News & Comment

In recognition of LGBTQ+ STEM Day on November 18th, we celebrate the achievements of queer researchers and their efforts to improve representation in STEM. Scott Cocker and Kyle Shanebeck are PhD students at the University of Alberta and co-founders of Scientific QUEERies, a biweekly seminar series that provides a platform for queer STEM professionals to share their achievements and personal stories. In this Q&A, we asked Scott and Kyle about their own research experiences, what it means to be queer in STEM, and the importance of initiatives like Scientific QUEERies.

As part of our celebration of LGBTQ+ STEM Day, we asked queer researchers and faculty about their academic experiences, role models, and how they promote an inclusive research environment.

Aposematism is a prey strategy to communicate toxicity or danger to predators, often through bright colours, and over time is learned by predators. McLellan et al. report in Current Biology that association between an aposematic insect and its host plant is learned by wild birds, to the point that any insect on the plant faces a lower predation risk.

In the 1930s, philosopher John Dewey stated: “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” The question of how we learn from the consequences of our actions has been investigated for decades. When deliberating between options, it is assumed that the outcome of our choice is used as a feedback signal to learn the value of the chosen option. But what about the forgone alternative? In a recent paper, Biderman and Shohamy show that we also revise the valuation of forgone options, assuming them to be inversely related to that of chosen ones.

Cinzia Fornai is a Scientific Coordinator with the Vienna School of Interdisciplinary Dentistry, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich. Her current role is focussed more on clinical research than her previous academic positions, and was facilitated by strong interdisciplinary collaboration.

October 12th is Ada Lovelace Day. Every year on this day we celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Although we have made progress in terms of gender equality in STEM, hurdles are still faced and changes are still needed. We spoke to Professor Jacqueline Gottlieb, Dr Kirsty Bannister and Natahsa Pushkin about their journeys in STEM in what are still male-dominated disciplines.

World Mental Health Day and Ada Lovelace Day are just 2 days apart. Whilst we use World Mental Health Day on October 10 to highlight what still needs to be done to address some of the gaps in our understanding of mental health, Ada Lovelace Day on October 12 celebrates Women in STEM. We spoke to Dr. Annemarie Schumacher Dimech—President and co-founder of the Women’s Brain Project—who embodies both days and strives to advance not only our gender-specific understanding of mental health but is also flying the flag for women in STEM careers.

October 10^th marks World Mental Health Day. In an increasingly uncertain world, an understanding of how we can manage our own mental wellbeing and treat mental health conditions is more important than ever. Although much progress has been made in recent years in terms of our abilities to both diagnose and treat mental health conditions, the need to advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms is continuous. In honour of World Mental Health Day this year, Communications Biology has gathered a Collection of our publications that fill some of the gaps in our current knowledge.

This year’s theme for Peer Review Week is “Identity”, with a focus on promoting equity in peer review practices and recognizing how personal identity can influence the process. While many researchers may involve trainees with their reviews, not all will acknowledge the contributions made by these early-career researchers or request that journals provide them with direct recognition. In this Q&A, we asked pairs of faculty and post-doctoral fellows who previously co-reviewed manuscripts at Communications Biology to reflect on their experiences with peer review, and the importance of including and recognizing early-career researchers as part of this process.

In celebration of Peer Review Week 2021, we asked pairs of faculty mentors and their trainees to reflect on their experiences as co-reviewers for manuscripts at Communications Biology, and the importance of providing peer review opportunities and recognition to early-career researchers.

The accumulation of amyloid β (Aβ) in the brain is an established feature of Alzheimer’s disease, however mechanisms that regulate Aβ accumulation are not fully understood. In a recent study, Wang et al show that Aβ accumulation in neurons is tightly regulated by cholesterol production in astrocytes. This finding paves the way for future work that will establish whether the selective removal of Aβ by targeting this mechanism has therapeutic potential.

Sahika Inal is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at KAUST and has been leading the Organic Bioelectronics group since 2016. With a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics from the University of Potsdam (Potsdam, Germany) and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Bioelectronics at the Centre Microelectronique de Provence in France, she is an expert in the characterization of conjugated polymers and biomedical device development. In this Q&A, Dr. Inal tells us about her research interests, excitement of constantly learning in the lab and the expanding biosensor field.

