Psychedelics, the brain and shamanism

“Call upon me, for I am the black jaguar. It is me you must evoke if you wish to scare the illness away.” These words of a Brazilian shaman describe the ancient practice of creating a charismatic intermediary with the divine.

In the above video, Emory art historian Rebecca Stone gives a brief overview of an ongoing exhibit at the Carlos Museum, “For I Am the Black Jaguar,” that explores shamanism through art, zoology, botany, religion and anthropology.

The trances that transformed shamans into totems like jaguars and whale sharks were brought about in part by the ingestion of etheogenic substances. Psychiatrists Katherine MacLean and Charles Raison will discuss what happens in the brain during these trances in a special lecture at the museum, on Thursday, November 29 at 7:30 pm.

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Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs

Paleontologist goes wild for Thanksgiving

Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin has prepared a special Thanksgiving treat -- a post about wild turkeys on his blog, "Life Traces of the Georgia Coast." Here's an excerpt:

"Unfortunately, because I live in the metropolitan Atlanta area, I never see turkeys other than the dead packaged ones in grocery stores. Nonetheless, one of the ways I experience turkeys as wild, living animals is to visit the Georgia barrier islands, and the best way for me to learn about wild turkey behavior is to track them. This is also great fun for me as a paleontologist, as their tracks remind me of those made by small theropod dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Era. And of course, as most schoolchildren can tell you, birds are dinosaurs, which they will state much more confidently than anything they might know about Benjamin Franklin."

Click here to read more.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons.

The drama over water

Water is now known as the new oil. Blue gold. The axis resource on which the development of all others turns. That humble liquid gushing out of your tap is a strategic commodity, the subject of a U.S. intelligence report that warns of a rising risk of political unrest and war over its increasingly scarce supply worldwide.

It’s also a theatrical headliner. A dance-for-camera drama called “Bend” explores our relationship to water, a relationship set to change dramatically in the face of climate change and other pressures. The video, above, shows a preview of the project, created by Lori Teague, choreographer and director of Emory’s Dance Program, and her husband, Mark Teague, videographer and stage manager at the Schwartz Center.

The public is invited to free, special showings of “Bend” on Thursday, September 27, at 7 pm, 8:30 pm and 10 pm in the Dance Studio of the Schwartz Center. Click here for details.

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West Nile virus detected in metro-Atlanta mosquitoes and birds

A total of 3,142 human cases of West Nile virus in the United States, including 134 deaths, have been reported to the CDC so far this year.

Emory students trap mosquitoes for testing.

Cooler weather may reduce the spread of the mosquito-borne virus, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Students from Emory’s Department of Environmental Studies West Nile virus lab are finding a high number of mosquitoes infected with the virus in metro Atlanta parks.

Some birds infected with the virus have also been found in the lab's research sites, including Tanyard Creek Park and Grant Park, says Uriel Kitron, a disease ecologist and chair of the Department of Environmental Studies.

The mosquito that transmits West Nile virus is an evening mosquito, coming out an hour before sunset and staying active through the night, Kitron told Channel 2 Action News. Click here to read more at Channel 2 news web site about the Emory research, and how you can protect yourself from West Nile virus.

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Acai berries can lengthen lives of fruit flies

Harvesting acai berries in the Brazilian Amazon. Products made from the berries are sold around the world, and are often marketed as health supplements.

By Quinn Eastman, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Bewildered by the array of antioxidant fruit juices on display in the supermarket and the promises they make? To sort out the antioxidant properties of fruits and berries, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine turned to fruit flies for help.

They found that a commercially available acai berry product can lengthen the lives of fruit flies, when the flies’ lives are made short through additional oxidative stress. Under certain conditions (a simple sugar diet) acai supplementation could triple flies’ lifespans, from eight to 24 days. Acai could also counteract the neurotoxic effects of the herbicide paraquat on the flies.

The results were recently published by the journal Experimental Gerontology, which awarded the paper its inaugural "Outstanding paper" prize. The lead author is Alysia Vrailas-Mortimer, a postdoctoral fellow in Emory University School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology. Vrailas-Mortimer says she didn’t start out focusing on acai. But acai worked better than several other antioxidant products such as vitamins, coenzyme Q10 and lutein.

"One thing that makes our work distinctive is that we tried commercially available supplements," she says. "We went to a health food store and filled up a basket."

She says she began the project with the help of undergraduate student Rosy Gomez, and narrowed her focus after initial success with acai. Vrailas-Mortimer took advantage of a discovery she had made working with Subhabrata Sanyal, assistant professor of cell biology. They had previously found that flies with mutations in the "p38 MAP kinase" gene have shorter lives and are more sensitive to heat, food deprivation and oxidative stress.

P38 mutant flies lived an average of only eight days when they were given a simple sugar water diet. However, their lifespans tripled when their diet was supplemented with acai. Ginger was used as a control for the diet supplements.

Acai also protected normal flies against oxidative stress, in the form of hydrogen peroxide or paraquat. Acai can protect against oxidative stress when flies are exposed to hydrogen peroxide before being given acai, but the protective effect does not hold up if the order is reversed.

Paraquat is an herbicide that has neurotoxic effects that resemble Parkinson’s disease. Under the influence of paraquat, flies’ sleep-wake cycles gradually become chaotic (see graph, above). Acai can also help soften the effects of paraquat on flies’ circadian rhythms.

"I think this is important," Vrailas-Mortimer says. "We show that whatever is in acai that is lengthening lifespan, it can also keep the flies functioning better for longer when faced with paraquat exposure. It is maintaining quality of life rather than just preventing them from dying."

Read more at Emory News Center.

