent to a throw-in did not cause immediate neurophysiological deficits for teens, suggesting that limited soccer heading exposure in youth sports may not result in irreversible harm if players are properly trained.
The findings, which represent the most comprehensive real-time study of soccer headers in adolescent athletes, were published in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.
For some professional athletes, repeated head loading in sports — using your head as part of the game — is associated with negative long-term brain health even when there are no initial clinical symptoms. Despite the awareness of long-term consequences, short-term neurophysiological issues after repeated head impacts like soccer heading are poorly understood in youth athletes. Some studies have identified potential issues across an entire sports season. This study examined the consequences of repeated head impacts shortly after the heading exposure with a battery of six different tests to examine a wider variety of potential clinical implications.
In 2015, the US Soccer Federation implemented limits on soccer headers for teens during practice — no more than 30 minutes of header practice time and no more than 15 to 20 headers per week. The English Premier League also passed guidelines restricting the number of high-force headers to 10 in a single practice per week. This lab-based study simulated these limits conducting 10 repeated soccer headers within a single session with experienced teenage players. Based on their findings, researchers determined that this practice did not result in acute neurophysiological issues, as assessed by a comprehensive exam. The study did not assess the safety of regular soccer headers over the course of a season or scholastic career.
“Soccer is a sport where intentionally using your head to hit the ball is an integral part of the game, and concern over its long-term effects has parents, caregivers and coaches understandably concerned,” said first study author Colin Huber, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at Emory University who conducted this research while with the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) at CHOP. “We wanted to simulate these effects in a controlled laboratory setting and build upon the work of prior studies to quantitatively assess the neurophysiological effects of repeated soccer heading.”
In this study, 19 participants (17 male, 2 female) between 13 and 18 years old were assigned to either a frontal heading group (directing the ball back to where it came from), an oblique heading group (directing the ball to the right) or a kicking control group. These participants completed neurophysiological assessments immediately prior to, immediately after and approximately 24 hours after completing 10 headers or kicks. These assessments included multiple eye movement tracking, pupil response and balance tests.
The study ultimately found no neurophysiological issues in either group when compared with the kicking control group, even when taking the six different assessments into account. However, oblique headers resulted in higher levels of angular head motion. Angular motion is associated with concussions and other brain injuries, suggesting that players should be properly trained to head the ball in a frontal fashion to reduce the risk of injury.
“This study represents the most comprehensive examination of the acute neurophysiological effects of soccer headers on youth to date, providing us with meaningful information regarding the safety of headers on the field,” said senior study author Kristy Arbogast, PhD, Co-Scientific Director at CIRP and research director of the Minds Matter Concussion Program at CHOP. “We need to be clear that there still may be long-term consequences for repeated soccer headers over the course of an athletic career, but it appears that a small number of headers in a given session does not pose an immediate risk to properly trained youth athletes.”
This study was supported by the National Institute of Neurologic Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health grant R01NS097549 and internal funds from CHOP.

A team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed a new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at incredible speeds — and may one day even deliver prescription drugs to hard-to-reach places inside the human body.
The researchers describe their mini healthcare providers in a paper published last month in the journal Small.
“Imagine if microrobots could perform certain tasks in the body, such as non-invasive surgeries,” said Jin Lee, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “Instead of cutting into the patient, we can simply introduce the robots to the body through a pill or an injection, and they would perform the procedure themselves.”
Lee and his colleagues aren’t there yet, but the new research is big step forward for tiny robots.
The group’s microrobots are really small. Each one measures only 20 micrometers wide, several times smaller than the width of a human hair. They’re also really fast, capable of traveling at speeds of about 3 millimeters per second, or roughly 9,000 times their own length per minute. That’s many times faster than a cheetah in relative terms.
They have a lot of potential, too. In the new study, the group deployed fleets of these machines to transport doses of dexamethasone, a common steroid medication, to the bladders of lab mice. The results suggest that microrobots may be a useful tool for treating bladder diseases and other illnesses in people.

“Microscale robots have garnered a lot of excitement in scientific circles, but what makes them interesting to us is that we can design them to perform useful tasks in the body,” said C. Wyatt Shields, a co-author of the new study and assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.
Fantastic Voyage
If that sounds like something ripped from science fiction, that’s because it is. In the classic film Fantastic Voyage, a group of adventurers travels via a shrunken-down submarine into the body of a man in a coma.
“The movie was released in 1966. Today, we are living in an era of micrometer- and nanometer-scale robots,” Lee said.
He imagines that, just like in the movie, microrobots could swirl through a person’s blood stream, seeking out targeted areas to treat for various ailments.