In this comment, Professor Christian Beste discusses the disconnection between psychology and neuroscience and the effects this can have on the progress of both fields and reproducibility. He also considers the role that publishers can play in strengthening the connections between the disciplines.

Examining the anatomy of an organism opens up a whole world of exploration into the function of its body, its evolution, and how it interacts with the biotic and abiotic elements in its environment. On the cusp of new advances in technology that have furthered this exploration, the editors at Communications Biology have gathered a Collection of our exciting research in organismal anatomy to highlight the possibilities of this field yet to come.

In order to maintain persistent infections, microbes that cause chronic disease have to evade detection by the human immune system. To do so, many modulate the expression of plasma membrane receptors that trigger cell signalling pathways and immune responses. Using microscopy and cell sorting techniques, Businger et al. map the morphological changes in the plasma membranes of macrophages infected by human cytomegalovirus or human immunodeficiency virus and find novel differentially expressed receptors.

Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, has taken on new meaning for the fields of chemistry and biology. DNA origami describes the folding of DNA strands to form nanoscale structures. The ability to design and form complex structures at a nanoscale level has fuelled new ambitions of nanostructure applications in life science. These predefined shapes become base structures for the development of a higher and complex functional structure. In a recent paper, Stömmer et al., demonstrated the ability to design a macromolecular level transportation network that allows the movement of molecules at sub-molecular levels using DNA. A multi-layer DNA origami was used to build micrometer-long hollow tunnels akin to railway tunnels. An accompanying DNA piston travelled through the tunnels with constant motion. The system also accommodated the application of electric fields to fuel the motion of the pistons along the filaments simulating a nanoscale electric railway system. This could revolutionize the way molecular drug delivery systems can be perceived in the future.

Lipid nanoparticles can be used to deliver nucleic acids for gene expression modulation—but getting them to target specific tissues is an ongoing challenge. In a new study by Dammes et al., a conformation-sensitive targeting strategy is used to achieve better selectivity in silencing gut-homing leukocytes in mouse models of colitis.

Carol Ibe is a Postdoctoral Scientist in the Saunders Lab at the John Innes Centre, Norwich. She received her PhD in Plant Sciences (as a Gates Scholar) from the University of Cambridge in 2020. From Nigeria, Carol understands the urgent need to develop the right capacity to advance bioscience education, research, and innovation to eradicate hunger, malnutrition, and extreme poverty in Africa. This led her to set up the JR Biotek Foundation, a non-profit organisation that is providing Africa-based early-career agricultural researchers with the right skillset and opportunities to improve widely consumed crop varieties in African countries, and to foster links between the lab and market to support smallholder farmers in the region. Her unwavering dedication and passion to improve the lives of others through her research and Foundation’s work has led to numerous awards including the University of Cambridge Society for the Application of Research Awards (CSAR) and the 2019 Bill Gates Sr. Prize.

Cunningham et al. comment on the U.K.’s commitment to protect 30% of land by 2030, by identifying priority landscapes for expansion of the current protected area network in the UK using 445 priority species ranges across the country, under two baseline protection definitions to reach this conservation target. They find that expanding the protected area network by initially only including the strictest protected areas would yield much greater representation of threatened species, and propose new considerations for protected area commitments.

Glycans are a major composition of the cell surface that interacts with the surrounding environment. The ability to carry out glycan-binding profile studies has been mainly done with glycan arrays. However, glycan arrays are not easily adaptable for cell surface and in vivo glycan recognition assays. The Liquid Glycan Array (LiGA) reported recently by Sojitra et al. is an alternative glycan recognition assay that employs DNA barcoding, bioorthogonal ligation and deep sequencing technology. In LiGA, barcoded M13 virions are used to present glycans to allow rapid identification of binding partners based on sequence identity. This physical link between the glycan to the DNA sequence fitted in the phage genome provides an ingenious approach to maneuver glycan binding profile studies in various conditions.