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Photo: iStockphoto.com.

Sanctuary chimps show high rates of drug-resistant staph

By Carol Clark

Chimpanzees from African sanctuaries carry drug-resistant, human-associated strains of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, a pathogen that the infected chimpanzees could spread to endangered wild ape populations if they were reintroduced to their natural habitat, a new study shows.

Young, motherless chimps need close contact.

The study by veterinarians, microbiologists and ecologists was the first to apply the same modern sequencing technology of bacterial genomes used in hospitals to track the transmission of staph from humans to African wildlife. The results were published today by the American Journal of Primatology.

Drug-resistant staph was found in 36 chimpanzees, or 58 percent of those tested at two sanctuaries, located in Uganda and Zambia. Nearly 10 percent of the staph cases in chimpanzees showed signs of multi-drug resistance, the most dangerous and hard to cure form of the pathogen.

“One of the biggest threats to wild apes is the risk of acquiring novel pathogens from humans,” says study co-author Thomas Gillespie, a primate disease ecologist at Emory University.

The study was led by Fabian Leendertz, the head of emerging zoonosis at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Other co-authors were from the University Hospital Munster in Germany, the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda and the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia.

Antibiotic resistance is rare in wild apes, with only one case of drug-resistant staph ever identified in them, Gillespie notes. That’s a stark contrast to ape sanctuaries, where necessary close contact with human caretakers promotes cross-species pathogen transmission.

“We thought that our study would find some pathogen transmission from humans to the apes, but we were surprised at the prevalence of drug-resistant staph we found in the animals,” Gillespie says. “It mirrors some of the worst-case scenarios in U.S. hospitals and nursing homes.”

Multi-drug resistant staph is a major human health problem, causing an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and more than 18,000 deaths annually in the United States alone. It’s unclear the magnitude of the effect the disease could have if accidentally introduced to populations of naïve wild apes.

The researchers hope that their findings influence the policies at ape sanctuaries, since many of them are under growing pressure to reintroduce rescued animals to the wild.

Sanctuaries serve an important function at the interface of animal welfare and species conservation, Gillespie says. “Both animal welfare and conservation are ethical imperatives, but what promotes one does not inevitably benefit the other. That’s just one of the many things that we’re learning as we work to conserve and care for chimpanzees.”

The prevalence of drug-resistant staph in sanctuary chimpanzees may also pose a risk to humans, Gillespie says, due to the close genetic relationship between primates and people.

“The chimpanzee may serve as an incubator where the pathogen can adapt and evolve, and perhaps jump back to humans in a more virulent form,” he says.

The booming human population in sub-Saharan Africa, and the resulting overlap of human activity in wild primate habitats, increases the risk of such cross-species transmission of pathogens, the researchers warn.

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Behaviors of tiniest water droplets revealed

Water mediates all biological processes, but we still don't fully understand its behavior.

From Science Daily:

“A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and Emory University has uncovered fundamental details about the hexamer structures that make up the tiniest droplets of water, the key component of life – and one that scientists still don't fully understand.

“The research, recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, provides a new interpretation for experimental measurements as well as a vital test for future studies of our most precious resource. Moreover, understanding the properties of water at the molecular level can ultimately have an impact on many areas of science, including the development of new drugs or advances in climate change research.

A 3-D model of the prism structure of the water hexamer, the smallest drop of water. "Ours are the first simulations that use an accurate, full-dimensional representation of the molecular interactions and exact inclusion of nuclear quantum effects through state-of-the-art computational approaches," says study co-author Joel Bowman, a theoretical chemist at Emory University. "These allow ws to accurately determine the stability of the different isomers over a wide range of temperatures."

‘"About 60% of our bodies are made of water that effectively mediates all biological processes,’ said Francesco Paesani, a study co-author and a biochemist at UC San Diego. ‘Without water, proteins don't work and life as we know it wouldn't exist. Understanding the molecular properties of the hydrogen bond network of water is the key to understanding everything else that happens in water. And we still don't have a precise picture of the molecular structure of liquid water in different environments.’

“As described in the JACS paper, researchers have determined the relative populations of the different isomers of the water hexamer as they assemble into various configurations called 'cage', 'prism', and 'book'.

A 3-D model of the cage structure of the water hexamer. The mesh contours represent the actual quantum-mechanical densities of the oxygen (red) and hygrogen (white) atoms. The small yellow spheres represent the hydrogen bonds between the six water molecules. Model images courtesy of UC San Diego.

“The water hexamer is considered the smallest drop of water because it is the smallest water cluster that is three dimensional, i.e., a cluster where the oxygen atoms of the molecules do not lie on the same plane. As such, it is the prototypical system for understanding the properties of the hydrogen bond dynamics in the condensed phases because of its direct connection with ice, as well as with the structural arrangements that occur in liquid water.

“This system also allows scientists to better understand the structure and dynamics of water in its liquid state, which plays a central role in many phenomena of relevance to different areas of science, including physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and climate research. For example, the hydration structure around proteins affects their stability and function, water in the active sites of enzymes affects their catalytic power, and the behavior of water adsorbed on atmospheric particles drives the formation of clouds.”

Read the whole article in Science Daily.

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Top photo by iStockphoto.com.

Democracy works for Endangered Species Act

The Bald Eagle, a living symbol of democracy as the national bird of the United States, was on the "threatened" list for the lower 48 states until 2007. Photo by Saffron Blaze via Wikipedia Commons.

By Carol Clark

When it comes to protecting endangered species, the power of the people is key, an analysis of listings under the U.S. Endangered Species Act finds.

The journal Science is publishing the analysis comparing listings of “endangered” and “threatened” species initiated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that administers the Endangered Species Act, to those initiated by citizen petition.

