World Food Day is celebrated each year on October 16. This year’s theme is “Water is life, water is food. Leave no one behind”. This year, PLOS ONE looks back at some of our recent publications on various aspects of food in society, including food security, food science, agriculture, nutrition and shopping habits.
More regular eating patterns may improve sleep in infants
Mühlematter C, Nielsen DS, Castro-Mejía JL, Brown SA, Rasch B, Wright KP Jr, et al. (2023) Not simply a matter of parents—Infants’ sleep-wake patterns are associated with their regularity of eating. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0291441. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291441
A recent study by an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Denmark, The Netherlands and the USA provides support for the idea that regular eating patterns may improve sleep regularity in infants. They followed 162 infants in Switzerland in a longitudinal study, and developed an Eating Regularity Index (ERI) to measure eating habits, and utilised five sleep composites from 32 sleep variables. They found that eating more regularly is correlated with lower variability in day-to-day sleep patterns, earlier bedtimes, and less fragmented nighttime sleep.
The diet of pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures may have included cotton
Reynoso-García J, Santiago-Rodriguez TM, Narganes-Storde Y, Cano RJ, Toranzos GA (2023) Edible flora in pre-Columbian Caribbean coprolites: Expected and unexpected data. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0292077. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292077
Researchers at the University of Puerto Rico, California Polytechnic State University and Diversigen, Inc. analysed human coprolites (mummified feces) for two cultures, the Huecoid and Saladoid, in pre-Columbian Vieques, Puerto Rico, and found that their diet consisted of maize, sweet potatoes, chili peppers, peanuts and papaya. Surprisingly, they also found traces of cotton, which leads to further questions about why cotton would be a part of their diet, and in which form it was consumed. The authors hypothesize that cotton seeds may have been used as either additives or as a source of oil, or that cotton fibers may have been ingested during the weaving process when weavers may have used saliva to prepare the yarn.
Nine out of ten female college students reported overeating during university COVID-19 closures
Constant A, Fortier A, Serrand Y, Bannier E, Moirand R, Thibault R, et al. (2023) Emotional overeating affected nine in ten female students during the COVID-19 university closure: A cross-sectional study in France. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0286439. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286439
A team of researchers at the University of Rennes conducted an online survey of female students at their university aged 18-24 on their eating habits in early 2021. 302 respondents completed the Emotional Overeating Questionnaire (EOQ), which measures eating in response to six emotions: anxiety, sadness, loneliness, anger, fatigue and happiness. Nine out of ten respondents reported emotional overeating, and the multi-variate analysis conducted for this study suggests that overeating could be related to inability to partake in interesting activities or social stimulation.
Small farms contribute up to one fifth of food produced in Mexico
Ibarrola-Rivas M-J, Orozco-Ramírez Q, Guibrunet L (2023) How much of the Mexican agricultural supply is produced by small farms, and how? PLoS ONE 18(10): e0292528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292528
In this study, researchers from the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) looked at the contribution of small farms to the total amount of agricultural production within Mexico. They used existing data from the 2019 Mexican National Survey of Agriculture, and characterise small farms as those that have less than 5 hectares of cropland, 16 pigs or less, 26 cows or less, or 500 chickens or less. They found that small farms produce 19% of Mexico’s agricultural production and constitute 15% of Mexico’s agricultural supply when including imports and exports. The authors point out that small farms may be important to achieving food sovereignty and could have important social and environmental benefits.
Labels on food that indicate the Physical Activity Calorie Equivalent may be useful to consumers in avoiding high-calorie food
Daley AJ, Kettle VE, Roalfe AK (2023) Implementing physical activity calorie equivalent (PACE) food labelling: Views of a nationally representative sample of adults in the United Kingdom. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0290509. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290509
A study of 4,000 adults in the United Kingdom, led by researchers at the University of Loughborough, attempted to clarify the views of the public around PACE labelling for foods. PACE stands for Physical Activity Calorie Equivalent, and includes information on the label about the energy expenditure conversion of the calorie content of the food item. For instance, this could mean a label on a drinks can which illustrates that the calorie equivalent of this drink is 26mins of walking or 13mins of running. Although most participants reported favoring the more common traffic-light system for labels, the majority of participants also indicated that PACE labels were more likely to catch their attention and to stop them buying food or drinks that were high in calories. The study provided support for using PACE labels on discretionary foods such as cakes and chocolates rather than everyday food items such as pasta, bread, fruit and vegetables.
Further reading:
Check out these additional recent studies on food-related sciences at PLOS ONE:
Knowles J, Codling K, Houston R, Gorstein J (2023) Introduction to the programme guidance for the use of iodised salt in processed foods and its pilot implementation, strengthening strategies to improve iodine status. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0274301. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274301
Hoving-Bolink RAH, Antonis AFG, te Pas MFW, Schokker D (2023) An observational study of the presence and variability of the microbiota composition of goat herd milk related to mainstream and artisanal farm management. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0292650. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0292650
Lee K, Capps O Jr (2023) Habitual behavior of household food expenditure by store type in the United States. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0291340. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291340
Hill CM, Chi DL, Mancl LA, Jones-Smith JC, Chan N, Saelens BE, et al. (2023) Sugar-sweetened beverage intake and convenience store shopping as mediators of the food insecurity–Tooth decay relationship among low-income children in Washington state. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0290287. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290287
del Prado A, Lindsay B, Tricarico J (2023) Retrospective and projected warming-equivalent emissions from global livestock and cattle calculated with an alternative climate metric denoted GWP*. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0288341. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288341
Brown TW, Park GW, Wittry B, Barclay L, Person M, Relja B, et al. (2023) SARS-CoV-2 surface contamination in metro-Atlanta grocery stores. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0291747. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291747
Joseph S, Friedrich H (2023) Analyzing drivers of organic food sales–A pooled spatial data analysis for Hamburg (Germany). PLoS ONE 18(10): e0285377. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0285377
October 13 is the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. PLOS ONE publishes research on all aspects of disaster risk reduction and across the spectrum of natural disasters, such as flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, landslides, heat waves and more. Today, we would like to highlight some recent studies published in PLOS ONE, and the authors behind this important work. We check in with Paula Andrea Valencia Londoño, who is the first author on a recent study of an informal settlement in northwestern Colombia, and Danielle Buttke, first author of a paper looking at how heat waves affect visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park.
Ecological urbanism as a condition underpinning urban life for internally displaced peoples in Colombia
Paula Andrea Valencia Londoño has a PhD in Social Sciences in the field of Culture of Peace from the University of Granada, Spain, Master in Development Studies from the University of the Andes, and is a Specialist in Peace and Conflict Management from the University of Granada. She was an Information Analyst at OCHA United Nations from 2008 to 2012, and is a full-time professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University of Medellin since 2012. She was coordinator of the Master in Conflict and Peace at the University of Medellin from 2012 to 2017, and currently she is Coordinator of the Specialization in Gender Studies and Leader of the Research Group on Conflict and Peace at the same university. Her most recent articles published in high impact journals are “Ecological urbanism as a condition underpinning urban life for internally displaced peoples in Colombia”, co-authored with Diana Valencia and Phoenix Paz and published in PLoS ONE 18(9), “Determinantes de género en la inseguridad objetiva y subjetiva: los casos de México y Colombia”, co-authored with Martha Natera and Marisela Pacheco, published in Política Criminal Vol. 18 Nº 35, “Habitabilidad de las mujeres desplazadas por la violencia en Colombia: caso de La Primavera”, co-authored with Diana Valencia and published in Cuadernos de Vivienda y Urbanismo, 16.
Valencia Londoño PA, Valencia Londoño D, Paz PS (2023) Ecological urbanism as a condition underpinning urban life for internally displaced peoples in Colombia. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0291794. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291794
PLOS: Your paper studies a settlement in Colombia which sits in an area with multiple risks, both from the environmental impact on human settlement, and the impact of the human settlement on the environment. Can you please explain a bit of the background of this settlement, and more about the most pressing risks?
PAVL: La Primavera is an informal settlement located in the north of the Aburrá Valley, in the metropolitan area of Medellín, which is exposed to multiple risks. The first risk is derived from its proximity to the Aburrá River, also called the Medellín River. The settlement does not have the necessary margin of retreat from the Aburrá River, which is aggravated by the process of erosion that is occurring on the river bank, due to the overexploitation of its resources such as gravel and sand, the consequence so far is the loss of four houses. On the other hand, the houses in La Primavera were built on both sides of the old train track, a train that today is planned to be reactivated as a commuter train and that in its construction would imply the resettlement of the town. In addition to this, the side of the settlement opposite the one bordering the river has the highway that connects Medellín with the Atlantic coast as its boundary, and unfortunately the nearest school is located across the highway, which generates a permanent risk of accidents for children and mothers. Finally, a high-voltage power cable passes over the settlement and a gas pipeline crosses its subsoil. In summary, La Primavera is a paradigmatic case of competition for limited resources and the absence of the state that produces an overload in the ecosystems, generating multiple risks, derived from the conditions of vulnerability that characterize its inhabitants.
PLOS: Having conducted this study, what do you understand are the most pressing concerns for ensuring safety and sustainability for this community?
PAVL: The community of La Primavera has learned to live with risk; for this reason, the perception of risk among the population differed significantly from the risk estimated during the technical visit. Although the risk of flooding is known throughout the settlement, there are other environmental hazards that put the population at greater risk but are less perceived. For example, erosion of the river banks below the house foundations is a major problem. The same is true for landslides. Although the perception of risk is low, the actual level of risk, as calculated in the technical assessment, is high. However, their greatest concern has been, for more than three years, the imminent construction of the commuter train, a public work that would force them to abandon their settlement, a territory that some settlers have inhabited for more than 40 years, in addition to the little or no compensation that will be granted for their illegal settlement status. This is why the advocacy work of community leaders has focused on a resettlement proposal that allows them to survive as a community and have access to their right to adequate housing.
PLOS: What are your hopes for the future of cities in terms of ecological urbanism?
PAVL: Ecological urbanism invites us to understand cities as living organisms, with a metabolism that consumes resources and generates waste, and also as part of a larger system, an ecosystem that must survive in order for them to subsist. Their deterioration is the prelude to the environmental risks that increasingly threaten cities. The question is: How can cities be designed in balance with the natural environment in Latin America, where spontaneous growth, the product of migration and the search for opportunities, has been the determining factor in urban expansion? The great challenge for this part of the continent is to reconvert cities so that they are not only consumers but also generators of resources.
Predicting climate-change induced heat-related illness risk in Grand Canyon National Park visitors
Danielle Buttke, DVM, PhD, MPH, DACVPM, leads the One Health Program for the National Park Service, a joint position between the Office of Public Health and Wildlife Health Branch that recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health. She serves as an agency lead for zoonotic disease response and leads outbreak response activities and research on ecological and climate drivers of zoonotic disease and climate impacts to health.
Dr. Buttke is also a AAAS Leshner Leadership Fellow for public engagement in science specializing in communication and behavior change. Prior to joining the National Park Service, she served as an epidemic intelligence service officer at the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. She holds bachelors in ecology and political science, a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine and PhD in comparative biomedical sciences from Cornell University, and a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.
Buttke DE, Raynor B, Schuurman GW (2023) Predicting climate-change induced heat-related illness risk in Grand Canyon National Park visitors. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0288812. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288812
PLOS: Your study looks at the future of heat-related illness risk for visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park. Can you tell us about the motivations behind this study, and how you came to be involved in this project?
DB: This study highlights one of the many reasons climate change is considered one of the greatest public health threats of the century. Because heat illness is one of the most immediate and direct impacts of a warmer climate, we thought that improving understanding of exactly how this direct impact would influence human health in our parks would give us a window into what future risk looks like and start conversations, planning, and action to address the human health threats of climate change more broadly. Grand Canyon National Park has unique features that put visitors at higher risk of heat illness. Hiking down in elevation into the Grand Canyon means the temperature gets hotter as your hike progresses and exertion increases, making it harder for the body to cool itself and resulting in a greater burden of heat illness in hikers. This elevated risk means that Grand Canyon National Park has had excellent programs and data on heat illness risk and provided an excellent model for our study.
PLOS: There is an interesting conundrum between the benefits of visiting national parks and the risks posed by environmental or physical extremes in these situations. What did you learn about this balance during your study – is there a significant need for better education before or during visits to extreme environments?
DB: There are a variety of environmental and physical risks associated with outdoor recreation. However, there are also tremendous health benefits associated with spending time in nature and outdoors, so it is important we take steps to ensure we can recreate safely. The National Park Service has a range of strategies to raise awareness and educate visitors during heat events and offers alternative activities to help visitors ‘Beat the Heat‘. Grand Canyon routinely provides safety messages on environmental and individual factors that can increase the risk of heat illness as well as tips on planning for heat and how to ‘Hike Smart‘ to avoid heat illness. As climate change increases the number and severity of extreme heat events, it is increasingly important that the public is aware of the risk and takes steps to protect themselves. We found that heat illnesses were most common during the shoulder seasons, when visitors are least prepared for heat events. This highlights the importance of education and awareness in reducing heat illness.
PLOS: What does your research tell us about the future of the risks to human life during heatwaves?
