Research

Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside barns, humans

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside barns, humans Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/30/2018 - 00:00

Cay Leytham-Powell

As humans evolved and expanded, so too did barn swallows, new research from CU �鶹ӰԺ suggests

The evolution of barn swallows, a bird ubiquitous to bridges and sheds around the world, might be even more closely tied to humans than previously thought, according to new study from the �鶹ӰԺ.

Chris Smith (left) and Rebecca Safran (right) re-examined the evolution of barn swallows and found that they may indeed have evolved alongside barns. Photographs courtesy of Rebecca Safran and Patrick Campbell/�鶹ӰԺ.

The research, published this week in Molecular Ecology, offers preliminary insight suggesting that the barn swallow and its subspecies evolved alongside—but independently from—humans. These new results make it one of the only known species, in addition to microscopic organisms like bacteria or viruses, to have developed in such a way, upending previous assumptions that barn swallows evolved prior to human settlement.

“Humans could be a really big part of the story,” said Rebecca Safran, a co-author of the study and an ecology and evolutionary biology (EBIO) associate professor at CU �鶹ӰԺ. “There’s very few studies that can point to the exact influence of humans, and so here, this coincidence of human expansion and permanent settlement and the expansion of a group that relies really, really heavily on humans is compelling.”

Barn swallows are found across the northern hemisphere and are characterized by their mud-cup nests that are built nearly exclusively on human-made structures. Despite their prevalence, however, not much is known about their evolutionary history, the timing of their expansion from northern Africa (where they originated) or how the six subspecies evolved so physically and behaviorally different yet remain almost genetically identical.

Previous studies published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution looked into these questions and found that the different subspecies split early, well before human settlement.

This new study, however, gave the topic a fresh look by examining the whole genome of 168 barn swallows from the two sub-species farthest apart on an evolutionary scale: H. r. savignii in Egypt (a non-migratory species that lives along the Nile) and H. r. erythrogaster in North America (a species found throughout North America that migrates seasonally to South America).

Barn swallow subspecies are found throughout the northern hemisphere. Barn Swallow illustrations courtesy of Hilary Burn, and map courtesy of the Safran lab.

These data—which are on the order of 100,000 times bigger than the previous dataset used—were then analyzed with more sophisticated computational resources and methods than previously available. This allowed researchers to get a more complete picture that places the timing of barn swallow differentiation or speciation (i.e., when the barn swallow subspecies separated) closer to that of when humans began to build structures and settlements.

“The previous studies were playing with the idea of potential impact on population sizes due to humans,” said Chris Smith, a graduate student in EBIO and the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology program, and the study’s lead author. “Our results suggest a much more substantial link with humans.”

These new preliminary findings also suggest that this evolutionary link may have been forged through a “founder event,” which is when a small number of individuals in a species take over a new environment and are able to expand their new population there thanks to an availability of resources and an absence of competitors. For barn swallows, this event may have occurred rapidly when they moved into a new, relatively empty environment: alongside humans.

“Everyone is always wondering how do you study speciation? It’s been viewed as this long-term, million-year (process), but in barn swallows, we are not talking about differentiation within several thousands of years,” said Safran. “Things are really unfolding rather rapidly.”

Smith concurred: “It’s interesting to study speciation in the beginning steps.”

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CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy receives $2 million gift commitment to encourage collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 06:00:00 +0000

CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy receives $2 million gift commitment to encourage collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/19/2018 - 00:00

David Kelly

AURORA, Colo. (September 19, 2018) - The ALSAM Foundation recently invested an additional $2 million to continue the Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program at the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The funding supports a second phase of grants for projects focused on drug discovery and development.

David Ross, PhD, chair of the CU Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and associate dean of research at the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy, is leading the school's efforts to identify new drug therapies and bring them to market quicker than ever before by supporting talented faculty.

"This support from The ALSAM Foundation is critical to our success," Ross said. "By allowing us to award grants to the best ideas at CU, we are able to support innovative approaches to identify the next generation of drugs to transform patient care."

The Therapeutic Innovation Grants Program encourages collaboration between the CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and the CU BioFrontiers Institute in �鶹ӰԺ as well as faculty throughout CU Anschutz.