“We found that citizens, on average, do a better job of picking species that are threatened than does the Fish and Wildlife Service. That’s a really interesting and surprising finding,” says co-author Berry Brosi, a biologist and professor of environmental studies at Emory University.

The "threatened" gray wolf. Photo by FWS.

Brosi conducted the analysis with Eric Biber, a University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor who specializes in environmental law.

Controversy has surrounded the Endangered Species Act (ESA) since it became law nearly 40 years ago. A particular flashpoint is the provision that allows citizens to petition the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list any unprotected species, and use litigation to challenge any FWS listing decision. Critics of this provision say the FWS wastes time and resources processing the stream of citizen requests. Another argument is that many citizen-initiated listings are driven less by concern for a species than by political motives, such as blocking a development project.

The study authors counter that their findings bolster the need to keep the public highly involved.

“There are some 100,000 species of plants and animals in North America, and asking one federal agency to stay on top of that is tough,” Biber says. “If there were restrictions on the number of citizen-initiated petitions being reviewed, the government would lose a whole universe of people providing high-quality information about species at risk, and it is likely that many species would be left unprotected.”

Only about 2,000 American Crocodiles, an ESA-protected species, remain in Florida. Photo by Tomas Castelazo via Wikipedia Commons.

The researchers built a database of the 913 domestic and freshwater species listed as “threatened” or “endangered” under the ESA from 1986 on. They examined whether citizens or the FWS initiated the petition, whether it was litigated, and whether it conflicted with an economic development project. They also looked at the level of biological threat to each of the species, using FWS threat scores in reports the agency regularly makes to Congress.

The Northern Spotted Owl. Photo by FWS.

The results showed that listings resulting from citizen-initiated petitions are more likely to pose conflicts with development, but those species are also significantly more threatened, on average, than the species in FWS-initiated petitions.

“The overriding message is that citizen involvement really does work in combination with the oversight of the FWS,” Brosi says. “It’s a two-step system of checks and balances that is important to maintain.”

The public brings diffuse and specialized expertise to the table, from devoted nature enthusiasts to scientists who have spent their whole careers studying one particular animal, insect or plant. Public involvement can also help counter the political pressure inherent in large development projects. The FWS, however, is unlikely to approve the listing of a species that is not truly threatened or endangered, so some petitions are filtered out.

“You could compare it to the trend of crowdsourcing that the Internet has spawned,” Brosi says. “It’s sort of like crowdsourcing what species need to be protected.”

Many people associate the success of the ESA with iconic species like the bald eagle and the whooping crane.

The Mojave Desert population of the Desert Tortoise is in the highest threat category of the ESA. Photo by FWS.

“To me,” Brosi says, “the greater accomplishment of the act is its protection of organisms that don’t get the same amount of attention as a beautiful bird or mammal.”

For example, the FWS turned down a petition to list the Mojave Desert population of the Desert Tortoise, Gopherus agassizii, but that decision was reversed. The Desert Tortoise is now in the ESA highest threat category, and populations of the entire species are thought to have declined by more than 90 percent during the past 20 years.

“One of the biggest threats it faces is urban and suburban expansion, which could have made it politically challenging for the FWS,” Brosi notes. “And yet, the Desert Tortoise is a keystone species that helps support dozens of other species by creating habitats in its burrows and dispersing seeds.”

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Her patient approach to health: Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs

Cassandra Quave bridges traditional and modern medicine as an ethnobotanist, studying human interactions with plants.

By Carol Clark

Cassandra Quave was first immersed in the battle against infectious diseases when she was 3 years old and hospitalized with a life-threatening case of staph.

“That’s probably why I feel a strong connection to people who deal with these kinds of infections,” says Quave, a graduate of Emory College who is now a visiting assistant professor at Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health.

Quave just received a $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue her research into how an extract from a tree common in forests across Europe might help fight antibiotic-resistant staph. The five-year project led by Quave will include collaborators from the Emory Institute for Drug Development, the University of Iowa and Montana State University.

She notes that prolific use of modern drugs in our society helped turn multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) into the leading cause of invasive disease in the U.S., killing more people every year than AIDS. And the remedies of traditional healers may lead to better ways of treating it.

Quave draws from the knowledge of rural people like 82-year-old Donato Sabato of Italy, who uses Malva sylvestris stems to treat stomachache. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

“Ideally, we should combine the best of both modern medicine and complementary alternative medicine,” says Quave. She bridges the two worlds as a medical ethnobotanist, studying human interactions with plants.

At 34, Quave already has a utility patent for one promising medicinal plant extract, and has filed a disclosure for a second patent. In 2011, she formed the bio-venture startup PhytoTEK with a friend from Harvard Business School, Sahil Patel, who is also an Emory alumnus. PhytoTEK advanced to the final round of the Harvard Business School’s Alumni New Venture Contest, placing in the top three of the global finals.

The unusual career of Quave (rhymes with “wave”) has been forged by everything from interviewing native healers in the Peruvian Amazon to undergoing dozens of major medical procedures in the United States.

She grew up in the small town of Arcadia, in a rural area of South Florida, where her mother was a teacher and her father ran a land-clearing business for agriculture. She had multiple congenital birth defects of her skeletal system, including missing part of her right calf bone. When she was 3, her right leg was amputated below the knee in an effort to improve her mobility.

“The doctors told my mother not to unwrap the bandages, but she noticed this horrible stench coming from my leg and knew that something wasn’t right,” Quave says. “As she took off the bandages, the flesh just fell off the bone. It was almost liquefied.”

Quave in the hospital, after the amputation of her lower right leg.

