uv radiation Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Fungus Breaks Down Ocean Plastic

The AHA! Team — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:39:26 +0000

Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research via EurekAlert! – A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, NIOZ published their results in the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect that many more plastic degrading fungi are living in deeper parts of the ocean. The fungus Parengyodontium album lives together with other marine microbes in thin layers on plastic litter in the ocean. Marine microbiologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) discovered that the fungus is capable of breaking down particles of the plastic polyethylene (PE), the most abundant of all plastics that have ended up in the ocean. The NIOZ researchers cooperated with colleagues from Utrecht University, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and research institutes in Paris, Copenhagen and St Gallen, Switzerland. The finding allows the fungus to join a very short list of plastic-degrading marine fungi: only four species have been found to date. A larger number of bacteria was already known to be able to degrade plastic. Follow the degradation process accurately The researchers went to find the plastic degrading microbes in the hotspots of plastic pollution in the North Pacific Ocean. From the plastic litter collected, they isolated the marine fungus by growing it in the laboratory, on special plastics that contain labelled carbon. Vaksmaa: “These so-called 13C isotopes remain traceable in the food chain. It is like a tag that enables us to follow where the carbon goes. We can then trace it in the degradation products.” Vaksmaa is thrilled about the new finding: “What makes this research scientifically outstanding, is that we can quantify the degradation process.” In the laboratory, Vaksmaa and her team observed that the breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 per cent per day. “Our measurements also showed that the fungus doesn’t use much of the carbon coming from the PE when breaking it down. Most of the PE that P. album uses is converted into carbon dioxide, which the fungus excretes again.” AltThough CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this process is not something that might pose a new problem: the amount released by fungi is the same as the low amount humans release while breathing. Only under the influence of UV The presence of sunlight is essential for the fungus to use PE as an energy source, the researchers found. Vaksmaa: “In the lab, P. album only breaks down PE that has been exposed to UV-light at least for a short period of time. That means that in the ocean, the fungus can only degrade plastic that has been floating near the surface initially,” explains Vaksmaa. “It was already known that UV-light breaks down plastic by itself mechanically, but our results show that it also facilitates the biological plastic breakdown by marine fungi.” Other fungi out there As a large amount of different plastics sink into deeper layers before it is exposed to sunlight, P.album will not be able to break them all down. Vaksmaa expects that there are other, yet unknown, fungi out there that are degrading plastic as well, in deeper parts of the ocean. “Marine fungi can break down complex materials made of carbon. There are numerous amounts of marine fungi, so it is likely that in addition to the four species identified so far, other species also contribute to plastic degradation. There are still many questions about the dynamics of how plastic degradation takes place in deeper layers,” says Vaksmaa. Plastic soup Finding plastic-degrading organisms is urgent. Every year, humans produce more than 400 billion kilograms of plastic, and this is expected to have at least triple by the year 2060. Much of the plastic waste ends up in the sea: from the poles to the tropics, it floats around in surface waters, reaches greater depths at sea and eventually falls down on the seafloor. Lead author Annika Vaksmaa of NIOZ: “Large amounts of plastics end up in subtropical gyres, ring-shaped currents in oceans in which seawater is almost stationary. That means once the plastic has been carried there, it gets trapped there. Some 80 million kilograms of floating plastic have already accumulated in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in the Pacific Ocean alone, which is only one of the six large gyres worldwide.” Journal Science of The Total Environment DOI 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172819 To read the original article click here.

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UV Radiation Kills Virus That Causes COVID-19 in Lab, Study Finds

AHA Publisher — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 07:00:07 +0000

