Seaglider was developed in 1997 by researchers at the School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory. In UW research the device has set records for the distance traveled and time spent alone at sea, using buoyancy to glide up and down through the ocean while using minimal power.

Kongsberg will pick up where previous licensee iRobot left off, handling orders for customers external to the UW. The Norwegian-owned company plans to hire five or six new employees to build Seagliders at its Lynwood facility.  The UW Seaglider Fabrication Center, managed by Fritz Stahr, will continue to employ three full-time staff members and two students to build and service Seagliders for UW researchers, and to service units sold before there was a commercial provider for the technology.

The Boldt decision revisited
Richard R. Whitney, a UW emeritus professor of fisheries, will give a public talk about his role in the Boldt decision, a 1974 ruling that gave Washington tribes an equal share of the state’s salmon catch. The talk is at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 23, in Fishery Sciences 102, and is free and open to the public.

Richard Whitney

Whitney’s talk, “My Fisheries Management Experience with Judge George H. Boldt in his Case United States v. The State of Washington,” will provide a firsthand account of the science and politics of those years. Whitney served as technical adviser to Judge Boldt from March 1974, one month after he handed down the ruling, until 1979, when the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed and affirmed the decision.

Whitney was a UW fisheries professor from 1983 to 1993. He previously held positions at the University of Maryland, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He is co-author of “Inland Fishes of Washington” and was elected in 2008 to the American Fisheries Society’s Fisheries Management Hall of Excellence.

U. of Minnesota president to speak
Eric Kaler, University of Minnesota president and former UW professor of chemical engineering, will speak on campus Tuesday, May 28, about challenges and opportunities for the nation’s top research universities.

Eric Kaler

Kaler taught at UW for seven years starting in 1982 before moving on to the University of Delaware and later to Stony Brook University in New York. He has been president at Minnesota since 2011.

He will speak to a general audience on “The Future of the American Research University” at 3 p.m. May 28 in the Lyceum of the Husky Union Building for the chemical engineering department’s first Bruce A. Finlayson Lecture. The lecture, the department’s largest event of the year, honors Finlayson, a chemical engineering professor emeritus who previously taught with Kaler. In a separate talk, Kaler will have a more technical presentation on surfactant microstructures at 10:30 a.m. May 28 in the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons (CSE 691) of the Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering.

Both talks are free and open to the public. A reception will follow the afternoon talk at 4 p.m. in the HUB Lyceum.

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Getty Images

Illustration of the Bull-leaping Fresco from the Great Palace at Knossos, Crete

DNA analysis is unearthing the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggest they arose from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier.

The British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900’s named the Minoans after a legendary Greek king, Minos. Based on similarities between Minoan artifacts and those from Egypt and Libya, Evans proposed that the Minoan civilization founders migrated into the area from North Africa. Since then, other archaeologists have suggested that the Minoans may have come from other regions, possibly Turkey, the Balkans, or the Middle East.

Now, a team of researchers in the United States and Greece has used mitochondrial DNA analysis of Minoan skeletal remains to determine the likely ancestors of these ancient people.

Mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells, contain their own DNA, or genetic code. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mothers to their children via the human egg, it contains information about maternal ancestry.

Getty Images

One of the buildings in Knossos restored by British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. Knossos was the major civil center of the Minoans.

Results published May 14 in Nature Communications suggest that the Minoan civilization arose from the population already living in Bronze Age Crete. The findings indicate that these people probably were descendents of the first humans to reach Crete about 9,000 years ago, and that they have the greatest genetic similarity with modern European populations.

Read the scientific paper.

Dr. George Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington professor of medicine and genome sciences, is the paper’s senior author. He believes that the data highlight the importance of DNA analysis as a tool for understanding human history.

“About 9,000 years ago,” he noted, “there was an extensive migration of Neolithic humans from the regions of Anatolia that today comprise parts of Turkey and the Middle East. At the same time, the first Neolithic inhabitants reached Crete.”

“Our mitochondrial DNA analysis shows that the Minoan’s strongest genetic relationships are with these Neolithic humans, as well as with ancient and modern Europeans,” he explained.

“These results suggest the Minoan civilization arose 5,000 years ago in Crete from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier,” he said. “Our data suggest that the Neolithic population that gave rise to the Minoans also migrated into Europe and gave rise to modern European peoples.”

Stamatoyannopoulos, who directs the UW Markey Molecular Medicine Center and who formerly headed the UW Division of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine, added, “Genetic analyses are playing in increasingly important role and predicting and protecting human health. Our study underscores the importance of DNA not only in helping us to have healthier futures, but also to understand our past.”

Stamatoyannopoulos and his research team analyzed samples from 37 skeletons found in a cave in Crete’s Lassithi plateau and compared them with mitochondrial DNA sequences from 135 modern and ancient human populations. The Minoan samples revealed 21 distinct mitochondrial DNA variations, of which six were unique to the Minoans and 15 were shared with modern and ancient populations. None of the Minoans carried mitochondrial DNA variations characteristic of African populations.

Further analysis showed that the Minoans were only distantly related to Egyptian, Libyan, and other North African populations. The Minoan shared the greatest percentage of their mitochondrial DNA variation with European populations, especially those in Northern and Western Europe.

When plotted geographically, shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was lowest in North Africa and increased progressively across the Middle East, Caucasus, Mediterranean islands, Southern Europe, and mainland Europe. The highest percentage of shared Minoan mitochondrial DNA variation was found with Neolithic populations from Southern Europe.

The analysis also showed a high degree of sharing with the current population of the Lassithi plateau and Greece. In fact, the maternal genetic information passed down through many generations of mitochondria is still present in modern-day residents of the Lassithi plateau.

Co-authors of the study are Jeffery R. Hughey of Hartnell College; Peristera Paschou of Democritus University of Thrace; Petros Drineas of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Manolis Michalodimitrakis of the University of Crete; and Donald Mastropaolo, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, and John A. Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington. The study was partially supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (5T32 GM007454), as well as from private funding.

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Expensive, state-of-the-art medical devices and surgeries often are thwarted by the body’s natural response to attack something in the tissue that appears foreign. Now, University of Washington engineers have demonstrated in mice a way to prevent this sort of response. Their findings were published online this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Lei Zhang, UW

These images show differences in collagen build-up in two tissue samples. Collagen is labeled in blue. The left image shows a thick collagen wall forming in the presence of a material that’s widely used for implantable devices. In contrast, collagen in the right image is more evenly dispersed in the tissue after the UW-engineered hydrogel has been implanted.

The UW researchers created a synthetic substance that fully resists the body’s natural attack response to foreign objects. Medical devices such as artificial heart valves, prostheses and breast implants could be coated with this polymer to prevent the body from rejecting an implanted object.

“It has applications for so many different medical implants, because we literally put hundreds of devices into the body,” said Buddy Ratner, co-author and a UW professor of bioengineering and of chemical engineering. “We couldn’t achieve this level of excellence in healing before we had this synthetic hydrogel.”

The body’s biological response to implanted devices – medical technologies that often cost millions to develop – has frustrated experts for years. After an implant, the body usually creates a protein wall around the medical device, cutting it off from the rest of the body. Scientists call this barrier a collagen capsule. Collagen is a protein that’s naturally found in our bodies, particularly in connective tissues such as tendons and ligaments.

If a device such as an artificial valve or an electrode sensor is blocked off from the rest of the body, it usually fails to work. Physicians and scientists have tried to minimize this, but they haven’t been able to eliminate it, Ratner said.

Ratner’s collaborator and co-author Shaoyi Jiang, a UW professor of chemical engineering, and his team implanted the polymer substance into the bodies of mice. The substance is known as a hydrogel, a flexible biomedical material swollen with water. It’s made from a polymer that has both a positive and negative charge, which serves to deflect all proteins from sticking to its surface. Scientists have found that proteins appearing on the surface of a medical implant are the first signs that a larger collagen wall will form.

After three months, Jiang and his team found that collagen was loosely and evenly distributed in the tissue around the polymer, suggesting that the mice bodies didn’t even detect the polymer’s presence.

For humans, the first three weeks after an implant are the most critical, because by then the body will show signs of isolating the implant by building a collagen wall. If this hasn’t happened in the first several weeks, it’s likely the body won’t default to an attack response toward the object.

“Scientists have tried many materials, and with no exception, this is the first non-porous, synthetic substance demonstrating that no collagen capsule forms, which could have positive implications for implantable materials, tissue scaffolds and medical devices,” Jiang said.

UW researchers and others have worked for nearly 20 years to find a way to help the body accept implants. In 1996, the National Science Foundation-funded UW Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) research center opened at the UW, with Ratner serving as director. Since that time, researchers have been trying to make a material that is invisible to the body’s immune response and could eliminate the body’s negative reaction to medical implants.

Now, nearly two decades years later, engineers have found the “perfect” substance, Ratner said.

“This hydrogel is not just pretty good, it’s exceptional,” he said.

The UW researchers plan to test this in humans, likely by working with manufacturers to coat an implantable device with the polymer, then measure its ability to ward off protein build-up.

The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, UWEB and the UW Department of Chemical Engineering.

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For more information, contact Ratner at ratner@uw.edu or 206-685-1005 and Jiang at sjiang@uw.edu. Jiang is traveling this week and is available by email.

The University of Washington in collaboration with Washington State University is developing an “academic redshirt” program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor’s program.

The first year will help incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline. The students will receive extra advising and a detailed course plan to help lay a strong foundation in engineering. At the UW, they will earn a spot in one of the school’s 10 engineering departments starting their second year.

Dawn Wiggin

Math Academy students from 2012 are shown after a workshop. The summer program at UW could be a feeder program for the new “academic redshirt” initiative.

“Engineering education needs to adapt to the tortoises, not just the hares,” said Eve Riskin, UW associate dean of engineering and program lead for the UW. “We’re talking about investing an extra year in what will hopefully be a 30-year engineering career.”

The initiative, called the Washington State Academic RedShirt in Engineering Program –STARS, for short – is funded by a National Science Foundation grant awarded May 8. Eight other colleges and universities also will receive grants to help increase retention of undergraduates in engineering and computer sciences.

Under the five-year grant, the UW and WSU will enroll 32 freshmen from Washington high schools each year for a total of 320 students after five years. Both universities will hire a person to oversee the program, and they hope to keep it running indefinitely. The first 64 students will begin this fall.

“More and more, we’re seeing students who are bright, but they’ve gone to a high school where the college preparation isn’t good,” said Bob Olsen, a WSU associate dean of engineering and lead of the redshirt program at WSU.

The program specifically targets low-income, motivated high school students in Washington state who are eligible for federal Pell Grants – financial aid based on family income and the cost of attending a university – or go to high schools where a high percentage of the students are on free or reduced-price lunches. Such students usually have a lower retention rate at the university level and are more likely to struggle in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Pell Grant students receive engineering degrees at significantly lower rates than non-Pell Grant students,” Riskin said. “This is unfortunate, because low-income students could most benefit from a lucrative engineering career.”

The Mathematics Academy, a summertime month-long intensive at the UW for high school students, could be a feeder for this new program in the state.

The UW will receive $970,000 over five years from the National Science Foundation to offer this program to incoming freshmen, and WSU will receive $700,000. Students in the UW cohort will get at least $2,000 in additional assistance from the College of Engineering as well as funding from traditional scholarship sources. These students will live in an engineering residential community.

The National Science Foundation partnered with Intel Corp. and General Electric Co. to fund the nine institutions for a total of $10 million in a grant called Graduate 10K+. Other funded schools include Cornell University, Syracuse University and California State University Monterey Bay. The Washington program is modeled after the Engineering GoldShirt Program at University of Colorado Boulder, now headed into its fifth year.

