Author Archives: jonghwanseo

The Missing Key: Psammosa pacifica

Posted on April 9, 2014 | Comments Off on The Missing Key: Psammosa pacifica

The mystery of our origins has always been a lifelong question even before the development of science. That development led to the theory of evolution and the debate of how humans and chimps have a common ancestor has been ongoing ever since. Not only that, it also led to many disputes and evolutionary questions between other lineages as humans have an innate curiosity of how things relate to one another.

A collage of protists source: wikimedia commons

As each lineage has things unique to them, our researcher became very interested in one particular group known as protists.

In today’s age, protist plays a role both positively and negatively, as the group covers a very wide spectrum. On the negative side, they are the reason for diseases such as malaria, with an estimated 207 million cases and 675,000 deaths in 2012 alone. Protist are also responsible for causing 3 billion dollars of loss per year in the poultry industry. Although protists do play an important role in other areas, such as acting as a primary food producer, their negative traits cause protist to be a very relevant issue in this day and age.

We met with Dr. Noriko Okamoto of UBC, who was able to find an organism called Psamoosa pacifica that contained the unique trait of two different groups of protist, known as dinoflagellates and apicomplexans, and was able to deduce that these two different groups shared a common ancestor through the use of serial Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) tomography, which allowed her to create many thin slices of the newly found organism and create a 3D image of its structure to compare.

Highlighted images of the structures of apicompexan, dinoflagellate, and Psammosa pacifica
Source of the images used: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0084653

 For a crash course lesson on dinoflagellates and apicomplexans, listen to the following podcast below:

 

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Thus, her research was able to answer a long-standing evolutionary question of how apicomplexans and dinoflagellates are related to each other and their origin.This study may lead to answers about how the protists are related and help build on the knowledge of ancestries we currently have.

This video talks about the implications of her research as it delves into how it impacts both the general public and other scientific fields:

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While finding a common ancestor between organisms may seem like a mere curiosity in action, it has the potential to help the humanity. As an example, the scientists were able to find a lead on when and the origin of the HIV-1 virus by finding the ancestral codes in HIV-1 virus that codes for AIDS. Likewise, while even our researcher is not very clear on how beneficial this information may be to the scientists in other fields, they will surely find uses for it when the time comes as her study provides brand new knowledge in molecular levels.

I hope this blog post has raised some awareness on protists and the importance of finding a common ancestor.

-By Jong Hwan Seo, Jeffrey Chen, Hyunbin Park, and Yuri Tomura (Group 2)

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Posted in Biological sciences, Outreach project

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The Invisible Cold War: Bacteria Vs. Humanity

Posted on March 24, 2014 | Comments Off on The Invisible Cold War: Bacteria Vs. Humanity

We are in a constant war and we don’t even realize it. No, it’s not the recent development in Ukraine or the crisis in Syria some time ago. It’s something much more subtle and dangerous. As you may have guessed it from the title, we are constantly fighting against bacteria with a type of weapon called antibiotics. Antibiotics are natural products used to kill bacteria by interfering with bacteria growth or replication. Unfortunately, we have been using our weapon inappropriately and now we are steadily losing this fight against bacteria.

Face of Danger (antibiotic-resistant bacteria, MRSA, at work. Image source: wikimedia)

However, researchers from the division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found something we can do to fight against bacteria. According to the study done in 2013 by Fridkin, S.K. and Srinivasan, A. (associate director for Healthcare Associated Infection Prevention Programs), by fusing antimicrobial stewardship with their strategies, hospitals in the U.S. is able to create a sort of benchmark for all hospitals to follow (2014). This is necessary as there is no clear guideline about how much of antibiotics is “too much.” In order to do this, they went through a trial and error of implementing sound decisions and comparing outcomes within 200 hospitals in U.S..

Now, here is why you might be asking why this is necessary at all when antibiotics can kill bacteria and have been doing so for the longest time. That is only half right. While we have been killing bacteria with antibiotics, they have been evolving through exposure of antibiotics and have become immune to them. As they become immune to the only weapon we have against them, we are forced to create or modify the antibiotics. This is called, “evolutionary arms race.”

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While manufacturing new antibiotics would be good and all, there has been reports of misuse of antibiotics in hospitals and other medical centers as early as late 1950’s which resulted in rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (Fridkin, S.K. & Srinivasan, A., 2014). If this faulty practice continues, all the effort and money went into producing antibiotics would be in vain as they would develop immunity again due to overexposure. Therefore, a new practice of controlling distribution of antibiotics called, “antimicrobial stewardship,” has been developed.

Just like how it is not wise to show all your cards in your hand during a poker game, it is not wise to show every antibiotics we got by misusing them. While this study proves that we can set a guideline for all hospitals to follow, it also supports further improvements over their strategies. To prevent a certain future where no cure exists to fight against lethal bacteria, I believe there should be more improvements on the guidelines and if possible, we as citizens should also be smart about our usage of antibiotics.