By awarding grants to researchers who build an interdisciplinary team from the CU School of Pharmacy, the BioFrontiers Institute at CU �鶹ӰԺ and from across the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, this fund will jumpstart some of the most transformational ideas at CU today.

"The ALSAM Foundation's generosity is fueling our innovative efforts and supporting high risk, high reward ideas in the laboratory," said CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean Ralph Altiere, PhD. "We are so grateful for their longtime partnership."

Some of the current active research areas include novel drug discovery efforts including high throughput and computational approaches, informatics and systems genetics, RNA-based therapeutics, immunotherapy and precision medicine.

�鶹ӰԺ the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is the only comprehensive academic health sciences center in Colorado, the largest academic health center in the Rocky Mountain region and one of the newest education, research and patient care facilities in the world. Home to 21,000 employees, more than 4,300 degree-seeking students and two nationally recognized hospitals, CU Anschutz trains the health sciences workforce of the future and fuels the economy. CU Anschutz features schools of medicine, pharmacy, dental medicine and public health, a college of nursing and a graduate school. Learn more at ucdenver.edu/anschutz.

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BioFrontiers research cited in article related to updated UVa paid parental leave policy

Anonymous — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 17:57:18 +0000

BioFrontiers research cited in article related to updated UVa paid parental leave policy Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/12/2018 - 11:57

Ruth Serven Smith of The Daily Progress

Adapted from The Daily Progress article.

The University of Virginia on Tuesday announced expanded paid leave benefits for new parents — a move that goes beyond a state executive order and one that could help the school remain competitive with its peers.

In June, Gov. Ralph Northam issued an executive order providing eight weeks of paid parental leave to state employees. The order, which included full-time UVa employees, was effective immediately.

In January, UVa will expand leave for part-time salaried staff, as well. The expansion bumps UVa up to the nation’s median for paid parental leave, according to University of Colorado researchers.

Now, each parent who is a UVa employee can take time off after the birth of a child or placement of a child under 18 with them as an adoptive or foster parent or guardian. Part-time salaried staff will receive time off prorated to the amount of hours they work — for example, someone who works 30 hours per week will be eligible for six weeks of paid time off.

Previously, UVa employees who were tenured faculty, tenure-track or had a one-year appointment were only eligible for three weeks of leave at full pay after the arrival of a child under the age of 7. Faculty could ask for additional unpaid time off or use short-term disability leave. Staff and other employees appeared to previously be eligible for only the 12 weeks unpaid leave guaranteed by federal law.

“Spending time with a child who just joined your family is incredibly important,” UVa President Jim Ryan said in a statement Tuesday. “Besides giving parents and children a chance to bond, studies have shown that paid parental leave makes children healthier, raises productivity at work and prevents parents from having to choose between taking care of a child and keeping their jobs.”

Virginia Tech expanded its policy to one identical to UVa’s in August.

Nationally, only 5 percent of U.S. workers had access to paid family leave in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the public sector, access to paid family and medical leave is spotty. California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia also cover some public employees or cities and counties that opt in.

When Northam signed the order, he said he hoped it would help state employees with young families who previously relied on a federal law that would protect their job while on leave but doesn’t require the time off to be paid.

Some universities have expanded leave on their own, but there is little consistency between which universities offer leave, the amount offered and if it is given to people who are not birth mothers, according to analysis from the University of Colorado at �鶹ӰԺ.

�鶹ӰԺ 60 percent of universities provide paid leave for new mothers or fathers, with an average duration of 14.2 weeks for women and 11.6 weeks for men, said Dan Larremore, an assistant professor of computer science who worked on the project.

“There was a huge amount of variability,” Larremore said. “I would have thought that the more prestigious places would have more of an incentive to treat new parents well, but it was all over the map.”

UVa’s eight weeks is at the median of leave offered at the 205 U.S. and Canadian universities surveyed, and below the amount offered by Princeton University, Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The group compared its findings about policies in academia with those of tech companies, some of which, such as Etsy Inc. and Spotify Technology, offer as much as six months of paid leave to men and women who become parents. Netflix Inc. offers a full year off.

But of higher importance than the amount of time off, said Allison Morgan, a graduate student who worked on the project, was making sure employees knew their school’s policy and keeping track of how the amount of leave offered might affect hiring, retention and tenure decisions.