The UW will hire a full-time staff member to work with students in the five-year program. Dawn Wiggin and Scott Winter, associate directors in engineering’s student academic services, are collaborators.

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For more information, contact Riskin at riskin@uw.edu or 206-685-2313. She is traveling on Wednesday, May 8, but will be reachable by email.

Clare McLean

Family physician Dr. Alisa Hideg is checked by a UW Medical Center nurse after receiving her shots in a UW tumor vaccine trial. Hideg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2011.

In June 2011 Dr. Alisa Hideg was a 42-year-old mother and family physician in the prime of her career practicing at Group Health in Spokane when she was diagnosed with estrogen and progesterone receptor negative/HER 2 positive breast cancer.

Breast cancer in young, premenopausal women is usually aggressive. So even after chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation, with her cancer in remission, Hideg wasn’t ready to take it easy. Both the type of breast cancer and the fact that it happened at a young age made her chances of relapse higher. This knowledge led her to experimental trials, and to the UW’s Tumor Vaccine Group.

Hideg found the UW Tumor Vaccine Group on the National Institutes of Health clinical trials website, ClinicalTrials.gov. She had heard about a trial at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelmen School of Medicine, where the use of gene-transfer therapy converted the patients’ own immune cells into weapons aimed at cancerous tumors. All 12 patients had advanced stage leukemia; nine of the 12 responded positively to the treatment, and two of the first three patients treated have been in remission for two full years.  The Perlelmen results encouraged her to seek out a UW study to see if she qualified.

The UW Tumor Vaccine Group currently offers clinical trials for patients with breast, ovarian or colon cancer. Hideg is in a very desirable trial with very specific criteria, and being approved to participate wasn’t easy. The goal of the clinical trial is to allow the patient to make and keep enough antibodies to quash any future HER-2 expressing breast cancer.

Dr. Nora Disis, UW professor of medicine and principal investigator of the study, explains how the vaccine may work.

“The vaccine is designed to stimulate a particular cell of the immune system, the T cell, to recognize the HER2 protein (that causes cancer),” Disis said. “If effective immunity is generated, the T cell activated by the vaccine should be able to hunt out tumor cells wherever they may be and destroy them.  This particular study is testing the use of an immune stimulator, ampligen, which may be able to activate the T cells more effectively than other agents we have used before.“

Clare McLean

The injection site for the tumor vaccine being tested raises four small dots on Dr. Hideg’s forearm.

Last month, Hideg received a vaccine dose at UW Medical Center. The process is gentle — a series of four small injections that make a little grid of dots on the upper arm — but the body’s response can be angry. Hideg experienced flu-like symptoms after the first visit. The reaction  may actually be a promising sign that her body is responding to the vaccine.

She’s positive and funny in the face of serious medicine. She tweets pictures of her experience to a network of fans and writes about her cancer in Spokane’s daily newspaper, the Spokesman-Review. In addition to being a doctor, patient and full-time mother, Hideg recently went through a series of intense interviews to add “teacher” to her resume. She has become a clinical faculty member to teach second-year UW medical students at the Spokane WWAMI site.  WWAMI is a regionalized medical education program that covers Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.

“Teaching has always been a part of my clinical practice,” Hideg said. “I have taught medical students, residents and others in my clinic since I finished my own training. This experience has reminded me how important teaching can be and how much I enjoy passing on what I have learned as a physician, a parent, and as a patient. Whether the vaccine is effective for me or not, I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the trial and help move the science forward. I believe in the potential of vaccine therapy for cancer and perhaps for other diseases also and I want a future with more options for my daughter and for others.”

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University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.

UW/NanoFacture/KNR

Hand-held device for extracting DNA.

The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

“It’s very complex to extract DNA,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research. “When you think of the current procedure, the equivalent is like collecting human hairs using a construction crane.”

This technology aims to clear those hurdles. The small, box-shaped kit now is ready for manufacturing, then eventual distribution to hospitals and clinics. NanoFacture, a UW spinout company, signed a contract with Korean manufacturer KNR Systems last month at a ceremony in Olympia, Wash.

The UW, led by Chung, spearheaded the research and invention of the technology, and still manages the intellectual property.

Separating DNA from bodily fluids is a cumbersome process that’s become a bottleneck as scientists make advances in genome sequencing, particularly for disease prevention and treatment. The market for DNA preparation alone is about $3 billion each year.

Conventional methods use a centrifuge to spin and separate DNA molecules or strain them from a fluid sample with a micro-filter, but these processes take 20 to 30 minutes to complete and can require excessive toxic chemicals.

UW engineers designed microscopic probes that dip into a fluid sample – saliva, sputum or blood – and apply an electric field within the liquid. That draws particles to concentrate around the surface of the tiny probe. Larger particles hit the tip and swerve away, but DNA-sized molecules stick to the probe and are trapped on the surface. It takes two or three minutes to separate and purify DNA using this technology.

“This simple process removes all the steps of conventional methods,” Chung said.

The hand-held device can clean four separate human fluid samples at once, but the technology can be scaled up to prepare 96 samples at a time, which is standard for large-scale handling.

UW/NanoFacture/KNR

A close-up view of the portable device.

The tiny probes, called microtips and nanotips, were designed and built at the UW in a micro-fabrication facility where a technician can make up to 1 million tips in a year, which is key in proving that large-scale production is feasible, Chung said.

Engineers in Chung’s lab also have designed a pencil-sized device using the same probe technology that could be sent home with patients or distributed to those serving in the military overseas. Patients could swab their cheeks, collect a saliva sample, then process their DNA on the spot to send back to hospitals and labs for analysis.

This could be useful as efforts ramp up toward sequencing each person’s genome for disease prevention and treatment, Chung said.

The market for this device isn’t developed yet, but Chung’s team will be ready when it is. Meanwhile, the larger device is ready for commercialization, and its creators have started working with distributors.

A UW Center for Commercialization grant of $50,000 seeded initial research in 2008, and since then researchers have received about $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Sang-gyeun Ahn, a UW assistant professor of industrial design, crafted the prototype.

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For more information, contact Chung at jae71@uw.edu or 206-543-4355.

The new, deadly Human Coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center was named for the Dutch hospital that identified the virus in a patient specimen.

A new virus that causes severe breathing distress and kidney failure elicits a distinctive airway cell response to allow it to multiply.  Scientists studying the Human Coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center, which first appeared April 2012 in the Middle East, have discovered helpful details about its stronghold tactics.

Their findings predict that certain currently available compounds might treat the infection.  These could act not by killing the virus directly but by keeping lung cells from being forced to create a hospitable environment for the virus to reproduce.  The researchers caution that their lab and computer predictions would need to be tested to see if the drugs work clinically.

The results appear in the April 30 issue of mBio, the Journal of the American Society for Microbiology. University of Washington virologist Laurence Josset is lead author of the paper, “Cell host-response to infection with novel human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center predicts potential antivirals and important differences with SARS-coronavirus.” She conducted the research in the laboratory of senior author Michael G. Katze, UW professor of microbiology noted for pioneering systems biology approaches to host and pathogen interactions.

Eleven of the 17 reported human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center cases worldwide were fatal. The virus is named for the Dutch hospital that identified the specimen from a Saudi Arabia patient. So far the illness has not easily passed person to person.  The new disease agent belongs to the betacoronavirus family, as does the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus, SARS.  Both viruses attack the lungs.  The new virus, however, is more closely related to bat coronaviruses than to SARS.  The two viruses latch onto different receptors to infect cells.

Rose Howard

Systems biologist Michael Katze (left) and virologist Laurence Josset are developing rapid computational analyses of host/pathogen interactions to quickly predict possible treatments for emerging infectious diseases.

Josset, Katze and their team learned that, shortly after human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center enters lung cells, it, like the SARS virus, induces changes in how the cells’ genes are regulated.  But the newer virus does so sooner.   Later, and throughout infection, the human coronavirus-EMC incites a massive sabotage – much greater than that of the SARS virus – of many genetic controls of protein production in lung cells grown in the laboratory.

“We found that a set of 207 genes in the lung cells was dysregulated early and permanently throughout infection with human coronavirus-EMC,” Josset said.  Various RNA levels were turned up or down.  The new virus appears to specifically hamper the work of several genes that enable the body to sense the presence of viruses.   The scientists believe such gene re-tuning by the virus could significantly lower the ability of lung cells to mount an appropriate antiviral reaction.

While SARS and coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center activated a few similar lung cell responses for their own benefit, overall, not much overlap occurred.  Each bad actor had its own modus operandi for interfering with lung cell gene activities.

“These differences in host gene-expression responses in the lab-grown lung cells,” the researchers said, “might affect how each virus causes illness in an infected individual.”

At present no proven treatment exists for human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center.  Because the virus succeeds in multiplying by hijacking cellular processes initiated in response to infection, the scientists searched for drugs that might target these cellular responses, and in so doing stop the virus from reproducing.  The researchers mentioned that this same approach is already being tested in influenza treatment. Drugs that reduce the body’s excessive inflammatory reaction to the flu virus have therapeutic benefit.

The scientists obtained a rapid, comprehensive assessment of the new coronavirus’s infective strategies by creating a global profile of how it disrupts gene transcription, the process by which DNA is copied into RNA for subsequent translation into proteins.  They analyzed this extensive data with computer programs that predict which current drugs might be re-purposed to correct the body’s virus-co-opted immune response.

The method could have widespread applications in fighting future dangerous viruses.

“Such an approach has the advantage of accelerating treatment availability, which could be crucial in case of an outbreak of an emerging pathogen,” Josset said.

Katze concurred, “Laurence and others in our group are developing new computational approaches to efficiently exploit information about the gene expression profiles induced by existing drugs and small molecules. Our goal is to quickly identify drugs that can modify specific host responses to virus infection.”

In the case of human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center, the approach yielded two promising possibilities.  The analysis suggested that the early and sustained changes in lung cell gene regulation could be reverted by four types of kinase inhibitor and one kind of glucocorticoid.  Additional studies are necessary, the researcher said, to determine the safety, effectiveness and required dosages of these drugs in treating human coronavirus-EMC.

What this study highlights, Josset said, is the advantages of fast, automated analysis of the transcriptome (all the messenger RNAs transcribed from the genome) of the infected cells.

“This method globally and efficiently characterizes the host response to emerging pathogens,” Josset said.  Data on the basic properties of a new virus and its interactions with host cells can usually be collected speedily.  It takes, on average, between two weeks to a month after the virus has been identified and isolated.

The gene expression data obtained from the analysis of human coronavirus-Erasmus Medical Center infection, she said, was so robust that it “provides a plethora of data to mine for further understanding and ideas to test about the new virus.”

“Because,” she added, “host response profiles also can be used to quickly identify possible treatment strategies, we anticipate that generating such profiles will become a general strategy for rapid characterization of future emerging viruses.”

Katze noted, “The emergence of new viruses, such as the H7N9 influenza virus in China, will continue to be a threat to public health. Devising new strategies to rapidly identify effective antiviral drugs is a high priority.”

In addition to Josset and Katze, the other researchers on the project were Vineet D. Menachery, Lisa E. Gralinski, Sudhakar Agnihothram, Boyd L. Yount,  Rachel L. Graham,  and Ralph S. Baric, all of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Pavel Sova and Victoria S. Carter, both of the UW.

The project was funded in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, contract HHSN272200800060C and grant U54AI081680.

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• Engineering Discovery Days
• Fri., April 26, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.
• Sat., April 27, 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Which is better for electrical storage: A potato, a lemon, an AA battery or a car battery?

If you’re curious, the answer to this question and more will be scattered around the University of Washington campus on Friday and Saturday, April 26-27, during the 2013 Engineering Discovery Days.

College of Engineering Dean's Office

A student gets a hug from the next-generation personal robot at last year’s event.