References

Fridkin, S. K., & Srinivasan, A. (2014). Implementing a strategy for monitoring inpatient antimicrobial use among hospitals in the united states. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 58(3), 401-406.

– Jong Hwan Seo

 

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Posted in Biological sciences

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If you build it, fuel will come: The newly-discovered method that will replace fossil fuels

Posted on March 3, 2014 | 1 comment

Starting from the Industrial Revolution, mankind has depended on fossil fuels to produce power to operate our equipments. Of course, the dangers of utilizing fossil fuels and their finite amounts were found as time went by and afterwards, many have attempted to find ways that either lessened the impact from fossil fuels or extracted fuel from a different source. Fortunately, we were able to find a way through conversion of dead plant tissues from the crops to produce energy. We call this fuel, “biofuel.”

The crop field of dreams. Source: imgur.com

However, as with everything that is too good to be true, there is a catch. According to this article, biofuel production requires a large amount of crop fields as each crops have severely limited range of lights they can absorb, therefore providing small amounts of fuel. This is because plants have evolved to make sufficient amount of energy from light just to survive and not to be our fuel storage. Not only that, biofuel is based on crops that we also grow to sustain ourselves. In short, if we are to use it to power our machines and transportation, we must be prepared to eat less.

As luck would have it, Per Morgen and his colleagues from University of Baghdad and Al-Muthanna University in Iraq found a new, cheap method that still uses biofuel but keeps all the advantages while eliminating all negative aspects.

Their method does not use crops in their entirety. Rather, they use the parts of crops that we cannot eat. That’s right, the starting material used for this method is cellulose.

What is cellulose? It is a main component of plants made of sugar chains. In order to digest it, one would require an enzyme called cellulase that helps break it down into smaller pieces, which we do not have.

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Moving on, they plan to convert cellulose into sugar and then convert the sugar into fuel with the help of an acid they extracted from treated rice husks to help move the process forward. The husks are generated in large bulk from global rice productions, therefore being cheap and easy to find.

Since this technique uses cellulose, there is no need to worry about cutting down food for fuels as we are using inedible, unusable portion of crops to make fuel while using digestible parts for food. Also, there is no need to cultivate separate fields of crops or worry about inefficiency of photosynthesis since cellulose can be extracted from crops we already have for food production and is found in large amount. Therefore, it is much more efficient and cheap than normal usage of biofuel and the output is high enough to replace fossil fuels.

The time when fossil fuels can no longer be used due to depletion will come and when it does, we will be ready.

-Harry Seo

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Posted in Science in the news

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Dangers of synthetic pesticides and why we should ‘bee’ careful

Posted on February 3, 2014 | 2 comments

When we think of synthetic pesticides, we commonly think of it as a necessary protection for our crops against insects, much like sunscreens, or as a nuisance that builds up inside our bodies and harms us until we pay the piper. However, according to the book, “Crop Chemo-phobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution?”,  there are so much more natural pesticides in the plant compared to the synthetic ones (About 99.9% of pesticides in a plant is, by weight, natural) that if we were to worry about something, it should be the natural pesticides. This, however, does not mean we should be using synthetic pesticides carelessly.  They are still harbingers of destruction to ecosystem and have already begun their dirty work on one of the beings that we depend on for agricultural benefits. That’s right, they are destroying the bees.

Source: imgur.com

According to the scientists, the bees are dying from a dangerous disorder called, “colony collapse disorder,” or commonly called as CCD. This disorder is developed from exposure to synthetic pesticides, which brings in other factors as a result, like parasites and fungi that would not have affected them if not for synthetic pesticides. Not only that, one of those pesticides that has been confirmed to be harmless to bees is increasing the bee’s chance of parasitic infection. Consequently, this would raise the stress level far beyond their tolerance and ultimately lead to colony collapse disorder. YouTube Preview Image What is this “colony collapse disorder” you say? It is when bees from a colony up and disappears  from their site due to the inhabitable stress in their living habitat, never to be seen again. We, as humans, depend on the bees to do most of the pollinating for countless vegetable and fruit crops. If they develop CCD from interacting with crops laced with synthetic pesticides, there will be fewer bees for the farmers to utilize and the harvest of fruits and vegetables will be severely limited.

Although synthetic pesticides may be insignificant when considering its effect on our well-being after intake, it is a serious cause and concern for the bees as it makes them vulnerable to so many stress-inducing organisms, such as parasites and fungi, and steers them towards what we now know as colony collapse disorder. While we still can, we should prevent usage of such pesticides and conserve their population so that in the long run, ours would be preserved as well.

-Jong Hwan Seo

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Posted in Science in the news