The team makes its microrobots out of materials called biocompatible polymers using a technology similar to 3D printing. The machines look a bit like small rockets and come complete with three tiny fins. They also include a little something extra: Each of the robots carries a small bubble of trapped air, similar to what happens when you dunk a glass upside-down in water. If you expose the machines to an acoustic field, like the kind used in ultrasound, the bubbles will begin to vibrate wildly, pushing water away and shooting the robots forward.
Other CU Boulder co-authors of the new study include Nick Bottenus, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; Ankur Gupta, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering; and engineering graduate students Ritu Raj, Cooper Thome, Nicole Day and Payton Martinez.
To take their microrobots for a test drive, the researchers set their sights on a common problem for humans: bladder disease.
Bringing relief
Interstitial cystitis, also known as painful bladder syndrome, affects millions of Americans and, as its name suggests, can cause severe pelvic pain. Treating the disease can be equally uncomfortable. Often, patients have to come into a clinic several times over a period of weeks where a doctor injects a harsh solution of dexamethasone into the bladder through a catheter.
Lee believes that microrobots may be able to provide some relief.
In laboratory experiments, the researchers fabricated schools of microrobots encapsulating high concentrations of dexamethasone. They then introduced thousands of those bots into the bladders of lab mice. The result was a real-life Fantastic Voyage: The microrobots dispersed through the organs before sticking onto the bladder walls, which would likely make them difficult to pee out.
Once there, the machines slowly released their dexamethasone over the course of about two days. Such a steady flow of medicine could allow patients to receive more drugs over a longer span of time, Lee said, improving outcomes for patients.
He added that the team has a lot of work to do before microrobots can travel through real human bodies. For a start, the group wants to make the machines fully biodegradable so that they would eventually dissolve in the body.
“If we can make these particles work in the bladder,” Lee said, “then we can achieve a more sustained drug release, and maybe patients wouldn’t have to come into the clinic as often.”

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is a highly contagious and seasonal respiratory virus that mainly causes common cold symptoms in healthy adults but can cause more serious lung infections in infants, the immunocompromised and older individuals. Strikingly, RSV infection remains the most common reason for hospitalization of infants and young children.
Recently, health officials anticipating a season of respiratory illness to rival some of the worst cold and flu seasons on record, have encouraged flu shots and reformulated COVID boosters. However, these options are not currently available for protection against RSV related lung disease. But this is changing, and a new study published in JCI Insight, led by Angela Wahl, PhD, Raymond Pickles, PhD, and J. Victor Garcia, PhD, with the International Center for the Advancement of Translational Science (ICATS), the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases (IGHID) at the UNC School of Medicine has shown that human T cells have an important role to play in controlling infection.
“Vaccine strategies for RSV have largely focused on the induction of an antibody response. Using novel precision animal models of RSV infection, we’ve gained novel insight into how the human immune system, and in particular human T cells, controls and clears RSV infection,” said Wahl, assistant professor of medicine and assistant director of the UNC ICATS.
“Our data shows that T cells can independently control RSV infection in human lung tissue in the absence of an RSV-specific antibody response. While a vaccine-induced RSV-specific T cell response would not be able to prevent infection, it could accelerate virus clearance and ameliorate disease if vaccine elicited antibodies fail to prevent infection, due to antigenic variability among circulating strains.”
The research team used two novel precision animal models to analyze RSV-induced human lung pathology and human immune correlates of protection at pre-determined time points. They showed that primed human CD8+ T cells or CD4+ T cells effectively and independently controlled RSV replication in human lung tissue in the absence of an RSV-specific antibody response. This preclinical data supports the development of RSV vaccines which also elicit effective T cell responses to improve RSV vaccine efficacy.
“It remains to be determined if vaccine efficacy fluctuates during RSV seasons due to variations in the circulating strains, and how long protection would last. But vaccines which can elicit T cell immunity may provide long-term protection against RSV infection and limit the severity of subsequent lung disease” said J. Victor Garcia, professor of medicine and director of UNC ICATS.
“With our recent experience with a global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 and the success of vaccines which are formulated to elicit neutralizing antibody responses it will be critical to understand how vaccine design can be tuned to also mount an effective T cell response against viral pathogens including RSV to more effectively clear infection from the lung” said Raymond Pickles of the UNC Microbiology and Immunology Department who was also involved in this study.
An effective and safe RSV vaccine is a priority for the WHO Initiative for Vaccine Research, but the incomplete understanding of how the human immune response controls RSV infection has proven to be a major hurdle towards developing an effective vaccine. On May 3, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved GSK’s Arexvy vaccine for the prevention of lower respiratory tract disease caused by RSV in individuals 60 years of age and older. Pfizer and Moderna also have two candidate vaccines that have shown efficacy against RSV-associated respiratory tract in Phase III clinical trials.
Other investigators include Frederic B. Askin, MD, (Pathology and Lab Medicine) and Jason K. Whitmire, PhD (Genetics) from UNC, and Guido Silvestri, MD, from Emory University.