Friday’s events geared toward school-aged children are at capacity, but families and members of the UW community can stop by on Saturday to see the hands-on exhibits, meet research teams and visit various engineering labs.

Saturday’s program also includes presentations for high school students about each engineering department, admissions and financial aid, and women in science and engineering.

The promenade along Rainier Vista and Drumheller Fountain will be filled with outdoor exhibits, and many of the engineering buildings will house the indoor displays. Look for old favorites such as the glowing pickle exhibit, homemade silly putty and flame movement demonstrations. You may also spot a water rocket, human-powered submarine and a life-sized robot.

Some new exhibits on this year’s program are wool dying, game demonstrations from the Center for Game Science and solar cell-powered toy car races. There will also be a scavenger hunt in which students visit various stations to find answers to baffling and quirky science questions.

Both days are free and open to everyone, but organizers ask that attendees register online. Close to 10,000 visitors are expected over the two days to this nearly century-old UW event.

Organizers recommend avoiding driving on campus during the event. Public transit and parking are available.

Photos from this year’s event will be posted on the Engineering Discovery Days Facebook page.

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• U.S. Ocean Observatories Initiative
• UW-led regional cabled observatory
• UW Applied Physics Laboratory work building the observatory

The basement lab near the University of Washington campus is, literally, buzzing. High-voltage machines produce energy that will soon run through cables snaking along the seafloor. A dozen engineers hunch over electronics, making alterations or running checks. In one corner, a nitride-coated titanium shaft has been sitting in a bucket of saltwater for four months to test the coating for corrosion. A glass-walled cleanroom prevents contaminants from interfering with seals on housings designed to keep out seawater pressing in at 4,200 pounds per square inch.

This is crunch time for University of Washington preparations to build the world’s largest underwater observatory. The National Science Foundation in 2009 launched the $239 million effort, pending availability of funds and Congressional approval. John Delaney, UW professor of oceanography, leads the project to create a cabled observatory that will bring power and Internet to the ocean floor. This new concept will use remote-controlled instruments and high-bandwidth video to create an enduring, real-time presence in the deep ocean.

Researchers in the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory were tasked by Delaney to build and test the equipment that will make up the observatory. Much of that equipment will be installed this summer. This is the biggest project the 70-year-old marine engineering institute has ever undertaken, said project lead Gary Harkins, a principal engineer with the lab.

“This concept of a real-time observatory will change what we do as ocean engineers, what we will learn how to do, and what ocean scientists can do with these systems now and in the future,” Harkins said.

The cabled observatory, known as the Regional Scale Nodes project, is part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative, an effort to integrate U.S. measurements of the ocean and seafloor. Other partners will build coastal and global observing networks, manage the data and conduct educational outreach. The Pacific Northwest observatory will span the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the Washington and Oregon coasts, the likely source of the next large regional earthquake.

Most of the regional network’s components will be built from aircraft-grade titanium because the material is strong and resists corrosion, which is crucial for electronics that will spend decades in saltwater.

“We are having a notable impact on the non-aircraft market for titanium,” remarked Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Geoff Cram.

Even so, most components must be designed to be switched out for possible repairs or upgrades during the observatory’s projected 25-year lifespan.

Over the past two summers, the backbone cable and high-voltage junction boxes were laid by telecommunications contractors. This summer’s deployments venture into uncharted territories. The team has booked 60 days of ship time on the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel for three cruises in July and August. Researchers will install lower-voltage cables that run from high-voltage nodes closer to the areas of scientific interest: deep-ocean volcanoes, seismically active plates, and an underwater ridge that seeps energy-rich methane gas.

While the engineering team readies the components, the science team is mapping out the science plan and finalizing the cruise details.

“The timeline isn’t forgiving on this one,” Cram noted.

In design work over the past four years, the engineers have considered how to protect the infrastructure from a possible failure by any of the components – some of which are experimental, and none of which has operated for this long at these pressures. They also have created a common time stamp for all the data, since scientists might want to make precise comparisons of measurements taken by different instruments at opposite ends of the network. They will do their best to protect all the instruments from ships, waves, marine animals and corrosion.

As the team finalizes the design, engineers have to ensure the sensors don’t interfere with each other. They also have to dissipate heat from the electronics, which give off about as much heat as a 60-watt light bulb but, in a tightly sealed housing, could still fry instruments.

“This is a highly integrated system operating in a very challenging environment,” said Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Dana Manalang, who oversees the sensor group. “From an engineering perspective, that makes this a challenging project.”

The team this summer will install about 40 sensors, of 13 different types, now being assembled and tested at the UW. The instruments include:

• A high-definition video and still camera that will provide live footage, starting this summer, to researchers and the public.
• Seismometers to provide early warning of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
• Commercial oceanographic sensors, including three precision pressure sensors built by Sea-Bird Electronics of Bellevue, Wash.
• Water samplers built by UW oceanographer David Butterfield. Some samples will be stored until researchers collect them; others will be analyzed in place to detect the seawater’s chemical and genetic contents.
• A deep-water mass spectrometer, developed by Harvard University oceanographer Peter Girguis, that will be installed near the volcano’s caldera
• Chemical sensors, developed by UW oceanographer Marv Lilley, that will go inside the hydrothermal vents. These will be inserted slowly so fragile ceramic parts survive the transition from near-freezing water to 570 ºF (300 ºC) temperatures inside the vent.
• Seafloor pressure and tilt sensors, developed by Bill Chadwick at Oregon State University, that detect pressure buildup below the ocean floor.

UW engineers have designed the system to digitize all this data and send it back to land via the cables in a few thousandths of a second.

Miles of underwater cable will arrive during coming weeks to a UW storage facility on Lake Washington. The engineering team will expand there as it builds components and outgrows its campus lab space.

The next few months will be hectic, said Harkins. Some of the UW researchers will join the telecommunications contractor to run a month-long final check of the backbone cable system from the Newport, Ore. shore station. UW engineers will build and test 10 secondary nodes to drive the instruments that will be installed this summer. Members of the engineering team will work with contractors and scientists to run pressure tests and perform final checks on their instruments.

Yet another team is developing a profiling system that records data in the upper 650 feet (200 m) of the ocean. That system is perhaps the most technically challenging aspect of the whole observatory, researchers said, and won’t be installed until summer of 2014, but initial testing will begin this summer at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Forty-six UW faculty and staff members are putting in long hours on the cabled observatory, including 15 on the science team and 31 on the engineering side.

Whoever you talk to, there’s one common refrain: “This is going to be a very busy summer.”

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For more information, contact Nancy Penrose, UW’s OOI Communications Coordinator, at 206-221-5781 or penrose@ocean.washington.edu.

A new procedure that thickens and thins fluid at the micron level could save consumers and manufacturers money, particularly for soap products that depend on certain molecules to effectively deal with grease and dirt. Researchers at the University of Washington published their findings online April 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read the back of most shampoos and dishwashing detergents and you’ll find the word “surfactant” in the list of active ingredients. Surfactant molecules are tiny, yet they are the reason dish soap can attack an oily spot and shampoo can rid the scalp of grease.

Surfactant molecules are made up of two main parts, a head and a tail. Heads are attracted to water, while the tails are oil-soluble. This unique structure helps them break down and penetrate grease and oil while immersed in water. It also makes the soaps, shampoos and detergents thicker, or more viscous.

Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and UW

A web-like, gel structure is formed after fluid passes through the flow device. The unit of measurement is 1 micron.

Soap manufacturers add organic and synthetic surfactants – and often a slew of other ingredients – to their products to achieve a desired thickness and to help remove grease and dirt. These extra ingredients add volume to the soap products, which then cost more to manufacture, package and ship, ultimately shifting more costs to consumers, said Amy Shen, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering and lead author of the paper.

The research team’s design could create the same thickening results without having to add extra ingredients.

“Our flow procedure can potentially help companies and consumers save a lot of money,” Shen said. “This way, companies don’t have to add too many surfactants to their products.”

Researchers found that when they manipulated the flow of a liquid through microscopic channels, the resulting substance became thicker. Now, scientists add a lot of salt, or alter the temperature and level of acidity to induce this change, but these methods can be expensive and more toxic, Shen said.

The team built a palm-sized tool called a microfluidics device that lets researchers pump water mixed with a little detergent and salt through a series of vertical posts. The distance between posts is about one-tenth the size of a single human hair. That micron-sized gap squeezes the liquid as it flows, causing it to quickly deform. The end result is a gel-like substance that’s more viscous and elastic.

University of Washington

A diagram showing how the microfluidics device works. Water mixed with salt and soap is injected into a spout (left back). The fluid travels through a series of posts (see enlarged segment) that cause the fluid to thicken.

When researchers looked at high-resolution images of the end product, they saw a series of wormlike rods attaching and intermingling with each other, creating an entangled web. This structure stayed intact after the procedure was complete, which suggests this process can create a permanent, scaffold-like network that could prove useful for biological applications, Shen said. She is collaborating with other UW researchers to try to create stable structures that could house enzymes and other biomarkers for detecting certain diseases.

Shen and her team also discovered that when they pumped a thicker, more elastic fluid through the device, the opposite effect happened – the gel became thinner and more porous. This could be useful in biomedical applications, Shen said, though it hasn’t yet been tested. In theory, a semi-solid gel could be injected into veins, then transform into a thinner liquid, delivering drugs throughout the body.

Researchers hope one eventual outcome will be a scaled-up industrial design of their microfluidics device that could help manufacturers churn out soap products that aren’t filled with an excess of added materials. Shen has presented her initial findings at Procter & Gamble Co.

“What we can provide are all of the important parameters for operating conditions so companies can have an industrial design to achieve their goals,” Shen said.

Research collaborators are Joshua Cardiel and Ya Zhao, UW doctoral students in mechanical engineering; Alice Dohnalkova, senior research scientist at Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.; and Neville Dubash and Perry Cheung, former post-doctoral researchers in mechanical engineering.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Shen at amyshen@uw.edu or 206-708-3411.

Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing the cosmic microwave background – a faint glow in the universe that acts as sort of a fossilized fingerprint of the Big Bang – Cramer has produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller and richer sound. (The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than 8 minutes.)

The effect is similar to what seismologists describe as a magnitude 9 earthquake causing the entire planet to actually ring. In this case, however, the ringing covered the entire universe – before it grew to such gargantuan proportions.

“Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small,” Cramer said.

European Space Agency/Planck Collaboration

The Planck satellite mission mapped light temperature differences on the oldest surface known — the background sky left billions of years ago when our universe first became transparent to light. Those differences helped to recreate the sound of the Big Bang.

In 2001, Cramer wrote a science-based column for Analog Science Fiction & Fact magazine describing the likely sound of the Big Bang based on cosmic microwave background radiation observations taken from balloon experiments and satellites.

A couple of years later that article prompted a question from a mother in Pennsylvania whose 11-year-old son was working on a project about the Big Bang: Is the sound of the Big Bang actually recorded anywhere?

Cramer answered that it wasn’t – but then began thinking that it could be. He used data from the cosmic microwave background on temperature fluctuations in the very early universe. The data on those wavelength changes were fed into a computer program called Mathematica, which converted them to sound. A 100-second recording represents the sound from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang until until about 760,000 years after the Big Bang.

“The original sound waves were not temperature variations, though, but were real sound waves propagating around the universe,” he said.

Cramer noted, however, that the 2003 data lacked high-frequency structure. More complete data were recently gathered by an international collaboration using the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite mission, which has detectors so sensitive that they can distinguish temperature variations of a few millionths of a degree in the cosmic microwave background. That data were released in late March and led to the new recordings.

