Daily Archives: July 29, 2022

As the University of Michigan continues to work toward carbon neutrality across all campuses and units, three student-led organizations have released annual reports that collectively detail a broad effort toward a universitywide culture of sustainability.

The reports from the Sustainable Food Program, Student Sustainability Coalition and Planet Blue Student Leaders showcase initiatives from the past year that have helped the campus community engage in more sustainable behaviors and learn more about relevant efforts on and off campus.

We couldnt be more pleased with the role that U-M students have taken in advancing sustainability, carbon neutrality and social justice, said Alex Bryan, sustainability programs manager for Student Life.

As these are urgent and important issues at U-M and around the world our community has shown great interest in taking meaningful and just climate action. And in no surprise, our students are helping to lead the effort. Over the last year, these groups have facilitated programs that led to more than 3,200 peer-to-peer interactive engagements.

The U-M Sustainable Food Program is a student-led initiative that aims to build just and resilient campus food systems. This includes helping scale the Campus Farm and expanding the Maize and Blue Cupboard.

The UMSFP 2021-22 academic year report notes a number of successful programs, events, collaborations and working groups, including:

The Student Sustainability Coalition report for the 2021-22 academic year details the organizations work fostering collaborations and empowering student-led environmental work at U-M.

The SSC, which the Graham Sustainability Institute and Student Life co-facilitate, seeks to connect students and student groups to catalyze university sustainability efforts. The organization communicates with the campus community via a weekly newsletter, dedicated social media accounts, summits and informal coffee chats.

The SSC report puts forward several ideas for fostering a culture of sustainability throughout U-M. In the year ahead, SSC aims to address a knowledge gap between students and U-M administration around relevant campus efforts, expand offerings like Earthfest that are programmed towards students, and work to center diversity, equity, inclusion and justice within sustainability initiatives.

The report also highlights the Planet Blue Student Innovation Fund, which funds student-led and initiated work that both reduces the universitys carbon footprint and helps foster sustainable values on campus.

SSC funded four PBSIF projects over the last year, including an energy-efficient cold-storage system that uses winter air for cooling, a bicycle repair station, canopy covers and light switch stickers that encourage energy conservation.

The Planet Blue Student Leaders program focuses on peer-to-peer engagement and culture change, with focus on early undergraduates as well as those who are less familiar with U-M carbon neutrality work or sustainability generally.

During the 2022-2022 academic year:

During the last year, U-M student programs granted $56,000to 12 student-led projects that prioritized equity and sustainability. Also, 281 graduating seniors earnedExcellence in Sustainability Honors Cords, in recognition of their involvement in climate action and dedication to the environment. Cords were produced locally by U-M students and with sustainable wool and dye from plants from Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

U-M continues to make strides toward net-zero emissions. Recent actions include joining the U.S. Department of Energy Better Climate Challenge, planning geothermal exchange heating and cooling systems, announcing $300 million in green bonds for capital projects aligned with U-M sustainability goals, launching a public dashboard tracking U-M emissions reduction efforts, and financing LED and energy conservation projects.

More here:

Student groups spur progress toward UM sustainability | The University Record - The University Record

Firefighters have made significant progress battling the ferocious Oak fire burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite national park, achieving 45% containment by Friday morning. The blazehas consumed more than 19,200 acres, fueled through the dry, overgrown vegetation coating the hillsides and favorable fire conditions that spurred erratic and extreme behavior.

Many have still been kept from their homes as the fire continues to spread since igniting last week, as residents await word on whether theirs was one of the 162 structures reported destroyed. That number could go up as damage assessment crews work to investigate the destruction, and hundreds of houses still lie in the fires path.

If the fire intensifies it could reach those areas, said a Cal Fire public information officer, Hector Vasquez, noting that warmer and drier conditions are expected in the coming days and that the steep, rocky terrain where the fire is burning has hindered efforts to corral it. Homes will remain at risk until the blaze has been completely extinguished. But the number [of homes at risk] has gone down significantly in the last few days, he added.

The Oak fire is one of many disasters raging across the US, as scorching temperatures baked the Pacific north-west, the west remained parched in record drought, and severe storms sent flash floods surging across several states. At least four people have died due to the extreme heat in Oregon, according to the state medical examiner, while the death toll mounts in Kentucky, where 16 people have been reported killed in historic flooding.

We may have even lost entire families, said Kentuckys governor, Andy Beshear, speaking in an update posted on YouTube.

The climate crisis has turned up the dial on disasters and, as temperatures continue to climb, extreme events are expected to increase and overlap, testing resilience and hampering recovery. Although the ways that individual events are linked to climate change must be studied to be confirmed, the trends tell a troubling story of whats to come.