Ohio State University via Newswise – COLUMBUS, Ohio – A specific wavelength of ultraviolet radiation killed more than 99.99% of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in laboratory tests, a new study has found. The results could offer an encouraging option for inactivating the virus that causes COVID-19 from surfaces or, potentially, from the air. It is the first study to demonstrate that specific doses of UV222, a relatively short wavelength of ultraviolet radiation, may be a feasible and safe approach to disinfecting COVID-19. The study appears on a preprint server and has not yet undergone a formal peer review by other scientists. “The special thing is that this wavelength is effectively absorbed by the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the proteins of the virus,” said Natalie Hull, lead author of the study and assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “And because of that, it was likely able to damage the proteins that perpetuate the virus infection cycle. And we think that’s why this is so effective.” The findings mean that UV222 could be a safe way to disinfect spaces contaminated by COVID-19, the researchers said. “This is the first time anyone has done something with the real virus, and as best we can tell, this is a wavelength that’s safe for humans,” said Richard Robinson, co-author of the study and associate professor of microbial infection and immunity at Ohio State. “And so theoretically, this could be a way of decontaminating that would be safer for people, and would also kill the virus.” There are caveats to the study. The findings, while encouraging, are “a starting point,” Hull said. The researchers tested the effectiveness of UV to destroy SARS-CoV-2 in a liquid solution, which is usually a more difficult medium to disinfect than air. But the study did not test UV222’s ability to kill the virus in the air or on non-liquid surfaces, and any real-world solution to fighting the virus in spaces where people live, work or play must be effective in those spaces. An open room would include other factors not tested in this study, including varying temperatures, humidity and air flow, Hull said. She said the UV light destroys the proteins and nucleic acids that make up the virus, essentially disabling it. Destroying the proteins and nucleic acids makes it impossible for the virus to replicate and complete the cycles necessary to infect people. “It’s basically like scrambling a protein with heat,” Hull said. “You’re applying energy and it breaks the bonds to change the structure. And these cell processes responsible for replicating the genome and making more virus components or binding to the host cell don’t happen in the same way, so it halts the infection cycle.” The researchers knew that ultraviolet radiation could inactivate coronaviruses, a broad category of viruses that includes SARS-CoV-2. (The common cold, for example, is also a coronavirus; UV radiation has been shown to destroy it as well.) But most commercially available UV lamps emit rays that are long enough to penetrate skin, making them a potential cancer risk. And little information is known about how much UV radiation is necessary to kill SARS-CoV-2. UV222 is a shorter wavelength of ultraviolet radiation than the rays that reach people from the sun, and previous studies have shown that UV222 is not likely to cause skin cancer and other health problems associated with UV radiation. (The “222” refers to the size of the wavelength — 222 nanometers. These wavelengths from the sun are mostly consumed by Earth’s atmosphere before they reach us.) The study was performed on samples of the COVID-19-causing virus that were cultivated and reproduced in a special laboratory on Ohio State’s campus designed to manage biologically dangerous pathogens and viruses. The research team obtained the samples from the Biodefense and Emerging Infections Research Resources Repository, an arm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Researchers directed UV222 at samples of the virus held in a liquid suspension, then tested to see how much of the virus was destroyed and how long the UV radiation took to destroy it. They tested times ranging from 15 seconds to 15 minutes. Robinson, who has studied tuberculosis and other lung pathogens and who is associate director of Ohio State’s Biosafety Level 3 lab where the tests were conducted, said he was overwhelmed by what they saw: A near-total destruction of the virus, after only a few minutes. “When we started these experiments last summer, it was at the time when nothing was working to stop COVID,” Robinson said. “And this was so rewarding, because immunologists were still unsure what to do and here was this thing where we could just zap the virus and see this immediate effect.” Hull and Robinson intend to continue testing UV222 in real-world conditions, and Hull said she is optimistic. “We found the virus is really wimpy when confronted with UV222,” she said. “And our findings are a conservative estimate – liquid is this nice place where the virus is much happier than in a room full of air. We don’t know for sure, but I think it’s reasonable to think it might work in the air, too. We need to do the experiments to find out for sure.” This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.

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New, Highly Precise ‘Clock’ Can Measure Biological Age

AHA Publisher — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 08:00:05 +0000

University of Cologne via EurekAlert – Using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, researchers at the University of Cologne have developed an ‘aging clock’ that reads the biological age of an organism directly from its gene expression, the transcriptome. Bioinformatician David Meyer and geneticist Professor Dr Björn Schumacher, director of the Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Disease at the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Aging Research and the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC), describe their so-called BiT age (binarized transcriptomic aging clock) in the article ‘BiT age: A transcriptome based aging clock near the theoretical limit of accuracy’ in Aging Cell. We are all familiar with chronological age – our age since birth. But biological age can differ from it, at times significantly. Everyone ages differently. Scientists can use aging clocks to determine an organism’s biological age. Until now, aging clocks such as Horvath’s epigenetic clock have been based on the pattern of methylations, small chemical groups that attach to DNA and change with age. Using the transcriptome, the new clock takes into consideration the set of genes that are read from DNA (messenger RNA) to make proteins for the cell. Until now, the transcriptome was considered too complex to indicate age. Sometimes genes transcribe a particularly large amount of mRNA, sometimes less. Hence, so far it has not been possible to develop precise aging clocks based on gene activity. Meyer and Schumacher’s new approach uses a mathematical trick to eliminate the differences in gene activity. The binarized transcriptome aging clock divides genes into two groups – ‘on’ or ‘off’ – thus minimizing high variation. This makes aging predictable from the transcriptome. ‘Surprisingly, this simple procedure allows very accurate prediction of biological age, close to the theoretical limit of accuracy. Most importantly, this aging clock also works at high ages, which were previously difficult to measure because the variation in gene activity is particularly high then,’ said Meyer. BiT age is based exclusively on approximately 1,000 different transcriptomes of C. elegans, for which the lifespan is precisely known. Model organisms such as the nematode provide a controllable view of the aging process, allowing biomarkers to be discovered and the effects of external influences such as UV radiation or nutrition on longevity to be studied. The new aging clock allows researchers to accurately predict the pro- and anti-aging effects of gene variants and various external factors in the nematode at a young age. The aging clock also showed that genes of the immune response as well as signalling in neurons are significant for the aging process. ‘BiT age can also be applied to predict human age quickly and with very high accuracy. Measuring biological age is important to determine the influence of environment, diet or therapies on the aging process and the development of age-related diseases. This clock could therefore find wide application in aging research. Since BiT age is based purely on gene activity, it can basically be applied to any organism,’ Schumacher explained. To read the original article click here.

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