As the universe cooled and expanded, it stretched the wavelengths to create “more of a bass instrument,” Cramer said. The sound gets lower as the wavelengths are stretched farther, and at first it gets louder but then gradually fades. The sound was, in fact, so “bass” that he had to boost the frequency 100 septillion times (that’s a 100 followed by 24 more zeroes) just to get the recordings into a range where they can be heard by humans.

Cramer is a UW physics professor who has been part of a large collaboration studying what the universe might have been like moments after the Big Bang by causing collisions between heavy ions such as gold in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Creating a sound profile for the Big Bang was something to do on the side, Cramer said.

“It was an interesting thing to do that I wanted to share. It’s another way to look at the work these people are doing,” he said.

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For more information, contact Cramer at jcramer@uw.edu.

University of Washington researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks.

University of Washington, MSNW

A concept image of a spacecraft powered by a fusion-driven rocket. In this image, the crew would be in the forward-most chamber. Solar panels on the sides would collect energy to initiate the process that creates fusion.

“Using existing rocket fuels, it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said lead researcher John Slough, a UW research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. “We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.”

The project is funded through NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Last month at a symposium, Slough and his team from MSNW, of which he is president, presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results. Theirs was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of funding last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.

NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology. The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive – the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.

Slough and his team have published papers calculating the potential for 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a rocket powered by fusion, which would make the trip more practical and less costly.

But is this really feasible?

Slough and his colleagues at MSNW think so. They have demonstrated successful lab tests of all portions of the process. Now, the key will be combining each isolated test into a final experiment that produces fusion using this technology, Slough said.

The research team has developed a type of plasma that is encased in its own magnetic field. Nuclear fusion occurs when this plasma is compressed to high pressure with a magnetic field. The team has successfully tested this technique in the lab.

Only a small amount of fusion is needed to power a rocket – a small grain of sand of this material has the same energy content as 1 gallon of rocket fuel.

To power a rocket, the team has devised a system in which a powerful magnetic field causes large metal rings to implode around this plasma, compressing it to a fusion state. The converging rings merge to form a shell that ignites the fusion, but only for a few microseconds. Even though the compression time is very short, enough energy is released from the fusion reactions to quickly heat and ionize the shell. This super-heated, ionized metal is ejected out of the rocket nozzle at a high velocity. This process is repeated every minute or so, propelling the spacecraft.

In the video below, the plasma (purple) is injected while lithium metal rings (green) rapidly collapse around the plasma, creating fusion.

The UW-MSNW team has successfully demonstrated the metal-crushing process in the UW Plasma Dynamics Laboratory in Redmond. The video below, taken from a 3-D computer simulation, shows three lithium rings as they collapse around plasma material.

The team had a sample of the collapsed, fist-sized aluminum ring resulting from one of those tests on hand for people to see and touch at the recent NASA symposium.

“I think everybody was pleased to see confirmation of the principal mechanism that we’re using to compress the plasma,” Slough said. “We hope we can interest the world with the fact that fusion isn’t always 40 years away and doesn’t always cost $2 billion.”

Now, the team is working to bring it all together by using the technology to compress the plasma and create nuclear fusion. Slough hopes to have everything ready for a first test at the end of the summer.

The Plasma Dynamics Lab – where Slough and colleagues, including UW graduate students, build and conduct experiments – is filled wall-to-wall with blue capacitors that hold energy, each functioning like a high-voltage battery. The capacitors are hooked up to a giant magnet that houses the chamber where the fusion reaction will take place. With the flip of a switch, the capacitors are simultaneously triggered to deliver 1 million amps of electricity for a fraction of a second to the magnet, which quickly compresses the metal ring.

University of Washington, MSNW

The fusion driven rocket test chamber at the UW Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond. The green vacuum chamber is surrounded by two large, high-strength aluminum magnets. These magnets are powered by energy-storage capacitors through the many cables connected to them.

The mechanical process and equipment used are reasonably straightforward, which Slough said supports their design working in space.

“Anything you put in space has to function in a fairly simple manner,” he said. “You can extrapolate this technology to something usable in space.”

In actual space travel, scientists would use lithium metal as the crushing rings to power the rocket. Lithium is very reactive, and for lab-testing purposes, aluminum works just as well, Slough said.

Nuclear fusion may draw concern because of its application in nuclear bombs, but its use in this scenario is very different, Slough said. The fusion energy for powering a rocket would be reduced by a factor of 1 billion from a hydrogen bomb, too little to create a significant explosion. Also, Slough’s concept uses a strong magnetic field to contain the fusion fuel and guide it safely away from the spacecraft and any passengers within.

Research partners are Anthony Pancotti, David Kirtley and George Votroubek, all of MSNW; Christopher Pihl, research engineer in aeronautics and astronautics at UW; and Michael Pfaff, a UW doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics.

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For more information, contact Slough at 425-319-5024 or sloughj@uw.edu.

More videos are available on the fusion-driven rocket’s YouTube channel.

Dr. Debby W. Tsuang, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Dr. Marshall S. Horwitz, professor of pathology, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, led the multi-institutional study.  Tsuang is also a staff physician at the Puget Sound Veterans Administration Health Care System.

The results are published in the April 3 online edition of the JAMA Psychiatry.

Loss of brain nerve cell integrity occurs in schizophrenia, but scientists have not worked out the details of when and how this happens. In all five families in the present study, the researchers found rare variants in genes tied to the networking of certain signal receptors on nerve cells distributed throughout the brain. These N-methyl-D-aspartate, or NMDA, receptors are widespread molecular control towers in the brain. They regulate the release of chemical messages that influence the strength of brain cell connections and the ongoing remodeling of the networks.

These receptors respond to glutamate, one of the most common nerve-signaling chemicals in the brain, and they are also found on brain circuits that manage dopamine release. Dopamine is a nerve signal associated with reward-seeking, movement and emotions.  Deficits in glutamate and dopamine function have both been implicated in schizophrenia but most of the medications that have been developed to treat schizophrenia have targeted dopamine receptors.

Tsuang and her groups’ discovery of gene variations that disturb N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor networking functions supports the hypothesis that decreased NMDA receptor-mediated nerve-signal transmissions contributes to some cases of schizophrenia.

Alice C. Gray

Gene variants that affect brain signal receptors may be one of several causes of schizophrenia symptoms, which can include terrifying hallucinations.

Tsuang pointed out that several hallucinogenic drugs, such as ketamine and phencyclidine (PCP, or angel dust), block N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors and can produce symptoms similar to schizophrenia. These are the strongest evidence implicating these receptors in schizophrenia. The drugs sometimes induce psychosis and terrifying sensory detachment. Reports of such effects in recreational drug users fingered faulty NMDA receptor networks as suspects in schizophrenia.

In all five of their study families, Tsuang’s team detected rare protein-altering variants in one of three genes involved with the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor network.  One of the genes, GRM5, is directly linked with glutamate signaling. In the other two genes, the links are indirect and connected through other proteins synthesized in brain cells. One of these proteins, PPEF2, appears to affect the levels of certain brain nerve-cell signaling mediators, and the other altered protein, LRP1B, may compete with a normal protein for a binding spot on a subunit of the NMDA receptor.

These discoveries provide additional clues to the molecular disarray that might occur in the brain nerve cells of some patients with schizophrenia, and suggest new targets for therapy for certain patients. In a disease occurring in about 1 percent of the population, the picture of how and why schizophrenia arises in all these people is far from complete.

“Disorders like schizophrenia are likely to have many underlying causes,” Tsuang noted.  She added that it might eventually make sense to divide schizophrenia into categories based, for example, on which biochemical pathways in the brain are disrupted.  Treatments might be developed to correct the exact malfunctioning mechanisms underlying various forms of the disease.

Tsuang gave an example: Agents that stimulate N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor-mediated nerve-signal transmissions include glycine-site blockers and glycine-transport inhibitors have shown some encouraging results in pre-clinical drug trials, but mostly in adjunctive treatment in addition to standard antipsychotic therapy.

“But perhaps the data we have generated will help pharmaceutical companies target specific subunits of the NMDA receptors and pathways,” Tsuang said.  She added, however, that effective treatments may lag by many years after these kinds of discoveries.  Someday it may make sense to initiate such treatments in people at high genetic risk when early symptoms, such as apathy and lack of motivation, appear, and before brain dysfunction is severe.

Also, possessing the newly discovered gene mutations does not always mean that a person will become schizophrenic. In the recent family study, three of the five families had relatives with the protein-altering variants who did not have schizophrenia.

“This isn’t surprising,” Tsuang observed, “Given that schizophrenia is such a complex disorder, we would expect that not everyone who carries the variants would develop the disease.”  In the future, researchers will be seeking what triggers the gene variants into causing problems, other mutations within affected individuals’ genetic profile that might promote or protect against disease, as well as non-genetic factors in the onset of the illness in genetically susceptible people.

The researchers also utilized a strategy and selected more distant relatives of affected individuals for genetic sequencing.   Distant kin share, a smaller proportion of genes compared to closely related family members.  For example,siblings typically on the average share about 50 percent of their genes whereas cousins on the average share 12.5 percent of their genes. The researhers also hypothesized that the causative mutation within each family would be the same variant.

This strategy helped the researchers decrease the number of genetic variants that were detected by sequencing and thereby concentrate only on the remaining strongest candidates. The researchers also filtered their results against the many publicly available sequencing databases. This allowed them to pick out genetic variants not seen in individuals without psychiatric illness.

According to Tsuang, the research team was excited by recent advances in technology enabled them to uncover unknown, rare genetic variants not previously found in large populations without psychiatric condition. The ability to rapidly sequence only those portions of the genome that code for proteins made this experiment possible.

The next step for the researchers will be to screen for the newly discovered genetic variants in a large sample of unrelated cases of schizophrenia compared to controls. They want to determine if the variants are statistically associated with the disease.

The study was funded by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Independent Investigator Award, National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institutes of Health, and the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

In addition to Tsuang and Horwitz, the first author on this publication is Andrew Timms, postdoctoral fellow in Horwitz’ laboratory and second author is Michael O. Dorschner of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Puget Sound Veterans Administration Health Care System.

Other scientists on the study were Jeremy Wechsler and Robert Kirkwood, of the UW Department of Pathology;  Carl Baker and Evan Eichler of the UW Department of Genome Sciences; and Olena Korvatska of the UW Department of Medicine, Division of Medical Genetics; Kyu Yeong Choi and Katherine W. Roche, of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health;  Santhosh Girirajan of the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.

The partnership slate for UW Medicine Health.

UW Medicine will launch a multi-media initiative April 1 to provide consumers with health and wellness information. In partnership with Fisher Communications, UW Medicine also will increase awareness of the latest treatments and medical breakthroughs at UW Medicine.

“In support of our mission to improve the health of the public, UW Medicine recognizes the need to encourage each member of our community to take responsibility for their personal health,” said Dr. Paul G. Ramsey, CEO of UW Medicine. “With this initiative, our audiences will gain valuable knowledge and tools for engaging in preventive care and establishing rewarding personal health behaviors.”

KOMO broadcast reporter Molly Shen will introduce the UW Medicine Health series.

“The new initiative is part of UW Medicine’s overall strategy to provide comprehensive care for our community,” said Johnese Spisso, UW Medicine’s chief health system officer. “It will highlight UW Medicine’s expertise in a broad range of primary care and specialty fields while helping consumers make informed decisions about their treatment options in our health system.”

Look for:

• Regular television and radio spots featuring UW Medicine experts and patients.on Fisher Communication’s KOMO News, KOMO News Radio and STAR 101.5. Topics for the first three months include heart, vascular and brain health.

• A new dedicated website, UW Medicine Health, uwmedicinehealth.com. It will have timely news items, features and columns about health and wellness, medical research advances and patient stories.

