BOSTON ? Downtown Dewey Square is crammed with tents and tarps of Occupy Boston protesters, but organizers made sure from the start of this weeks-old encampment that there was room for the holy.
No shoes are allowed in the "Sacred Space" tent here, but you can bring just about any faith or spiritual tradition.
A day's schedule finds people balancing their chakras, a "compassion meditation" and a discussion of a biblical passage in Luke. Inside, a Buddha statue sits near a picture of Jesus, while a hand-lettered sign in the corner points toward Mecca.
The tent is one way protesters here and in other cities have taken pains to include a spiritual component in their occupations. Still, Occupy Wall Street is not a religious movement, and signs of spiritually aren't evident at all protest sites.
Clergy emphasize they are participants in the aggressively leaderless movement, not people trying to co-opt it. Plus, in a movement that purports to represent the "99 percent" in society, the prominent religious groups are overwhelmingly liberal.
Religion might not fit into the movement seamlessly, but activist Dan Sieradski, who's helped organize Jewish services and events at Occupy Wall Street, said it must fit somewhere.
"We're a country full of religious people," he said. "Faith communities do need to be present and need to be welcomed in order for this to be an all-encompassing movement that embraces all sectors of society."
Religious imagery and events have been common since the protests began. In New York, clergy carried an Old Testament-style golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street bull to decry the false idol of greed. Sieradski organized a Yom Kippur service. About 70 Muslims kneeled to pray toward Mecca at a prayer service Friday.
A Chicago group, Interfaith Worker Justice, has published an interfaith prayer service guide for occupation protests nationwide.
Clergy who support the protests say they are a natural fit with many faiths, because they share traditional concerns about economic injustice. They also point to history, including the civil rights movement and abolition.
"Every movement for social change that has really made a difference has included the power of God, the power of the spirit and the power of people of conscience," said the Rev. Stephanie Sellers, one of the Episcopalian "protest chaplains" praying with protesters at different sites.
Sieradski said his Jewish faith's commitment to helping the powerless was one reason he was attracted to the movement, but he didn't intend to establish regular Jewish services. He announced his first event, a Sabbath potluck dinner, on online social networks, not knowing what to expect. The strong turnout led him to help organize the Yom Kippur service, activities during Sukkot, and what Sieradski hopes will be regular religious events.
In Boston, Marty Dagoberto said the Sacred Space was also created in an unforced way, after he suggested the idea at Occupy Boston's first general gathering. He said the space helps promote a spirit of calm and unity crucial to bringing change.
"I feel like it's really important for us to stay rooted in love, simply put," Dagoberto said.
Religious elements haven't sprouted up as visibly in other Occupy Wall Street movements nationwide, said Elizabeth Drescher, a lecturer on Christian spirituality at Santa Clara University, who has visited the occupations in Santa Cruz and St. Louis.
She said some protesters are wary because they don't recognize the authority of institutions, including religious ones, and are generally looking for clergy to be "ministering but not proselytizing." She recalled a conversation with an Occupy Santa Cruz protester while a man in a clerical collar picked up trash.
"(The protester) said, `That dude's here with us. He's not handing out pamphlets and trying to save me. He's picking up trash,'" Drescher said.
While protesters are cautious about religious leaders, those leaders have concerns, as well. The Rev. Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, has visited Occupy Wall Street and praised the movement for forcing society to re-examine its values. But she said the school is still trying to discern how much to be involved.
"There's so much polarization in our country now, and demonization of one side of the other. ... As religious leaders, we want to be `repairers of the breach,'" she said, paraphrasing a passage in Isaiah. "So the question is how we can come together, Wall Street and Main Street, to come up with solutions that are going to work for all of us?"
Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an advocacy group for conservative mainline Protestants, said while Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in getting attention, it's limited because it's only attracting religious support from the left.
A call for government redistribution of wealth and reliance on street activism doesn't appeal to the swath of suburban churchgoers with conservative political and religious leanings, he said.
"It doesn't seem they put a lot of thought into expanding their support base beyond those who identify with 1960s-era protest action," he said.