DB: Heat illness is one of the many ways that climate change threatens human health, and like other climate-related risks, it will become more severe in the future. Our work also shows the potential that climate action holds to save lives and improve human well-being. Extreme heat waves can be incredibly disruptive to visitors vacationing in National Parks, but they can be more detrimental and devastating to outdoor workers, and to other vulnerable populations that lack the ability to avoid heat exposure or adapt to the extreme temperatures. This study improves our understanding of how climate change threatens the National Park Service’s ability to provide safe and enjoyable experiences for visitors. We hope that it brings attention to the very significant threat climate change poses to human health and how important climate action is to all humans but especially those at greatest risk and with the least resources to respond.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
In this latest installment of our Editor Spotlight series, we speak with Academic Editor Camelia Delcea from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. Dr Delcea tells us about her experience with the PLOS ONE Editorial Board, her experience of using openly available data to validate results, and how her research on the boarding of airplanes changed when new variables related to infection control were included.
Camelia Delcea received the Ph.D. degree in economic cybernetics and statistics from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania. She is currently with the Economic Cybernetics and Informatics Department, Bucharest University of Economic Studies. Her research interests include agent-based modeling, operations research (optimizing the airplane boarding methods and improving the evacuation process), grey systems theory, artificial intelligence systems, companies’ financial and non-financial analysis, risk management, nonlinear and dynamic systems, consumer’s behavior, online social networks, and sentiment analysis. Dr. Delcea is an Active Member of the Grey Uncertainty Analysis Association. She received 19 international and national awards, including the Best Paper Award, the Georgescu Roegen for Excellent Scientific Research Award, the Excellent Paper Award, and the Top Reviewer Award. She was invited to deliver a keynote speech on grey systems themes at the IEEE GSIS Conference, in 2013, 2016, and 2017; and the GSUA Conference, in 2018.
PLOS: What do you enjoy most about being an Editorial Board member at PLOS ONE? What are some of the challenges?
CD: First and foremost, it is a tremendous honor to have been appointed as an Editorial Board member at PLOS ONE, considering the journal’s international reputation and the esteemed researchers who have published within its pages. Additionally, the journal provides an excellent platform for connecting with fellow researchers from different disciplines, enriching one’s knowledge and abilities within a scholarly community.
The interaction with Senior Editors, both on the platform and beyond, is invaluable as it offers constant support whenever needed. Serving on the Editorial Board exposes me to a wide array of research topics and methodologies, granting me a broader perspective on scientific trends. It also compels me to stay updated with the latest advancements in various fields, fostering professional growth. Participating in the review process gives me a profound sense of contributing to scientific progress by promoting rigorous research through a fair peer review system.
However, challenges do exist. Time management can be an issue, especially during periods of increased submission loads and when other professional and personal commitments demand attention. Finding sufficient time to thoroughly evaluate each article and provide constructive feedback can be challenging during such periods.
Overall, the rewards of being an Editorial Board member at PLOS ONE far outweigh the time management challenge, and I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the journal’s mission of advancing scientific knowledge.
PLOS: How important are open science practices in your field? Do you have experience of reusing data or code that has been published openly, or other researchers building on your own work when you have shared things like code or data?
I believe that open science practices hold immense significance in my field. Access to data, code, and research findings can foster advancements across various disciplines, cultivating a more inclusive scientific community and driving innovation.
Personally, I have experienced the benefits of open science in both replicating and validating different aspects of my research over time. Utilizing openly available resources has facilitated efficient comparisons with results obtained from similar studies. By starting from validated results acknowledged by the scientific community and building upon the work of respected researchers, it instills a sense of belonging to a research community and accelerates the pace of research.
Regarding my own research, whenever the opportunity arises, I have made a conscious effort to openly share code and data to the greatest extent possible. I strongly believe that open science practices play a pivotal role in every scientific endeavor, fostering collaboration and advancing scientific knowledge.
PLOS: You’ve worked on the safe boarding of airplanes during the Covid-19 pandemic. What surprised you about modeling and understanding these real-life scenarios?
Working on airplane boarding methods in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has presented significant challenges, primarily due to the diverse restrictions imposed by different countries, territories, and airlines. There has been a race against time to offer the best safety solutions to passengers. Prior to the pandemic, our focus was mainly on cost reduction and increasing passenger satisfaction. These aspects were measured through conventional indicators such as boarding time and the number of interferences. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a shift, emphasizing the crucial need for adaptability in a global effort to address a real-life global crisis. In this context, new indicators were required to measure safety during the boarding process.
Surprisingly, some of the boarding methods that worked well in non-pandemic situations proved less effective from a safety perspective, underscoring the importance of adhering to specific rules that were previously overlooked. This realization highlights the significance of following strict protocols during boarding to ensure the safety of passengers, which has been partly overlooked in the past.
One of the most valuable lessons I have learned from working in this field during the pandemic is the importance of collaboration with experts in the field. It has been a transformative experience, shifting our focus to prioritize the safety of passengers in the face of a global crisis.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
In this interview, we check in with Pierluigi Vellucci, who joined the PLOS ONE Editorial Board a year ago this week. Dr Vellucci discusses his motivations for becoming involved with PLOS ONE, the transformative agreements leading to greater adoption of Open Access publishing, and the versatility of agent-based modeling.
Pierluigi Vellucci is a researcher in Mathematical Methods of Economics, Finance and Actuarial Sciences at the Department of Economics of Roma Tre University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematical Models for Engineering, Electromagnetism, and Nanoscience in 2017 at La Sapienza University of Rome. His most recent research interests include multi-agent systems for the study of public opinion formation and methods of representation theory (frames, Gabor systems, and wavelets) for the analysis of financial series. He has been a visiting professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Florida International University (Miami), and has authored over 40 scientific publications.
PLOS: Congratulations to one year on the PLOS ONE Editorial Board. What have you learned in the past year about ensuring a fair and thorough review process?
PV: Thank you for the opportunity to reflect on my experience as a member of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board over the past year. Joining the board was a decision I made after carefully reviewing several articles as a peer reviewer. I am a strong advocate for open access and I believe that PLOS ONE is one of the pioneers of open science. So, why not join PLOS ONE and contribute to improving open-access science?
I have been amazed by the central role that peer review plays in the advancement of science. Editors and reviewers act as guardians of science. Being involved in the work of the Editorial Board is a way to be part of this process, and both an honour and a responsibility. Furthermore, from my point of view, it is an opportunity to promote the use of mathematical formalism where possible to analyse and solve complex problems arising from the social sciences.
I have been delighted to be part of the PLOS ONE Editorial Board due to the journal’s emphasis on the technical quality of scientific articles rather than their perceived ‘impact.’ I believe that a reputable open access scientific journal will help people gain a better understanding of the social problems I am addressing through mathematical modeling.
PLOS: You have published a lot of your research on preprints and/or Open Access? What first motivated you to do this? What continues to motivate you to do so?
PV: Thank you for the opportunity to discuss my experience with publishing research on preprints and/or open-access platforms. I have indeed published a significant portion of my research on these platforms, not only journals that are entirely open access but also those that are not but which offer this possibility after acceptance of the paper, thanks in part to transformative agreements signed by the university I am affiliated with (Roma Tre University), in which the costs covered by the institutions not only ensure read access to scientific journals but also include those for open access publication (article processing charges) by affiliated authors.
High impact, equitable access, and rapid turnaround – are the driving factors for me.
Open access is crucial for providing equitable and unrestricted access to high-quality scientific knowledge. PLOS ONE has been at the forefront of the open science movement, enabling free and fair access to cutting-edge research. However, it is essential to maintain high standards, as some open-access journals continue to publish manuscripts of questionable value.
I view Open Access options as an important part of the future of scholarly publishing. It ensures access to information for students and researchers who might not otherwise have the means to obtain it. From this point of view, I think that to reduce inequalities, we must encourage open access.
PLOS: Your research touches upon many different applications, from decision-making to prices of oil and metals. What is it about Agent-Based Models that allow us to model so many different phenomena?
PV: Agent-based modeling is a simulation approach that focuses on the behavior and interactions of individual entities, called agents, within a larger system. Agents can be individuals, organizations, or even abstract entities. The behavior and decision-making processes of agents are typically modeled based on simple rules and heuristics, allowing for the emergence of system-level behaviors. Agent-based models simulate the interactions and dynamics among agents over time in order to understand the patterns and outcomes that emerge from their collective behavior.
Agent-based models often do not assume perfect rationality or complete knowledge on the part of the agents and can capture a wide range of behaviors and interactions.
For example, I can think of a recent published work with my friend and colleague Elisa Iacomini (a researcher at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Ferrara), where we hypothesized that a certain type of agent acts contrary (regardless) to the strategy followed by a certain social group, a subgroup of the whole society. Our article represents a virtual experiment, as we defined mathematical laws that agents must follow and conducted numerical simulations. We then compared the simulation results with numerical evidence from real data (specifically, Twitter data in our case). Our work is empirical and preliminary in nature, aimed at understanding which direction to take for future research. There are examples where the predictive value of these models has shown its effectiveness. I would like to mention the models introduced by physicist Serge Galam, widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of sociophysics. His predictions regarding the outcomes of various political elections, such as Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, have made him an internationally renowned figure. However, that is not the central point. In my opinion, agent-based models should not compete with other models, such as machine learning, in an attempt to determine who is better at predicting the future. The power of agent-based models lies in their ability to explain the emergence of social phenomena through the use of simple assumptions about society. In a way, similar to the approach of physicists creating theories to explain the workings of the universe, agent-based models allow for the creation of a theory to understand the functioning of society.
Stay tuned for more content within computer science, mathematics and complex systems at EveryONE over the next few weeks. If you are at the NetSci2023 conference this week, don’t forget to check in with our Senior Editor Hugh Cowley, or to catch talks by many of our Editorial Board members and Guest Editors, including Renaud Lambiotte, Mirta Galesic, Marta Sales-Pardo, Hocine Cherifi, Alberto Aleta, Ceyhun Eksin, Dion O’Neale, Luis M. Rocha, Fabio Saracco, Petter Holme, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos and Tiago Peixoto.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
It is a busy time for the network sciences at PLOS. On June 20, we announced a new journal as an addition to our portfolio, PLOS Complex Systems. PLOS Complex Systems will be a community-led journal focused on research to understand the drivers and behaviors of complex systems, and will enable rapid dissemination of groundbreaking results, cross-fertilization of knowledge, and increased collaboration to address the fundamental questions that affect individuals and global societies. For more on this announcement, please see here.
In addition, PLOS will have a large presence at the NetSci2023 conference, 10-14 July. PLOS ONE Senior Editor Hugh Cowley will be in attendance, and is happy to meet with interested authors, reviewers and Editorial Board members. Attendees at this conference will have plenty of opportunities to hear talks by PLOS ONE Editorial Board members and Guest Editors, such as Renaud Lambiotte, Mirta Galesic, Marta Sales-Pardo, Hocine Cherifi, Alberto Aleta, Ceyhun Eksin, Dion O’Neale, Luis M. Rocha, Fabio Saracco, Petter Holme, Fragkiskos Papadopoulos and Tiago Peixoto.
In a paper published by PLOS ONE on June 23, 2023, Michael S. Vitevitch and Mary Sale of the University of Kansas explore whether or not languages may have a phonological “backbone” of words that would allow speakers to communicate with an essential number of words in many different situations. They found that the English language appears to have a kernel lexicon containing words that may be key to language development or rehabilitation, which they discovered using network simplification with phonological criteria. Below, we speak with Professor Vitevitch about the inspiration behind and outlook from this study.
Prof. Vitevitch’s research applies the mathematical tools of network science to language, and also examines various types of speech errors (including the tip of the tongue state) and auditory illusions (like the speech to song illusion). You can learn more about his research and obtain copies of his publications at his website: http://people.ku.edu/~mvitevit/
PLOS: Your study looks at the idea of a “phonological backbone”. What led to the idea that such a backbone would exist?
MV: Previous studies in my lab had identified “important” nodes in a network of phonological word-forms at the micro-level (i.e., identifying individual nodes that were “important”) and at the meso-level (i.e., identifying a subset of nodes that were “important”). When I read in PLOS ONE (Neal Z.P. (2022). Backbone: An R Package to Extract Network Backbones. PLOS ONE, 17 (5), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269137) about a new R package that would extract the backbone of a network to form a simplified sub-network of a more complex, denser network, I wondered if this technique could be used to identify “important” nodes at the macro-level in the phonological network (i.e., at the level of the whole network). We assumed that the nodes and connections that would “survive” the backbone extraction process would be those that were most “important” to the network. Previous studies had used other approaches—such as the most frequently occurring words in the language, or the words that are learned early in life—to identify an essential or kernel vocabulary, so we were really interested in seeing what a phonological criterion might produce.
PLOS: Were there any surprises about the features of the words that you found to constitute the backbone in this English lexicon?
MV: Our network was built by connecting words that sounded similar to each other by changing a sound, known as a phoneme, in one word to form another word. By adding, substituting, or deleting a phoneme in the word cat, you get the other words that would be connected in the network to cat, like at, scat, hat, cut, or can. That’s the only information encoded in the network. After extracting the backbone from the whole network of approximately 20,000 words we found that the approximately 6000 nodes and connections that “survived” tended to be short words, occurred often in the language, and were still connected in a way that allowed you to get from one node to another in the backbone very quickly. We were surprised to find that even though information like the frequency with which a word occurs in the language wasn’t directly encoded in the network, the backbone contained words that occurred often in the language. Such words are recognized and produced more quickly and accurately than words that occur less often in the language, and tend to be acquired earlier in life, so our simple phonological criterion yielded a kernel vocabulary that was comparable in size and content to kernel vocabularies that had been identified using other criteria. The fact that all of these different approaches converge on a kernel vocabulary comparable in size and content suggests that these words might be important for many aspects of language processing in humans and perhaps in machines as well.
PLOS: What first made you interested in applying the study of networks to language learning and cognition?