The toddler returned to the hospital for treatment of a severe staph infection. “I had to spend a very long time in the hospital,” she recalls. “I remember the nurses putting me in a bright-red bath of Betadine. I thought it was blood.”

Her leg had to be cut off even shorter, leaving her with a heavily scarred stump that lacks fatty tissue, making prosthetics less comfortable.

A neighbor later told Quave that she had felt sorry for her when she was a little girl and watched her struggle to climb the ladder of a slide. The neighbor thought it was terrible that Quave’s mother saw her daughter cry from the effort, and didn’t go and help.

“I’m so glad my parents had the strength not to help me do everything,” Quave says. “That made me independent. It takes a special person to raise a disabled child.”

Quave at work in the Amazon.

Like many kids, Quave enjoyed playing in the dirt or climbing a tree to be alone with a good book. During high school, she learned to operate the bulldozer and backhoe parked in the family’s yard, so she could help with her father’s business on summer breaks. Curiosity was her constant companion. She excelled in science fairs, competing at the state and international level. For her first science project, in the sixth grade, she took saliva samples from her dog, a horse and a cow for a comparative analysis. 

Nearly every year as she grew up, Quave had to return to the hospital to have her leg re-operated on. The bone had to be filed down as it kept growing out the end of the stump. She later made history as one of the first amputees to have bone lengthening surgery. “They broke my femur and implanted a kind of knob that you twist,” Quave explains matter-of-factly.

At 13, she developed scoliosis. Metal rods were surgically implanted in her back. She also had hip dysplasia, requiring her pelvis to be broken and rebuilt.

One silver lining to her slew of medical problems was pediatric orthopedist Chad Price, who also happens to be an Emory alumnus. He performed almost every surgery on Quave, except for the initial leg amputation, and became a friend and mentor that Quave still consults.

“I was a very odd, inquisitive kid, and Dr. Price took the time to listen to me and answer all of my questions,” Quave says. “He is different from most surgeons, he’s almost like a traditional healer in the way that he connects with patients,” she adds. “I remember once when I was coming out of anesthesia, and I was crying because it hurt so much. Dr. Price lay down in the bed next to me and held me.”

The metal rods implanted in Quave’s spine had to be removed after she had a bad reaction to them and her back became inflamed. Quave told one of the medical residents who saw her before surgery that she wanted the operation filmed.

“He thought that was a really strange request and said, no, but then Dr. Price said, ‘Sure, we’ll do that for you.’ I still have the VHS tape at home. It was fascinating to me, to see them chisel these rods out of my back.”

"I have as much respect for the best traditional healers as I do for the top scientists at Emory," says Cassandra Quave, right, in the Peruvian Amazon as an undergraduate at Emory.

During the 8th grade, Quave started volunteering at the local hospital’s emergency room. “I would spend Friday and Saturday nights watching doctors perform procedures in this small-town E.R. I’d make sure the patients were comfortable, bring them blankets and things,” she recalls. “I definitely had a gift for communicating with people who were sick.”

When her mother insisted that she get home before 2 am, Quave recalls arguing, “That’s when all the good drug cases and bar fights start coming in.”

Following in the footsteps of Price, Quave got her undergraduate degree at Emory, where she majored in biology and anthropology. She planned to go on to medical school and become an orthopedic surgeon. But a different path opened up when she took a tropical ecology class from Larry Wilson, an adjunct faculty in Emory’s department of environmental studies and an ecologist at Atlanta’s Fernbank Science Center. Under Wilson’s tutelage, Quave spent several months in the Peruvian Amazon, researching the therapies of traditional healers.

“You can learn a lot by listening to those people,” Quave says. “I have as much respect for the best traditional healers as I do for the top scientists at Emory.”

Traveling by boat through the Amazon. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

Quave’s leg became inflamed and infected from the rough walking on the jungle trails, but she had come prepared with antibiotics. She treated her leg and simply walked less, switching to small riverboats to travel amid the mestizo communities.

Many of the children had swollen bellies and stunted growth, telltale signs of intestinal worms. A traditional healer explained to her how the white latex from a fig tree could be made into a remedy to purge worms. The Peruvian government, however, had installed medicine chests in the remote communities, stocked with treatments for parasites and other ailments. Eventually, the supplies were used and not replenished. Meanwhile, the traditional healers had stopped training apprentices because people preferred the stronger drugs to the older ways.

“I would see all these kids with swollen bellies, and a fig tree right in the middle of the village, but no one knew how to prepare the treatment,” Quave says. “It’s a great example of why we have to understand both sets of knowledge – modern and traditional.”

A Peruvian healer shares his knowledge. Photo by Cassandra Quave.

She uses the term “complementary alternative medicine,” or CAM, adding: “There is a reason it’s called ‘complementary.’ It doesn’t have to be just one or the other.”

An acceptance letter from a medical school was waiting for her when she returned to Atlanta during her senior year at Emory, but the Amazon had changed Quave. She no longer wanted to be an MD. A chance meeting with an Italian ethnobiologist at a conference led Quave to Southern Italy, where she conducted field research into the traditional remedies of rural people there.

She wrote a sort of “cookbook” of traditional medicine of the region. The volume, penned in English and Italian, and full of gorgeous photographs, aims to conserve both the local knowledge and the natural environment.

A weed to one person is medicine to another.

Quave also fell in love while in Italy. She married Marco Caputo, a resident of the tiny town of Ginestra, and they now have two young children. “It’s funny how fate works,” she says.