The movement could still attract center-right religious support from the Roman Catholic Church, said Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America. But he said it must be clear protesters in the still-fuzzily-defined movement share mainstream Catholic concerns about consumerism and an unfettered free market.
"If it becomes just another version of American progressivism, then I can imagine the church probably wouldn't want to cozy up to it too much," Schneck said.
Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, who helped organize Friday's Muslim prayer service in New York, believes religious groups have already amplified the movement's power. He sees his involvement as a duty, because so many in his congregation are affected by the nation's economic woes.
"If Moses or Jesus or Mohammed were alive in this day and time they'd be out there guiding and inspiring and teaching these young people," he said.
___
Associated Press reporter Karen Matthews in New York contributed to this report.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia ? Defense lawyers in Cambodia's Khmer Rouge genocide trial have filed a complaint accusing the prime minister of interfering in the proceedings.
Two lawyers for Nuon Chea, the No. 2 Khmer Rouge leader, allege that Prime Minister Hun Sen and his colleagues interfered with defendants' right to a fair trial. They filed a criminal complaint with state prosecutors Monday at Phnom Penh Municipal Court.
Nuon Chea will go on trial with three other defendants late next month.
The U.N.-backed tribunal is seeking justice for an estimated 1.7 million people who died under the 1970s communist Khmer Rouge regime.
Hun Sen has publicly chided the tribunal several times, but the complaint is basically a tactic employed as part of an aggressive legal defense.
SOUTHERN SHUNEH, Jordan ? Jordan's king has urged Israel and the Palestinians to look to the Arab Spring uprisings for inspiration and to restart their stalled peace talks.
Abdullah says the future for the Middle East and beyond is with the "normalcy of peace."
He spoke at Saturday's opening of a two-day special meeting of the Davos-based World Economic Forum held on the shores of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.
Abdullah says "shortsighted leaders may think they can shut" the door to peace ? a rebuke believed directed at Israel's right-wing government.
He says a Palestinian-Israeli deal must consider Israel's "security and acceptance" and allow for the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
The new Siri virtual assistant is without a doubt the highlight of Apple's new iPhone 4S, so we knew it wouldn't be long before we saw some TV spots showcasing its chatty ways. And just like clockwork, the company is now rolling out its first ad that lets everyone know what the familiar-looking smartphone is now capable of.
The brief 30-second ad shows new iPhone 4S owners of all ages putting Siri to good use ? asking for everything from directions and weather reports to tips on formal wear. It's a great way to show the scope of information that Siri can provide, and will undoubtedly lead to some interested prospective owners. Not to mention make everyone with a iPhone 4 pine for an upgrade.
Curiously, the ad only shows Siri responding to one of the inquiries, possibly because the virtual assistant's rather robotic tone might turn off otherwise excited consumers. Check out the full ad above and let us know what you think in the comments!
NEW YORK - Abby Wambach has added another accolade to her long list of honors.
She was selected Sportswoman of the Year by the Women's Sports Foundation on Wednesday night.
Wambach led the U.S. with four goals at the World Cup in Germany, where the Americans lost to Japan on penalty kicks in the final. She now has 13 career World Cup goals, placing her third on the all-time scoring list.
Top-ranked golfer Yani Tseng won in the individual category. Tseng is a six-time LPGA Tour winner this season. She became the youngest player ? male or female ? to win five majors when she won the Women's British Open in July.
The U.S. Women's Ski Jumping team won the Wilma Rudolph Courage Award, and 12-year-old Winter Vinecki won the Annika Sorenstam Inspiration Award. Vinecki runs triathlons to raise awareness of prostate cancer in honor of her late father.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Barcelona set a club record by extending its unbeaten streak to 13 games with a 2-0 victory over the Czech Republic's Viktoria Plzen in the Champions League.