MV: Back in the early 2000’s I was teaching a graduate class on artificial neural networks (a different kind of network than the complex networks used in the present study), and I wanted a popular press book to use in the class to spark interest in the students before diving into the research papers that were heavier on mathematics. As I was preparing materials for the class, I read Barabási’s book Linked to see if it would be a suitable candidate for the popular press book for the class. I quickly realized that the book wasn’t about artificial neural networks (or what are often called deep-learning networks now), but I couldn’t put the book down because it kept making me think about a way to use this other type of network to map out the relationships among all the words in that part of memory known as the mental lexicon. Instead of just looking at a word and the words immediately around it that sounded similar, I now had a set of tools to see if words that were similar to a word a few steps away also might influence various language processes, such as the perception, production, or acquisition of words. Instead of the six-degrees of Kevin Bacon, think of the six degrees of the word ‘cat’. That led to a new direction in my research—looking at how the structure of the phonological network influences various language and cognitive processes—that I’ve been pursuing for the past decade and a half now.
PLOS: You made the data available for this study through OSF. What made you choose this way of sharing your data?
MV: My co-author and I liked that OSF is a third-party that is independent of any journal, university, or research institution, so we felt like this option would allow us to make our materials available to researchers regardless of what the future held (e.g., journal changing publishers, employment at another institution, retirement from the field, etc.). Hopefully, our materials will still be available and useful to researchers long after we are gone.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
February 11 marks the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. PLOS ONE is marking this day by handing over our EveryONE blog to the Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science Latin America (WBDS LA) community. This group was founded by women for women and other gender minorities, and activities and administration are run almost exclusively using volunteer hours without dedicated funding. The ethos and spirit of the group is a showcase of active researchers displaying qualities that often go under-recognized in research assessment – the value of mentorship, true community support, and a concerted effort to create an inclusive, welcoming and collaborative research environment.
Below, one of their co-founders, Dr. Ana Julia Velez Rueda (UNQ – CONICET* (Argentinian Scientific Council)) provides an thoughtful and thought-provoking account of gender equality in science in Latin America generally, and specifically within the research community within bioinformatics and data sciences.
By Dr. Ana Julia Velez Rueda – WBDS LA Co-founder
Since 22 December 2015, we have been commemorating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The United Nations General Assembly adopted this day to promote the full and equal access and participation of females in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. But, is this day still important in a world where technology plays such an important role in every aspect of our lives? And in a reality where there is no doubt that STEM professions are the future in the economic world? According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, a person working in STEM earns two-thirds more than those employed in other fields. Nevertheless, despite the importance of these fields and the economic advantage that studying these careers would bring, women and non-binary people are still underrepresented in STEM [1].
So perhaps this 11th February, instead of questioning “How do we attract women into these spaces?” we should ask ourselves “How do we support women and diversity, and how do we accompany them, so they do not give up?”
Dr. Ana Julia Velez Rueda
In Latin America, these differences are even more pronounced. According to a survey by the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS, 2015) [2], women make up less than 20% of the total membership in Latin America, and they are mostly in administrative positions on the governing councils. According to data from the Ibero-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), in 2017 in Latin America, only 36% of researchers working in engineering and technology were women, while in most countries of the region, they are overrepresented in medical and health sciences and in social sciences [3]. However, these observations are not just representative figures for a large number of individual fates. It has been shown that the low representation of women in STEM fields is closely related to deeper inequalities observed in all different social aspects and that it has a negative impact on the productivity and economic competitiveness of the countries of the region [4]. So perhaps this International Day of Women and Girls in Science could be a good opportunity to ask ourselves how we can change this reality that affects us all.
Progress and Challenges in Gender Equality in STEM in Latin America
Since the 1980s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) founded by feminist women from many countries in Latin America have brought gender perspectives to science. Through workshops, training, and research, they have created and maintained spaces to disseminate, discuss, and promote critical thinking about women’s inequality in society. Since the mid-2010s, there has been an expansion of these initiatives in the region, driven by different institutional hierarchies that aim to institutionalize actions and proposals on gender equality in different universities [5].
Many women still working in STEM are also working in a variety of nonprofits and projects that aim to give visibility to the work of women and other minorities. These groups also focus on data collection, participate in shaping public policy, provide accompaniment, and create networks of support. From Mexico to Argentina, we have RAGCyT, HackWomen, Technolatinas, DataGenero, Las de Sistemas, Rede Brasileira De Mulhere Scientistas, Parent in Science, PyLadies, RLadies, KuñaTech, STEM sin Fronteras, and of course, the WBDS LA, just to mention some of them. They are all sustained by the volunteer work of their members and sometimes by the financial support of international organizations and foundations, but most of them do so with little or no government recognition or support. So perhaps this 11th February, instead of questioning “How do we attract women into these spaces?” we should ask ourselves “How do we support women and diversity, and how do we accompany them, so they do not give up?”.
Although we are still struggling to build and fund the basic infrastructure to run our events, like many of our colleagues in other NGOs, we are here to contribute to change for all the women and girls who are here and will come.
Dr. Ana Julia Velez Rueda
Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science Latin America: Our contribution to reducing the gender gap
Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science Latin America (WBDS LA) is a community of women working in the fields of bioinformatics and data science, created in 2019 by Ana Julia Velez Rueda, Liliane Conteville (Embrapa Pecuária Sudeste – São Paulo, Brazil) and Lucy Jimenez (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia), with the support of dozens of researchers from the region and the world. WBDS LA brings together women and other gender minorities working in STEM in the public and private sectors. Our community aims to promote and give visibility to women’s research and contributions in these areas. It also aims to foster networking and collaboration within the community of women scientists from the public and private sectors.
Our organization, like all organizations that have a gender perspective, was born out of a need to recognize ourselves, to join forces and efforts, and to let ourselves and everyone know that we are also part of these masculinized niches like bioinformatics and data science [6-8]. We have all suffered violence, harassment, or discrimination throughout our careers [9-12] and we wanted to create support networks for those who come after us and for ourselves. We were born in and are a multicultural and multinational community with representatives from different countries in Latin America.
To increase diversity, all our events are open and free. In addition, we strive to provide materials in Spanish and Portuguese (the main languages spoken in Latin America) and English (the main language of science). For example, our website and most of our educational material and tutorials are available in these 3 languages. We make big efforts to translate all the video content of the lectures and workshops into these languages.
We have found our own answer by fighting for equality with the women around us and working with other communities and people focused on these issues.
Dr. Ana Julia Velez Rueda
Since 2019, we have held 3 conferences, attended by more than 3000 women and non-binary people from all over the world, with more than 100 speakers from Latin America all of whom were women. Three booklets with more than 500 amazing research works, one special issue in Bioinformatics and two articles are the results of this amazing experience [13,14]. In the 3 years of our existence, we have trained more than 1200 people in our workshops and courses, with mostly women and non-binary attendees.
Currently, the WBDS LA comprises a group of women who volunteer in this community and thousands of colleagues who follow us on social media. Although we are still struggling to build and fund the basic infrastructure to run our events, like many of our colleagues in other NGOs, we are here to contribute to change for all the women and girls who are here and will come. And to the question, “How can we accompany women and other underrepresented groups so they do not give up?” We have found our own answer by fighting for equality with the women around us and working with other communities and people focused on these issues. In the words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only’. Not ‘as long as’. I matter equally. Full stop.” [15].
[8] Moss-Racusin, C. A.; Molenda, A. K.; Cramer, C. R. Can Evidence Impact Attitudes? Public Reactions to Evidence of Gender Bias in STEM Fields. Psychol. Women Q. 2015, 39 (2), 194–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684314565777.
[9] Moss-Racusin, C. A.; Dovidio, J. F.; Brescoll, V. L.; Graham, M. J.; Handelsman, J. Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2012, 109 (41), 16474–16479. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109.
[10] Cech, E. A.; Waidzunas, T. J. Systemic Inequalities for LGBTQ Professionals in STEM. Sci. Adv. 2021, 7 (3), eabe0933. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe0933.
[12] Clancy, K. B. H.; Nelson, R. G.; Rutherford, J. N.; Hinde, K. Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault. PLOS ONE 2014, 9 (7), e102172. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172.
[13] Jiménez, L.; Conteville, L. C.; Feldfeber, I.; Didier, M. G.; Stegmayer, G.; Marino-Buslje, C.; Rueda, A. J. V. Highlights of the 1st Latin American Conference of Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science. The Biophysicist 2021, 2 (3), 99–102. https://doi.org/10.35459/tbp.2020.000174.
[14] (10) Rueda, A. J. V.; Conteville, L.; Pantano, S.; González, W. Women in Bioinformatics & Data Science – Latin America. Methods X 2022, 9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2022.101907.
[15] Excerpt of “Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As 2023 gets underway, the PLOS ONEStaff Editor team has looked back on some of our favorite papers published in 2022. The editorial team currently consists of 20 full-time editors, who spend their time assisting authors, Academic Editors, reviewers and readers throughout the publication process and beyond. Given the broad scope of PLOS ONE, both in terms of research areas and article types, we are fortunate to work on an incredible variety of manuscripts and topics each year. As a result, collating a list of our favorite or most memorable manuscripts from the past year is never easy. Below, we present you with a glimpse of highlights from 2022 hand-picked by our staff editors. We would like to thank all our authors, reviewers, Academic Editors and readers for a wonderful year, and we look forward to working together in 2023.
Behavioral and Social Sciences, Neuroscience, Mental Health Division
Authenticating coins of the ‘Roman emperor’ Sponsian
Pearson PN, Botticelli M, Ericsson J, Olender J, Spruženiece L (2022) Authenticating coins of the ‘Roman emperor’ Sponsian. PLoS ONE 17(11): e0274285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274285
pone.0274285
Non-destructive imaging and spectroscopic techniques were used to authenticate coins depicting an obscure ‘Roman emperor’ named Sponsian. These coins were thought to be forgeries. The authentication forces a re-evaluation of Sponsian as a historical figure. Combining evidence from the coins with the historical record, the study proposes that Sponsian ruled the isolated Roman Province of Dacia during the military crisis of the 260s CE.
Prevalence of questionable research practices, research misconduct and their potential explanatory factors: A survey among academic researchers in The Netherlands
Gopalakrishna G, ter Riet G, Vink G, Stoop I, Wicherts JM, Bouter LM (2022) Prevalence of questionable research practices, research misconduct and their potential explanatory factors: A survey among academic researchers in The Netherlands. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263023
This large survey by Gopalakrishna and colleagues of researchers in the Netherlands revealed the prevalence of questionable research practices and suggests ways to promote research integrity. It suggests that greater emphasis on scientific norm subscription, strengthening reviewers in their role as gatekeepers of research quality and curbing the “publish or perish” incentive system promotes research integrity.
Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music
Smit EA, Milne AJ, Sarvasy HS, Dean RT (2022) Emotional responses in Papua New Guinea show negligible evidence for a universal effect of major versus minor music. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269597. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269597
In western cultures, emotions induced by music are strongly influenced by ‘major’ and ‘minor’ characteristics in harmonics, but is is unknown whether this effect exists universally. The authors examined whether non-Western cultures experience these typical emotive shifts in music in a sample of participants living in a remote region of Papua New Guinea with differing levels of exposure to Western-influenced music. The findings showed that emotive valence of major and minor was strongly associated with exposure to Western-influenced music and culture, indicating that culture is a strong mediator of people’s emotional responses to music. The study was also only one of a very few number of studies in this literature to study these effects in a non-industrialized context where participants have little exposure to a globalized music culture.
Do book consumers discriminate against Black, female, or young authors?
There is evidence of race- and gender-based discrimination in the publishing industry. One possible explanation is the preferences of book consumers. Weinberg and Kapelner tested this hypothesis with a large-scale experiment in which they collected ratings of mocked-up books from over 9000 participants who were presented with book covers and descriptions from both fiction and non-fiction genres, with one of three possible titles per book randomly assigned. Race, gender, and age of the author were signaled via names and photographs. The authors found no support for any claim of consumer bias against black or females authors. In fact, participants were willing to pay approximately $0.50 more for books by Black writers. The authors conclude that there is no evidence of taste-based preferences by consumers that would rationalize the historic discriminatory treatment of Black or of female authors by publishers nor of discrimination based on an author’s age.
Experiences of criticism in adults with ADHD: A qualitative study
Individuals with mental health problems often face discrimination. Here, Beaton and colleagues analyse free text comments from adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on their experiences of criticism from family, friends and colleagues. Participants reported commonly criticised behaviours and traits, with many noting they felt consistently criticised and felt unable to succeed. The authors indicate that the findings highlight the importance of advocating for a more flexible society that is accepting of individuality and neurodiversity.
Life Sciences Division
Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing in pre-cellularization Drosophila melanogaster embryos
Albright AR, Stadler MR, Eisen MB (2022) Single-nucleus RNA-sequencing in pre-cellularization Drosophila melanogaster embryos. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0270471. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270471
pone.0270471
In an effort to establish the use of single-nucleus RNA-sequencing to detect local changes in gene expression for early Drosophila embryos, Albright and colleagues compared nuclei transcript abundance differences between wide type and dCTCF mutants and identified distinct clusters that corresponded to spatial regions of the embryo. A resource of candidate differentially expressed genes was provided to explore the subtle changes upon loss of dCTCF gene. The results highlighted the potential of this new technique as a means of understanding the regulation of gene expression in the early Drosophila embryo.
