Category: Study

New research findings from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health indicate that exposure to even low levels of arsenic poses significant health /risks, including an increased risk of kidney cancer.

The incidence of kidney cancer in the United States rose by an average of 1.2 percent each year between 2011 and 2019 to become the seventh most common cancer. In the meantime, smoking — a well-established risk factor for kidney cancer — has continued to decline.

This led researchers to consider other possible contributing factors, including arsenic, a known cause of various cancers that is naturally occurring in groundwater in Texas and other areas. Unlike previous studies, the Texas A&M study focused on low levels of arsenic exposure (below the regulatory threshold of 10 parts per billion) in both public water systems, which are regulated by various government agencies, and private well systems, which are not regulated.

“Some public water systems are poorly managed and could expose customers to arsenic, but the 40 million people in the United States who rely on private wells are particularly vulnerable,” said Taehyun Roh, with the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Others involved with the study were Daikwon Han, Xiaohui Xu, and then-doctoral student Nishat Tasnim Hasan*, with the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and Garett Sansom, with the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. The project was supported by grants from the Houston Methodist Research Institute, Robert and Janice McNair Foundation and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Their findings, published in Environmental Pollution, examined the relationship between kidney cancer rates and arsenic levels in drinking water across 240 Texas counties. The team analyzed cancer data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results on 28,896 cases of cancer among adults in Texas aged 20 and older, alongside water testing data from the Texas Department of State Health Services and the Texas Water Development Board.

They used a statistical model that accounts for geographic location and adjusted the model for demographic and socioeconomic factors and cancer risk factors such as obesity, smoking and diabetes. They also adjusted for covariates that included pesticide density, social vulnerability, income level, rurality, cardiovascular disease hospitalization rates and the prevalence of chronic kidney disease.

The analysis found that exposure to between 1 and 5 parts per billion raised kidney cancer risk by 6 percent, and exposure above 5 parts per billion raised the risk by 22 percent. In addition, the risk of cancer increased by 4 percent with each doubling of water arsenic levels.

“This suggests that even low-level arsenic exposure in drinking water may be associated with an increased risk of kidney cancer, which aligns with previous research indicating an association between this exposure and lung, bladder and skin cancers,” Roh said.

Hasan noted that their study design can indicate associations between factors but not causality and recommended that future studies focus on individual-level and biometric data — rather than the county-level data used here — to better assess the effects of factors such as lifestyle, family history of kidney cancer and other possible sources of arsenic exposure.

“Still, our findings indicate that reducing arsenic exposure could reduce the incidence of kidney cancer, and this could be achieved through efforts such as enhanced regulatory oversight and targeted public health interventions,” Hasan said.

*This link no longer exists and has been removed.

A first-of-its-kind study has measured the toxicity of several types of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), better known as “forever chemicals,” when mixed together in the environment and in the human body.

The good news: Most of the tested chemicals’ individual cytotoxicity and neurotoxicity levels were relatively low. 

The bad news: The chemicals acted together to make the entire mixture toxic.

“Though they are structurally similar, not all forever chemicals are made equal — some are more potent, others less. When mixed, all components contributed to the mixture’s cytotoxicity and neurotoxicity,” says the study’s first-author, Karla Ríos-Bonilla, a UB chemistry PhD student.

“In the laboratory assays we used in this study, most of the types of PFAS that we tested did not appear to be very toxic when measured individually. However, when you measure an entire sample with multiple PFAS, you see the toxicity,” adds study co-author Diana Aga, SUNY Distinguished Professor, director of the RENEW Institute and Henry M. Woodburn Chair in the Department of Chemistry.

This research was conducted in collaboration with Beate Escher of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Leipzig, Germany, where Ríos-Bonilla did the in vitro toxicity experiments in the high-throughput screening facility CITEPro. It was published Sept. 11 in Environmental Science and Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

The study is novel in that it assesses mixture toxicity of PFAS. These synthetic compounds have been widely used in consumer products — from nonstick pans to makeup — for decades, and they can take hundreds to thousands of years to break down, if ever. They are estimated to be in at least 45% of the nation’s drinking water and in the blood of practically every American, and they have been linked to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Earlier this year, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the first-ever drinking water standards for six kinds of PFAS. However, it is estimated that there are over 15,000 varieties present in the environment. Only a handful of these chemicals have standards and are regulated. 

“There are six PFAS that can be regulated because we know a lot about them and their toxicity. Unfortunately, we cannot regulate other forms of PFAS until their toxicities are known,” says Aga, who is principal investigator of the EPA STAR grant that funded the research. “We need to set maximum contamination levels for each PFAS that is proportional to their toxicity. To regulate contaminants, it is crucial to know their relative potencies when they occur as mixtures in the environment, along with their predicted environmental concentrations.” 