Tips from the journals of the American Society for MicrobiologyPublic release date: 20-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Human Norovirus In Groundwater Remains Infective After Two Months
Researchers from Emory University have discovered that norovirus in groundwater can remain infectious for at least 61 days. The research is published in the October Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Human norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis. The disease it causes tends to be one of the more unpleasant of those that leave healthy people unscathed in the long run, with diarrhea and vomiting that typically last for 48 hours. Norovirus sickens one in 15 Americans annually, causing 70,000 hospitalizations, and more than 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The results answer a question of great importance to public health, which had driven researcher Christine Moe and her colleagues to conduct this research: If well water becomes contaminated with noroviruses--perhaps from leaking sewer lines or a septic tankhow long do these noroviruses survive in water, and when would it be safe to drink from that well?
To answer that question, they prepared a safety-tested virus stock solution. They then put a known amount of this solution into a container of groundwater from an Atlanta well, which had met Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards.
The researchers then tested the virus infectivity at days naught, 4, 14, 21, 27, and 61, by having volunteers drink the water on those days. The durability of the virus' infectivity was unexpected, says Moe. Most of the 13 volunteers became infected at various time points, exhibiting among them the complete range of norovirus symptoms, which endured for as long as five days post challenge. "We were surprised to observe that even the volunteers that drank the water 61 days after we had added the virus still got infected with the norovirus," says Moe.
Norovirus may remain infective far longer than 61 days. The researchers stored the groundwater at room temperature in the dark, using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction to determine how much viral RNA remained after 622 days, and again after 1,266 days. They found no reduction after the first interval, and very little at the end of the second interval. Unfortunately, funding was insufficient to test infectivity in human volunteers beyond day 61.
"This study provides further evidence of the need to treat groundwater used for drinking water," says Moe, adding that the Environmental Protection Agency and other decision-makers who regulate drinking water need to take these findings into account, particularly since roughly half the US population relies upon groundwater for drinking.
To ensure that the volunteers' health would not be compromised, the investigators conducted the study in a special research unit of Emory University Hospital, while taking a variety of other precautionary measures.
Anticipating a question about who would volunteer to participate in a study with such potentially unpleasant consequences, Moe says that some volunteers have said that "they want to see how good their immune system is, and whether they will actually get sick." Three of the 13 volunteers did not become sick. One volunteer was the local librarian "who came to the research unit with a huge bag of books that she wanted to read while she was in the study," says Moe.
(S.R. Seitz, J.S. Leon, K.J. Schwab, G.M. Lyon, M. Dowd, M. McDaniels, G. Abdulhafid, M.L. Fernandez, L.C. Lindesmith, R.S. Baric, and C.L. Moe, 2011. Norovirus infectivity in humans and persistence in water. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77:6884-6888.)
Women Can Self-Test for HPV, Easily and Accurately
A team of German researchers has shown that women can accurately test themselves for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the most common cause of cervical cancer. The research is published in the October Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
"The high sensitivity of this self-sampling method guarantees to identify nearly all HPV-infected women," says first author Yvonne Delere, of the Robert Koch Institute of the Ministry of Health, Berlin.
Worldwide, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women, with half a million new cases and a quarter million deaths, annually, according to the World Health Organization. Virtually all cases are linked to certain strains HPV.
In the study, the researchers compared self sampling with conventional endocervical brush samples obtained by gynecologists in two groups of women 20-30 years of age, with (55 women) and without (101 women) a recent suspicious cytological smear. The two sampling methods were in accord in the two groups 84 and 91 percent of the time, respectively. Overall, the women rated the self-sampling method easy, at 12 on a scale of 0 (easy) to 100 (difficult).
The Netherlands has already introduced the new technique into cervical cancer screening programs, and Delere hopes to see the method become widespread in developing countries, where women frequently lack easy access to medical personnel and testing.
The researchers note that concordance between the conventional and the self-sampling methods is good despite the fact that the techniques sample different areas. The cervical brush sampling is directed towards the transformation zone, the area on the cervix where abnormal cells most commonly develop, while the lavage includes the whole cervical area.
"The higher prevalence of HPV, hr-HPV, and HPV16 in cervicovaginal lavage samples may be explained by additional infections at extracervical sites," according to the paper. "Since these infections may be a reservoir for virus infecting the cervical epithelium at the transformational zone, they are probably epidemiologically relevant. Therefore, cervicovaginal lavage sampling may be superior to cervix-directed sampling for future HPV prevalence studies."
