Marine iodine emissions in a changing world

Iodine is a critical trace element involved in many diverse and important processes in the Earth system. The importance of iodine for human health has been known for over a century, with low iodine in the diet being linked to goitre, cretinism and neonatal death. Research over the last few decades has shown that iodine has significant impacts on tropospheric photochemistry, ultimately impacting climate by reducing the radiative forcing of ozone (O 3) and air quality by reducing extreme O 3 concentrations in polluted regions. Iodine is naturally present in the ocean, predominantly as aqueous iodide and iodate. The rapid reaction of sea-surface iodide with O 3 is believed to be the largest single source of gaseous iodine to the atmosphere. Due to increased anthropogenic O 3, this release of iodine is believed to have increased dramatically over the twentieth century, by as much as a factor of 3. Uncertainties in the marine iodine distribution and global cycle are, however, major constraints in the effective prediction of how the emissions of iodine and its biogeochemical cycle may change in the future or have changed in the past. Here, we present a synthesis of recent results by our team and others which bring a fresh perspective to understanding the global iodine biogeochemical cycle. In particular, we suggest that future climate-induced oceanographic changes could result in a significant change in aqueous iodide concentrations in the surface ocean, with implications for atmospheric air quality and climate

The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for Plant Biology

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services

Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

The Ku Protein Complex Interacts with YY1, Is Up-Regulated in Human Heart Failure, and Represses α Myosin Heavy-Chain Gene Expression

Human heart failure is accompanied by repression of genes such as α myosin heavy chain (αMyHC) and SERCA2A and the induction of fetal genes such as βMyHC and atrial natriuretic factor. It seems likely that changes in MyHC isoforms contribute to the poor contractility seen in heart failure, because small changes in isoform composition can have a major effect on the contractility of cardiac myocytes and the heart. Our laboratory has recently shown that YY1 protein levels are increased in human heart failure and that YY1 represses the activity of the human αMyHC promoter. We have now identified a region of the αMyHC promoter that binds a factor whose expression is increased sixfold in failing human hearts. Through peptide mass spectrometry, we identified this binding activity to be a heterodimer of Ku70 and Ku80. Expression of Ku represses the human αMyHC promoter in neonatal rat ventricular myocytes. Moreover, overexpression of Ku70/80 decreases αMyHC mRNA expression and increases skeletal α-actin. Interestingly, YY1 interacts with Ku70 and Ku80 in HeLa cells. Together, YY1, Ku70, and Ku80 repress the αMyHC promoter to an extent that is greater than that with YY1 or Ku70/80 alone. Our results suggest that Ku is an important factor in the repression of the human αMyHC promoter during heart failure

Personalized medicine approach for optimizing the dose of tafamidis to potentially ameliorate wild-type transthyretin amyloidosis (cardiomyopathy)

<div><p></p><p>Placebo-controlled clinical trials are useful for identifying the dose of a drug candidate that produces a meaningful clinical response in a patient population. Currently, Pfizer, Inc. is enrolling a 400-person clinical trial to test the efficacy of 20 or 80 mg of tafamidis to ameliorate transthyretin (TTR)-associated cardiomyopathy using clinical endpoints. Herein, we provide guidance for how to optimize the dose of tafamidis for each WT TTR cardiomyopathy patient using its mechanism of action as the key readout, i.e. we identify the dose of tafamidis that maximally kinetically stabilizes TTR in the blood. Tetramer dissociation is rate limiting for TTR aggregation, which appears to drive the pathology of the TTR amyloidoses. Hence, we measure the TTR tetramer dissociation rate (kinetic stability) in the patient's plasma as a function of tafamidis dose to optimize the dose employed to maximize kinetic stability. Historical data tell us that a subset of patients exhibiting higher tafamidis plasma concentrations are maximally kinetically stabilized at the 20-mg tafamidis dose, whereas the patient studied herein required a 60 mg once daily dose to achieve maximum kinetic stabilization. We anticipate that establishing the dose of tafamidis that achieves maximal TTR kinetic stabilization will translate into a maximal clinical effect, but that remains to be demonstrated.</p></div