Other co-authors from UB are G. Ekin Atilla-Gokcumen, Dr. Marjorie E. Winkler Distinguished Professor and associate chair of the Department of Chemistry, and Judith Cristobal, senior research scientist.

Ríos-Bonilla is also supported by a graduate fellowship from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

To conduct the study, researchers created their own PFAS mixtures, one that is representative of an average American’s blood serum, and the other of surface water samples found in the U.S. Ríos-Bonilla used data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the average concentration ratios of PFAS in human blood and in surface water, respectively. 

They then tested these mixtures’ effects on two cell lines: one that tests for mitochondrial toxicity and oxidative stress, and the other for neurotoxicity.

Of the 12 PFAS spiked in the water mixture, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) — commonly used in nonstick pans and firefighting foam — was the most cytotoxic, making up to 42% of the mixture’s cytotoxicity.

On the other hand, both PFOA and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) contributed roughly the same cytotoxicity (25%) to the neurotoxicity assay, despite both contributing only 10 and 15% to the mixture in terms of concentration, respectively. 

The blood mixture had four PFAS present, but PFOA again was the most cytotoxic to both cell lines. Despite its molar contribution being only 29%, PFOA triggered 68% of the cytotoxicity in the cytotoxicity assay, and 38% in the neurotoxicity assay.

Interestingly, when researchers analyzed the toxicity of the extracts from real biosolid samples collected from a municipal wastewater treatment plant, very high toxicities were observed, despite the measured low concentrations of PFOA and other PFAS in the sample. 

“This means that there are many more PFAS and other chemicals in the biosolids, which have not been identified, that contribute to the toxicity of the extracts observed,” Aga says.

One of researchers’ goals was to determine if PFAS acts synergistically. This is when two or more chemicals’ combined effect is greater than the sum effect of the individual chemicals. However, their findings indicate that the effect of PFAS is concentration-additive: meaning that an established mixture toxicity prediction model can be used to predict the combined effect of mixtures. 

“As up to 12 PFAS in the mixtures acted concentration-additive for cytotoxicity and specific neurotoxicity, it is likely that the thousands of other PFAS that are in commerce and use are also acting in the same manner,” Escher says. “Mixtures pose more of a risk than individual PFAS. As they act and occur in mixtures, they ought to be regulated as mixtures.”

Researchers say the results of this study will also be very useful in assessing effectiveness of remediation efforts. Breaking down PFAS can sometimes create harmful byproducts that cannot be detected by chemical analysis, so measuring the toxicity of a sample after treatment may be the only way to judge whether a remediation technology is effective.

“Toxicity assays can be a complimentary tool when analytical chemistry doesn’t give you all the answers, especially when the identities of contaminants in the mixture are unknown, which is the case in many polluted sites,” Aga says.

ATLANTA — Trees and bushes planted near highways do more than improve the scenery. A new Georgia State University study finds they significantly reduce air pollution caused by motor vehicles, which has been linked to a host of illnesses.

Over two three-month periods, researchers sampled air quality at five sites along metro Atlanta interstates and highways. When compared to similar sites without vegetation, the researchers found a 37 percent reduction in soot and a 7 percent reduction in ultrafine particles at sites with natural or ornamental vegetation. The findings appear in the journal PLoS One.

“Trees and bushes near roadways don’t solve the problem of air pollution caused by motor vehicles, but they can help reduce the severity of the problem,” said lead author Roby Greenwald, associate professor in the GSU School of Public Health.

A growing body of evidence has linked motor vehicle pollution to conditions such as asthma, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer and heart attacks. Solutions to the problem of elevated pollution levels near roadways are urgently needed, Greenwald and his colleagues noted, because 45 million people in the United States live, work or attend school within 300 feet of a major highway.

Roadside vegetation reduces air pollution through several mechanisms, including by creating a large surface area onto which small particles adhere. The new study builds on previous research into the role that vegetation can play in reducing air pollution by sampling at several sites over an extended period and incorporating a model that allowed the researchers to account for factors such as wind direction, traffic volume and distance to the highway.

Greenwald emphasized that while roadside vegetation can significantly reduce particulate air pollution, it doesn’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions or ozone pollution. He said that to achieve a more comprehensive reduction in the health hazards associated with highways, municipalities can improve air quality by making it safe, pleasant and convenient for people to get where they need to go without a motor vehicle. Changes could include expanding public transportation and developing and improving bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, for example.