Instead of random extreme weather events, were seeing these large-scale anomalies, said climate scientist Karen McKinnon, who studies climate variability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also noted the scale of the continent-wide heatwave.

Most evidence pointed to the extreme 120F temperatures in the Pacific north-west last year as being largely a freak event, she said. But if we see it again, thats a huge signal that something about the underlying physics of the system is changing. If you see two freak events in a row, then you know you need to re-examine your conceptual system.

As for fires, California which experienced record-breaking blazes in recent years has had a milder start to its high-risk season, even with the destructive Oak fire.

This time last year we had multiple fires burning throughout the state, Vasquez said, adding that the lack of competition for resources played a big part in enabling crews to attack the fire quickly. We had so many personnel and they got here quickly because we had a wide range of personnel not assigned to other incidents.

Still, with months left before the state sees wetting rains that reduce the risks, this could just be the beginning of another fire-filled season. Fires are important to maintaining the health of Californias landscapes, and can improve resilience and ecosystem recovery, especially in forests that are adapted to flames. But high-intensity conditions and an over-abundance of dried fuel have changed fire behavior, resulting in more destructive blazes.

Overgrown parched vegetation across the state is baking in summer heat. Many regions are primed to burn.

There have been several fires started since the Oak incident started, Vasquez said, and that could be a strong indicator of what lies ahead of us.

Read this article:

Firefighters make further progress to contain raging Oak fire near Yosemite - The Guardian US

What if, in people with blinding retinal disorders, one could simply introduce into the retina healthy photoreceptor cells derived in a dish from stem cells, and restore sight?

Its a tantalizingly straightforward strategy to curing blindness, yet the approach has been met with a number of scientific roadblocks, including introduced cells dying rapidly or failing to integrate with the retina.

A new study, published in Stem Cell Reports, overcomes these challenges and marks significant progress toward a cell-based therapy. The work, led by a team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, and the National Institutes of Healths National Eye Institute (NEI), introduced precursors of human photoreceptor cells into the retinas of dogs. A cocktail of immunosuppressive drugs enabled the cells to survive in the recipients retinas for months, where they began forming connections with existing retinal cells.

In this study, we wanted to know if we could, one, improve the surgical delivery of these cells to the subretinal space; two, image the cells in vivo; three, improve their survival; and four, see them migrate to the layer of the retina where they should be and start integrating, says William Beltran, a professor of ophthalmology at Penn Vet and senior author on the study. The answer to all those questions was yes.

Beltran and Gustavo Aguirre at Penn Vet have long been interested in addressing retinal blinding disorders and they have had great successes to date at producing corrective gene therapies for conditions with known causative genes. But for many cases of inherited retinal degeneration, a gene has not been identified. In other patients, the disease has progressed so far that no photoreceptor cells remain intact enough for gene therapy. In either scenario, a regenerative medicine approach, in which photoreceptors could be regrown outright, would be extremely valuable.

To develop a cell therapy, Beltrans team joined with groups led by John Wolfe of CHOP and Penn Vet; David Gamm at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Kapil Bharti at the NEI, in a consortium supported by the NEIs Audacious Goals Initiative for Regenerative Medicine. The partnership combined Beltrans teams expertise in canine models of retinal degeneration and vast experience in cell-based therapy approaches from the Wolfe, Gamm, and Bharti labs.

Photoreceptor cells, which are made up of rods and cones, constitute a layer of the outer retina critical to initiating the process of vision, whereby the energy of light transforms into an electrical signal. To function properly, they must form a connection, or synapse, with cells of the inner retina to pass along the visual information. Thus, the goal of this cell therapy is to recreate this layer and enable it to integrate with the retinas other cell types in order to relay signals from one layer to the next.

In the current work, the team used stem cellderived precursors of human photoreceptor cells developed in the Gamm lab to serve as the basis of the cell therapy. In collaboration with the Bharti lab, they developed a new surgical approach to inject the cells, which were labeled with fluorescent markers, into the retinas of seven dogs with normal vision and three with a form of inherited retinal degeneration, then used a variety of non-invasive imaging techniques to track the cells over time.

The use of a large animal model that undergoes a naturally occurring form of retinal degeneration and has a human-size eye was instrumental to optimize a safe and efficient surgical procedure to deliver doses of cells that could be used in patients, says Gamm.

The researchers observed that cell uptake was significantly better in the animals with retinal degeneration compared to those with normal retinas.

What we showed was that, if you inject the cells into a normal retina that has its own photoreceptor cells, the retina is pretty much intact and serves as a physical barrier, so the introduced cells dont connect with the second-order neurons in the retina, the bipolar cells, Beltran says. But in three dogs that were at an advanced stage of retinal degeneration, the retinal barrier was more permeable. In that environment, cells had a better ability to start moving into the correct layer of the retina.

