Volume 30 · Number 3 · Spring 2013
News & Notes
Go(a)t medicine?
UC Davis Professor James Murray discusses the potential of milk from transgenic goats someday saving children fromlife-threatening diarrhea.
Someday in the future, a treatment for diarrhea — which claims the lives of 1.8 million children around the world each year — may be dispensed from the udders of transgenic goats, thanks to research at UC Davis.
Scientists who developed the goats specifically to produce an antimicrobial protein found in human breast milk have found that their milk is effective in treating diarrhea in young pigs.
The study, reported in March in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE, is the first on record to show that goats’ milk carrying elevated levels of the antimicrobial lysozyme, a protein found in human breast milk, can successfully treat diarrhea caused by bacterial infection in the gastrointestinal tract.
“Many developing parts of the world rely on livestock as a main source of food,” said James Murray, an animal science professor and lead researcher on the study. “These results provide just one example that, through genetic engineering, we can provide agriculturally relevant animals with novel traits targeted at solving some of the health-related problems facing these developing communities.”
In this study, Murray and colleagues fed young pigs milk from goats that were genetically modified to produce milk with higher levels of lysozyme, a protein that naturally occurs in the tears, saliva and milk of all mammals.
Although lysozyme is produced at very high levels in human breast milk, the milk of nontransgenic goats and cows contains very little lysozyme.
Because lysozyme limits the growth of some bacteria that cause intestinal infections and diarrhea and also encourages the growth of other beneficial intestinal bacteria, it is considered to be one of the main components of human milk that contribute to the health and well-being of breast-fed infants.
Pigs were chosen for this study as a research model because their gastrointestinal physiology is quite similar to humans, and because pigs already produce a moderate amount of lysozyme in their milk.
The study found that young pigs fed the lysozyme-rich goat milk recovered much more quickly from diarrhea than did the young pigs that received goats’ milk without enhanced levels of lysozyme. Overall, the pigs fed the lysozyme milk were less dehydrated, had less intestinal inflammation, suffered less damage to the inner intestines and regained their energy more quickly than did the pigs in the control group. And, the researchers detected no adverse affects associated with the lysozyme-rich milk.
The lysozyme-enhanced milk used in this study came from a transgenic line of dairy goats developed in 1999 by Murray, co-author Elizabeth Maga and their colleagues.
Other researchers on this study are Caitlin Cooper, Lydia Garas Klobas and Maga, all of the Department of Animal Science.
The future of farming
9 Billion Mouths to Feed: the Future of Farming
The global population is expected to hit 9 billion by 2050 and there's an urgent need to reform our food production and “grow” more farmers to meet the rising demand.
Last fall, UCTV presented the online premiere of 9 Billion Mouths to Feed: the Future of Farming, a campus-produced, four-part documentary that examines how UC Davis researchers, students and others are working together to develop innovative ways to feed the world without depleting our resources, while also training the next generation of farmers in sustainable, high-tech farming practices.
The Shamatha Project: exploring human transformation
The John Templeton Foundation has awarded a grant of $2.3 million over three years to continue and extend the Shamatha Project, the most comprehensive investigation yet conducted into the effects of intensive meditation training on mind and body.
The Shamatha Project is led by Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and the MIND Institute.
This inaugural Templeton Prize Research Grant, Quantifiable Constituents of Spiritual Growth, was announced last November during a special session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago in honor of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, winner of the 2012 Templeton Prize, who gave a videotaped presentation.
In a TedxUCDavis talk, Clifford Saron examines the physiological effects of meditation.
“This project represents a true long-term perspective on the developmental consequences of intensive meditation training. Nothing quite like this has been done before,” Saron said.
At several meetings sponsored by the Massachusetts-based Mind and Life Institute, Saron has presented results from the Shamatha Project to the Dalai Lama, who has endorsed the project. Saron and his colleagues have also shared results from this research with scientific and lay audiences around the world.
“The Shamatha project is a remarkable scientific odyssey. This major award from the Templeton Foundation will help Dr. Saron and our team expand the boundaries of this innovative research,” said Ron Mangun, dean of the UC Davis Division of Social Sciences and a co-investigator on the grant.
Finding peace of mind
With the new funding, Mangun, Saron, project co-director Bajinder Sahdra, a former postdoctoral researcher and now a lecturer at the University of Western Sydney in Australia, and their colleagues will continue and expand the analysis of data from the Shamatha Project.