“We should plant more trees along roadways because they provide benefits that go beyond aesthetics,” Greenwald said. “But I don’t want to give anyone the impression that we can solve all of the problems associated with motor vehicle emissions simply by planting trees.”

In addition to Greenwald, co-authors on the study are Jeremy Sarnat, associate professor at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, and Christina Fuller, associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Engineering.

Research in this news release was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number R21ES029252. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

– Story by Sam Fahmy, photo by Meg Buscema

Woods Hole, Mass. — Under normal conditions, the floating macroalgae Sargassum spp. provide habitat for hundreds of types of organisms. However, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB) that emerged in 2011 has since then caused unprecedented inundations of this brown seaweed on Caribbean coastlines, with harmful effects on ecosystems while posing challenges to regional economies and tourism, and concerns for respiratory and other human health issues.

Researchers looking into the question of what is the nutrient supply for the GASB say that they have now clearly identified that the nutrient content of Sargassum tissue could help determine the enrichment sources and potentially improve predictions and Sargassum management efforts.

“We show clearly for the first time that Sargassum in the GASB is enhanced in both nitrogen and phosphorus, indicative of a healthy and thriving population,” according to the journal article “Nutrient and arsenic biogeochemistry of Sargassum in the western Atlantic,” published in Nature Communications.

“Stable nitrogen isotope values point to riverine sources in some circumstances and are more equivocal in others. Distinguishing the various nutrient sources sustaining the GASB will require systematic snapshots of nutrient content and isotopic composition across its entire breadth,” according to the paper. “Presumably, the closer one gets to the source, the higher the nitrogen and / or phosphorus content of Sargassum should be. In that sense, basin-wide patterns in nitrogen and phosphorus elemental composition could provide the fingerprinting necessary to unequivocally determine the sources.”

The paper notes that a variety of nutrient sources for the GASB blooms have been suggested, including upwelling, vertical mixing, discharge from the Amazon and Congo rivers, and atmospheric deposition. Though, the paper states that the causes of the GASB and the mechanisms controlling its variability remain unknown.

The paper also indicates that the nutritional status of Sargassum in the GASB is enriched, with higher nitrogen and phosphorus content than are populations of Sargassum that reside in its Sargasso Sea habitat.

“In its traditional environment, Sargassum is a great ecological benefit. However, the proliferation of biomass in the tropical Atlantic has proven the old adage that too much of a good thing can be bad,” said journal article lead author Dennis McGillicuddy, Jr., senior scientist in the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).

The finding that nitrogen and phosphorus are higher in the GASB than in the Sargasso Sea “is a smoking gun that the GASB inundations are nutrient-driven,” said McGillicuddy. “A consequence of this finding is that it presents us potentially with the opportunity to use those nitrogen and phosphorus markers in Sargassum tissue to fingerprint the ultimate sources of these nutrients that are sustaining these seaweed blooms.”

In addition, the paper notes that the presence of arsenic in Sargassum tissue – which reflects phosphorus limitation – significantly constrains the utilization of the seaweed biomass that washes ashore.

“As the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has grown over the last decade, the public has become increasingly aware of this phenomenon and its impact on coastal communities,” said co-author Peter Morton, associate research scientist in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University, College Station. “Our research shows that Sargassum could become enriched in arsenic, depending on the conditions in which it grows. Plans to remove or exploit this material when it washes ashore should consider the potential for Sargassum to contain high concentrations of arsenic, so we encourage affected communities to proceed with caution when exploring options to deal with seasonal inundations of Sargassum.”

Due to the threats that the Sargassum inundations pose to the environment, economy, and human health, the paper recommends the need for expanded observational and modeling studies to understand the GASB’s physical, biological, and chemical drivers. The paper notes that “the societal need for scientific understanding is urgent: improved seasonal to interannual predictions would offer tremendous value for proactive planning and response, while quantification of the underlying causes could inform potential management actions to mitigate the problem.”

McGillicuddy first saw Sargassum when he was a child growing up in Florida and his grandfather took him fishing near the seaweed because that was the best place to fish. “It was an oasis in the oceanic desert,” McGillicuddy said.

“Now, the system has changed in a fundamental way. We’ve got an oceanographic process out there that is creating this. As a scientist, and as a fisherman, I feel an urgent need to try to understand this situation, not only to help answer the interesting scientific questions around this problem, but do so in a way that we are able to understand the situation and eventually mitigate it in a way that would be of value to society,” he said.

McGillicuddy and co-author Brian Lapointe also stressed the importance of the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of this research, which encompasses a number of disciplines including biology, chemistry, and physics.