Diagnostic accuracy of non-invasive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by canine olfaction
Grandjean D, Elie C, Gallet C, Julien C, Roger V, Desquilbet L, et al. (2022) Diagnostic accuracy of non-invasive detection of SARS-CoV-2 infection by canine olfaction. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0268382. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0268382
pone.0268382
The development of efficient and early COVID-19 testing methods is a very timely subject and much work remains to advance from proofs of concepts to practical applications. In this popular article, Grandjean and colleagues conducted a double-blinded test of COVID-19 detection using trained dogs and suggest that the detection of COVID-19 by dogs could be an alternative to antigenic tests.
Physical Sciences and Engineering
A feather hydrogen (δ2H) isoscape for Brazil
Alquezar RD, Costa FJV, Sena-Souza JP, Nardoto GB, Hobson KA (2022) A feather hydrogen (δ2H) isoscape for Brazil. PLoS ONE 17(8): e0271573. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271573
Gmagnago, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Alquezar and colleagues present the first feather hydrogen isoscape for Brazil. Isoscapes are essentially isotopic maps that model how isotopes vary in space and time. As such, isoscapes can be used in a variety of applications in order to understand animal origins, for instance within ecology and forensic sciences. The Brazil hydrogen isoscape was developed through collection of feathers from ornithological collections and field campaigns in National Parks around the country, focusing on tanager species belonging to the family Thraupidae. These data were analysed in conjunction with climatic variables, such as temperature, precipitation and solar radiation, using machine learning in order to build a map of feather isotopes across Brazil. Although the model has limitations, including relatively low predictive power for this first iteration, isoscapes like these are increasingly deployable within forensic investigations, such as the illegal wildlife trade.
Analysis, identification and confirmation of synthetic opioids using chloroformate chemistry: Retrospective detection of fentanyl and acetylfentanyl in urine and plasma samples by EI-GC-MS and HR-LC-MS
Valdez CA, Leif RN, Corzett TH, Dreyer ML (2022) Analysis, identification and confirmation of synthetic opioids using chloroformate chemistry: Retrospective detection of fentanyl and acetylfentanyl in urine and plasma samples by EI-GC-MS and HR-LC-MS. PLoS ONE 17(11): e0275931. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275931
pone.0275931
Synthetic opiod fentanyl and its analogues have widespread use in anesthesia and pain management, but despite being highly controlled substances, their illicit use and unpredictable fatal dosage when combined with other substances have led to tragic consequences in many countries. This new method reported by Carlos A. Valdez and colleagues is effective at detecting fentanyl and acetylfentanyl at levels reflecting those reported in overdose victims, and the chemical reaction approach used in the method enables the detection and identification of unknown fentanyls, with potential implications for diagnosis and monitoring supply.
Kay R, Katrycz CW, Heimlich EJ, Hatton BD (2022) Programmable droplets: Leveraging digitally-responsive flow fields to actively tune liquid morphologies. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0264141. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264141
pone.0264141
Kay and colleagues from The University of Toronto present a proof-of-concept method of tuning liquid droplet morphology. They do this by creating a modified version of a Hele-Shaw cell and allowing the boundary valves to be either open or closed to the atmosphere. This allows for control of the pressure, which means that droplet shape and position can be manipulated using the local flow fields. B adding a dye to the liquid, in this case carbon black to castor oil, they created droplet morphologies that can be switched between being optically transmissible and absorptive. This sort of liquid smart material can potentially be employed in a variety of applications, such as shading, camouflage and dynamic displays.
Public Health and Medicine Division
Robust and generalizable embryo selection based on artificial intelligence and time-lapse image sequences
Berntsen J, Rimestad J, Lassen JT, Tran D, Kragh MF (2022) Robust and generalizable embryo selection based on artificial intelligence and time-lapse image sequences. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0262661. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262661
Artificial intelligence and deep learning approaches hold promise to revolutionize medical practice, including the assessment and selection of the most viable embryos for vitro fertilization (IVF). In this paper, Berntsen and colleagues developed a deep learning-based embryo selection model based on time-lapse microscopy images. They showed that their fully automated model performed better than state-of-the-art, manually annotated methods. In addition, using a large dataset from 18 IVF clinics, they showed that the model is generalizable across different subgroups of age and clinical conditions, and correlated with traditional embryo development and morphology parameters. This model will help establish efficient, reliable, and reproducible tools in IVF clinics to combat rising infertility rates worldwide.
Romantic partner embraces reduce cortisol release after acute stress induction in women but not in men
Berretz G, Cebula C, Wortelmann BM, Papadopoulou P, Wolf OT, Ocklenburg S, et al. (2022) Romantic partner embraces reduce cortisol release after acute stress induction in women but not in men. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0266887. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266887
Stress is an inevitable aspect of daily life, and it’s essential to find ways to manage it. One form of stress-relief that has been studied is social touch, such as massages. However, the impact of other forms of physical touch on stress have not been widely explored in literature . This study looked at the impact of a short-term embrace between romantic partners on stress levels. The results showed that women who embraced their partner before a stressful situation had a lower cortisol response compared to a control group. No similar stress-reducing effects were observed in men. The study suggests that a short-term embrace before a stressful situation can help reduce stress in women.
Modeling the spread of the Zika virus by sexual and mosquito transmission
Agudelo S, Ventresca M (2022) Modeling the spread of the Zika virus by sexual and mosquito transmission. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0270127. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270127
The Zika virus (ZIKV) infects humans via sexual contact or mosquito bites and presents a significant threat to newborns of mothers infected with the virus during pregnancy. In this article, Agudelo and Ventresca establish a mathematical model that analyzes the impact of the sexual and mosquito transmission on ZIKV spread within a population. They concluded that ZIKV spreads mostly via mosquito transmission, while sexual transmission alone appears negligible for viral dissemination. The model can serve as a powerful tool in combating viral spread by providing reliable information for the implementation of protective health policies.
Using wearable biological sensors to provide personalized feedback to motivate behavioral changes: Study protocol for a randomized controlled physical activity intervention in cancer survivors (Project KNOWN)
Liao Y, Schembre SM, Brannon GE, Pan Z, Wang J, Ali S, et al. (2022) Using wearable biological sensors to provide personalized feedback to motivate behavioral changes: Study protocol for a randomized controlled physical activity intervention in cancer survivors (Project KNOWN). PLoS ONE 17(9): e0274492. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274492
Evidence supports multiple health benefits of physical activity for cancer survivors, however, many cancer survivors are not sufficiently active to achieve these benefits. In this study protocol, Liao and colleagues describe a randomized pilot study to test the feasibility of a physical activity intervention in 50 cancer survivors. The novel intervention will demonstrate the immediate positive impact of physical activity to participants through the use of wearable devices. The authors hypothesize that “biofeedback” from wearable devices may help to motivate behavioral change.
Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis
Minadeo M, Pope L (2022) Weight-normative messaging predominates on TikTok—A qualitative content analysis. PLoS ONE 17(11): e0267997. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267997
TikTok is a popular social media platform amongst young people. Use of this platform for fitness and nutrition advice is very popular, however the quality of this content has not been well researched. This study investigated key themes in posts related to nutrition and weight-related content on this platform. From 1000 videos, each with over a billion views, the majority of posts were found to present weight-normative views, which may negatively impact young viewers with body image/eating disorders. This study indicates the importance of helping TikTok users discern credible information, and the ability to selectively remove triggering content from their feeds, which may help address the prevalence of weight-normative content and its potentially negative impact.
Hangry in the field: An experience sampling study on the impact of hunger on anger, irritability, and affect
Swami V, Hochstöger S, Kargl E, Stieger S (2022) Hangry in the field: An experience sampling study on the impact of hunger on anger, irritability, and affect. PLoS ONE 17(7): e0269629. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269629
Conducting the first experience sampling study on the emotional outcomes of hunger, Swami and colleagues investigated the relationship between hunger and negative emotions, known to many as feeling “hangry”. The findings showed that greater levels of self-reported hunger were associated with greater feelings of anger and irritability, suggesting that feeling “hangry” is a real experience. The results of the study might facilitate the understanding of everyday experiences of emotions, support practitioners in ensuring productive individual behaviours and interpersonal relationships and could potentially help individuals to regulate certain emotions by putting feelings into words and labelling an emotion.
PLOS ONE recently published a new Collection of research entitled Recent Advances in Understanding Plastic Pollution. Given the broad scope of this collection, and the potential implications this research has on both humans the rest of the biosphere globally, we are digging deeper into the findings with some of the authors from papers included in this collection. In this third installment of interviews, we learn more about how microplastics may affect metabolism, and how it is getting easier to use machine learning to analyse samples containing microplastics.
CJ O’Brien, Plastics Campaign Associate, Oceana
CJ O’Brien has worked in research and advocacy to protect the ocean from plastic pollution in the United States and Zanzibar, Tanzania. She is currently the Plastics Campaign Associate at Oceana where she works on policies to reduce the production and use of single-use plastic. Before joining Oceana, she earned a master’s degree in Development Practice from Emory University with a focus on Environmental Conservation and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E). There, she grappled with the complex interactions between marine conservation, plastic pollution, and international development. CJ also has a B.S. in Biology from California Lutheran University. Her honors thesis explored the impacts of plastic on the digestive enzyme activity in marine mussels which is the study highlighted here.
CJ O’Brien’s paper in this collection: O’Brien CJ, Hong HC, Bryant EE, Connor KM (2021) The observation of starch digestion in blue mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis exposed to microplastic particles under varied food conditions. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0253802. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253802
PLOS: In this paper, you studied the effects of microplastics on blue mussel Mytilus galloprovincialis during different food regimes. Why is this species particularly interesting to study in order to understand plastic pollution?
CJO: Mytilus galloprovincialis are small but mighty in their importance to the marine ecosystem and to plastic pollution research. Many researchers study this species because they are bioindicators which means they help us monitor the overall health of the environment. Mytilus galloprovincialis filter feed and are sessile creatures, making them extremely sensitive to pollution and other anthropogenic changes. Studying this species and its physiological reaction to the exposure of microplastic allowed us as researchers to get a better look at how microplastics are not only impacting them as a species, but how microplastic might be impacting the ecosystem as a whole.
Additionally, Mytilus galloprovincialis are crucial to the marine environment and to humans as well. This species is constantly filtering the water column in which they live, creating more clean environments for their marine neighbors. They are also found all over the world and are cultivated for food in many different regions. Not to mention they make great lab subjects as they are easy to care for. I would say that intertidal filter feeders in general are extremely fascinating organisms and crucial in our understanding of plastic pollution, the health of the ocean, and the health of humans.
PLOS: You found that enzyme activity was affected by the presence of microplastics in the high-food regime only. Was this a result you had foreseen? How is the high-food regime reflected in the real lives of this species?
CJO: This outcome was shocking to me. I expected amylase activity to be negatively affected by the presence of microplastic in both feeding regimes. I thought that since microplastic holds no nutrition for these organisms, that filtering microplastic particles would take up a large proportion of their energy to filter, increase toxicity, or reduce available organic content available for digestion. Theoretically, these perturbations could hinder their ability to make or secrete amylase and survive. However, mussels evolved a range of digestive related characteristics to cope with fluctuations in nutrients and understanding how they modulate them when exposed to microplastic pollution is an emerging field of science.
In our experiment, we subjected mussels to fluctuating feeding environments that differ, similar to that to mussels at different shore levels. Mussels fed high food concentrations represented mussels that live lower in the water column and are exposed to more feeding options than mussels high on the shore due to daily tidal variation. With that context, I thought that the amylase activity in mussels in the low food group would be impacted more than mussels in the high food group. This inference was not observed and in fact high microplastics led to unpredictably high amylase activity.
This was interesting to me because food digestion is positively related to food abundance–the digestive modulation hypothesis–and microplastics is not food. Mussels are adapted to conserve energy as much as they can due to unpredictable environments, such as tidal, thermal, and pH variation. Any change to their energy reserves in nature could impact their growth, survival, and fitness. However, our study showed that it is possible that even under very high microplastic exposures and presumably less organic content ingested, amylase activity was actually increased to compensate for diluted food.
PLOS: Working to combat plastic pollution must be endlessly inspiring but occasionally daunting. What motivated you to work in this field, and what are the rewards that keep you going?
CJO: Growing up in Florida, I’ve always had a deep curiosity and connection to the ocean. My motivation for getting into this field was fueled by wanting to protect the place that I loved most. I increasingly saw plastic pollution on beaches that I spent time at and as I started to learn more, I realized just how big this problem is. I was utterly fascinated that a man-made material, made to last forever but oftentimes only used for a few moments has caused so much harm–especially microplastic which can be microscopic. It is so insidious!
Currently, I work on policies that reduce the production and use of single-use plastic. While I don’t work in research anymore, I’ve seen firsthand how research influences policies that reduce single-use plastic. It is so crucial that researchers continue to investigate how this pollutant impacts the health of our oceans and the health of us as humans. Plastic production is expected to increase and if we are to have any chance in fighting the plastic pollution crisis, we will need all hands on deck from scientists, policymakers, as well as artists, musicians, community members, and young people. I feel hopeful when I see collaborative, creative, and equitable approaches to this problem.
PLOS: Several other studies in this Collection also look the effects of plastic pollution on living species. Has seeing these other research studies in the collection helped inspire any thoughts about future work you might do, or other advances your research community will make?
CJO: Our study subjected mussels to high concentrations of spherical microplastics that may have an effect on mussels in future microplastics conditions. Our results showed that these types of microplastics are not lethal over short exposures. I continue to monitor studies of microplastics on bivalves and other marine organisms in general in my role as the Plastics Campaign Associate. The Connor Lab at University of California-Irvine continues to deeply study how bivalves work from genome to phenome.