Because the transplanted human cells could be interpreted by the dogs immune system as foreign entities, the researchers did what would be done in other tissue transplant procedures: They gave the dogs immunosuppressive drugs. The trio of medications had been tested previously by Oliver Garden, a veterinary immunologist with Penn Vet at the time of the study, who is now dean of Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine.

Indeed, while the injected cell populations declined substantially in dogs that did not receive the immune-suppressing drugs, the cell numbers dipped but then sustained in the dogs that received the cocktail.

Further characterization of the introduced cells revealed evidence of potential synapses. We saw that yes, some are appearing to shake hands with those second-order neurons, Beltran says. There appeared to be contact.

The next stage for this project will be to continue optimizing the therapy, and then test whether there is a functional responsein other words, improved visionin its recipients.

William Beltran is a professor of ophthalmology and director of the Division of Experimental Retinal Therapies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Beltrans coauthors on the work were Penn Vets Ana Ripolles-Garcia, Natalia Dolgova, Svetlana Savina, John H. Wolfe, Oliver A. Garden, and Gustavo D. Aguirre; the University of Wisconsin-Madison's M. Joseph Phillips, Allison L. Ludwig, Sara A. Stuedemann, Uchenna Nlebedum, and David M. Gamm; and the National Eye Institutes Arvydas Maminishkis, Juan Amaral, and Kapil Bharti.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants EY029890, EY06855, and EY031230), Fighting Blindness Canada, Foundation Fighting Blindness, Research to Prevent Blindness, the Van Sloun Fund for Canine Genetic Research, Retina Research Foundation, Emmett A. Humble Distinguished Directorship of the McPherson Eye Research Institute, the Sanford and Susan Greenberg End Blindness Outstanding Achievement Prize, and the Sandra Lemke Trout Chair in Eye Research.

Here is the original post:

Progress toward a stem cellbased therapy for blindness | Penn Today - Penn Today

This will be the final update from Northern Rockies Team 1. Zane Browns Type 3 team will assume command of the fire tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.

We appreciate the support from communities affected by the Clear Fire. The safety of our firefighters and the public is, first and foremost, our highest priority. Your cooperation in meeting that objective was instrumental, said Mark Goeller, Northern Rockies Team 1 Incident Commander.

Summary:Yesterday, helicopters completed the backhaul of equipment from the north portion of the fire. Patrol, mop up and equipment backhaul will continue across the east section of the fire.

The Pioneer Peak Hotshot crew will scout for opportunities to improve and extend firelines along the fires southern edge.

Most of the resources assigned to the incident are patrolling control lines and completing the remaining fire suppression repair work on the east flank of the fire.

Creeping and smoldering fire behavior within isolated interior fuel pockets could produce visible smoke across the fire area today. Aerial and ground resources will patrol the fire for undetected hotspots.

Weather: It will be partly cloudy today with warmer temperatures reaching a high of 67F, relative humidity at 38%, mild west winds at five mph, and no chance of wetting rain.

The Temporary Flight Restriction remains in place over the fire area. All non-mission aircraft and drones must avoid the area outlined in the TFR for the safety of aircraft supporting the Clear Fire and firefighters on the ground. Go to https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr2/list.html to stay informed of any modifications to the TFR

Sheltering & Evacuations: Contact the Denali Borough at (907) 683-1330, visit denaliborough.org or follow http://www.facebook.com/denali.borough

Fire Loss & Suppression Repair: Contact the Denali Borough at (907) 683-1330

Other Fire Information:Alaska Fire Information, (907) 356-5511; akfireinfo.com, and on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AK.Forestry and http://www.facebook.com/BLMAFS

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Categories: Active Wildland Fire, AK Fire Info, Alaska DNR - Division of Forestry (DOF)

Tags: 2022 Alaska Fire Season, 2022 Fire Season, Alaska Division of Forestry, Anderson, BLM Alaska Fire Service, Clear Fire, Nenana

Originally posted here:

Progress on the Clear Fire Alaska Wildland Fire Information - akfireinfo.com

Saint Michael and the Dragon. Found in the collection of Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, ... [+] Barcelona. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

This is part of a continuing series describing antiviral antibodies to prevent and treat SARS-CoV-2 infections. In this series, we will discuss the fundamental nature of virus evolution, how SARS-CoV-2 has mutated to evade neutralizing antibodies, and our latest attempts to fight against these mutations with more recent and improved antibody candidates.

Monoclonal antibody treatments remain our greatest asset in the fight against Covid-19, though in recent months, the effectiveness of these treatments has waned. New variants with more mutations have evolved to overcome antibodies from monoclonal therapies, vaccines, and prior infections. The search for monoclonal antibodies that neutralize not one but all strains is underway to counter these new variants.