“This collaborative study illustrates the value of interdisciplinary research teams to understanding complex oceanographic phenomena in an era of rapid global change, in this case, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt that formed in 2011,” said co-author Brian Lapointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sargassum.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences through the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health, WHOI, the Isham Family Charitable Fund, the State of Florida, and NASA.

Sargassum samples of opportunity were collected on U.S. GO-SHIP lines A20 (Ryan Woosley, chief scientist; marine physical chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Global Change Science), and A22 (Viviane Menezes, chief scientist; physical oceanographer at WHOI), carried out on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson (voyages TN389 and TN390) with the support of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. U.S. GO-SHIP (Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program) is a component of International GO-SHIP.

###

Authors: Dennis J. McGillicuddy, Jr.^1*, Peter L. Morton², Rachel A. Brewton³, Chuanmin Hu⁴, Thomas B. Kelly⁵, Andrew R. Solow¹, and Brian E. Lapointe³

Affiliations:

¹Department of Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

²Department of Oceanography, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

³Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University, Fort Pierce, FL, USA

⁴College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL, USA

⁵College of Fisheries and Ocean Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA.

^*Corresponding author

About Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation and operate the most extensive suite of data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu

Newswise — WASHINGTON (March 8, 2023)–Juvenile dermatomyositis, a rare but often severe and chronic systemic autoimmune disease, includes a large number of patients who are treatment resistant, requiring long term immunosuppressive therapy. A small open-label study published in Arthritis and Rheumatology shows promise using a targeted biologic therapy called abatacept to treat such patients.  

In the 24-week trial, ten patients with juvenile dermatomyositis ages 7 years or older with moderate disease activity who all received abatacept therapy had significant improvements in their muscle strength, physical function, endurance and skin rashes, as well as in the amount of muscle inflammation on MRI. In addition, patients were able to lower the daily dose of corticosteroids during the trial, said Rodolfo V. Curiel, M.D., the study Principal Investigator and an Associate Professor of Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences.

“This study makes an important contribution to the field of juvenile dermatomyositis,” Curiel said. “Treatment resistant patients require long-term immunosuppressive therapy with glucocorticoids, methotrexate and other medications. This 24-week clinical trial suggests abatacept may be beneficial and a potentially safe option for refractory juvenile dermatomyositis.”

Curiel says the study is the first clinical trial conducted to evaluate the safety and efficacy of abatacept in such patients. Further study must be conducted to verify the findings of this small, pilot study, he says.

“This is a breakthrough for juvenile dermatomyositis. The majority of these treatment-refractory patients improved at least moderately in clinical disease activity measures, as well as in two objective blinded measures, interferon genes and protein markers, reflecting downregulation of a key cytokine signaling pathway in JDM, and muscle inflammation on MRI. These data strengthen the trial findings and promise of abatacept for JDM, although further studies are needed.” said Lisa G. Rider, M.D., Head, Environmental Autoimmunity Group, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, and Clinical Professor of Medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. 

The paper, “Improvement in Disease Activity in Refractory Juvenile Dermatomyositis Following Abatacept Therapy,” was published online in Arthritis and Rheumatology.

The study was supported by Bristol Myers Squibb, Cure Juvenile Myositis Foundation and the GW Medical Faculty Associates. In addition, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, which are part of the National Institutes of Health, supported part of the research. 

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Exposure to phthalates, a class of chemicals widely used in packaging and consumer products, is known to interfere with normal hormone function and development in human and animal studies. Now researchers have found evidence linking pregnant women’s exposure to phthalates to altered cognitive outcomes in their infants.

Most of the findings involved slower information processing among infants with higher phthalate exposure levels, with males more likely to be affected depending on the chemical involved and the order of information presented to the infants.

Reported in the journal Neurotoxicology, the study is part of the Illinois Kids Development Study, which tracks the effects of hormone-disrupting chemicals on children’s physical and behavioral development from birth to middle childhood. Now in its seventh year, IKIDS has enrolled hundreds of participants and is tracking chemical exposures in pregnant women and developmental outcomes in their children. Susan Schantz, a neurotoxicologist and professor emerita of comparative biosciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the principal investigator of the study. She is a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, which houses the IKIDS program at Illinois.

“IKIDS is part of a larger initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program. It is tracking the impact of prenatal chemical exposures and maternal psychosocial stress on children’s growth and development over time,” Schantz said. “We measure numerous birth outcomes, including birth weight and gestational age. We also assess infants’ cognition by studying their looking behavior. This allows us to get measures of working memory, attention and information-processing speed.”

The researchers analyzed metabolites of three commonly occurring phthalates in urine samples regularly collected from the pregnant women in the study. The chemical exposure data were used in combination with assessments of the women’s infants when the children were 7.5 months old.