KOMO news anchor Molly Shen will introduce the program to viewers and listeners of KOMO News, KOMO News Radio and Star 101.5. The first series of TV and radio spots on heart health will begin April 8. During these segments, UW Medicine experts and patients will share stories and insights about the care they received at UW Medicine.

This month’s articles on heart health include:

• UW Medicine Regional Heart Center leads in heart care.
• How to reduce your risk of coronary artery disease.
• New defibrillator for treating heart rhythm disorders.
• Multi-specialty care saves a triathlon runner with heart disease.

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For more information, contact UW Medicine Strategic Marketing & Communications at 206-543-3620.

Christopher Merrikh

Using bacteria as a model organism, Houra Merrikh, assistant professor of microbiology, and her student Samuel Million-Weaver, study DNA replication and transcription conflicts that can lead to genomic instability and mutations.

Bacteria appear to speed up their evolution by positioning specific genes along the route of expected traffic jams in DNA encoding. Certain genes are in prime collision paths for the moving molecular machineries that read the DNA code, as University of Washington scientists explain in this week’s edition of Nature. Read the article.

The spatial-organization tactics their model organism, Bacillus subtilis, takes to evolve and adapt might be imitated in other related Gram-positive bacteria, including harmful, ever-changing germs like staph, strep, and listeria, to strengthen their virulence or cause persistent infections. The researchers think that these mechanisms for accelerating evolution may be found in other living creatures as well.

Replication – the duplicating of the genetic code to create a new set of genes– and transcription – the copying of DNA code to produce a protein – are not separated by time or space in bacteria. Therefore, clashes between these machineries are inevitable. Replication traveling rapidly along a DNA strand can be stalled by a head-on encounter or same-direction brush with slower-moving transcription.

The senior authors of the study, Houra Merrikh, UW assistant professor of microbiology, and Evgeni Sokurenko, UW professor of microbiology, and their research teams are collaborating to understand the evolutionary consequences of these conflicts. The major focus of Merrikh and her research team is on understanding mechanistic and physiological aspects of conflicts in living cells – including why and how these collisions lead to mutations.

Impediments to replication, they noted, can cause instability within the genome, such as chromosome deletions or rearrangements, or incomplete separation of genetic material during cell division. When dangerous collisions take place, bacteria sometimes employ methods to repair, and then restart, the paused DNA replication, Merrikh discovered in her earlier work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Christopher Merrikh

The researchers on the Nature paper “Accelerated gene evolution through replication-transcription conflicts” pose before a microbiology history timeline. They are: Sandip Paul, Houra Merrikh, Evgeni Sokurenko, Sujay Chattopadhyay, and Samuel Million-Weaver, all of the UW Department of Microbiology

To avoid unwanted encounters, bacteria orient most of their genes along what is called the leading strand of DNA, rather than the lagging. The terms refer to the direction the encoding activities travel on different forks of the unwinding DNA. Head-on collisions between replication and transcription happen on the lagging strand.

Despite the heightened risk of gene-altering clashes, the study bacteria B. subtilis still orients 25 percent of all its genes, and 6 percent of its essential genes, on the lagging strand.

The scientist observed that genes under the greatest natural selection pressure for amino-acid mutations, a sign of their adaptive significance, were on the lagging strand. Amino acids are the building blocks for proteins. Based on their analysis of mutations on the leading and the lagging strands, the researchers found that the rate of accumulation of mutations was faster in the genes oriented to be subject to head-on replication-transcription conflicts, in contrast to co-directional conflicts.

According to the researchers, together the mutational analyses of the genomes and the experimental findings indicate that head-on conflicts were more likely than same-direction conflicts to cause mutations. They also found that longer genes provided more opportunities for replication-transcription conflicts to occur. Lengthy genes were more prone to mutate.

The researchers noted that head-on replication-transcription encounters, and the subsequent mutations, could significantly increase structural variations in the proteins coded by the affected genes. Some of these chance variations might give the bacteria new options for adapting to changes or stresses in their environment. Like savvy investors, the bacteria appear to protect most of their genetic assets, but offer a few up to the high-roll stakes of mutation.

The researchers pointed out, “A simple switch in gene orientation …could facilitate evolution in specific genes in a targeted way. Investigating the main targets of conflict-mediated formation of mutations is likely to show far-reaching insights into adaptation and evolution of organisms.”

The research project was supported with start-up funds from the UW Department of Microbiology and with grants from the National Institutes of Health (RC4AI092828 and RO1 GM084318.)

Scientists on this project, in addition to Merrikh and Sokurenko, were Sandip Paul, Samuel Million-Weaver, and Sujay Chattopadhyay, all of the UW Department of Microbiology.

Barcelona Superconducting Center

Alya Red, an electromechanical computational model of the heart developed at the Barcelona Superconducting Center, shows cardiac muscle fibers. UW researchers are seeking ways to strengthen weakened heart muscles through gene therapy.

The potential of gene therapy to boost heart muscle function was explored in a recent University of Washington animal study. The findings suggest that it might be possible to use this approach to treat patients whose hearts have been weakened by heart attacks and other heart conditions.

Michael Regnier, UW professor and vice chair of bioengineering, Charles Murry, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Biology and co-director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and Sarah Nowakowski, a UW graduate student in bioengineering, led the study. The findings appeared online March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Normally, muscle contraction is powered by a molecule, the nucleotide called adenosine-5′-triphosphate, or ATP. Other naturally occurring nucleotides can also power muscle contraction, but in most cases they have proven to be less effective than ATP.

Dr. Charles Murry in his heart muscle cell research lab.

In an earlier study of isolated muscle, however, Regnier, Murry and their colleagues had found that one naturally occurring molecule, called 2 deoxy-ATP, or dATP, was actually more effective than ATP in powering muscle contraction.  dATP  increased both the speed and force of the contraction, at least over the short-term.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to see whether this effect could be sustained. To do this, they used genetic engineering to create a strain of mice whose cells produced higher-than-normal levels of an enzyme called ribonucleotide reductase. This enzyme converts the precursor of  ATP, adenosine-5’-diphosphate or ADP, to dADP, which, in turn, is rapidly converted to dATP.

Dr. Michael Regnier holds a model of a heart in one hand, and a hand weight in another.

“This fundamental discovery, that dATP can act as a ‘super-fuel’ for the contractile machinery of the heart, or myofilaments, opens up the possibility to treat a variety of heart failure conditions,” Regnier, an established investigator of the American Heart Association, said. “An exciting aspect of this study and our ongoing work is that a relatively small increase in dATP in the heart cells has a big effect on heart performance.”

The researchers found that increased production of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase increased the concentration of dATP within heart cells approximately tenfold. Even though this level was still less than one to two percent of the cell’s total pool of ATP, the increase led to a sustained improvement in heart muscle function. The genetically engineered hearts contracted more quickly and with greater force.

“It looks as though we may have stumbled on an important pathway that nature uses to regulate heart contractility,” Murry added. “The same pathway that heart cells use to make the building blocks for DNA during embryonic growth makes dATP to supercharge contraction when the adult heart is mechanically stressed.”

Importantly, the elevated dATP effect was achieved without imposing additional metabolic demands on the cells. That observation suggests that the modification would not harm the cell’s functioning over the long-term.

The study’s findings, the authors write, suggest that treatments that elevate dATP levels in heart cells may prove to be an effective treatment for heart failure.

Read the PNAS scientific article, “Transgenic overexpression of ribonucleotide reductase improves cardiac performance.”

The work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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BEAT BioTherapeutics, a private company spinout from the UW, has entered into an exclusive global license agreement covering  this technology and is moving forward with clinical development. For more information, visit www.BeatBioTherapeutics.com

The University of Washington Botanic Gardens started work last August on a two-year project to  digitize those records and create an interactive geographic information systems map for the entire park. Eventually planners and visitors will be able to go online and pinpoint specific plants and collections within the arboretum, and access all sorts of historical details.

UW Botanic Gardens/U of Washington

Handwritten notes and updates for one of the 100-foot by 100-foot parcels in the 230-acre Washington Park Arboretum.

“People will be able to find an area in the arboretum, then zoom down and see which plants are there,” says Tracy Mehlin, project manager and information technology librarian at the UW’s Center for Urban Horticulture. “It will be really fascinating and educational to have all of that history linked to the plant records, and accessible online to everyone.”

One of the first tasks of the project was to begin surveying and verifying the geospatial coordinates of the 230-acre park, which decades ago was divided into 595 grid squares, each 100 feet by 100 feet. When those grid markers and coordinates are confirmed, they will be used to create a map that supports the geo-referenced database. Two- and three-person teams of students and staff have already been out surveying for the past couple months.

It’s a multitiered project, and Mehlin has been working closely with other partners at the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

Sarah Reichard, director of UW Botanic Gardens, is the principal investigator on the grant along with Soo-Hyung Kim, a UW professor of environmental and forest sciences. Jim Lutz, a research scientist and engineer with the College of the Environment, has been helping coordinate the student survey crews and GIS mapping. UW information systems engineer David Campbell is working on the searchable database and Web interface.

UW Botanic Gardens/U of Washington

The same grid with digitized information and incorporating GIS mapping.

Others involved are helping with various projects, including digitizing the existing maps, as well as handwritten notes and histories attached to each of the park’s 10,000 “accessions,” plants that are part of the formal collection.  The UW Botanic Gardens owns and manages the collection in the arboretum which is a City of Seattle park.

When completed, the searchable database will be a boon for environmental research, park management and visitors, Reichard said.

“The idea is that eventually you’d be able to get the coordinates of a particular collection, like our magnolias, and locate them on your cell phone or GPS unit,” she said. “We can start putting together virtual tours, and visitors can go from plant to plant.”

Awarded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the grant is expected to run through August 2014.

Researchers in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences in the University of Washington School of Public Health have assisted gun ranges by evaluating their ventilation systems and testing their employees’ exposure to airborne lead levels.

Niels Noordhoek

Bullet shot from a revolver releases
smoke that contains lead.

The evaluations are part of the occupational health and safety consultations offered by the Field Research and Consultation Group to companies that request assistance. Consultants observe work practices, collect air and wipe samples, and make recommendations for controlling workplace exposures.

Firing ranges should have a well-designed and operating ventilation system, said Martin Cohen, director of the Field Research and Consultation Group and senior lecturer in environmental and occupational health Sciences. The ventilation system should capture and remove airborne lead to prevent deposits on surfaces. It also reduces exposures to lead, for those workers at the range, the public, and people in occupations that require gun practice and training as part of their jobs—namely, police officers and military personnel.

But designing and installing an effective ventilation system that works well in a firing range can be tricky.

Explained Cohen. “Usually the space is fairly tight. There are practical considerations for where you can put a duct system and it needs to be designed and operated properly.”

It’s also expensive, added Gerry Croteau, a research industrial hygienist with the Field Research and Consultation Group. He has evaluated ventilation systems  and monitored worker airborne lead exposures at several gun ranges.

If a workers’ eight-hour average airborne lead levels exceeds  the “action level” of 0.03 milligrams per cubic meter, the facility is required to comply with stringent regulations involving respiratory protection, ventilation controls, housekeeping and practices to keep the worker from leaving the facility with lead on their clothes or body. These regulations were promulgated by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In our state the regulations are enforced by—the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (part of the Department of Labor and Industries)..

Gun range employees typically don’t spend a lot of time on the actual firing range, with the exception of range cleaning and maintenance activities

Every day or two, the bullet casings and target remnants need to be cleaned off the range floor. Some ranges use soil or sand berms behind the target to stop the bullets. These also must be periodically cleaned.

Cohen said that the methods that the employer and workers use to clean and maintain the range are crucial to protecting the workers from lead exposure. If workers sweep, fine lead dust particles can become airborne and produce a respiratory exposure hazard.