Back in the United States, Quave pursued a PhD in biology at Florida International University, where she focused on an ethnobotanical approach to drug discovery. “I felt strongly that people who dismissed traditional healing plants as medicine because the plants don’t kill a pathogen were not asking the right questions,” she says. “What if these plants play some other role in fighting a disease?”

She led a project to analyze extracts from 100 different species of plants that she had collected in Italy, guided by clues from hundreds of interviews with local people and healers. She was particularly interested in finding treatments for skin and soft-tissue infections, to help in the fight against MRSA.

This “super bug” bacterium can cause everything from mild skin irritation to death. MRSA is difficult to treat because it is constantly adapting, and has become resistant to many antibiotics. It is now common in people with weak immune systems in hospitals and nursing homes. People with implanted medical devices, like knee or hip replacements, are especially at risk since the implants provide a smooth surface that the sugary matrix of the bacteria likes to adhere to.

In 2005, the CDC reported that MRSA was responsible for an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths, and the rates have kept rising since then.

Rubus ulmifolius, or the elm leaf blackberry, is one plant that shows promise for treating MRSA.

Even more alarmingly, MRSA infections are on the rise in healthy, young people outside of hospitals. Those who share close quarters and have skin-to-skin contact, such as football players, are at higher risk.

Quave is uncovering promising new ways to treat MRSA by teasing apart leaves, stems, roots and bark, isolating individual plant compounds for analysis. Her first patent involves a compound from the roots of an Italian elm leaf blackberry that neutralizes the staph defense system.

“Think of it like Star Trek,” she says, explaining that after MRSA attaches to something, it can grow a biofilm that acts like a shield against antibiotics, much like a villainous space ship uses a force field to ward off weapons of the Starship Enterprise. The plant extract prevents the MRSA bacteria from attaching to anything, so it can’t throw up a force field.

Quave hopes that the extract could one day be used to coat artificial implants and catheters before they are surgically implanted, preventing MRSA from ever gaining a foothold on them.

The recent NIH grant Quave received will further her research into a second compound from a European tree. This compound, which she is identifying only as “Extract 134” until a utility patent is filed, inhibits the toxic effects of MRSA.

An Albanian woman tells her plant stories.

“One reason that MRSA can infect healthy people is that it’s really good at producing a ton of toxins that it shoots out like lasers to cause tissue damage,” Quave says. “Extract 134 turns off the MRSA system responsible for toxin production. The bacteria is still able to grow, but its weapons are turned off.”

Taking away MRSA’s tissue damaging weapons, and/or its force field, could tip the battle back into the favor of the host’s immune system, with little, or no, help from antibiotics, Quave theorizes.

“It’s more of a delicate approach. The goal is to improve patient therapy, reduce infection rates, and avoid creating more virulent strains of MRSA,” she says.

After a post-doctoral stint at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Quave joined Emory last fall. She was recruited by another one of her long-time mentors, Michelle Lampl, a physician and anthropologist who heads Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health. Lampl founded the center last year to serve as a nexus of Emory’s diverse assets in health education, research and practices. The aim is to foster exchange among scholars whose interests span the scientific, social and cultural dimensions of health and well-being.

Quave teaches a course on medical botany while also pursuing her drug discovery research that will tap expertise from anthropology, biology, chemistry and environmental studies. “I have my finger in a lot of pies,” Quave says, “so I tend to bring together a lot of different people who might not normally mix.”

Many hurdles remain to getting the plant-based MRSA treatments from the laboratory into clinical trials, but Quave is undaunted. “I’m used to obstacles,” she says. “I’ve climbed a lot of brick walls in my life.”

All photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave.

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The dark lore of Deadly Nightshade

The dark lore of Deadly Nightshade

Atropa belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade, is native to Europe. Drawing from 1887 edition of "Kohler's Medicinal Plants."

“Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet and mad as a hen.”

This centuries-old text describes symptoms that can be caused by Atropa belladonna, more commonly known as Belladonna, or Deadly Nightshade. The beautiful, but highly toxic, plant “is very interesting in that it has this dark lore associated with witches,” says Kristen Cross, an Emory junior majoring in biology and environmental studies.

Cross recently gave a presentation on Deadly Nightshade, as part of Emory’s Botanical Medicine and Health class taught by enthnobotanist Cassandra Quave. Click here to watch a video of her talk.

Kurt Stuber/Wikipedia Commons

Atropine and hyoscine are the chemicals that make the plant toxic, as well as giving it potent medicinal and intoxicating effects. Consumption of only a few berries from the Deadly Nightshade can be lethal.

Women mixed Deadly Nightshade and other plants together to make “flying ointments,” Cross says. “They would get together at night and have these rituals where they would experience sensations of flying and euphoria.”

Women in Venice used drops made from Deadly Nightshade to make their pupils dilate and increase the allure of their eyes. It was also used in ocular surgery during the 1800s to make it easier to remove cataracts.

Today, extracts from Deadly Nightshade are showing promise for treatment of depression and nausea, among other benefits. The plant “is on the dangerous border of very poisonous and very useful,” Cross notes.

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Pastoralism key to Horn of Africa's future

The livestock trade generates an estimated $1 billion a year in exports for the Horn of Africa.

Mark Tran writes in the Guardian's Poverty Matters blog about a new book, "Pastoralism and Development in Africa: Dynamic Change at the Margins." Following is an excerpt, referencing a chapter by Emory anthropologist Peter Little:

 "...Peter Little argues that despite its many challenges, mobile pastoralism will continue throughout the Horn for the simple reason that a more viable, alternative land-use system for these areas has not been found. But he predicts that the nature of pastoralism in 2030 will be very different from today.