Among teenaged girls, the transformation zone lies on the cervix's outer surface, where it is more vulnerable to infection than it is in adult women.
The self-sampling device, the Delphi Screener, is a sterile, syringe-like device containing five milliliters of buffered saline. One operates it by plunging the handle, releasing the saline into the vagina, holding it down for five seconds, then releasing the handle, so that the device retrieves the fluid. Next, one plunges the lavage specimens into prelabeled coded tubes, and mails it to the laboratory.
(Y. Delere, M. Schuster, E. Vartazarowa, T. Hansel, I. Hagemann, S. Borchardt, H. Perlitz, A. Schneider, S. Reiter, and A.M. Kaufmann, 2011. Cervicovaginal self-sampling is a reliable method for determination of prevalence of human papillomavirus genotypes in women aged 20 to 30 years. J. Clin. Microbiol. 49:3519-3522.)
Newly Discovered Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes
Waters polluted by the ordure of pigs, poultry, or cattle represent a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes, both known and potentially novel. These resistance genes can be spread among different bacterial species by bacteriophage, bacteria-infecting viruses, according to a paper in the October Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
"We found great quantities of bacteriophages carrying different antibiotic resistance genes in waters with fecal pollution from pigs, cattle, and poultry," says Maite Muniesa of the University of Barcelona, Spain, an author on the study. "We demonstrated that the genes carried by the phages were able to generate resistance to a given antibiotic when introduced into other bacteria in laboratory conditions," says Muniesa.
Although we often think of antibiotic resistance genes as evolving into existence in response to the antibiotics that doctors use to fight human disease and that agribusiness uses to fatten farm animals, microbes had undoubtedly been using both antibiotics and resistance genes to compete with each other for millions of years before antibiotics revolutionized human medicine and resistance genes threatened their efficacy to the point where the World Health Organization considers them to be one of the biggest risks to human health.
Thus, the Spanish researchers suspect, based on their study, that these resistance gene reservoirs are the product of microbial competition, rather than pressure from human use of antibiotics. They note that the pasture-fed cattle in their study are not fed antibiotics, and they suggest that even if antibiotic feed additives were banned, new resistance genes might emerge while old ones spread from these reservoirs into bacteria that infect humans.
And if resistance genes are being mobilized from these reservoirs, it becomes important to understand how the resistance genes are transmitted from phage to new bacterial species, in order to develop strategies that could hinder this transmission, limiting the emergence of new resistance genes, says Muniesa.
(M. Colomer-Lluch, L.Imamamovic, J. Jofre, and M. Muniesa, 2011. Bacteriophages carrying antibiotic resistance genes in fecal waste from cattle, pigs, and poultry. Antim. Agents Chemother. 55:4908-4911.)
New Insights Into Insulin Resistance Could Lead to Better Drugs for Diabetics
Research published in the October Molecular and Cellular Biology moves us closer to developing drugs that could mitigate diabetes.
Diabetes afflicts an estimated 26 million Americans, while 79 million have prediabetes. In other words, one in three Americans confronts this disease. Diabetes raises the risk of heart disease and stroke by as much as fourfold, and it is the leading cause of blindness among adults 20-74. It is also the leading cause of kidney failure.
In earlier research, four years ago another team of researchers showed that they could boost insulin sensitivity in experimental rodents by giving the animals a drug called myriocin. People with diabetes have a condition called insulin resistance, which renders them poorly able to process sugar. That results in high blood sugar, which damages the blood vessels, leading to many of diabetes' ills. In their study, that team, led by Johannes M. Aerts of the University of Amsterdam, observed a decrease in a compound called ceramide, which sits on cell membranes in the circulatory system, which they postulated was responsible for the rise in insulin sensitivity.
In the new study, Xian-Cheng Jiang of Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, and his collaborators set out to confirm this earlier work, using a genetic approach.
The new research provides strong evidence that ceramide was not causing insulin sensitivity, but that another membrane-bound compound, sphingomyelin, might be doing so.
Ceramide is the substrate for the last step in a five step cascade that produces sphingomyelin. In that step an enzyme called sphingomyline synthase 2 (SMS2) cleaves ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. The first enzyme in this pathway is called serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT).