Ho-min Park, PhD Student, Ghent University
Hello, my name is Ho-min Park. I am currently pursuing a doctoral degree in computer science engineering from Ghent University, Belgium. In this context, I am working as a teaching assistant for the Informatics and Bioinformatics courses at Ghent University Global Campus in Incheon, Korea. This extended campus of Ghent University offers educational programmes in Molecular Biotechnology, Food Technology, and Environmental Technology. As a dry lab scientist, I am conducting convergence-oriented research that applies artificial intelligence to predictive tasks that have been put forward by the different wet labs at Ghent University Global Campus.
Ho-min Park’s paper in this collection: Park H-m, Park S, de Guzman MK, Baek JY, Cirkovic Velickovic T, Van Messem A, et al. (2022) MP-Net: Deep learning-based segmentation for fluorescence microscopy images of microplastics isolated from clams. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0269449. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269449
PLOS: You studied various machine learning techniques for annotating microplastics from fluorescence microscopy images, which is very promising for reducing the time and effort it takes researchers to analyze microscopy images. How close are we to where machine learning can truly analyze microscopy images as well as a human can?
HP: I think we are getting very close. For quite a few image analysis and annotation efforts that take up a lot of time, I even believe that machine learning techniques are already better than humans, given that humans tend to suffer from visual fatigue rather quickly. Furthermore, when targeting high-speed and high-quality image analyses, the ideal approach will most likely consist of first having machine learning analyze an image of interest, and then ask a domain expert to validate the analysis performed.
However, we still need to obtain a better understanding of the inherent limitations of data-driven approaches. Human-made data often contain biases and errors, and where these biases and errors can propagate to machine learning models that were trained on these human-made data. For example, while annotating our microscopy images, we were able to spot several image blobs that made it hard for humans to determine whether these blobs were denoting microplastics or light bleed artifacts, and where such ambiguities typically also affect the training and decision-making capabilities of machine learning models.
PLOS: You made all data and code publicly available for the software you developed for this project. What motivated you to do this? Do you know whether other researchers have used your code or software, maybe not yet for this project, but perhaps for any other code you’ve made available in the past?
HP: In imaging of microplastics, the acquisition of data requires several steps, and where most of these steps can be considered time-consuming and labor intensive, especially when they involve chemical processes. In particular, to obtain a set of microscopy images, we had to collect numerous clam samples, subsequently digesting the proteins and lipids, staining the remaining microplastics pieces, and performing image capturing with a microscope. As a result, most studies only make available the amount and the type of microplastics, and not the original images. However, this makes it challenging for other researchers to cross-validate experimental methods and results. We therefore took the decision to open up our data and our software, thus making it easier for other researchers to build on top of our work. In this respect, we also plan to post an introductory article on our work to the Papers with Code platform in the near future. Finally, although our paper was published only recently, we already received several inquiries regarding the usage of our data and our software.
PLOS: For this paper, you had two collaborating institutions and three “first authors” who contributed equally. Can you tell us more about how this collaboration worked?
HP: The idea of building a machine learning tool first came about when Maria Krishna, who is a PhD student in Food Chemistry at Ghent University Global Campus, encountered difficulties in manually counting microplastics in the fluorescence images she collected. After discussing these difficulties with me (Maria Krishna knew about my computer vision research), and after encouragement from our doctoral advisors, we decided to experiment with a few images and a number of deep learning models. This required a lot of work, both on the chemistry side (for the acquisition of microplastics from shellfish until image collection) and on the machine learning side (for model training and development of the GUI). In this context, we received a lot of help from two student interns, Sanghyeon Park and Jiyeon Baek, with Sanghyeon even staying on for the entire duration of the project.
PLOS: As a researcher, how do you hope to inspire other researchers, and the general public, to focus on plastic pollution as a social issue? What are some ways in which researchers who do not work directly in this field can help?
HP: With increasingly better methodologies to quantify microplastics pollution, including computational methodologies that leverage machine learning, we believe it will be easier to raise awareness about the seriousness of the spread of microplastics, and where this increased awareness will hopefully trigger more research and development efforts. These research and development efforts could for instance target the creation of biodegradable plastics, the discovery and possible engineering of organisms that can break down microplastics, and a better understanding of the risks posed by microplastics and their impact on human health, and where the latter effort would be of high interest to law and policy makers.
Cover image: Port of Dover, 2014 Beach Clean (CC-BY 2.0)
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
Last week, PLOS ONE a new Curated Collection – Recent Advances in Understanding Plastic Pollution. In this second installment of our Q&A with authors from this collection, we speak with author groups who study consumer knowledge and attitudes toward plastic products and the ease of recycling.
Emma Berry, Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast
Emma Berry is a Health Psychology Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast. Emma’s research interests include psychological adjustment to long-term conditions, health and environmental behaviour change, and psychosocial and behavioural intervention development. Emma is also interested in creative modes of communicating information and providing education, particularly in the format of comics.
Emma Berry’s paper in this Curated Collection: Roy D, Berry E, Dempster M (2022) “If it is not made easy for me, I will just not bother”. A qualitative exploration of the barriers and facilitators to recycling plastics. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0267284. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267284
PLOS: You carried out a study to investigate motivations and barriers to recycling plastics, and the title of your paper is quite telling – it needs to be easy for people to recycle. Was there anything about the results of this study that surprised you?
EB: A novel element of this study was to qualitatively explore how the dexterity of plastic packaging can influence recycling behaviour. It was interesting to find that, in spite of environmental concern, participants openly recognised that the complexity of recycling, which is influenced by both the packaging and the accessibility of recycling resources i.e. bins, is an important barrier to recycling behaviour. Even when people are motivated to recycle, this does not always translate into action. Moreover, experiencing environmental concern does not necessarily make recycling a priority. For many people recycling is one of many competing life priorities, so if it requires too much cognitive and/or physical effort, other competing behaviours will take precedent. Of relevance to plastic manufacturers and retailers, our study reaffirms the usefulness of simplicity in the design of plastic packaging, with clear visual cues to aid decisions about what, how, where, and when to recycle.
PLOS: It is mentioned in the paper that some of the original intentions on how the data was to be used changed. Can you elaborate on how some of these changes occurred? Sometimes it can feel like a lot of pressure for research to always work out like we hoped or planned, so it is nice to hear how things can be adapted or altered for various scenarios during an ongoing study.
EB: The value of qualitative designs is that we can adopt an inductive or bottom-up approach, enabling us to be more receptive of new and unexpected findings. This also means that we can be more flexible (within the realms of the research question) about how the data is interpreted and used, depending on the emergent themes. The decision to integrate the survey data was post-hoc, based on the qualitative themes extracted. The survey work was conducted separately and was intended to provide an overview of recycling awareness, knowledge, and behaviours in a cross-section of people living in Northern Ireland. However, following the analysis of the qualitative findings, we felt that the frequencies observed in the survey data corroborated the salience of themes relating to physical opportunity and motivational factors underpinning intentions to recycle.
PLOS: You chose to publish the peer review history of your paper online together with the paper itself. Can you tell us what motivated you to do this? Was there anything in particular about the peer review process or recommendations from the editors or reviewers that felt especially useful for enhancing the paper?
EB: Publishing the peer review history of the paper supports an open science approach and allows readers to acknowledge how the paper has evolved from the original submission. However, we also wanted to acknowledge the specific recommendations provided by peer reviewers. In particular, the helpful recommendations to improve the structure and reporting of the interview and survey findings, in order to strengthen the narrative and make the most of the data available. Moreover, the peer review process prompted us to clarify the theoretical framework applied to the methodology (the COM-B model), which is a novel and valuable element of the study. We felt it was important to acknowledge the value of the peer review process to reaffirm this.
PLOS: Two other studies in this collection also look at consumer attitudes to recycling and waste, and the use of bioplastics. These are “Chukwuone NA, Amaechina EC, Ifelunini IA (2022) Determinants of household’s waste disposal practices and willingness to participate in reducing the flow of plastics into the ocean: Evidence from coastal city of Lagos Nigeria. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0267739. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267739” and “Filho WL, Barbir J, Abubakar IR, Paço A, Stasiskiene Z, Hornbogen M, et al. (2022) Consumer attitudes and concerns with bioplastics use: An international study. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0266918. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266918” Has seeing these other research studies in the collection helped inspire any thoughts about future work you might do, or other advances your research community will make?
EB: Our paper, in conjunction with the two other studies in this collection support the need for research that focuses on the design and evaluation of interventions to support appropriate recycling behaviour and minimise inappropriate disposal of plastic waste. The paper by Filho et al. (2022) is interesting as it considers how plastic material can be altered to improve the ecological footprint of the production and degradation of packaging, and this resonates with a previous paper we collaborated on by Meta et al. (2021: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2020.12.015). All three papers collectively affirm the need to provide more behavioural scaffolding to assist recycling in day to day life. This means adjusting the choice architecture by focusing on the design of plastic packaging and the availability of cues and resources required to recycle more effortlessly.
Stay tuned for more interviews with authors from this collection.
Cover image: Port of Dover, 2014 Beach Clean (CC-BY 2.0)
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
PLOS ONE is delighted to introduce a new Curated Collection – Recent Advances in Understanding Plastic Pollution. This global challenge may have not been the biggest fixture in the media during the past couple of years, but researchers, governments, volunteers and the public have all been working hard on ensuring that it is easier than ever to be a part of the movement to reduce plastic pollution. Many of us will now be used to receiving take-away food in paper bags or boxes and being equipped with wooden forks and spoons instead of the traditional plastic ones. The PLOS ONE community of researchers working on plastic pollution have been busy reporting new results on identifying microplastic prevalence in various organisms and habitats, understanding how members of the public understand recycling and bioplastics, and how clothes shed microfibers during washing and drying. You can learn more about all of this in our new Curated Collection.
In this first installment of our Q&A with authors from this collection, we speak to some of our researchers working on how clothes may contribute to microfiber pollution during washing and drying.
Neil Lant, Research Fellow, Procter & Gamble
Dr Neil Lant joined Procter & Gamble’s Newcastle Innovation Centre in 1997 after completing a chemistry degree and PhD in bioorganic chemistry. For the past 25 years he has worked in fabric and home care product development for all regions of the world, with a strong emphasis on applying new enzyme technology to improve product performance and sustainability, resulting in over 150 families patent applications. He also leads P&G’s microfiber research program, as part of his broader interests in the role of fabric care products in improving textile sustainability.
Neil Lant’s paper in this Curated Collection: Lant NJ, Defaye MMA, Smith AJ, Kechi-Okafor C, Dean JR, Sheridan KJ (2022) The impact of fabric conditioning products and lint filter pore size on airborne microfiber pollution arising from tumble drying. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0265912. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265912
PLOS: Your studied microfiber shedding from clothes during various washing and drying conditions. You made a distinction between European and North American washing routines. What is the main difference between these? How do they differ from those in other parts of the world that were not studied?
NL: The washing machines used in Europe are almost exclusively front-loaders with a wash water volume of around 13 litres. However, in North America several very different appliance types are being used, broadly falling into three types – (i) front loaders that are essentially larger versions of European machines, (ii) traditional top-loading machines that have a large water volume of around 64 litres and (iii) high efficiency top-loading machines with a water volume of around 32 litres. We have found that microfiber release is driven by many factors but our previous publications were the first to recognise that the ratio of water volume to fabric weight was particularly important with high water to fabric ratios causing the highest levels of release. For this reason we run testing in both European and top-loading North America machines to check that the same trends are observed in very different conditions. Other appliance types are used in different regions of the world, and many consumers still wash by hand, but the European and North American washing machines are good representatives of those used in markets where tumble drying is common, as in this paper we were mainly interested in microfiber release during the drying step.
PLOS: You mention in this study that the only real solution to microfiber shedding may be to design a completely different type of dryer. What would need to be the key differences, and how close are we to being able to developing something like that?
NL: The study was focused on airborne microfiber pollution arising from vented dryers which have a air duct to the outside of the building, which is the most important type of dryer in North America with over 95% of the market. The airborne microfiber release can be eliminated by either improving the removal of fibers from that air flow (e.g. using the cyclonic filtration process used in many vacuum cleaners) or moving to fully sealed condenser dryers that collect all fibres and moisture within the appliance. The only problem with the latter is that the fibers can end up in the condensed water or on the condenser which is typically washed in a sink, running the risk of solving an air pollution issue by increasing water pollution! This suggests that we might need to redesign all tumble dryers to ensure that all fibers can be collected and disposed in household waste, with no opportunity for fibers to be released to the air or water.
Chimdia Kechi-Okafor, co-author of this study in PLOS ONE, inspects one of the filters used to better understand microfiber shedding during tumble drying. Chimdia Kechi-Okafor is a PhD student in Fibre Evidence at Northumbria University.
PLOS: You studied how clothes shed during washing and drying. We also know that clothes shed microfibers whilst we wear them. Do we know how the microfiber release for a certain garment differs during washing vs drying vs wearing?
NL: Forensic scientists have known for a long time that fabrics lose fibers when they make contact with other surfaces, but loss of fibers to the air and their transfer to other surfaces has now been proven. We also know that fibers will be lost during line drying of clothes. Although textile scientists are gaining a better understanding of the relationship between fiber, yarn, and textile construction and microfiber shedding during washing, more research will be needed to understand whether the same principles apply to other modes of microfiber release. And we still don’t have a clear understanding of the relative quantities of microfibers being released from textiles to air and water from these sources nor the ultimate fate of these fibers. However, there is a clear consensus that steps to reduce the intrinsic ‘sheddability’ of clothing will be a move in the right direction and we anticipate future government legislation to drive any changes needed in textile manufacturing, in line with proposed legislation in several markets to include microfiber filters in new washing machines.