Chunyu Wang, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has added to his body of research on Alzheimer’s disease with significant findings in Angewandte Chemie.
Together with his team, which includes first author and Rensselaer doctoral student Dylan Mah, Wang performed the most comprehensive study to date of the interactions between ApoE, or Apolipoprotein E, and heparan sulfate (HS). ApoE is a protein that combines with fats to transport cholesterol throughout the body. Heparan sulfate is a sugar molecule present on cell surfaces that plays a key role in cellular communication. A variant of ApoE, ApoE4, is the most significant genetic risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s tremendously interesting to explore why ApoE4 can increase Alzheimer’s risk,” said Wang.
Wang’s team investigated not only ApoE4, but ApoE3, the most common ApoE genotype and two protective isoform ApoE2 and ApoE Christchurch, as well. They discovered that the 3-O-sulfo (3-O-S) modification of HS was important for ApoE/HS interactions. All isoforms of ApoE recognized 3-O-S, but the differences in their strength of interactions correlated with Alzheimer’s disease risk.
“In the initial glycan array experiment, which is basically a chip with a collection of different heparan sulfate oligosaccharide on it, we flowed ApoE over it,” said Mah. “We were quite surprised to see that it had a binding pattern that looked very similar to Tau protein. It binds very well to the 3-O sulfated structures.”
Tau protein is implicated in many neurogenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
The team’s findings point to a new potential drug target to slow the progress of the disease: the enzymes responsible for sulfation called heparan sulfate 3-O transferases.
Next, the team plans to take a deeper look at ApoE/HS interaction by developing a 3D structural model of ApoE-HS interaction and examining this interaction in cell cultures and animal models.
“Alzheimer’s disease is very complex with so many aspects,” said Wang. “The more I study it, the more interesting it gets.”
“Ultimately, we want to prevent or mitigate enough of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease so people can continue to live independently,” added Mah. “Understanding how the disease works on a molecular basis is really critical to finding new treatments.”
“As our population ages, Dr. Wang’s research on Alzheimer’s disease is increasingly significant,” said Deepak Vashishth, director of Rensselaer’s Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, of which Wang is a member. “The identification of a new potential drug target to fight this progressive disease is enormously exciting for not only the six million patients in the United States, but for their families and caregivers.”
Wang and Mah were joined in research by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Ashely Canning, James Gibson, Fuming Zhang, and Robert J. Linhardt. Yongmei Xu, Xuehong Song, and Lianchun Wang of the University of South Florida contributed, along with Guowei Su and Jian Liu of Glycan Therapeutics; Jing Zhao of China Agricultural University; and Yongmei Xu, Eduardo Stancanelli, and Jian Liu of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Scientists have been worried about the potential harms of microplastics for years. These small plastic particles less than 5 mm in length have been found everywhere because of plastic pollution — from the Earth’s deep oceans to remote regions in Antarctica, and even the seafood we eat. But, are microplastics really harmful?
An international team of scientists, including researchers from McGill University, have found evidence that microplastics in the digestive tract of seabirds altered the microbiome of the gut — increasing the presence of pathogens and antibiotic-resistant microbes, while decreasing the beneficial bacteria found in the intestines.
“Our findings reflect the circumstances of animals in the wild. Since humans also uptake microplastics from the environment and through food, this study should act as a warning for us,” say the authors.
“The gut microbiome encompasses all the microbes in the gastrointestinal tract, which help control the digestion of food, immune system, central nervous system, and other bodily processes. It’s a key indicator of health and well-being,” says Julia Baak, co-author of the study and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at McGill University.
To gain a better understanding of how species are affected by diets chronically contaminated with microplastics, the scientists examined the gut microbiome of two seabird species, the northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis) and the Cory’s shearwater (Calonectris borealis) that live mainly on the high seas and feed on marine mollusks, crustaceans, and fish.
“Until now there was little research on whether the amounts of microplastics present in the natural environment have a negative impact on the gut microbial health of affected species,” says Gloria Fackelmann, who conducted the study as part of her doctoral thesis at the Institute of Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Genomics at Ulm University in Germany.
In studying the seabirds, the researchers discovered that microplastic ingestion changed the microbial communities throughout the gastrointestinal tract of both seabird species. “The more microplastics found in the gut, the fewer commensal bacteria could be detected. Commensal bacteria supply their host with essential nutrients and help defend the host against opportunistic pathogens. Disturbances can impair many health-related processes and may lead to diseases in the host,” says Fackelmann.
According to the researchers, most studies exploring the impact of microplastics on the microbiome are done in labs using very high concentrations of microplastics. “By studying animals in the wild, our research shows that changes in the microbiome can occur at lower concentrations that are already present in the natural environment,” says Fackelmann.