To test the hypothesis that ceramide is involved in modulating insulin resistance the researchers used knockout mice for each of these enzymes. They postulated that (partially) knocking out the first enzyme in the cascade would decrease ceramide levels while knocking out the last enzyme in the sphingomyelin pathway would boost ceramide levels, since that enzyme uses ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. Thus, SPT knockout mice would have greater insulin sensitivity, while SMS knockout mice would have reduced insulin sensitivity.
Surprisingly, while ceramide levels changed as predicted, that change did not influence insulin sensitivity, which was higher in both groups.
The research has important implications for drug development for mitigating diabetes. Myriocin proved highly toxic and major efforts to modify the drug to reduce that toxicity have been fruitless. Myriocin's toxicity probably stems from the fact that it inhibits the first step of the sphingomyelin biosynthetic pathway, affecting all the downstream biology, says Jiang. The discovery that knocking out the last step in the biosynthetic pathway improves insulin sensitivity means that drug treatments could target that last enzyme, SMS, leaving the rest of that biosynthetic pathway to function normally.
(Z. Li, H. Shang, J. Liu, C.-P. Liang, Y. Li, Y. Li, G. Teitelman, T. Beyer, H.H. Bui, D.A. Peake, Y. Zhang, P.E. Sanders, M.-S. Kuo, T.-S. Park, G. Cao, and X.-C. Jiang, 2011. Reducing plasma membrane sphingomyelin increases insulin sensitivity. Mol. Cell. Biol. 31:4205-4218.)
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Tips from the journals of the American Society for MicrobiologyPublic release date: 20-Oct-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Human Norovirus In Groundwater Remains Infective After Two Months
Researchers from Emory University have discovered that norovirus in groundwater can remain infectious for at least 61 days. The research is published in the October Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Human norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis. The disease it causes tends to be one of the more unpleasant of those that leave healthy people unscathed in the long run, with diarrhea and vomiting that typically last for 48 hours. Norovirus sickens one in 15 Americans annually, causing 70,000 hospitalizations, and more than 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The results answer a question of great importance to public health, which had driven researcher Christine Moe and her colleagues to conduct this research: If well water becomes contaminated with noroviruses--perhaps from leaking sewer lines or a septic tankhow long do these noroviruses survive in water, and when would it be safe to drink from that well?
To answer that question, they prepared a safety-tested virus stock solution. They then put a known amount of this solution into a container of groundwater from an Atlanta well, which had met Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards.
The researchers then tested the virus infectivity at days naught, 4, 14, 21, 27, and 61, by having volunteers drink the water on those days. The durability of the virus' infectivity was unexpected, says Moe. Most of the 13 volunteers became infected at various time points, exhibiting among them the complete range of norovirus symptoms, which endured for as long as five days post challenge. "We were surprised to observe that even the volunteers that drank the water 61 days after we had added the virus still got infected with the norovirus," says Moe.
Norovirus may remain infective far longer than 61 days. The researchers stored the groundwater at room temperature in the dark, using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction to determine how much viral RNA remained after 622 days, and again after 1,266 days. They found no reduction after the first interval, and very little at the end of the second interval. Unfortunately, funding was insufficient to test infectivity in human volunteers beyond day 61.
"This study provides further evidence of the need to treat groundwater used for drinking water," says Moe, adding that the Environmental Protection Agency and other decision-makers who regulate drinking water need to take these findings into account, particularly since roughly half the US population relies upon groundwater for drinking.
To ensure that the volunteers' health would not be compromised, the investigators conducted the study in a special research unit of Emory University Hospital, while taking a variety of other precautionary measures.
Anticipating a question about who would volunteer to participate in a study with such potentially unpleasant consequences, Moe says that some volunteers have said that "they want to see how good their immune system is, and whether they will actually get sick." Three of the 13 volunteers did not become sick. One volunteer was the local librarian "who came to the research unit with a huge bag of books that she wanted to read while she was in the study," says Moe.