"Although it will remain the economic foundation of the region, pastoralism will not be practiced by many. Little sees former pastoralists investing in local fodder farms, urban-based markets and services that serve the livestock sector, educating their children and engaging in small-scale trading and other self-employed enterprises. Many would also work for livestock producers as hired herders. Ideally, fattening operations for export animals and meat-processing facilities would be located nearer to pastoral production areas, generating additional employment for local non-pastoralists.

"'In this scenario, the normal occurrence of drought would no longer result in widespread food shortages and hunger as makrets would function effectively and local incomes would be sufficient to purchase needed foods,' writes Little."

Read the whole article on the Guardian web site.

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What we can learn from African pastoralists
Climate change, from the hooves up

Image: iStockPhoto.com.

Neuroscience and a whale of a legal case

Brandom Keim writes in Wired Science about a movement by some animal advocates to give legal rights to whales and dolphins, collectively known as cetaceans. An excerpt from the article:

 “’We have all the evidence to show that there is an egregious mismatch between who cetaceans are and how they are perceived and still treated by our species,’ said evolutionary neurobiologist Lori Marino of Emory University during a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“’These characteristics make it ethically inconsistent to deny the basic rights of cetaceans.’ “The discussion at which Marino spoke was titled ‘Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Ethical and Policy Implications of Intelligence,’ and its presence at the AAAS annual meeting, a sort of all-star game for science, signifies a sea-level change in how cetaceans are understood.

“Just a few decades ago, cetacean rights would have been considered a purely sentimental rather than scientifically supportable idea. But scientifically if not yet legally, evidence is overwhelming that cetaceans are special.

“At a purely neuroanatomical level, their brains are as complex as our own. Their brains are also big — and not simply because cetaceans are large. Dolphins and whales have brains that are exceptional for their size, second only to modern humans in being larger than one would expect. They also possess neurological structures that, in humans, are linked to high-level social and intellectual function."

Read the whole article in Wired Science.

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Do dolphins deserve special status?

Emory's starvine: A rare plant clings to campus

The American starvine typically must grow for several years before sprouting flowers. Photos, above and below, by Kyra C. Wu.

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

Within a sun-dappled forest on the Emory campus, field biologist Carl Brown is engaged in an ecological scavenger hunt, searching for a plant so rare that its future is in question.

Scanning dead leaves and pine duff, he recites the clues like a botanical recipe: Favors locations near water and tree gaps; often found beneath maple trees; prefers filtered sunlight on a well-drained slope; frequently near a deadfall…

Then it appears — the native starvine, a modest, green-leafed vine, both sturdy and elegant, that tenderly stretches in aerial ascent toward low-hanging tree branches. The sparse clusters of American starvine (also called "bay starvine") tumbling down a remote hillside represent a virtual refuge for the obscure plant — one of several protected locations Brown has mapped around campus where the species has a toehold.

Studying the starvine's meandering course, Brown smiles: "This could be one of the best sites in existence — the center of American starvine in the world — here at Emory, in an old growth urban forest."

Once found throughout America's southeastern woodlands, Schisandra glabra is now an unusual sight, classified as endangered or threatened across the region. In Georgia it is found in only a dozen counties, mostly within the Atlanta metro region. Rarely studied, little is known about this ancient woody vine that may, in fact, harbor untapped medicinal potential. In China, its cousin is a popular medicinal agent.

But an unusual alliance between Emory's department of environmental studies and the Wesley Woods Hospital horticultural therapy program is giving new life to starvine, teaming to propagate, cultivate and study the elusive species. And if all goes well with the project, the partners may attempt to expand the presence of the vanishing plant into Emory's urban forest.

Last fall, Brown, an adjunct instructor in environmental studies who regularly explores Emory's woodlands, and Kirk Hines, a certified horticultural therapist who founded and directs the horticultural therapy program at Wesley Woods, joined forces to help preserve the plant.

With starvine runners gingerly collected by Brown, a group of about 20 patients in the Wesley Woods program rooted and potted a handful of new plant starts. Today, those starts are thriving; some plants are already over two feet tall and climbing. Standing near the Wesley Woods Hospital greenhouse, Hines inspects a glossy specimen, discussing the therapeutic rewards for patients: "We worked on everything from direction following to standing, range of motion and gross motor skills. You see [them] brighten, a bit more engagement — they don't feel quite so much like they're in a hospital.

"And they loved taking part in that conservation effort, doing something meaningful," he adds. "It's work no one else was really doing, and now (the starvine) is rooted, and transplanted and growing."

The result? New starvine starts with a survival rate of over 50 percent. "It's not bad, considering there isn't a lot of literature out there to lead the way," says Hines, who runs one of the state's only horticultural therapy programs.

While East Asia is home to about 25 species of Schisandra, only one — Schisandra glabra — is native to North America. In China, the Asian version of the plant is considered a traditional medicinal staple on par with ginseng. Cultivated on plantations and found growing wild, it has been used as a tonic to promote overall health for thousands of years.

Though little research suggests the woodlands Indians who once populated Druid Hills cultivated American starvine as a traditional medicinal agent, Brown believes it's very likely. "The ethnobotany of the Piedmont is largely missing from Georgia and Alabama, because the Creek were at war with the U.S. when early botanists would have been coming through," he says.



When Brown began studying local starvine six years ago, he emailed botanists around the country seeking more information. He found little. "They all wrote back within an hour because many hadn't seen it growing — very few ethnobotanists had ever seen it in the wild, with flowers and berries, due to its restricted habitat," he recalls.

"It's true," concurs retired USDA botanist James Duke. "Though Schisandra is very well-researched in China, we Americans tend to study other people's plants more than we study our own."