The latest phase of the project will address two big questions: After going through intensive meditation training, what differentiates people who develop their lives in ways that relieve suffering for themselves and others close to them from those who do not; and how are measured changes in cognitive, psychological and physiological processes related to peoples’ life experience years later?
Measuring meditation
The project is investigating the effects of two three-month retreats held in 2007. A total of 60 volunteers received intensive daily instruction from Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace in developing calm, focused attention and cultivating compassionate concern.
Throughout the retreats, they were tested for a variety of psychological, physiological and cognitive measures. Participants in the second retreat were also interviewed about their experiences during training, and all participants provided spoken accounts of their experiences five and 15 months later.
In a series of papers and conference presentations, the team has described how retreat participants reported improved psychological functioning, were better able to sustain visual attention and inhibit habitual responses, and were more engaged with and sympathetic to suffering.
Participants also showed greater activation of attention-related brain regions during meditation after training and had improved measures of cellular health that have been linked to aging. In addition, those participants who reported greater mindfulness had diminished stress hormone levels.
The new funds will aid completion of an analysis of the original data set as well as support follow-up studies. The researchers will use a sophisticated network analysis to see which physiological and psychological measures made during the retreats are associated with long-term personal growth years later — and which are not.
“We’re relating how things that we can measure in the laboratory reflect meaningful changes in peoples’ lives,” Saron said.
Shunning political labels
Young adults in California registered to vote in record numbers in 2012, especially online, driving a trend toward no party affiliation, according to recent research.
With the implementation of online registration a month before the November election, registration among 18- to 24-year-olds in California increased 14 percent statewide compared with the 2008 general election. Young voters now make up 11 percent of the state’s electorate.
Of the 244,049 new California youth registrants in 2012, 154,054 registered online — 63 percent. Those stating “no party preference” (29.6 percent) were the second-largest group after those identifying as Democrats (38.5 percent). Young adults are the only group of California voters among whom fewer than 40 percent are registered as Democratic.
“The rising youth electorate in California may not mean future growth in Democratic party registration rolls as some analysts have predicted,” said Mindy Romero, a researcher at the UC Davis Center for Regional Change and author of the study. “Instead, if this trend continues, a younger electorate will mean even smaller percentages of both registered Democrats and Republicans.”
Reducing gun violence
Garen Wintemute, a leading authority on gun violence prevention and an emergency medicine physician, believes broader criteria for background checks and denials on gun purchases would help prevent future mass shootings such as those that occurred at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech and Columbine.
Garen Wintemute, who directs the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, says gun violence could e substantially reduced if Congress expands requirements for background checks on retail gun sales to cover firearm transfers between private parties.
“To reduce the number of deaths and injuries from firearms in the United States, we need to develop policies that require background checks for all firearm purchases, including private-party sales — the most important source of firearms for criminal buyers and others who are prohibited from purchasing guns,” said Wintemute, director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the inaugural Susan P. Baker-Stephen P. Teret Chair in Violence Prevention.
Wintemute’s research has shown that among persons who purchase firearms legally, those with a previous conviction for a misdemeanor violent crime are roughly nine times as likely as those with no criminal history to be arrested for a violent crime later. For those with two or more such prior convictions, he found the risk increases by a factor of 10 to 15. In addition, studies have shown that firearm owners who abuse alcohol are more likely than other owners to engage in violence-related firearm behavior.
He suggests preventing individuals with a previous conviction for a misdemeanor violent crime, such as assault and battery, from purchasing or possessing a firearm, as well as developing better data and criteria that allow authorities to distinguish between those with a treatable mental disorder without histories of violence from those with histories of violence or substance abuse.
Wintemute emphasizes taking a broad approach.
“It may be impossible to predict the next mass shooting incident, and we cannot expect interventions designed for specific circumstances to eliminate the risk of firearm violence. But we can change our firearms laws, based on existing evidence, to reduce harm and better ensure public safety,” he said.
“Some 40 percent of all firearm transactions, for example, involve private-party sellers, who are not required to keep records and cannot obtain a background check,” Wintemute said. “We need policies that prevent these quick, anonymous and undocumented sales. We also need policies that deny gun purchases to those who we know are at high risk for violence.”