“One best practice is to use a vacuum with a HEPA filter. It can keep the dust from becoming airborne during cleaning,” said Cohen. HEPA is an acronym for High-Efficiency Particulate Air.

Workers should wear a Tyvek suit, gloves, and a respirator while cleaning. Tyvek is a Dupont trademark for its protective, non-woven fabric. Regulations stipulate that work shoes and clothing are not allowed to be worn outside the facility  as lead laden clothing can potentially contaminate the home environment.

“With this approach we could potentially have tens or hundreds of thousands of additional surface pressure observations, which could significantly improve short-term weather forecasts,” said Cliff Mass, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

Cumulonimbus.ca

PressureNet is a free app for Android devices that contain pressure sensors.

Owners of certain new Android smartphones and tablet computers can now download the PressureNet app, which measures atmospheric pressure and provides the data to UW researchers.

When some smartphone manufacturers recently added pressure sensors, to estimate the phone’s elevation and help pinpoint its location, Mass saw an opportunity to enhance weather prediction. In the autumn he approached Cumulonimbus, a Canadian app company that developed a barometer application for smartphones that collects all the data and shares it back with users.

The PressureNet app this week collected about 4,000 observations per hour, with users clustered in the northeastern United States and around some major cities.

“We need more density,” Mass said. “Right now it’s a matter of getting more people to contribute.”

Android devices equipped with pressure sensors include Samsung’s Galaxy S3, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note and Nexus 4 smartphones, and the Nexus 10 and Motorola Xoom tablet computers.

Atmospheric pressure is the weight of the air above, and includes information about what is happening as air masses collide. Precise tracking of pressure readings and pressure changes could help weather forecasters to pinpoint exactly where and when a major storm will strike.

Mass is particularly interested in the center of the country, which is prone to severe storms but includes fewer weather observation stations.

“Thunderstorms are one of the areas of weakest skill for forecasting,” Mass said. “I think thunderstorms in the middle part of the country could potentially be the biggest positive for this approach. They are relatively small-scale, they develop over a few hours, they can be severe and can affect people significantly.”

Tracking storms a few hours out could help people better protect themselves and their property. In the Seattle area, the tool could improve short-term forecasts for wind and rain.

“I think this could be one of the next major revolutions in weather forecasting, really enhancing our ability to forecast at zero to four hours,” Mass said.

Cliff Mass, Univ. of Washington

UW researchers are the first scientists to have access to the smartphone pressure data. They are plotting the observations and preparing them for use in weather-prediction models.

Cumulonimbus updated the app’s privacy settings last week so users could allow access to the data by scientific researchers. Since then, the UW group has been uploading the pressure data each hour and preparing it for use in weather forecasting models. The data will soon be available to all researchers who want to incorporate it in weather-prediction tools.

A project begun in 2010 by Mass and Gregory Hakim, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences, has explored ways to improve weather forecasts by taking advantage of surface pressure measurements. The current network of U.S. weather stations offers about one thousand air-pressure readings. Adding observations collected by small-scale weather networks and hobbyists, the UW team found, improves the forecasts. A weather station in every pocket would offer an unprecedented wealth of data.

A recent blog post by Mass explains more about the UW group’s approach. Luke Madaus, a UW graduate student in atmospheric sciences, will load the smartphone data into a weather-forecasting system. At first the tool will use only stationary data points, but eventually it may include data from devices in motion.

Building the system will take a few months, Mass said. By this summer’s thunderstorm season he hopes the UW team will be using smartphone data to forecast storms and compare their results against traditional forecasts.

If the technique is successful, the researchers hope to supply it to the National Weather Service and the weather bureaus of other countries.

The technique could be particularly useful, Mass noted, in countries that have little weather-forecasting infrastructure but where smartphones are becoming more common.

The research has been funded by Microsoft Corp. and the National Weather Service.

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For more information, contact Mass at 206-685-0910 or cliff@atmos.washington.edu.

A team led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Southeast University in China discovered a molecule that shows promise as an organic alternative to today’s silicon-based semiconductors. The findings, published this week in the journal Science, display properties that make it well suited to a wide range of applications in memory, sensing and low-cost energy storage.

Jiangyu Li, UW

Electrical response of the newly developed organic crystal.

“This molecule is quite remarkable, with some of the key properties that are comparable with the most popular inorganic crystals,” said co-corresponding author Jiangyu Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering.

The carbon-based material could offer even cheaper ways to store digital information; provide a flexible, nontoxic material for medical sensors that would be implanted in the body; and create a less costly, lighter material to harvest energy from natural vibrations.

The new molecule is a ferroelectric, meaning it is positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other, where the direction can be flipped by applying an electrical field. Synthetic ferroelectrics are now used in some displays, sensors and memory chips.

In the study the authors pitted their molecule against barium titanate, a long-known ferroelectric material that is a standard for performance. Barium titanate is a ceramic crystal and contains titanium; it has largely been replaced in industrial applications by better-performing but lead-containing alternatives.

The new molecule holds its own against the standard-bearer. It has a natural polarization, a measure of how strongly the molecules align to store information, of 23, compared to 26 for barium titanate. To Li’s knowledge this is the best organic ferroelectric discovered to date.

A recent study in Nature announced an organic ferroelectric that works at room temperature. By contrast, this molecule retains its properties up to 153 degrees Celsius (307 degrees F), even higher than for barium titanate.

The new molecule also offers a full bag of electric tricks. Its dielectric constant – a measure of how well it can store energy – is more than 10 times higher than for other organic ferroelectrics. And it’s also a good piezoelectric, meaning it’s efficient at converting movement into electricity, which is useful in sensors.

The organic crystal is made from bromine, a natural element isolated from sea salt, mixed with carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen (its full name is diisopropylammonium bromide). Researchers dissolved the elements in water and evaporated the liquid to grow the crystal. Because the molecule contains carbon, it is organic, and pivoting chemical bonds allow it to flex.

The molecule would not replace current inorganic materials, Li said, but it could be used in applications where cost, ease of manufacturing, weight, flexibility and toxicity are important.

Li is working on a number of projects relating to ferroelectricity. Last year he and his graduate student found the first evidence for ferroelectricity in soft animal tissue. He was co-author on a 2011 paper in Science that documents nanometer-scale switching in ferroelectric films, showing how such molecules could be used to store digital information.

“Ferroelectrics are pretty remarkable materials,” Li said. “It allows you to manipulate mechanical energy, electrical energy, optics and electromagnetics, all in a single package.”

He is working to further characterize this new molecule and explore its combined electric and mechanical properties. He also plans to continue the search for more organic ferroelectrics.

The joint first authors of the new paper are Yuanming Liu, a UW postdoctoral researcher in mechanical engineering, and Da-Wei Fu, a doctoral student working with co-corresponding author Ren-Gen Xiong at Southeast University. Other co-authors are Hong-Ling Cai, Qiong Ye, Wen Zhang and Yi Zhang at Southeast University; Xue-Yuan Chen at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Gianluca Giovannetti and Massimo Capone at the Italian National Simulation Centre.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, China’s National Natural Science Foundation and the European Research Council.

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For more information, contact Li at 206-543-6226 or jjli@uw.edu.

Co-directors Vikram Jandhyala and Moe Khaleel

“This collaboration will open up new avenues for research,” said co-director Vikram Jandhyala, UW professor and chair of electrical engineering, who leads the Applied Computational Engineering Lab. “We are creating an interdisciplinary place to work with colleagues at PNNL on data-intensive science and engineering.”

Co-director with Jandhyala is Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Moe Khaleel, leader of the Computational Science and Mathematics research division. The lab will fund the time for Jandhyala and Khaleel to lead the institute.

“The expanded partnership between UW and PNNL will create tremendous new opportunities for both organizations,” said Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering. “Big data is transforming the process of discovery in all fields. UW and PNNL have significant and complementary strengths.”

Lazowska leads the eScience Institute, created in 2008 to support data-driven discovery at the UW. Many of the roughly dozen UW faculty who will be involved with the new group at its launch are eScience Institute affiliates.

The new institute will initially draw from the UW’s departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Applied Math, but all UW faculty whose work advances data-driven discovery and large-scale computing will be invited to affiliate.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory already has two scientists based at the UW who are conducting Department of Energy research related to big data and nuclear physics. About eight more PNNL researchers are expected to join them in UW’s Sieg Hall by the end of 2013.

Other researchers will join the center but stay in their existing labs.

All institute members will have access to computational resources at both institutions including the UW’s Hyak supercomputer, developed by the eScience Institute and UW-IT, and the Olympus supercomputer as well as other elements of PNNL Institutional Computing. Researchers will also make extensive use of cloud resources.

Jandhyala also hopes to develop relationships with the region’s business and startup communities.

“In the short term, we aim to promote collaboration among university and government scientists who are working with big data,” he said. “In the longer term, we hope this becomes a Northwest hub for advanced computing research.”

Initial projects will include algorithms and software for large graph analyses, smart grid simulation and encryption for cloud computing. The institute will draw on UW expertise in computer science, engineering, applied math and natural sciences, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory expertise in designing high-performance computers and running large-scale environmental simulations.

The two institutions already collaborate on the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, which is based at the national lab and includes installations in UW buildings and residence halls.

“Together we’ll be able to do amazing things,” Lazowska said.

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Adapted from the PNNL press release posted at http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=964.

Public health statistician one of Forbes’ rising stars

Daniela Witten, assistant professor of biostatistics at the UW School of Public Health, was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list for 2012 in the field of science and healthcare. She was named to the 2011 list for science and innovation.

Forbes calls Witten and the other standouts – 30 people each in 15 categories from art and style to sports and technology – “tomorrow’s brightest stars.” All are under 30 years of age and include names such as singer Adele, 24, Miami Heat forward LeBron James, 28, and Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, 28.

Witten, 28, was recognized for her work developing statistical tools that can analyze large sets of data such as the human genome, work that could lead to better treatment and prevention of disease.

“Witten became a professor at 26, and is now developing machine learning programs that convert vast amounts of data into useful knowledge,” the magazine said in its online report. The “30 Under 30” list will also appear in the Jan. 21 Forbes magazine.

The potential varied uses of Witten’s research include personalizing cancer therapy, understanding genomes, recommending products to shoppers and predicting election results.

“One of the things that’s really cool about machine learning is that there is an incredibly broad set of tools that can be applied in a wide set of areas,” Witten said. The techniques used in health sciences aren’t much different from those in other fields, she said, such as getting computers to understand human speech or tools that Google uses to recommend search results.

“The question is how can we teach a computer to do something useful with this data?” Witten said.

Tony Avellino, UW professor of neurological surgery, and Thomas Lendvay, a UW associate professor of pediatric urology who practices at Seattle Children’s Hospital, led the surgical team.

“This is truly an innovative procedure for either spina bifida patients or patients with lower-level spinal-cord injury who have sensation in the groin but not the penis,” said Avellino.

Lendvay noted that, “Based on the positive results of the first two patients, this new procedure has the potential to greatly improve the quality of life in our spina bifida adult and adolescent patients.”

CDC

Spina bifida can take several forms. This illustration shows a type in which the spinal cord protrudes from the infant’s back.

People with spinal bifida were born with an incomplete closure of their backbone, often because the neural tube didn’t form correctly during early embryonic development. Even when the spine is surgically closed after birth, the spinal cord in the affected section may not work properly in conducting nerve impulses. The patient may have a combination of nerve function and loss. They may have paralysis or numbness in only some parts of their body, for example.

The new operation is known as “Tomax” (for TO MAX-imize sensation, sexuality and quality of life). The procedure entails transferring a branch of the nerve supplying sensation from the thigh skin to the main skin sensation nerve to the penis. The successful completion of the procedure allows men with spinal cord impairment to feel sensation in a previously insensitive penis and improve sexual health.