PLOS: Several other studies in this Collection also look the effects of plastic pollution on living species. One of these is “Kapp KJ, Miller RZ (2020) Electric clothes dryers: An underestimated source of microfiber pollution. PLoS ONE 15(10): e0239165. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239165” Has seeing these other research studies in the collection helped inspire any thoughts about future work you might do, or other advances your research community will make?
NL: Kapp and Miller’s article was a breakthrough in being the first to recognise, and begin to quantify, the contribution of vented tumble dryers to airborne (and subsequent terrestrial) pollution. Their methods involving use of snow to collect deposited microfibers were fantastic. As their study only involved two dryers and didn’t measure the relative quantities of microfibers being released during washing and drying, we were keen to build on that study with a more extensive program spanning different markets, impact of fabric care products, and evaluating some potential solutions. The quantity of literature focused on tumble drying is still very limited so we would like to continue researching this area with an emphasis on condenser dryers which are already very common outside of North America and, when integrated with heat pump technology, are much more energy efficient resulting in lower operating costs and reduced carbon footprint.
KJ: “Your recent paper focuses on reconstructing the paleoclimate in the southern Kalahari, to evaluate the impact of environmental change on human evolution in this region. Can you explain the link between climate change and human evolution, and the role of southern Africa in the human evolutionary story?”
JV: Climate is a major driver of human evolution. There are debates about the extent to which climate influenced human evolution, but it is generally accepted that changing climatic conditions did influence early human movement, adaptations and behaviour, and there is growing evidence of this link. This doesn’t seem hard to imagine as we feel the effects of the changing climate even today, and at a time when humans were tethered to and dependent on the environment for survival, for example relying on fresh water and conditions conducive to hunting and foraging, it is likely that the climate played a prominent role in human evolution.
However, sites with both archaeological and geological records, underpinned by a reliable chronology, are needed to better understand how climate change impacted early humans. Datable archives of palaeoclimate, associated with well-preserved archaeological material are rare, particularly in arid interior regions. Ga-Mohana Hill is one such locality, providing a valuable opportunity to investigate the impact of climate change on human evolution. The climate system in South Africa is complex; unravelling how it was different in the past, and how this influenced human-environment interactions, is a major challenge, but it is important for understanding how our species adapted to changing climatic conditions, and what this can tell us about climate change in the future.
There are debates about the extent to which climate influenced human evolution, but it is generally accepted that changing climatic conditions did influence early human movement, adaptations and behaviour, and there is growing evidence of this link.
A time of particular interest in human evolution studies is the Middle Stone Age, during which early human populations developed behaviours characteristic of Homo sapiens, e.g. an ochre drawing at Blombos Cave, and collections of crystals at Ga-Mohana Hill. In South Africa, many archaeological sites dated to this period that preserve evidence of these behavioural advancements are situated along the southern Cape Coast, which is argued to have been a nexus for these behavioural developments, in part due to the favourable and stable climatic conditions that prevailed.
Archaeological sites with evidence for similarly advanced behaviours exist in the interior parts of southern Africa, and these sites are receiving renewed attention; however, the associated climate conditions are still poorly understood. Our research contributes important information to what is developing as a complex, multi-factorial picture of early human-environment interaction, and our results challenge the notion that humans only occupied arid regions when they were humid.
Image credit: Robyn Pickering
KJ: “What are tufas, and why are they such a good indicator of humidity levels and paleoclimatic conditions?”
JV: Tufas are rocks that form from ground waters that emerge at the surface as springs. These fresh spring waters are rich in dissolved calcium, typically sourced from carbonate bedrock, in this case 2.4 billion year old dolomites from the Palaeoproterozoic era.
Tufas are similar to stalagmites or stalactites that form from drip-waters in caves – the big difference is that tufas form from ground waters that emerge at the surface of the landscape, not inside a cave environment, and so they are exposed to light, dust and plant matter, making them slightly more complicated deposits.
Tufas form when particular climatic conditions are met, the most important being sufficient rainfall to recharge the underground aquifers. The groundwaters dissolve calcium from the dolomitic bedrock, and when the aquifers are full, these calcium-rich waters overflow. In addition to sufficient rainfall, higher levels of humidity, and moderate temperatures are necessary to maintain the conditions that are favourable for tufa formation (too hot and this would create too much evaporation, reducing the amount of water available; too cold and the levels of carbon dioxide in the soil through which the rain water infiltrates will be too low, making the waters less efficient at dissolving calcium from the bedrock). As such, the presence of relict tufas points to periods in the past when this balance of sufficient moisture, humidity and temperatures existed. Today, the tufas at Ga-Mohana Hill are mostly inactive as the area experiences a semi-arid, evaporative climate, with only little rainfall during the austral summer months (December – February).
Through field observations, we determined that the tufa deposits represent past periods of flowing water in the form of shallow streams, standing pools and waterfalls cascading down the hillside.
This means that in the past, Ga-Mohana Hill would have been an oasis of fresh water, likely supporting plant productivity, and providing a crucial resource for early human populations active in the area. Despite their complexity, tufas are amenable to dating, which is important for constraining the timing of this wetter environment.
In our study, we use the uranium-thorium dating method to obtain ages for the tufa deposits at Ga-Mohana Hill. Knowing the ages of the tufas allows us to constrain times in the past that fresh water was available on the landscape. We determined that there are at least five distinct episodes of tufa formation during the last 114 thousand years. Three of these times coincide with the timing of archaeological horizons, dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) to approximately 105, 31, and 15 thousand years ago, which indicates contemporaneous human occupation and tufa formation.
KJ: “Working in the Kalahari must come with its challenges. Tells us about the logistics involved with conducting fieldwork in such a remote place. What does a typical fieldwork day look like, and what were your most memorable fieldwork moments?”
JV: Field work in the Kalahari is wonderful – it really is a special place and the landscape is beautiful, with big open skies and bare land that stretches as far as the eye can see.
I’ve been fortunate to conduct my field work with an experienced team of archaeologists, who are well-organised and efficient. Ga-Mohana Hill is also located close to a town, Kuruman, and so we have been lucky to enjoy relatively luxurious field accommodation at a local B&B.
A typical day of field work involves an early start and a substantial breakfast to get us through the day. We then drive to Ga-Mohana Hill, where we all pitch in to assist with carrying the equipment needed for the archaeological excavation up the hill to the rockshelter (it is then that I am thankful that geologists in the field only really need a hammer and a notebook!). The archaeologists set up their excavation, and I am often reminded not to walk too close to the excavation pit as I peer in with interest to see the archaeologists at work.
We reached the shelter just as the cloud burst, and watched in awe from our vantage point as a large curtain of rain drenched the valley below us. The downpour didn’t last very long, and after a few minutes the storm clouds rolled on, with the rain curtain stalking across the landscape like a giant figure. The air felt extra clear, like it had been rinsed clean, and a sweet, warm smell floated up from the freshly wet earth. It was a beautiful moment.
After examining the map and a discussion on the days plans, our survey team then embark on foot to explore the area. Sometimes this also involves visits to local farmers to request permission to survey their land for archaeological material. We traverse the hills, observing the geology, looking for secondary carbonates to sample, and identifying stone tools, which are photographed and georeferenced, but left in their place to preserve the material culture. I use a geological hammer and chisel to sample the tufas, but sometimes power tools are necessary to better extract samples, and in those instances I have fun wielding an angle grinder or diamond-tipped drill.
Around lunch time we find a spot in the shade to eat our melted cheese sandwiches, and then continue with our survey and sampling in the afternoon. If our survey is close to the rockshelter, we join the excavation team for mid-morning tea and biscuits. Despite being in a fairly remote location, we still enjoy some creature comforts! Most of the field seasons are conducted in winter, when the mornings are crisp and the days are warm and clear. We have conducted shorter field seasons during the summer months, and then an earlier start to beat the heat, and carrying enough water is essential.
One of my most memorable field moments was during a visit to Ga-Mohana Hill in January which is the height of summer and also the rainy month. We were there to collect rain and drip water from the rockshelter and surrounding areas. As we were walking up the steep hillside to the shelter, we heard rumbling and a large, low storm cloud appeared. We observed the clouds roll across the valley in front of us, and felt the first big warm drops of rain on our skin. We reached the shelter just as the cloud burst, and watched in awe from our vantage point as a large curtain of rain drenched the valley below us. The downpour didn’t last very long, and after a few minutes the storm clouds rolled on, with the rain curtain stalking across the landscape like a giant figure. The air felt extra clear, like it had been rinsed clean, and a sweet, warm smell floated up from the freshly wet earth. It was a beautiful moment.
KJ: “As you may know, PLOS is dedicated to advancing not just Open Access, but pushes the boundaries of “open” to create a more equitable system of scientific knowledge and understanding. Our global research inclusivity policy promotes not only interaction between researchers from all over the world, but also encourages local engagement where we conduct our research. Archaeology and anthropology have been historically vulnerable to ‘parachute research’, where researchers from other nations arrive at a country of interest and conduct research without consulting or crediting any of the local population. What are your thoughts on global research inclusivity, and how does this ethos fit in with your research?
JV: That’s absolutely right, and such parachute practices are very apparent in a place like South Africa, where we have a rich and abundant archaeological and geological heritage that has mostly been researched by foreigners. This was jarringly evident to me when I attended a Palaeoanthropology conference in Austin, Texas; the majority of posters and oral presentations on Stone Age archaeology were on sites from southern and eastern Africa, but the authors were American. I found this so strange, as I hadn’t quite grasped the uniqueness of our heritage and the extent to which this was being investigated by people from around the world, very few of whom enter into collaborations with researchers at local institutions. This system robs local researchers of the opportunity to work on artefacts and collections in their own country, and it excludes the local population from being involved in the process, as foreigners generally don’t know how (or can’t be bothered) to engage with local communities. This creates a division and mistrust between scientists and local communities, who are the true custodians of the heritage. The research also suffers because local knowledge, customs and practices are not taken into account, and so interpretations are made through a narrow and foreign lens, without consideration of local perspectives. As such, the local population are unaware of the scientific publications produced, and are excluded from the knowledge and the conversation.
The research also suffers [when local collaborators are excluded] because local knowledge, customs and practices are not taken into account, and so interpretations are made through a narrow and foreign lens, without consideration of local perspectives. As such, the local population are unaware of the scientific publications produced, and are excluded from the knowledge and the conversation.
The authors of this study are a diverse interdisciplinary team with researchers from South Africa, Australia and North America. The lead archaeologists, Dr Jayne Wilkins (Canadian) and Dr Ben Schoville (American) are now based in Australia at Griffith University and the University of Queensland respectively, but both spent time at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, where they trained South African students and continue to involve them in field work and projects in the Northern Cape. They also maintain a close collaboration with Dr Robyn Pickering, a South African geologist at UCT, who conceptualised the tufa study and facilitated my training on U-Th methods. Through her, I had the opportunity to visit the Isotope Geochemistry Group at the University of Melbourne, where Prof Jon Woodhead and Dr John Hellstrom trained me in analysing the tufas using laser ablation and U-Th dating, with help from Dr Alan Greig, Dr Helen Green and Dr Rieneke Weij. It is through global collaborations such as this, where a diverse range of expertise, knowledge and perspectives are shared and combined, that inclusive, quality research can be produced.
In conducting our research at Ga-Mohana Hill, it was important for us to involve the local community as much as possible. We engaged with the Baga Motlhware Traditional Council to speak with them about the work we were interested in conducting and to request permission to carry it out at Ga-Mohana Hill, which is a place of spiritual and ritual significance.
To respect the ritual significance, I took a low impact approach, sampling the tufas carefully with targeted methods (e.g. using custom-made core barrels attached to a hand-held drill) and in unobtrusive locations, taking care to leave very little trace. Also, the archaeological excavations are back-filled and covered at the end of each season, so that no trace is left. These protocols were established shortly after we began investigations at Ga-Mohana after discussions with local community members about the best way to respect local traditions. The project is always working toward improving our understanding of the ways in which we can better engage with and involve the local community.
Image credit: Anse Nke
KJ: “You (have mentioned that you) are part of the Human Evolution Research Institute (HERI –https://www.heriuct.co.za/). Can you tell us more about that? And how do you think institutes like HERI help to address the important issue of research inclusivity?”
JV: HERI is doing important work in bringing attention to palaeoscience research in South Africa, and the people behind it. Through financial aid and media engagement, HERI provides support to researchers, particularly African womxn and people of colour, to promote transformation and the inclusion of diverse skills, backgrounds and perspectives in the palaeosciences. I am grateful to HERI for supporting my research and granting me opportunities to kickstart my career.
About the author:
Jessica von der Meden is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, interested in Quaternary geology and palaeoclimates related to human evolution. She is working on the occurrence, formation and dating of tufa (secondary fresh water carbonate deposits) at the archaeological site of Ga-Mohana Hill in the southern Kalahari. She is first author of Tufas indicate prolonged periods of water availability linked to human occupation in the southern Kalahari
This December marks 15 years since PLOS ONE published its first papers. As we celebrate this milestone, we invited authors of some of the first papers to be published, as well as an author of a more recent paper, to share information about their careers, their perspectives on Open Science, and their experiences as PLOS ONE authors.
We spoke with Miriam Kolko (University of Copenhagen), Matthew Goddard (University of Lincoln), Andrej A Romanovsky (Arizona State University) and Seppo Ylä-Herttuala (University of Eastern Finland).