Careful with that aquarium
In Memoriam
Adel Kader, Jori “Jerry” Kaneko, Fumio Matsumura, Ralph Pomeroy, Paul Sabatie and Frances Zeman....
Well-intentioned children and aquarium hobbyists seeking to “free” their pet fish down a toilet bowl or into a local waterway may inadvertently be contributing to the threat of invasive species downstream, according to new research.
In a study for the California Ocean Protection Council, lead author Susan Williams, an evolution and ecology professor with the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, found that more than 11 million nonnative ornamental marine individuals — such as tropical fish, seaweed and snails bound for aquariums — representing at least 102 species, are being imported annually through California’s ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles, primarily from Indonesia and the Philippines. And 13 of those species have been introduced to California marine waters — presumably after being released from aquariums.
While that number is low, the report cautions that 69 percent of the introduced species established themselves successfully in California, signaling a potential threat to marine ecosystems. Some nonnative, invasive species can rapidly spread and outcompete native species for food and habitat.
“Although relatively few aquarium species have been introduced compared with species in other pathways, such as ballast water, they are highly successful because they’re grown to be hardy and robust,” Williams said. “They have to be tough to survive in the trade.”
The aquarium trade represents a $1 billion a year global industry and a popular home hobby, the report said.
Meteorite triggered ‘scientific gold rush’
UC Davis has one of the few labs set up to study this type of meteorite.
A meteorite that exploded as a fireball over California’s Sierra foothills in spring 2012 was among the fastest, rarest meteorites known to have hit the Earth, and it traveled a highly eccentric orbital routeto get here.
An international team of scientists that included nine UC Davis researchers published their research in the journal Science last December. They found that the meteorite that fell over Northern California last April was the rarest type known to have hit the Earth — a carbonaceous chondrite. It is composed of cosmic dust and presolar materials that helped form the planets of the solar system.
“For me, the fun of this scientific gold rush is really just beginning,” said UC Davis geology professor Qing-zhu Yin. “This first report based on the initial findings provides a platform to propel us into more detailed research.”
The scientists learned that the meteorite formed about 4.5 billion years ago. It was knocked off its parent body, which may have been an asteroid or a Jupiter-family comet, roughly 50,000 years ago. That began its journey to Sutter’s Mill, the gold discovery site that sparked the California Gold Rush.
As it flew toward Earth, it traveled an eccentric course through the solar system, flying from an orbit close to Jupiter toward the sun, passing by Mercury and Venus, and then flying out to hit Earth.
The high-speed, minivan-sized meteorite entered the atmosphere at about 64,000 miles per hour. The study said it was the fastest, “most energetic” reported meteorite that’s fallen since 2008, when an asteroid fell over Sudan.
Before entering Earth’s atmosphere, the meteorite is estimated to have weighed roughly 100,000 pounds. Most of that mass burned away when the meteorite exploded. Scientists and private collectors have recovered about 2 pounds.
Core values of deep Earth
Using computer simulations, researchers from UC Davis and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have helped to solve a mystery that scientists have puzzled over since the early 1950s: What accounts for Earth’s core density? Their discovery: That Earth’s core is composed of about 0.1 to 0.8 percent carbon, the largest reservoir of carbon on the planet.
“We knew the density of the core, and we knew that metal iron and nickel alone couldn’t account for that density,” said geology professor and study co-author Qing-Zhu Yin. “You need something lighter.” To discover their content in the Earth’s core, the scientists went to the computer and created a simulation.
An accurate knowledge of carbon’s influence will help to increase our understanding of Earth’s age and the exact timing of the core’s formation
Getting into shape, video game-style
Reversing the image of the sedentary game player, a new video game under development at UC Davis will encourage children to strengthen their action-hero characters by logging miles walked and calories burned in the real world.
Researchers in the School of Education and Foods for Health Institute are teaming with a professional game designer to create the game, which requires players to enter personal health data and set physical goals.
“Gamers project their identities into game play in various ways already, but we are particularly interested in what might happen if the avatar in a game is tied directly to the gamer’s body and his or her actions outside the game,” said Cynthia Carter Ching, a grant recipient and School of Education professor who also is an expert in learning with technology.
The project is funded with a two-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation aimed at fighting childhood obesity.