Three years ago, Duke, who runs the Green Farmacy Garden, a teaching garden with more than 300 medicinal plants in Fulton, Maryland, asked if Brown could spare a few starvine samples, intent on planting the American species alongside its Chinese cousin. It is a species, he believes, that is ripe for further study. "I'm sure there are good-hearted people everywhere in the Southeast who would like to help out an endangered species, but that would be more likely if we could prove its medical potential," Duke says. "What knowledge we have, we can thank Carl for," he adds.

For now, Emory's protected woodlands will continue to serve as a rare laboratory for the American starvine, a plant that has become a common campus placename, attached to a road, bridge and parking deck.

Brown continues to monitor existing starvine patches, while tracking the ongoing cultivation being done by Hines and his patients, as they break new botanical ground with their plant starts. Hines hopes the relationship can expand, and is considering other native plants that patients can help propagate. In the project, he sees a holistic symmetry.

"It's the knowledge that we've had native American tribes living right (along Clifton Road) who may have used this for healing, and knowing that now this is one of the chief medical corridors in the Southeast," Hines muses. "I think it just fits," he adds.

Related:
Windstorm reshapes Atlanta forests

Is a dog your baby's new best friend?

Daniel DeNoon writes about a new study involving pets and babies for WebMD Health News. An excerpt:

"Babies in homes with dogs have fewer colds, fewer ear infections, and need fewer antibiotics in their first year of life than babies raised in pet-free homes, Finnish researchers find. Homes with cats are healthier for babies, too, but not to the same extent as those with dogs, note researchers Eija Bergroth, MD, of Finland's Kuopio University Hospital, and colleagues.

"'The strongest effect was seen with dog contacts. We do not know why it was stronger than with cat contacts,' Bergroth tells WebMD. 'It might have something to do with dirt brought inside by the dogs, especially since the strongest protective effect was seen with children living in houses where dogs spent a lot of time outside.'...

"A time-honored theory, the hygiene hypothesis, suggests that children's immune systems mature best when infants are exposed to germs in just the right amount. Too many germs are unhealthy, but so is a sterile, germ-free home.

"That theory is now giving way to the 'microbiome hypothesis,' says Karen DeMuth, assistant professor of pediatrics at Atlanta's Emory University.

"'The microbiome hypothesis is that early-life exposure to wide varieties of microbes lets them mix with the microbes in the gut and helps them keep the immune system from reacting against itself and causing autoimmune disease, or from reacting against stuff you should ignore and causing allergy,' she says."

Read the whole article in WebMD Health News.

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Image: iStockphoto.com

The math of 'The Amazing Spider-Man'

Spider silk, the protein fiber spun by spiders, has the tensile strength of high-grade steel. But how much spider silk would you need to stop a train?

In the above video, Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi considers this question and others raised by “The Amazing Spider-Man,” the latest in the series of films inspired by the beloved Marvel Comic super hero.

And if you decide to build your own web shooter, click on the sketch, above, that was released to promote the film.

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Now we're cooking: Ovens for a hot, crowded world

The recent record hot day in Atlanta, 106 degrees, inspired an Emory staffer to bake chocolate chip cookies on his dashboard. Photo by Stephen Beehler.

As a heat wave bakes the eastern United States, nearly 2.4 million people who are accustomed to pressing a button to alter the air around them have been left without power. It’s a good time to think about all the people who live their whole lives without modern-day appliances, and how the burgeoning human population, climate change and declining resources are converging into a recipe for disaster.

Every branch of science will be needed to solve this simmering stew of problems, says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz. For a recent issue of Physics World, he writes about the history of stoves and ovens, and how physics is tackling some of the environmental and resource usage issues associated with cooking.

“Despite the rapid development of cooking technology and its gastronomic application since 1800,” Perkowitz writes, “two to three billion people worldwide, mostly in developing countries, still eat food prepared by the ancient method of cooking over open fires or in rudimentary stoves fed by solid fuel – wood, agricultural residue, animal dung and sometimes coal.

“Cooking over open fires or on primitive stoves presents a series of costs. Most sobering is the health cost, in the form of some two million annual deaths caused by respiratory illnesses arising from indoor smoke. Our climate also suffers, with these cooking methods increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by about 3 percent per year and producing black carbon (a main component of soot) and other emissions caused by inefficient burning. Also, the heavy consumption of biomass at up to two tons per family per year, often in a non-sustainable form, leads to deforestation.”

Perkowitz describes several stove designs aimed at helping solve the global cooking issue:

The rocket stove is a simple device based on convective flow of heated air.

The Oorja stove, developed for Indian households by First Energy and the Indian Institute of Science, uses a combustion process, powered by rechargeable batteries, to lower fuel use and emissions.

The Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity (SCORE), developed at the University of Nottingham in the UK, actually uses sound waves to generate electricity along with heat for cooking.

It remains to be seen if these designs will prove successful in the developing world, where many people struggle to afford food, much less something to cook it on.

Meanwhile, if you're an American planning to cook out this 4th of July, you may want to consider using the dashboard of your SUV.

Related:
Crime may rise along with Earth's temperatures

Bottom photo: iStockphoto.com.

Crime may rise along with Earth's temperatures

By Hal Jacobs, Emory Quadrangle

When most people think about global warming, they envision rising temperatures and sea levels. Robert Agnew, a professor of sociology at Emory, thinks about rising crime rates.

It was in the early 1990s, while focusing on the causes of crime and delinquency, that he began to see that certain strains, or stressors, increase the likelihood of crime – including economic deprivation, discrimination, criminal victimization, harsh or erratic discipline, child abuse and neglect. These strains can foster a range of negative emotions such as anger, frustration and depression that put people under pressure to take corrective action. Some of those actions are criminal.