Their perspectives provide a fascinating insight into how their research careers have progressed in the past fifteen years, as well as the changes the research world has experienced. We hear about the importance of open science practices, and how open access publishing has gone from a relatively new idea fifteen years ago to an almost ubiquitous endeavor in the present day. They also discuss their experiences of both expected and unexpected discoveries, how they have stayed on track in pursuing their research goals, and the importance of being a good collaborator and keeping flexible in a dynamic research landscape.
Could you tell us a bit about what you are working on at the moment? What does your lab group look like?
MK: I am in the fortunate situation of leading the research group Eye Translational Research Unit, EyeTRU. We work with different aspects of glaucoma. All our research projects have the patient in mind and we thus have preclinical and clinical models to explore the pathophysiology behind glaucoma. In addition, we work to stratify and optimize existing treatments for glaucoma patients. We are particularly aware of the inappropriate side effects that occur with preservative-containing eye drops as well as the sparse regulation of generics. Finally, we work with big data to identify predictive factors for risk assessment and earlier detection of sight-threatening diseases, such as glaucoma. Currently, EyeTRU consists of 2 postdocs, 8 PhD students, a laboratory technician and several master’s and bachelor’s students.
It is essential to share knowledge, including sharing data, so that the most knowledge is obtained that can benefit patients
Miriam Kolko
What does a typical day at work look like for you?
MK: I am a clinician-scientist and spend half my time with patients and half time with teaching and research. I treat patients with glaucoma medically and surgically twice a week. The remaining time goes with research teaching and multicenter studies.
In your field, how important are open science practices? Do you have any success stories of having shared or re-used data, code, a preprint, or something else?
MK: Transparency is really important and creates the environment for original ideas and collaborations. The ability to publish preprints is one of many ways to share research at an early stage. Another very important prerequisite for knowledge sharing and innovative research is a safe working environment. Sure, competition is important, but teamwork is the key to ground-breaking research. In general, I believe that it is essential to share knowledge, including sharing data, so that the most knowledge is obtained that can benefit patients.
Can you tell us about an important moment in your career as a scientist, which helped shape you as a researcher?
MK: My research career started in the United States as a Fulbright scholar and later as a PhD student Under Professor Nicolas G Bazan. I spent a total of 5 years in the USA, which shaped me as a basic science researcher and has since given me the foundation to create a translational research environment in my research group Eye Translational Eye Research, EyeTRU.
PLOS ONE is celebrating 15 years as a journal this year. Can you tell us where you were in your career 15 years ago? If you could give advice to your former self as a researcher, what would you say?
MK: Believe in the impossible and keep going. Life as a clinician-scientist or full researcher is fantastic, but you face challenges along the way. The environment is harsh and the best advice is to stay behave as one would like others to behave.
Looking back at your paper, which was one of the first papers published in PLOS ONE, what did you learn from this study? Did you continue to work in this field and build on these findings?
MG: This paper was the first report inferring the dynamics of the evolution of homing endonuclease genes (HEGs: a type of ’selfish’ gene or non-Mendelian element) in metazoans. The surprising finding was they appear to have horizontally transferred between Cnidarian species. This was one of the final papers in my line of enquiry into HEGs and I moved on to other areas after this.
To meaningfully translate science done in university labs to the outside world is a hard but rewarding activity.
Matthew Goddard
Do you remember when you first heard of PLOS ONE? What made you first interested in publishing with PLOS ONE?
MG: This was back in the days before the explosion of journals occurred and most were still only accessible via subscriptions. I recall hearing the news of a new type of journal that was completely open access being suggested and I liked the idea of this very much. It was a gamble publishing in a new journal with a new format with no impact factor etc. but this was worth it as the ethos of the open access idea sat well with us.
Could you tell us a bit about what you are working on at the moment? What does your lab group look like?
MG: Mostly studying the effects of agricultural management (i.e. conservation agricultural approaches) and land-use change on soil biology (using DNA and classic methods) and physiochemical attributes (mainly C-sequestration and water retention). These are important areas, especially for the UK, to help understand how to best manage land given climate change and the desire to move to more sustainable agricultural approaches. There is a lack of data in this area.
In your field, how common are open science practices? Do you have any success stories of having shared or re-used data, code, a preprint, or something else?
MG: Very common, and pre-prints of any publication must be available to evaluated via the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) system. I tend to conduct studies that generate data but we have used whole genome DNA sequence data from various microbes that are publicly available to better understand the genomes that we have sequenced. Such resources are invaluable to help understand the larger ecological and genetic picture.
PLOS ONE is celebrating 15 years as a journal this year. Can you tell us where you were in your career 15 years ago? If you could give advice to your former self as a researcher, what would you say?
MG: I had just completed my first post-doctoral position at the NERC centre for population biology at Imperial College’s Silwood Park in the UK. I am not sure about advice to my former self, but to someone at the first post-doc stage of their career it would be to expose yourself to and learn from as wide a diversity of scientists, ideas and places as possible.
Publishing papers is crucial to a career in research. Can you tell us of an event or memory that was not a paper, which influenced your career as a researcher?
MG: Hard: probably moving from the ‘blue-skies’ area where I mostly just interacted with other researchers during my PhD and post-doc to interacting with farmers/agricultural workers and gaining an appreciation of how to attempt to meaningfully translate science done in university labs to the outside world is a hard but rewarding activity.
Looking back at your paper, which was one of the first papers published in PLOS ONE, what did you learn from this study?
AAR: Actually, that was the very first paper published by PLOS ONE [3]. That study was conducted by two brilliant researchers, Camila Almeida and Alex Steiner, who at that time were postdocs in my FeverLab. Both were trained by Professor Guillermo Branco, a patriarch of Brazilian thermophysiology, and both have become highly productive independent scientists. Camila, who played a leading role on that study, and Alex made a remarkable discovery by showing that behavioral thermoregulation does not require the integrity of the brain structure called hypothalamus. Many textbooks on thermoregulation state that body temperature is controlled by a “central government” located in the hypothalamus. This widely spread erroneous view is allegedly supported by the fact that rats with lesions in a certain part of the hypothalamus cannot defend their body temperature against heat or cold. Camila and Alex reproduced these experiments. They found that rats with lesioned hypothalami indeed could not defend themselves against thermal challenges – but only when they were restrained in little cages and could not use behavioral thermoregulation. When the same rats were allowed to move freely and select a warmer or cooler environment, they exhibited fully competent thermoregulatory responses – no weakness whatsoever! That study was a blow to the idea that the hypothalamus is the “chief commander” of thermoregulation. If the readers of this blog are interested to learn more about how this idea was discrowned and what replaced it, please go to my review [5].
But most importantly, we enjoyed – and still enjoy and are proud of – being a part of the open access revolution.
Andrej A Romanovsky
Do you remember when you first heard of PLOS ONE? What made you first interested in publishing with PLOS ONE?
AAR: The history of science is the history of illusions (like the one about the hypothalamus controlling body temperature)… In 2006, we published in PLOS Biology a study conducted in FeverLab by Alex Steiner (mentioned above) and Andrei Ivanov (now Professor at Cleveland Clinic), with the help of multiple collaborators [6]. This study, which found that fever is initiated outside of the brain, in the lungs and liver, was well-received. Encouraged by this success, we submitted our next study to PLOS Biology – again! Soon we received good reviews and an invitation to move the paper to … PLOS ONE. At that time, PLOS ONE did not exist, and this is where illusions enter our story. Listen, everybody knows that there are many Nature journals, right? Nature Neuroscience, Nature Immunology, Nature This, Nature That… But among all the Nature journals, there is one that stands like Gulliver among the Lilliputians: Nature! Camila, Alex, and I tried to imagine what type of journal PLOS ONE would be. And we came to the conclusion, or should I say illusion, that PLOS ONE would be the same to the PLOS journals as Nature was to the Nature journals! It was due to this illusion that we accepted the invitation, and this is how the very first PLOS ONE article [3] was born! And although PLOS ONE did not turn into the most prestigious PLOS journal (and was not designed to do so), our article seeded what has grown to become the Gulliver of all Gullivers in scientific publishing – the journal that has published more papers than any other academic journal in the history of mankind. But most importantly, we enjoyed – and still enjoy and are proud of – being a part of the open access revolution.
Could you tell us a bit about what you are working on at the moment?
AAR: I retired from laboratory research in 2019 to dedicate my remaining professional life to making several new drugs. The ideas for all these drugs came from or are closely related to my past research. Together with my colleagues, we have launched a couple of startups, including my favorite, Zharko Pharma. The name is a transliteration of the Russian adverb жарко (žárko), which means hot, like in feeling uncomfortably hot. Zharko’s goal is to develop a drug for treating the thermal discomfort experienced by menopausal women – hot flashes. Hot flashes are a widely spread condition that are debilitating in some women, and no effective non-hormonal treatment is currently available.
Publishing papers is crucial to a career in research. Can you tell us of an event or memory that was not a paper, which affected your research?
AAR: Yes, I can tell you about a silly event in FeverLab’s life that gave us a cover of the Journal of Neuroscience. When Andras Garami (now Head of Thermophysiology Department at University of Pécs Medical School in Hungary) worked with me as a postdoc, we were studying the role of the so-called TRPV1 channel in thermoregulation. The latest Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature…”, including TRPV1. This channel is expressed on sensory nerves and is responsible for the burning sensation we have while eating chili peppers. Being a Hungarian, Andras was not a stranger to spicy foods, but he wanted to experience first-hand how spicy “spicy” can be and was looking in grocery stores for the hottest peppers. Eventually he found a habanero so spicy that blisters covered his lips after he tasted it. Not a surprise that many mammals avoid eating spicy peppers! Soon thereafter we needed to confirm the absence of the TRPV1 channel in TRPV1-knockout mice. We realized that these mice should not feel the hotness of habanero and would be expected to be able to eat this pepper, whereas “normal” mice (those with a functional TRPV1) should avoid this blister-inducing “poison”. Andras then ran experiments in mice, and these experiments confirmed our expectations. We later published an article about thermoregulation in TRPV1-knockout mice in the Journal of Neuroscience [7], a knockout mouse devouring a habanero stares out at you with hungry eyes from the cover of this issue.
Looking back at your paper, which was one of the first papers published in PLOS ONE, what did you learn from this study? Did you continue to work in this field and build on these findings?
SYH: We have a long history in therapeutic angiogenesis studies and this PLOS ONE paper was one of the first to realistically study long-term safety concerns of VEGF-A overexpression in vivo. The results were very important since they showed that even a low-level VEGF-A expression in vivo for an extended period of time (> one year) can cause significant side effects, such as cancer, thus preventing the use of vectors leading to long-term transgene expression in clinical VEGF-A studies. Also, Cre-loxP technology was quite new at that time and the paper showed how useful it is for in vivo safety and efficacy studies. We still use this mouse model for retinal angiogenesis studies.
Do you remember when you first heard of PLOS ONE? What made you first interested in publishing with PLOS ONE?
SYH: I think that it was from PLOS website.
For younger researchers, I would say that “Be brave and aim high to reach your vision and goals but be also realistic and prepared for sharp turns and surprises in your research”.
Seppo Ylä-Herttuala
Could you tell us a bit about what you are working on at the moment? What does your lab group look like?
SYH: We are continuing our pioneering work in cardiovascular gene therapy. After several advances in vector design, transgene optimization and improved local cardiac delivery methods, we have continued to apply therapeutic angiogenesis for the treatment of severe myocardial ischemia and have now conducted five clinical phase 1 and 2 trials with adenoviral vectors. Our most recent multicenter trial is currently recruiting patients in five cardiology centers in the EU for the treatment of severe coronary heart disease. We also have a very active research program for new vector development and in VEGF signaling mechanisms. My research group currently has 35 members.
In your field, how common are open science practices? Do you have any success stories of having shared or re-used data, code, a preprint, or something else?
SYH: Open access practices are very common in biomedical and clinical research. Most of our papers are now open access. This is also a requirement of EU and ERC grants which we have had during the last 10 years. Also, we have used open access data archives to identify new non-coding RNAs and gene expression profiles in mouse, pig and human heart and other tissues. From these sources we have identified new short hairpin RNAs and miRs which can regulate endogenous VEGF expression.
PLOS ONE is celebrating 15 years as a journal this year. Can you tell us where you were in your career 15 years ago? If you could give advice to your former self as a researcher, what would you say?
SYH: Fifteen years ago I was a just-appointed professor of Molecular Medicine with a very enthusiastic research program in angiogenesis and cardiac ischemia, extending from VEGF signaling studies to translational and clinical studies. Most of these goals have now come through, albeit with several surprises and new turns in the research direction over the years. For younger researchers, I would say that “Be brave and aim high to reach your vision and goals but be also realistic and prepared for sharp turns and surprises in your research”.
Publishing papers is crucial to a career in research. Can you tell us of an event or memory that was not a paper, which influenced your career as a researcher?
SYH: I so well remember the moment in 1996 when we, as the first in the world, did the first adenoviral gene transfer to human arteries with percutaneous catheter technique. This paved the way for my further research career in angiogenesis and cardiac ischemia.