In this series, we have discussed several pan-variant monoclonal antibodies, all of which promise against current Omicron strains and previous variants of concern such as Alpha, Beta, and Delta. Here we analyze another described in a study by Zhou et al.: the ZCB11 antibody.

ZBC11 Antibody Origin

Hong Kong researchers used an uncommon antibody identification method in their study. Antibodies described previously in this series were identified either from the sera of those naturally infected with Covid-19 or from a specially-engineered mouse model. Here researchers use the sera of mRNA vaccine inoculated patients as the basis for antibody collection.

Collecting the sera of 34 Pfizer vaccinated subjects, Zhou et al. found that only two of the 34 samples had neutralizing activities against all variants of concern included in the study, notably Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omicron BA.1. Subject #26 displayed the highest neutralization titers against Beta and Delta. They showed above-average neutralization of Alpha, Gamma, and Omicron. Zhou et al., therefore, took a closer look at the sera of this vaccinee for broadly neutralizing antibodies.

FIGURE 1: Serially diluted plasma samples subjected to neutralization assay against the pseudotyped ... [+] SARS-CoV-2 WT (a) and five VOCs (bf).

The researchers collected another blood sample 130 days after the second vaccination. Fourteen antibodies were identified, while only seven (ZCB3, ZCB8, ZCB9, ZCB11, ZCC10, ZCD3, ZCD4) showed positive responses to WT spike. They narrowed these seven to four by limiting their search to receptor-binding domain-specific antibodies that displayed neutralization against the wildtype Wuhan strain, namely ZCB3, ZCB11, ZCC10, and ZCD3. Along with a control antibody, ZB8, these four moved onto VOC neutralization assays.

ZCB11 Antibody Neutralization

Zhou et al. conducted both pseudovirus and live virus assays for the four antibody candidates. Against the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Omicron BA.1 pseudotypes, ZCB11 was the only candidate to neutralize all variants and consistently outperformed other antibodies when they did neutralize.

Against authentic viruses, this result was replicated to an even greater degree. ZCB11 consistently and effectively neutralized all variants in the lineup, including Omicron BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2. We note that the currently circulating BA.4 and BA.5 were not included in the neutralization assays. Still, the potent neutralization of BA.2 and all earlier strains strongly indicates ZCB11s broad neutralization.

FIGURE 2: Neutralization IC50 values of NAbs against the wildtype, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and ... [+] Omicron strains. The lower the IC50 values, the greater the neutralization.

ZCB11 Antibody Target

Alongside many other monoclonal antibodies, The ZCB11 antibody targets the receptor-binding motif. Cyro-electron microscopy analysis of the antibody revealed the antibody binding to the Spike protein in the up conformation, wherein the Spike is preparing to bind the ACE2 receptor of the host cell.

FIGURE 3: Cryo-EM density map of spike trimer in complex with ZCB11 Fab. Two of three different ... [+] states (3u and 2u1d) are shown. Spike trimer is color-coded in green and Fab is in pink and purple in two states, respectively. Down RBD is color-coded in yellow.

Why does this antibody neutralize much more effectively than previous monoclonal treatments when they all bind the receptor-binding domain? We can attribute this to two things. One reason for the broad activity found with ZCB11 is that most of the amino acid contacts are highly conserved among all known coronavirus sequences.

The antibody footprint binds the Spike amino acids D420, L455, F456, N460, A475, S477, T478, F486, and N487. Three of these, S477, T478, and F486 are mutated in the latest Omicron strains to S477N, T478K, and F486V. In the GISAID SARS-CoV-2 sequence database, all positions aside from the three Omicron exceptions are mutated less than 5,000 times in over 12 million sequences, meaning the footprint of this antibody is highly conserved.

Notably, Zhou et al. found that S477N and T478K increase the binding affinity between the antibody and Spike, rather than interfering with neutralizing capability. They postulate that this is at least a partial explanation for the antibody's substantial neutralization of the variant.

The second reason is that most of the amino acid positions in ZCB11 are relatively unmutated in natural strains. Previous antibodies have contact points at major residues of mutation like N501 and E484, but ZCB11 mostly lacks contact points at major mutational residues.

As we recommend with all broadly neutralizing antibodies, there is no reason to limit treatment to just one. An antibody cocktail of two or three monoclonal antibodies covering a broad footprint of conserved residues could be a powerful weapon against current and future strains, which are sure to continue mutating to evade immunity. We must prioritize and expedite these antibodies' production as the pandemic continues to rage.

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus

See more here:

Progress In The Search For Broadly Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibodies IV - Forbes