The researchers used a well-established method that gives insight into the reasoning of children too young to express themselves verbally: Infants typically look longer at unfamiliar or unexpected images or events.

The team used an infrared eye-tracker to follow each infant’s gaze during several laboratory trials. With the infant sitting on a caregiver’s lap, researchers first familiarized the child with two identical images of a face. After the infant learned to recognize the face, the researchers showed that same face paired with an unfamiliar one.

“In repeated trials, half of the 244 infants tested saw one set of faces as familiar, and half learned to recognize a different set of faces as familiar,” Schantz said. “By analyzing the time spent looking at the faces, we could determine both the speed with which the infants processed new information and assess their ability to pay attention.”

The assessment linked pregnant women’s exposure to most of the phthalates that were assessed with slower information processing in their infants, but the outcome depended on the specific chemical, the sex of the infant and which set of faces the infant viewed as familiar. Male infants, in particular, tended to process information more slowly if their mothers had been exposed to higher concentrations of phthalates known to interfere with androgenic hormones.

The specific characteristics of faces presented to the infants in the familiarization trials also appeared to play a role in the outcome, the researchers reported. Phthalate-exposed children who were first familiarized with faces from Set 2 were more likely to experience slower processing speed than those familiarized with faces from Set 1. The finding is perplexing, Schantz said, but is likely related to differences in the infants’ preferences for the faces in the two sets. It also may be an indication that familiarization with the Set 2 faces is a more sensitive detector of changes in processing speed related to phthalate exposure.

 “Most previous studies of the relationship between prenatal exposure to phthalates and cognition have focused on early and middle childhood,” Schantz said. “This new work suggests that some of these associations can be detected much earlier in a child’s life.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institutes of Health  ECHO Program supported this research.

DOI: 10.1016/j.neuro.2021.03.001

This article was imported from a previous version of the News Bureau website. Please email news@illinois.edu to report missing photos and/or photo credits.

The mosquito protein AEG12 strongly inhibits the family of viruses that cause yellow fever, dengue, West Nile, and Zika and weakly inhibits coronaviruses, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and their collaborators. The researchers found that AEG12 works by destabilizing the viral envelope, breaking its protective covering. Although the protein does not affect viruses that do not have an envelope, such as those that cause pink eye and bladder infections, the findings could lead to therapeutics against viruses that affect millions of people around the world. The research was published online in PNAS.

Scientists at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH, used X-ray crystallography to solve the structure of AEG12. Senior author Geoffrey Mueller, Ph.D., head of the NIEHS Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Group, said at the molecular level, AEG12 rips out the lipids, or the fat-like portions of the membrane that hold the virus together.

“It is as if AEG12 is hungry for the lipids that are in the virus membrane, so it gets rid of some of the lipids it has and exchanges them for the ones it really prefers,” Mueller said. “The protein has high affinity for viral lipids and steals them from the virus.”

As a result, Mueller says the AEG12 protein has great killing power over some viruses. While the researchers demonstrated that AEG12 was most effective against flaviviruses, the family of viruses to which Zika, West Nile, and others belong, it is possible AEG12 could be effective against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. But, Mueller said it will take years of bioengineering to make AEG12 a viable therapy for COVID-19. Part of the problem is AEG12 also breaks opens red blood cells, so researchers will have to identify compounds that will make the protein target viruses only.

Alexander Foo, Ph.D., an NIEHS visiting fellow and lead author of the paper, explained that mosquitoes produce AEG12 when they take a blood meal or become infected with flaviviruses. Like humans, mosquitoes mount a vigorous immune response against these viruses, with AEG12 bursting their viral covering. But, at the beginning of the project, Foo and his colleagues knew little about the function of AEG12.

“The prospect of studying a new protein is exciting, yet daunting,” Foo said. “Thankfully, we had enough clues and access to a wide range of expertise at NIEHS to piece it together.”

Co-author and crystallography expert Lars Pedersen, Ph.D., is leader of the NIEHS Structure Function Group. He routinely uses information about a molecule’s physical makeup in his work and encourages more scientists to consider using this data in their studies. He said, “Our research shows that understanding the structure of a protein can be important in figuring out what it does and how it could help treat disease.”

Grants: 
Z01ES043010 
ZICES102506 
ZIAES102645

Reference: Reference: Foo ACY, Thompson PM, Chen S-H, Jadi R, Lupo B, DeRose EF, Arora S, Placentra VC, Premkumar L, Perera L, Pedersen LC, Martin N, Mueller GA. 2021. The mosquito protein AEG12 displays both cytolytic and antiviral properties via a common lipid transfer mechanism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A: doi: 10.1073/pnas.2019251118 [Online 9 March 2021].