During the last few decades, Agnew’s research on general strain theory has become one of the leading explanations for crime, and he has become its chief architect. He is among the most frequently cited criminologists in the world, and was recently elected president of the American Society of Criminologists.

Agnew believes the pressures caused by climate change will become “one of the major forces – if not the major force – driving change as the century progresses.” He lists strains such as increased temperatures, heat waves, natural disasters, serious threats to livelihood (think farming, herding, fishing), forced migrations on a massive scale and social conflicts arising as nations and groups compete for increasingly scarce food, fresh water and fuel. Especially in the developing world, he believes crime will become a critical issue, making it more difficult to keep the peace in megacities heavily populated by immigrants.

Agnew’s background in criminology isn’t purely academic. He grew up in the Atlantic City of the 1950s and 60s, before casinos brought tourist dollars and jobs. “There was a lot of race and ethnic conflict a lot of crime and delinquency in high school, and I drew very much on those experiences when I came to criminology.”

Read more about Agnew’s youth in Atlantic City here.

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Top image: istockphoto.com.

Bee happy: It's National Pollinator Week

Bees, termites and ants are all social, group-minded insects or "superorganisms" but "honey bees are the only ones I love," says Cindy Hodges. Photo by Kay Hinton.

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

In honor of National Pollinator Week, we bring you Emory alum Cindy Ransom Lewis Hodges, a master beekeeper and vice president of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association.

“Honeybees are vital to the sustainability of the food supply all the way down to the neighborhood garden,” Hodges says. “They are the only pollinator that ‘gives back’ with honey, wax, pollen, and propolis.”

In fact, Hodges’s honey won best in show from the Georgia State Beekeepers Association last fall. “And that’s with urban honey!” she says.

Her hives include a research colony on a fifth-floor patio of Emory’s Math and Science Center that is used for foraging studies in the Department of Environmental Studies. “We took the bees up in the elevator,” she says, laughing. Her bees need regular tending: on a recent rainy spring day, she was planning to deliver a swarm hive (also known as a bait hive) to one of her existing hives. “In the spring, honeybees swarm, which is their form of colony reproduction and is actually a healthy sign, but as urban beekeepers we try to prevent it,” she says. Sometimes the bees will relocate to bait hives, which smell like old wax, when they are placed nearby.

Part beekeeper, part bee evangelist, Hodges and husband Mike Hodges, another Emory alum, decided they needed an avocation once their children left the house (daughter Maggie will receive an MD/MPH from Emory in 2013). So Cindy tends her hives and Mike makes mead from the honey. “When we attend beekeeper conventions, I go for the bees and he goes for the microbreweries,” she jokes.

Honeybees in the U.S. are in trouble, although not endangered, and the need for agricultural pollinators has increased exponentially. Although Hodges admits to being stung about once a week, she is constantly recruiting others into the fold. “I am proud to be taking an active part in the repopulation of Atlanta’s urban corridor,” she says. “Urban bees are helping to pollinate trees, shrubs, fruits, vegetables, and, of course, flowers in the oasis areas of the city between the concrete deserts.”

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Suprising nuggets about poultry farming

Tom Philpott writes in Mother Jones about a new report on poultry farming from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry. An excerpt from Philpott's story:

"The poultry industry has alighted upon Georgia in a way it hasn't in any other individual state. According to the report, which is lavishly footnoted and was prepared with the help of grad students from Emory University's Department of Environmental Health, the U.S. now produces 8.84 billion broilers (meat chickens) every year—of which 1.4 billion, or nearly one in six, are produced in Georgia.

"The state's annual broiler flock, roughly equal in number to the human population of China, takes place on just 2,170 farms—meaning that each one produces a mind-numbing 640,000 birds, collectively churning 2 million tons of chicken litter (feces plus bedding and other waste).

"Concentrating so much waste, laced as it is with arsenic and antibiotic-resistant pathogens along with algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorpus, is bound to cause problems, which are well laid out in this report."

Read the whole article on Mother Jones.

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Nurses go into the fields to serve migrant workers 

Photo: iStockphoto.com.

Study to track germs in airline cabins

By Jennifer Johnson, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

A new study is expected to provide the first detailed information on how infectious diseases may spread onboard commercial airliners. Sponsored by aircraft manufacturer Boeing, the research will document patterns of passenger movement inside aircraft cabins and inventory the microbes present in cabin air and on surfaces such as tray tables and lavatory fixtures.

Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University are working together on the three-year project, in collaboration with Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines.

"We will learn how people move around in aircraft and study the microbes that are there at different times during flights,” says Howard Weiss, a mathematician at Georgia Tech. "From that information, we can start modeling the disease transmission and developing intervention strategies."

In 2002, 20 people on an international flight were infected by a single SARS patient, which showed how air travel could serve as a conduit for the rapid spread of both emerging infections and pandemics of known diseases.

"By understanding the patterns of how infectious diseases may be transmitted from an infected person to an uninfected person, companies like Boeing may be able to design aircraft that better protect passengers and crew members," says Vicki Hertzberg, an associate professor in Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.

The researchers will use sophisticated sampling equipment carried aboard the aircraft to gather information about what’s in the cabin air. They will also swipe certain touch surfaces, and both the wipes and air-sampling filters will be analyzed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and mass spectrometry equipment to identify the microbes present.

To study passenger movements around the aircraft, the researchers plan to use a modern twist on an old-fashioned technique: Graduate students watching and recording movement on an iPad. "They will be actively looking at who’s getting up and down, when they are doing it, and where they are going when they do," Hertzberg explains. "We will need to do this at a fairly high resolution with respect to time and place."