(S.R. Seitz, J.S. Leon, K.J. Schwab, G.M. Lyon, M. Dowd, M. McDaniels, G. Abdulhafid, M.L. Fernandez, L.C. Lindesmith, R.S. Baric, and C.L. Moe, 2011. Norovirus infectivity in humans and persistence in water. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 77:6884-6888.)
Women Can Self-Test for HPV, Easily and Accurately
A team of German researchers has shown that women can accurately test themselves for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, the most common cause of cervical cancer. The research is published in the October Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
"The high sensitivity of this self-sampling method guarantees to identify nearly all HPV-infected women," says first author Yvonne Delere, of the Robert Koch Institute of the Ministry of Health, Berlin.
Worldwide, cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women, with half a million new cases and a quarter million deaths, annually, according to the World Health Organization. Virtually all cases are linked to certain strains HPV.
In the study, the researchers compared self sampling with conventional endocervical brush samples obtained by gynecologists in two groups of women 20-30 years of age, with (55 women) and without (101 women) a recent suspicious cytological smear. The two sampling methods were in accord in the two groups 84 and 91 percent of the time, respectively. Overall, the women rated the self-sampling method easy, at 12 on a scale of 0 (easy) to 100 (difficult).
The Netherlands has already introduced the new technique into cervical cancer screening programs, and Delere hopes to see the method become widespread in developing countries, where women frequently lack easy access to medical personnel and testing.
The researchers note that concordance between the conventional and the self-sampling methods is good despite the fact that the techniques sample different areas. The cervical brush sampling is directed towards the transformation zone, the area on the cervix where abnormal cells most commonly develop, while the lavage includes the whole cervical area.
"The higher prevalence of HPV, hr-HPV, and HPV16 in cervicovaginal lavage samples may be explained by additional infections at extracervical sites," according to the paper. "Since these infections may be a reservoir for virus infecting the cervical epithelium at the transformational zone, they are probably epidemiologically relevant. Therefore, cervicovaginal lavage sampling may be superior to cervix-directed sampling for future HPV prevalence studies."
Among teenaged girls, the transformation zone lies on the cervix's outer surface, where it is more vulnerable to infection than it is in adult women.
The self-sampling device, the Delphi Screener, is a sterile, syringe-like device containing five milliliters of buffered saline. One operates it by plunging the handle, releasing the saline into the vagina, holding it down for five seconds, then releasing the handle, so that the device retrieves the fluid. Next, one plunges the lavage specimens into prelabeled coded tubes, and mails it to the laboratory.
(Y. Delere, M. Schuster, E. Vartazarowa, T. Hansel, I. Hagemann, S. Borchardt, H. Perlitz, A. Schneider, S. Reiter, and A.M. Kaufmann, 2011. Cervicovaginal self-sampling is a reliable method for determination of prevalence of human papillomavirus genotypes in women aged 20 to 30 years. J. Clin. Microbiol. 49:3519-3522.)
Newly Discovered Reservoir of Antibiotic Resistance Genes
Waters polluted by the ordure of pigs, poultry, or cattle represent a reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes, both known and potentially novel. These resistance genes can be spread among different bacterial species by bacteriophage, bacteria-infecting viruses, according to a paper in the October Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
"We found great quantities of bacteriophages carrying different antibiotic resistance genes in waters with fecal pollution from pigs, cattle, and poultry," says Maite Muniesa of the University of Barcelona, Spain, an author on the study. "We demonstrated that the genes carried by the phages were able to generate resistance to a given antibiotic when introduced into other bacteria in laboratory conditions," says Muniesa.
Although we often think of antibiotic resistance genes as evolving into existence in response to the antibiotics that doctors use to fight human disease and that agribusiness uses to fatten farm animals, microbes had undoubtedly been using both antibiotics and resistance genes to compete with each other for millions of years before antibiotics revolutionized human medicine and resistance genes threatened their efficacy to the point where the World Health Organization considers them to be one of the biggest risks to human health.
Thus, the Spanish researchers suspect, based on their study, that these resistance gene reservoirs are the product of microbial competition, rather than pressure from human use of antibiotics. They note that the pasture-fed cattle in their study are not fed antibiotics, and they suggest that even if antibiotic feed additives were banned, new resistance genes might emerge while old ones spread from these reservoirs into bacteria that infect humans.