Max Overgoor from the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands had performed 18 successful operations when David Shurtleff, UW professor of pediatrics, invited him to Seattle to observe the first U.S. operation of this nature.

Pediatric urologist Dr. Thomas Lendvay

Lendvay and Avellino performed the procedure at Seattle Children’s Hospital in March 2009. Their first U.S. patient was a 19-year-old college student. At a recent follow-up appointment, the young man reported having erogenous penile skin sensation and enhanced sexuality over the course of  the past 18 months.

He said: “Before the surgery, I had no sensation at all. I found that sex was very frustrating and unsatisfying. Today, I have very good sensation. … I feel like a gained a body part that I was previously missing.”

Avellino and Lendvay performed two procedures (at Harborview Medical Center and UW Medical Center) on another patient who also experienced erogenous sensation where he had never before felt anything. This man reported, “It continues to improve my quality of life and makes me feel like I have a much more normal and complete body.”

Avellino said the success of this pioneering procedure is due to a truly multidisciplinary effort. “We can do innovative things here because we have experts from different specialties collaborating as a team. Pediatricians, spina bifida specialists, urologists and neurosurgeons — all working together.”

UW neurological surgeon Dr. Anthony Avellino

Lendvay added, “We are planning to collaborate with our Rehabilitation Medicine colleagues to expand this surgical opportunity to patients with traumatic spinal cord injury.  We also hope to explore the role such surgery may have in female patients with spinal cord lesions.”

In October, Lendvay presented one of the surgical videos at the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in New Orleans during the “Innovative Procedures in Pediatric Urology” panel. Avellino and Lendvay have submitted a video of the most recent procedure to the American Urological Association annual meeting, which will be held May 4–8, 2013, in San Diego, Calif.

For more information about the procedure, read Overgoor’s article in the Journal of Urology, “Increased Sexual Health After Restored Genital Sensation in Male Patients with Spina Bifida or a Spinal Cord Injury: the TOMAX Procedure.”

Alice C. Gray

The Washington state business volume impact of publicly funded research conducted at Association of American Medical Colleges-member institutions was nearly $1.8 billion in 2009.

A report released this week from the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that its member medical schools, teaching hospitals and healthcare systems had a combined economic impact of more than $587 billion in the United States in 2011. The firm Tripp Umbach conducted the economic measurements and analysis.

The not-for-profit association represents 133 accredited medical schools and 255 major teaching hospitals and health systems in the United States, including Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers.

Washington was among the 25 states with the highest economic impact from academic medicine, which encompasses three interwoven missions:  training physicians and biomedical scientists, conducting research, and providing patient care.

UW Medicine is one of the largest members of the Association of American Medical Colleges in the country. UW Medicine includes four hospitals (UW Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Valley Medical Center), the University of Washington School of Medicine; UW Physicians, the largest physician practice plan in the Northwest; UW Neighborhood Clinics; and Airlift Northwest.UW Medicine also shares in the ownership and governance of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and Children’s University Medical Group.

The total business volume economic impact of association members in the state of Washington was more than $5.7 billion, an amount that placed Washington 25^th in the nation. New York, California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Texas had the highest total business volume impact.

Clare McLean

UW Medicine has more than 21,000 employees. Above, a UW Medical Center cafeteria staff member prepares a meal in the Plaza Cafe.

UW Medicine has more than 21,000 employees.  Nationally, the Association of American Medical Colleges-represented institutions included in the study employ more than 1.9 million individuals.  In 2011, one in every 40 wage earners in the United States worked either directly or indirectly for a U.S. medical school or teaching hospital, the report found.

Although not included in the total $587 billion contribution to the national economy for 2011, a previous analysis by Tripp Umbach found that publicly funded research by association members added nearly $45 billion to the nation’s economy in 2009 and accounted for one in every 500 jobs.  An appendix on the research findings is included in the full 2012 report.  In calculating the state business volume impact of publicly funded research conducted at the Association of American Medical Colleges-member institutions in Washington state, Tripp Umbach ranked Washington ninth in the nation at nearly $1.8 billion in 2009. California ranked  No. 1, Massachusetts was No. 2 and New York was No. 3.

Washington state’s association-member institutions also generated more than $309 million in state tax revenue.

In addition, the institutions generated nearly $165 million in out-of-state visitor-related revenue (not including charges for medical services) for Washington state. This includes spending in local communities by out-of-state patients and their friends and families. It also includes local community spending by those attending meetings and conferences sponsored by the institutions.

The study team noted that nationally, Association of American Medical Colleges members have “substantial economic and social impacts on their multi-county regions and within the counties and cities where they have operations. … Communities in all regions of the country typically rely on these institutions for job creation, high-quality medical care, advanced research, new business development and education of medical professionals.”

The full report is available here.

Dr. Mark Snowden, Harborview chief of psychiatry, discusses the implementation of an innovative depression treatment, PEARLS (Program to Encourage Active, Rewarding Lives), with a group of administrators.

UW Training Xchange is on a mission to put more new therapies, tools, and process improvements into the hands of healthcare practitioners and other professionals for the benefit of millions of people. Life-saving advances continually emerge from faculty labs and clinics at the University of Washington, which is one of the nation’s largest recipients of federal research funding for biomedical science.

Most UW researchers publish journal articles about their new findings and proven methods, but many of their readers don’t know how to adopt them. Faculty and graduate students do not have time to set up and promote training programs. To address the innovation adoption gap, the UW is expanding its Training Xchange initiative to enable researchers to transmit their innovations to healthcare workers and other professionals locally and far beyond the Northwest.

Dr. Paul Ciechanowski, director of Training XChange, with Allison Waddell, program manager, in front of the Center for Commercialization sign. Photo by Brian Donohue.

“The UW is one of the nation’s leading centers for health, medical, and bioengineering research, and we’d like to see as many research advances out in the world making lives better for people, rather than sitting on a bookshelf. Training others in their use is a way to do this,” said Dr. Paul Ciechanowski, UW associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Training Xchange. Ciechanowski co-developed the initiative with Dr. Richard Veith, chair of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Their team created a training infrastructure that helps university researchers translate evidence-based information and methods from their labs and clinics into formats designed for wider dissemination.

Offerings include a range of in-person and online training products through which trainees gain tangible skills and practical knowledge they can put to work immediately.

“Combining our faculty’s expertise with the experience and platform of Training Xchange is a great way to bridge the gap between research and practice,” Veith said.

One major initiative called TEAMcare brings a proven UW faculty intervention to medical clinics. It integrates mental health and medical services for people diagnosed with both depression and diabetes or coronary heart disease. TEAMcare results in better treatment that can save lives. A group led by Dr. Wayne Katon, UW professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, developed TEAMcare with assistance from Training Xchange. Success in promotion and early adoption of  has earned the UW a $1 million award from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the program as part of an $18 million national initiative to foster the widespread implementation of TEAMcare.

Allison Waddell and Zandra Grissom from Training XChange present a poster about the program at a Center for Commercialization’s Innovator Award Ceremony.

“Health professionals are eager to have concrete ways to help their patients, and the Training Xchange infrastructure makes it easier to transmit programs like TEAMcare,” Katon said.

Training Xchange is already at work across the country. It has been teaching health professionals at a major national health system how to reduce debilitating anxiety in patients with an approach developed jointly by UW and UCLA. Clients for Training Xchange programs now include Harborview Medical Center and The Polyclinic in Seattle, the California Institute of Mental Health, the national offices of the Epilepsy Foundation in Maryland and others.

As a program within the university’s Center for Commercialization, more commonly known as C4C, the Training Xchange has expanded from its early focus on healthcare to other training areas, such as education, computer science, and bioengineering.

“Over the coming years, we are committed to seeing more of our research outcomes in practice out in the world,” said Fiona Wills, director of Technology Licensing at C4C. “Training Xchange is a terrific option for our busy researchers to increase the visibility and impact of their innovations.”

EEGs, a measurement of electrical activity in the brain, superimposed over images of the brain. The red boxes call out a possible epileptic episode. Image courtesy Raimondo D’Ambrosio.

Epilepsy can result from genetics or brain damage. Traumatic head injury is the leading cause of acquired epilepsy in young adults. It is often difficult to manage with antiepileptic drugs. The mechanisms  behind the onset of epileptic seizures after brain injury are not known . There is currently no treatment to cure it, prevent it, or even limit its severity.

The multi-institutional research team used a rodent model of acquired epilepsy in which animals develop chronic spontaneous recurrent seizures -the hallmark of epilepsy- after a contusive head injury similar to that causing epilepsy in humans.  The rats were randomized to either mock-cooling or cooling of the contused brain by no more than 2 Celsius degrees. This degree of cooling, the authors explained, is known to be safe and to decrease mortality of patients with head injury.  The rats  were then monitored for four months after injury and epilepsy was evaluated by intracranial EEG. The contused brain was cooled continuously with special headsets engineered to passively dissipate heat. No Peltier cells or other power sources for refrigeration were needed.

Raimondo D’Ambrosio

Color-coded temperature readings (digital thermography) from brain cooling devices.

The investigators report that cooling by just 2 degrees celsius for 5 weeks beginning 3 days after injury virtually abolished the later development of epileptic seizure activity. This effect persisted through the end of the study. The treatment induced no additional pathology or inflammation, and restored neuronal activity depressed by the injury.

“These findings demonstrate for the first time that prevention of epileptic seizures after traumatic brain brain injury is possible, and that epilepsy prophylaxis in patients could be achieved more easily than previously thought, said  the lead author of the study,  Raimondo D’Ambrosio, UW associate professor of neurological surgery.  He added that a clinical trial is required to verify the findings in head injury patients.

In addition to D’Ambrosio,  the research team from the UW  included  John W. Miller, professor of neurology and director of the UW Regional Epilepsy Center;   Nancy R. Temkin, professor of neurological surgery and biostatistics; and  Jeffrey G. Ojemann, professor of neurological surgery. Other members of the team were  Steven M. Rothman, professor of pediatrics and director, Clinical Neurosciences in Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota  and  Matthew D. Smyth, professor of pediatrics and neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis.

Their project “Mild passive focal cooling prevents epileptic seizures after head injury in rats” was funded by CURE Epilepsy in partnership with the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

The article shares newly defined signs for terms like “light-year,” “organism” and “photosynthesis.” It also describes a successful crowdsourcing effort started at the University of Washington in 2008 that lets members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community build their own guide to the evolving lexicon of science.

A screen capture from the ASL-STEM Forum.

“It’s not a dictionary,” explained Richard Ladner, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. “The goal of the forum is to be constantly changing, a reflection of the current use.”

A scientific and technical dictionary for American Sign Language has existed since the late 1990s.  It is called Science Signs Lexicon, launched by Harry Lang, an early proponent of science in the deaf community and a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology.

But a dictionary can’t include the newest terms, Ladner said, and many graduate students won’t find the specialized terms used in their chosen fields. For example, Ladner helped organize a 2008 workshop where a deaf scientist said only about one-quarter of his field’s specialized terms existed in his native language, American Sign Language, or ASL. Many workshop participants reported that at some point they had had to work with their interpreters to develop their own code words.

That year, with funding from Google Corp. and the National Science Foundation, Ladner’s group launched the ASL-STEM Forum, an online compilation of signs used in science, technology, engineering and math that is more like Wikipedia or the Urban Dictionary.

“The goal was to have one place where all these signs could be,” Ladner said. “We’re not trying to decide on new signs but just collect the ones that are in current use.”

The site lists 6,755 terms from biology, chemistry, engineering, math and computer science textbooks. Of those, about 2,800 have video entries, some with multiple entries. Partnerships with the country’s two largest higher education institutions for deaf and hard-of-hearing students have helped provide content.