The researchers are adding their parental leave findings to a project that looks at how factors such as gender, family makeup and an institution’s prestige interact in academia.

“We’re generally interested in institutional and perceived barriers to participation in the sciences, and one of the barriers we saw was the use of parental leave in the sciences,” Morgan said. “We want to uncover persistent inequities in science, and the data shows there are more disparities than we’d like.”

Ruth Serven Smith is a reporter for The Daily Progress. Contact her at (434) 978-7254, rserven@dailyprogress.com or @RuthServen on Twitter.

The paid parental leave project by Allison Morgan, Sam Way, Mirta Galesic, Aaron Clauset, and Dan Larremore at the �鶹ӰԺ and the Santa Fe Institute.

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Researchers peer inside cells to spy on cancer's on-off switch

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Researchers peer inside cells to spy on cancer's on-off switch Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/13/2018 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Medical student Daniel Youmans (left) and Tom Cech (right), director of the BioFrontiers Institute, look over an image from a high-powered microscope (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU �鶹ӰԺ)

Forty years after researchers first discovered it in fruit flies, a once-obscure cluster of proteins called PRC2 has become a key target for new cancer-fighting drugs, due to its tendency—when mutated—to bind to and silence tumor-suppressing genes.

New CU �鶹ӰԺ research published today uses state-of-the-art imaging to offer an unprecedented look at the complex, illuminating how it finds its way to genes, what happens when it gets there and how a new generation of cancer therapeutics might disrupt the process.

The findings, published in the journal Genes and Development, also shed new light on just how epigenetic changes—the switching on or off of genes—happen inside the cell.

“Many cancers make use of epigenetic gene silencing to promote their own growth. Medical scientists want to inhibit this cancer-causing process, but they first need to know exactly how it works,” said Nobel Laureate and Distinguished Professor Thomas Cech, senior author of the study. “Our new work contributes to the understanding of how the molecular machine responsible for gene silencing is recruited to its sites of action in human cells, determining which genes are turned off.”

Daniel Youmans works in his lab (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU �鶹ӰԺ)

For the study, Cech and lead author Daniel Youmans, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at CU �鶹ӰԺ and an MD at Anschutz Medical Center, used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to apply fluorescent tags to the individual proteins which make up PRC2, or Polycomb Repressive Complex 2.

Then, they used a high-tech microscope to observe what happens to the proteins inside living human cells, both under normal conditions and when exposed to a cancer drug called A-395, which is a PRC2 inhibitor.

“Our work helps define the mechanism of these cancer drugs and changes what we thought about the way PRC2 functions inside cells,” Youmans said.

PRC2 is made of a cluster of four core proteins, which interact with other proteins circulating in the cell. When they click together just right, like puzzle pieces, it signals the complex to make its way to certain genes in the cell, silencing them, said Youmans.

In a healthy cell, that silencing can influence whether a stem cell becomes a neuron or heart cell and shut off genes which could promote disease. But in many cancers, including lymphoma, the complex is hijacked to silence tumor suppressors.

Scientists previously thought that PRC2 cancer therapeutics worked by preventing the complex from binding to genes. But when watching it swirl around the cell, the researchers discovered that in the presence of the drug, the molecular silencing machine made it to its locations. Once there, it just failed to fully do its job.

They also identified specific auxiliary proteins which PRC2 must click to in order to be recruited to its target genes.

“We showed that when you disrupt the interaction between PRC2 and these other puzzle pieces, it completely disrupts its ability to bind to specific places,” said Youmans.

The findings suggest that existing PRC2 inhibitors, while effective, may be working in a different way than previously believed. They also open the door for development of new drugs, which could get at the same end goal by preventing PRC2 from binding to certain locations on genes altogether.

“Cancer is always mutating so it’s important to have a broad toolbox of therapeutic options,” said Youmans.

As a student in CU’s Medical Scientist Training Program, which enables medical students to simultaneously pursue a Ph.D., Youmans has a unique perspective on the possible applications of his research.

“I’m heartened by the idea that the work I do in the laboratory could ultimately help the patients I see in the hospital,” he said.

Jens Schmidt, who was a postdoctoral research fellow at the BioFrontiers Institute and is now an assistant professor at Michigan State University, contributed to this study.

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