And if resistance genes are being mobilized from these reservoirs, it becomes important to understand how the resistance genes are transmitted from phage to new bacterial species, in order to develop strategies that could hinder this transmission, limiting the emergence of new resistance genes, says Muniesa.
(M. Colomer-Lluch, L.Imamamovic, J. Jofre, and M. Muniesa, 2011. Bacteriophages carrying antibiotic resistance genes in fecal waste from cattle, pigs, and poultry. Antim. Agents Chemother. 55:4908-4911.)
New Insights Into Insulin Resistance Could Lead to Better Drugs for Diabetics
Research published in the October Molecular and Cellular Biology moves us closer to developing drugs that could mitigate diabetes.
Diabetes afflicts an estimated 26 million Americans, while 79 million have prediabetes. In other words, one in three Americans confronts this disease. Diabetes raises the risk of heart disease and stroke by as much as fourfold, and it is the leading cause of blindness among adults 20-74. It is also the leading cause of kidney failure.
In earlier research, four years ago another team of researchers showed that they could boost insulin sensitivity in experimental rodents by giving the animals a drug called myriocin. People with diabetes have a condition called insulin resistance, which renders them poorly able to process sugar. That results in high blood sugar, which damages the blood vessels, leading to many of diabetes' ills. In their study, that team, led by Johannes M. Aerts of the University of Amsterdam, observed a decrease in a compound called ceramide, which sits on cell membranes in the circulatory system, which they postulated was responsible for the rise in insulin sensitivity.
In the new study, Xian-Cheng Jiang of Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, and his collaborators set out to confirm this earlier work, using a genetic approach.
The new research provides strong evidence that ceramide was not causing insulin sensitivity, but that another membrane-bound compound, sphingomyelin, might be doing so.
Ceramide is the substrate for the last step in a five step cascade that produces sphingomyelin. In that step an enzyme called sphingomyline synthase 2 (SMS2) cleaves ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. The first enzyme in this pathway is called serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT).
To test the hypothesis that ceramide is involved in modulating insulin resistance the researchers used knockout mice for each of these enzymes. They postulated that (partially) knocking out the first enzyme in the cascade would decrease ceramide levels while knocking out the last enzyme in the sphingomyelin pathway would boost ceramide levels, since that enzyme uses ceramide to produce sphingomyelin. Thus, SPT knockout mice would have greater insulin sensitivity, while SMS knockout mice would have reduced insulin sensitivity.
Surprisingly, while ceramide levels changed as predicted, that change did not influence insulin sensitivity, which was higher in both groups.
The research has important implications for drug development for mitigating diabetes. Myriocin proved highly toxic and major efforts to modify the drug to reduce that toxicity have been fruitless. Myriocin's toxicity probably stems from the fact that it inhibits the first step of the sphingomyelin biosynthetic pathway, affecting all the downstream biology, says Jiang. The discovery that knocking out the last step in the biosynthetic pathway improves insulin sensitivity means that drug treatments could target that last enzyme, SMS, leaving the rest of that biosynthetic pathway to function normally.
(Z. Li, H. Shang, J. Liu, C.-P. Liang, Y. Li, Y. Li, G. Teitelman, T. Beyer, H.H. Bui, D.A. Peake, Y. Zhang, P.E. Sanders, M.-S. Kuo, T.-S. Park, G. Cao, and X.-C. Jiang, 2011. Reducing plasma membrane sphingomyelin increases insulin sensitivity. Mol. Cell. Biol. 31:4205-4218.)
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Samsung and Google haven't officially revealed which US carriers will be getting the Galaxy Nexus next month, even though Verizon has been leaked, is shown in the official trailer (included after the break, look at 0:22), and there was a quickly-retracted Facebook confirmation earlier. Now, the official signup page for release info on Samsung's site allows users to show their preference between AT&T, Cellular South, Metro PCS, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon. It's hardly a confirmation this latest Android phone will ever be available on all of them, but if you're not on Big Red, we won't kill your Ice Cream Sandwich dreams yet.
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