Collaborators include Caroline Solomon, a UW alumna and biology professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and Lang and Raja Kushalnagar at Rochester’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

Visit the forum to see a sign for “bioengineering,” “integral” and “peer-to-peer,” none of which is listed in the Science Signs dictionary. Terms still seeking an ASL translation include “byte” and “eukaryote.”

Anyone can visit the forum, but to add signs a user must create a free account then record a short video using a computer’s camera that can be reviewed and uploaded. People also can rate and comment on signs uploaded by other users.

Mary Levin, UW

Richard Ladner with students in a 2007 summer computing program.

Ladner hopes the recent article will spur interest and encourage people to suggest more entries among the remaining terms. He is seeking funding to update the site, and hopes it will reach critical mass among ASL speakers in scientific and technical fields.

Between 2006 and 2010, U.S. institutions awarded 301 doctorate degrees in STEM fields to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, Ladner said. Because that number includes hard-of-hearing, the number of science PhDs who use ASL is likely much lower. Many members of that community are geographically scattered, and to make matters worse, American Sign Language and British Sign Language have their own technical lexicons.

“I hope ASL-STEM Forum helps more deaf students become scientists and engineers,” Ladner said. “And as more deaf students enter these fields they will hopefully contribute to the forum, making it sustainable and useful over time.”

Now working on the forum at the UW are Kyle Rector, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, and John Norberg, a UW undergraduate in math who is minoring in ASL. Early members of the UW team include computer science and engineering doctoral students Anna Cavender, now working on accessibility projects at Google, and Jeffrey Bigham, now an accessibility researcher at the University of Rochester in New York; and former UW undergraduates Daniel Otero, Michelle Shepardson and Jessica Dewitt.

Ladner runs a national summer program to encourage deaf and hard-of-hearing students to pursue careers in computer science, and he leads AccessComputing, a larger UW-based national effort to encourage people with disabilities to pursue computing fields. His group is also involved in a number of research projects that combine computing, mobile technology and accessibility.

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For more information, contact Ladner at 206-543-9347 or ladner@cs.washington.edu.

A University of Washington team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection.

Kim Woodrow, UW

The electrospun fibers can release chemicals or they can physically block sperm, as shown here.

The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal PLoS One. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month awarded the UW researchers almost $1 million to pursue the technology.

“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author Kim Woodrow, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

Electrospinning uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets or pills. No high temperatures are involved, so the method is suitable for heat-sensitive molecules. The fabric can also incorporate large molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods.

At a lab meeting last year, Woodrow presented the concept, and co-authors Emily Krogstad and Cameron Ball, both first-year graduate students, pursued the idea.

Kim Woodrow, UW

Fibers stick to a hard surface (top) and then can be removed to create a hollow ring (bottom left). Bottom right shows a closeup of the tiny fibers.

They first dissolved polymers approved by the Food and Drug Administration and antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV to create a gooey solution that passes through a syringe. As the stream encounters the electric field it stretches to create thin fibers measuring 100 to several thousand nanometers that whip through the air and eventually stick to a collecting plate (one nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch). The final material is a stretchy fabric that can physically block sperm or release chemical contraceptives and antivirals.

“This method allows controlled release of multiple compounds,” Ball said. “We were able to tune the fibers to have different release properties.”

One of the fabrics they made dissolves within minutes, potentially offering users immediate, discrete protection against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Another dissolves gradually over a few days, providing an option for sustained delivery, more like the birth-control pill,  to provide contraception and guard against HIV.

The fabric could incorporate many fibers to guard against many different sexually transmitted infections, or include more than one anti-HIV drug to protect against drug-resistant strains (and discourage drug-resistant strains from emerging). Mixed fibers could be designed to release drugs at different times to increase their potency, like the prime-boost method used in vaccines.

The electrospun cloth could be inserted directly in the body or be used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products.

Electrospinning has existed for decades, but it’s only recently been automated to make it practical for applications such as filtration and tissue engineering. This is the first study to use nanofibers for vaginal drug delivery.

While this technology is more discrete than a condom, and potentially more versatile than pills or plastic or rubber devices, researchers say there is no single right answer.

“At the time of sex, are people going to actually use it? That’s where having multiple options really comes into play,” Krogstad said. “Depending on cultural background and personal preferences, certain populations may differ in terms of what form of technology makes the most sense for them.”

The team is focusing on places like Africa where HIV is most common, but the technology could be used in the U.S. or other countries to offer birth control while also preventing one or more sexually transmitted diseases.

The research to date was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the UW’s Center for AIDS Research. The other co-author on the paper is Thanyanan Chaowanachan, a UW postdoctoral researcher and longtime HIV expert.

The team will use the new Gates Foundation grant to evaluate the versatility and feasibility of their system. The group will hire more research staff and buy an electrospinning machine to make butcher-paper sized sheets. The expanded team will spend a year testing combinations that deliver two antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV and a hormonal contraceptive, and then six months scaling up production of the most promising materials.

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For more information, contact Woodrow at 206-685-6831 or woodrow@uw.edu.

Leila Gray

Rie Tatsumi-Koga (right) and Nobu Koga are a wife-and-husband scientific team who research protein design.

The lead authors are Nobuyasu Koga and Rie Tatsumi-Koga, a husband-and-wife scientific team in David Baker’s lab at the UW Protein Design Institute.

The project benefited from hundreds of thousands of computer enthusiasts around the world who adopted Rosetta@home for simulating designed proteins.

Protein molecules start as an unstable, high energy chain of amino acids. This chain then begins folding into various shapes to try to achieve a stable, low energy state.  The end result is its distinctive molecular structure. Rosetta@home volunteers helped the project team to plot this energy landscape from protein structure predictions.

“The structural options become fewer as the interactions that stabilize the protein selectively favor one folding pattern over others,” explained Koga. “This decline in conformation options to eventually achieve a unique, ordered structure is called a funnel-shaped energy landscape,” he said, drawing a tornado-like figure on a whiteboard.  The researchers came up with guidelines for robustly generating this type of energy landscape.

According to Tatsumi-Koga, these rules require the interactions among the residues in the protein’s amino acid chain to consistently favor the same folded conformation in forming its molecular shape. This is made possible, for example, by defining whether a specific unit will form a “right-handed” orientation or its mirror image, and disfavor others.

The researchers, she said, synthesized the proteins they had originally designed and tested “in silico” (on the computer) and physically characterized them through “in vitro” (laboratory test tube) experiments. They also compared the molecular structures of the computer models with these laboratory-derived proteins to see how well they matched.

Koga stressed that the project looked strictly at protein structure. He smiled as he said his group was striving toward a “platonic ideal,” a reference to Plato’s theory of perfect forms.  In our imperfect material world, proteins are not always optimized for their stability, but can be beset by bulges, kinks, strains, and improperly buried parts, and many diseases arise from protein malformations.

During this project, the researchers achieved a library of five ideal structures, but since filing their report have added several more.  To make them accessible to other scientists, the designs have been deposited in the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics and the lab analysis of their chemical structure was put in the Biological Magnetic Resonance Database.

The team was not attempting to create specific new proteins that could carry out particular activities.

However, their design principles and methods, according to their report, should allow the ready creation of a wide range of robust, stable, building blocks for the next generation of engineered functional proteins.  Such proteins would be custom-made for the task, instead of repurposed from proteins with unrelated functions.

Leila Gray

The UW Protein Design Institute is housed at the new UW Molecular Engineering Building.

The hope is that engineered proteins will be useful for drug and vaccine development, especially for formidable viruses like HIV or rapidly changing ones, like the flu.  Proteins designed to exact specifications might also prove therapeutically useful in cleaving mutated genes, and for speeding up chemical reactions important in industry and environmental reclamation.

The Institute for Protein Design, directed by David Baker, was recently established at the UW and aims to design proteins to address 21st century challenges in medicine, energy and technology.

The project, Principles for designing ideal protein structures, was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIH grant U54 GMO94597. Koga also received a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

NIH

An image of the Down syndrome trisomy, showing an extra chromosome 21.

A triplicate of any chromosome is a serious genetic abnormality called a trisomy. Trisomies account for almost one-quarter of pregnancy loss from spontaneous miscarriages, according to the research team. Besides Down syndrome (trisomy 21), some other human trisomies are extra Y or X chromosomes, and Edwards syndrome (trisomy 18) and Patau syndrome (trisomy 13), both of which have extremely high newborn fatality rates.

In their report appearing in the Nov. 2 edition of Cell Stem Cell, a team led by Dr. Li B. Li of the UW Department of Medicine described how they corrected trisomy 21 in human cell lines they grew in the lab.  The senior scientists on the project were gene therapy researchers Dr. David W. Russell, professor of medicine and biochemistry, and Dr. Thalia Papayannopoulou, professor of medicine.

The targeted removal of a human trisomy, they noted, could have both clinical and research applications.

In live births, Down syndrome is the most frequent trisomy. The condition has characteristic eye, facial and hand features, and can cause many medical problems, including heart defects, impaired intellect, premature aging and dementia, and certain forms of leukemia, a type of blood cancer.

“We are certainly not proposing that the method we describe would lead to a treatment for Down syndrome,” Russell said.  “What we are looking at is the possibility that medical scientists could create cell therapies for some of the blood-forming disorders that accompany Down syndrome.”

For example, he said, someday Down syndrome leukemia patients might have stem cells derived their own cells, and have the trisomy corrected in these lab-cultured cells.  They could then receive a transplant of their own stem cells – minus the extra chromosome – or healthy blood cells created from their fixed stem cells and that therefore don’t promote leukemia, as part of their cancer care.

Lifetime Television

A scene from the Lifetime movie, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, featuring actress Krystal Nausbaum, who played the role of a youngster with Down syndrome.

He added that the ability to generate stem cells with and without trisomy 21 from the same person could lead to better understanding of how problems tied to Down syndrome originate.  The cell lines would be genetically identical, except for the extra chromosome. Researcher could contrast, for example how the two cell lines formed brain nerve cells, to learn the effects of trisomy 21 on neuron development, which might offer insights into the lifelong cognitive impairments and adulthood mental decline of Down syndrome. Similar comparative approaches could seek the underpinnings of untimely aging or defective heart tissue in this genetic condition.

The formation of trisomies is also a problem in regenerative medicine research using stem cells. Russell and his team observed that their approach could also be used to revert the unwanted trisomies that often arise in creating stem cell cultures.

Figuring out the exact techniques for removing the extra chromosome was tricky, Russell said, but his colleague Li worked hard to solve several challenges during his first attempts at deriving the engineered cell lines.

“Dr. Li’s achievement was a tour de force,” Russell said.

The researchers used an adeno-associated virus as a vehicle to deliver a foreign gene called TKNEO into a particular spot on chromosome 21, precisely within a gene called APP, which sits on the long arm of the chromosome.  The TKNEO transgene was chosen because of its predicted response to positive and negative selection in specific laboratory growth mediums.  When grown in conditions that selected against TKNEO, the most common reason for cells to survive was the spontaneous loss of the chromosome 21 harboring the transferred gene. Other survival tactics were point mutations, which are single, tiny alterations in DNA base pairs; gene silencing, which meant TKNEO was “turned off” by the cell; or deletion of the TKNEO.

Russell explained a key advantage of this technique for getting rid of the entire extra chromosome: Once it was gone, nothing was left behind.

“Gene therapy researchers have to be careful that their approaches do not cause gene toxicity,” he said. This means, for example, that removal of a chromosome must not break or rearrange the remaining genetic code. This method shouldn’t do that.”

Other researchers on this study were Kai-Hsin Chang, Pei-Rong Wang and Roli K. Hirata. The project was supported by grants from Horizon Discovery and from the National Institutes of Health (DK55759, HL53750,GM086497, DK077864, and HL46557.)  The researchers declared no financial conflicts of interest.