Author biographies
Miriam Kolko
Miriam Kolko is chief physician and glaucoma specialist at the Copenhagen University Hospital, Rigshospitalet-Glostrup. She is also professor in translational eye research at the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen. Prof. Kolko is president of the Danish Glaucoma Society and board member of Fight for Sight, Denmark. During medical school Prof. Kolko completed a Fulbright Scholarship at the Neuroscience Center of Excellence, Louisiana State University, US. Here she became interested in basic neuroscience. After medical school, she completed a Ph.D. and a postdoctoral position in the same laboratory. In 2003, Prof. Kolko returned to Denmark after a total period of 5 years in the United States. She completed another postdoctoral position, after which she underwent residency in ophthalmology followed by a 3-year glaucoma fellowship. From 2014 to 2017, Prof. Kolko directed glaucoma in the Region of Zealand until she was assigned to her current position. At the University of Copenhagen, Prof. Kolko is heading the research cluster “Personalised Medicine”. In addition, Prof. Kolko is heading the research group, Eye Translational Research Unit (EyeTRU). The research in EyeTRU concerns cellular, translational, epidemiological and clinical models for understanding glaucomatous neurodegeneration. Prof. Kolko has received more recognitions. Among these, she has received the first “Award of excellence” from the Danish Ophthalmological Association and the Lions Prize. Prof. Kolko is co-chair of the neuroprotection SIG in the EGS and member of the EGS membership and national society committee. Recently, Prof. Kolko was elected to the WGA, Associate Advisory Board and as EVER glaucoma chair. Finally, Prof. Kolko was elected member of the board of directors of ACTA Ophthalmologica. All in all, Prof. Kolko is one of the few clinician-scientists that bridge between a clinical career with medical and surgical treatment of glaucoma patients and basic and translational research models to understand the pathophysiology behind as well as the current management of glaucoma.
Matthew Goddard
Professor Matthew R Goddard, PhD, BSc hons, DIC, FHEA undertook a PhD and post-doctoral fellowship in evolutionary and ecological biology at Imperial College (Silwood Park), then moved to a Faculty position at University of Auckland (New Zealand) in 2004 and then gain a Professorial position at the University of Lincoln (UK) in 2015. Mat has worked extensively with the agricultural sector and spearheaded microbial ecology revealing the differential distribution of microbes associated with agriculture and how this may effect agricultural outputs. Mat now has a strong focus on soils and runs large scale agri-ecosystem projects fusing next-generation DNA sequencing to evaluate biodiversity (not just microbes) with soil physics and chemistry to both understand the effect of agricultural managements and land-use change to provide evidence to inform decisions by land owners that aim to minimise disease and elevate agricultural and ecological health and quality.
Andrej A. Romanovsky
Andrej A. Romanovsky, MD, PhD, FAPS, is a physiologist and neuroscientist with primary expertise in body temperature regulation. In 2019, he left his Professor position at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, to work on the development of drugs for disorders of thermoregulation and hot flashes. Dr. Romanovsky helped to found the pharmaceutical startups Zharko Pharma, Catalina Pharma, and Synventa and currently works with these companies as an officer, Board member, or consultant. His current primary affiliation is with Zharko Pharma in Olympia, Washington; he also holds an Adjunct Faculty position at Arizona State University. Dr. Romanovsky has published more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Temperature and the Editor of two volumes on Thermoregulation: From Basic Neuroscience to Clinical Neurology published by Elsevier within the Handbook of Clinical Neurology series in 2018. In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Physiological Society. Andrej’s hobby is tree farming. He has co-founded the family partnership Tree Fever: Forestland Conservation and Development and since 2011 has been operating a Douglas-fir tree farm growing timber in western Washington. He is married to Nancy L. Romanovsky, an oil painter, and they have four children and two grandchildren.
Seppo Ylä-Herttuala
Dr. Seppo Yla-Herttuala, MD, PhD, FESC is a world leader in cardiovascular gene therapy for ischemic diseases. His team was the first to use adenovirus-mediated gene transfer to human arteries already in 1996. Since then, he has conducted five phase 1-2 clinical trials in cardiovascular gene therapy. He is also the originator of the concept of epigenetherapy. His group has been widely recognized for basic biology, translational and epigenetic research of the vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGFs), especially focusing on the new members of the VEGF family. Previously he worked with oxidized LDL and atherosclerosis and was the first to show that OxLDL exists in human atherosclerotic lesions. His list of publications includes over 600 peer reviewed scientific articles.
References
1. Kolko M, Horwitz A, Thygesen J, Jeppesen J, Torp-Pedersen C. The Prevalence and Incidence of Glaucoma in Denmark in a Fifteen Year Period: A Nationwide Study. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(7): e0132048. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132048
2. Goddard MR, Leigh J, Roger AJ, Pemberton AJ. Invasion and Persistence of a Selfish Gene in the Cnidaria. PLoS ONE. 2006;1(1): e3. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000003
New and modified materials for future energy production, storage and use is an active area of research, where the progress made will shape society and support a sustainable future. In August of 2021, PLOS ONE published a new collection of Energy Materials papers, showcasing state-of-the-art research in this exciting field. We interviewed some of the authors whose research is part of this collection, in order to shed further light on the discoveries they have made and the challenges they continue to tackle.
Sascha Raufeisen
Sascha is currently a PhD student at Institute of Technical and Environmental Chemistry at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. B.Sc. in chemistry (topic bachelor’s thesis: “Synthesis of a thiofunctionalized phosphoramidite for DNA synthesis”). M. Sc. in environmental chemistry (topic master’s thesis: “Investigation of the pyroelectrocatalytic oxidation capability of lithium niobate and lithium tantalate in an aquatic system“). Research focus: new advanced oxidation processes (AOP’s) and combinations (e.g. ultrasound with electrochemistry or photocatalysis) and pyrocatalysis (mechanism elucidation, modelling, application, catalyst development/synthesis) analytical chemistry and water analytics.
Sascha Raufeisen’s paper in this collection: Raufeisen S, Stelter M, Braeutigam P (2020) Pyrocatalysis—The DCF assay as a pH-robust tool to determine the oxidation capability of thermally excited pyroelectric powders. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228644
Can you tell us a bit about the beginning of this project that led to your PLOS ONE paper? If you weren’t involved in the study from the start, what was your first impression of the study?
SR: In 2014, I worked on a research module on the topic of electrochemical COD determination as part of my master’s degree in environmental chemistry. During my literature research, I read a lot on the topic of new and innovative advanced oxidation processes. By chance, I came across an article by Gutmann et al. In this article, they presented for the first time a wastewater treatment process based on thermally excited pyroelectric materials. I was immediately fascinated by the underlying mechanism and the prospect of exploiting the huge residual heat potentials in industry for the purification of wastewater. When, by chance, the first author of this study was also working in Jena and we exchanged ideas with him about the topic, I was hooked. I decided to change the topic of my master’s thesis and set out on the stony path of working on a completely new topic. After many missteps, corrections, and minor successes, I finished my master’s thesis with ten times more questions than when I started. Consequently, I decided to investigate pyrocatalysis further as part of my doctoral thesis. In the course of this work, I came to the conclusion that the methodology of the DCF assay needs to be fundamentally revised, which eventually resulted in my PLOS ONE paper.
Pyrocatalysis is a very exciting new research area. Do you envision that it will be possible in the future to apply this to energy generation applications of different kinds, in addition to wastewater remediation?
SR: In my opinion, further potential fields of application are H2 generation and the disinfection of (waste)water. Pyrocatalytic H2 generation could contribute to the supply of industry (e.g. steel production) with sustainably produced H2. Pyrocatalytic disinfection may gain importance especially with regard to future pandemic prevention. At the moment, however, the application of pyrocatalysis in all these three fields of application is highly dependent on the further development of pyroelectric catalysts. The DCF assay presented in the PLOS ONE paper can make a valuable contribution here.
As an early career scientist, how did you prepare yourself for the review process when submitting your first few papers? Is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known before that first submission?
SR: In order to prepare myself, I consulted more experienced scientists at our institute. They explained what I had to pay attention to in the cover letter, the abstract and the introduction. They also helped me with the suggestion of reviewers. The communication with the reviewers went smoothly. The most challenging part of my first two publications was choosing the right journal. With such a new topic at the cross section between environmental/water chemistry and materials science, I received many rejections due to the lack of fit.
What hopes do you have for the future of research into sustainable energy solutions? Do you have a clear sense at this point where you would like to go in your career?
SR: I hope that all industrialized countries will finally recognize that we must increase our efforts extremely in order to slow down climate change as much as possible. An essential point here is the conversion of our entire energy demand (electricity and heat) to a regenerative basis. Since this is not possible with current technologies, research in this area must be accelerated. In addition to storage technologies, I believe that concepts for the use of residual heat must also be further developed. One technique could be pyrocatalysis, which could be used for wastewater treatment and H2 generation at the same time. I want to contribute to this transformation with my research.
Jeremi Dauchet
Jeremi Dauchet is a physicist who received his PhD in chemical engineering in 2012. He is expert in transport physics and radiative transfer in particular (including electromagnetic theory applied to the determination of radiative properties), with special emphasis on the Monte Carlo method. Associate professor at Pascal Institute (France), his research is applied to photoreactive processes engineering.
Jeremi Dauchet’s paper in this collection: Supplis C, Dauchet J, Gattepaille V, Gros F, Vourc’h T, Cornet J-F (2021) Radiative analysis of luminescence in photoreactive systems: Application to photosensitizers for solar fuel production. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0255002. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0255002
Can you tell us a bit about the beginning of this project that led to your PLOS ONE paper? If you weren’t involved in the study from the start, what was your first impression of the study?
JD: This work was initiated by experimental results obtained by Caroline Supplis during her PhD. We observed unexpected yet significant impact of luminescence when studying bio-inspired H2 production in a benchmark photoreactor. The analysis of those experiments led us to carry the thorough radiative study presented in our PLOS ONE paper.
We noticed that you shared your Monte Carlo algorithm with your PLOS ONE paper. What motivated you to do this? Do you have any experience of using other researcher’s code from publications, or know of anyone who has used the code you’ve shared?
JD: Indeed, we are dedicated to open research and distributing open source codes and databases is part of that approach. We often provide the codes used in our publications as supplementary material or as links directed to our websites. Ensuring that these codes and databases will be available to readers in the long run is a concern. We know that our codes and databases are used by other researchers because they contact us when they need advises (or when it is no longer available at the provided url!). When those codes are mature enough, we work with Meso-Star for software development, support, maintenance, integration and distribution under GNU general public license (www.meso-star.com/projects/misc/about-en.html). Conversely we routinely use other researcher’s codes, for example the famous Mie code for electromagnetic scattering provided by Craig F. Bohren and Donald R. Huffman as an appendix in their book “Absorption and Scattering of Light by Small Particles”.
Was there anything that surprised you during this study, or did everything go exactly according to plan?
JD: This entire study had not been envisaged when Caroline’s PhD research-plan was being drawn up! Photoreactive processes are controlled at different scales by radiative transfer and therefore, we knew that radiative analysis will be an important part of the work. But we did not anticipate such significant effects of luminescence, which led Caroline to 3 years of investigations.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the role that advances within the science of energy materials may play in our lives over the next few decades. As the world grapples with the challenges of increasing energy demand and dynamic usage patterns, the community of scientists developing materials for future energy production, usage and storage are a vital part of building a sustainable future. In August of 2021, PLOS ONE published a new collection of Energy Materials papers, showcasing state-of-the-art research in this exciting field. We interviewed some of the authors whose research is part of this collection, in order to shed further light on the discoveries they have made and the challenges they continue to tackle.
Rosa Mondragón
I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (Spain). I defended my PhD thesis about spray drying of nanofluids in 2013 and that was my first experience with the amazing field of nanofluids. I am currently Associate Professor in the Fluid Mechanics area of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Construction in Universitat Jaume I and I belong to the Multiphase Fluids research group. My research is focused on the synthesis and characterization of nanofluids for heat transfer, thermal energy storage and solar radiation absorption applications. I have been participant member of the COST Action “Overcoming Barriers to Nanofluids Market Uptake – NANOUPTAKE” (2016-2020) whose objectives were the development of a common understanding about nanofluids preparation and characterization and the acceleration of the transfer of knowledge from fundamental research to industrial applications.
Rosa Mondragon’s paper in this collection: Mondragón R, Sánchez D, Cabello R, Llopis R, Juliá JE (2019) Flat plate solar collector performance using alumina nanofluids: Experimental characterization and efficiency tests. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0212260. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0212260
Can you tell us a bit about the beginning of this project that led to your PLOS ONE paper? If you weren’t involved in the study from the start, what was your first impression of the study?
RM: I began my research on nanofluids for heat transfer applications in 2010 but after some years doing experimental characterization of thermophysical properties at the lab scale (thermal conductivity, viscosity, specific heat, etc.) we needed to move towards the analysis of its use in real applications. The only difficulty was to find any research group having the suitable facilities to start a joint collaboration. Besides, most of the facilities required quite a big volume of fluids making also a challenge sending the nanofluid to a different research centre. Fortunately, we found out that the Thermal Engineering research group of our department had recently acquired a flat plate solar collector that could be used. That was the beginning of the project that led to the paper published and some lessons learnt.
What is it about nanofluids that make them such a good candidate for use in solar collectors?
RM: The term nanofluid was coined to refer to the mixture of nanoparticles dispersed in a base fluid with improved thermal properties, specifically thermal conductivity. This thermal conductivity enhancement achieved due to the higher thermal conductivity of the solid nanoparticles leads to an increase in the heat transfer capacity of the fluid and the efficiency of the solar collector. However, there are more variables involved in the process such as the decrease in the specific heat capacity or the increase in the viscosity. As a result, a combined experimental analysis of all the nanofluid thermophysical properties is necessary to ensure a better performance of the nanofluid in transferring the thermal energy obtained from the absorbed solar energy, compared to the base fluid. It is also worth mentioning that there exist a wide variety of nanoparticles with good thermal properties, inexpensive and non-toxic that can be selected.
Was there anything that surprised you during this study, or did everything go exactly according to plan?
RM: Of course not everything went exactly according to the plan but it comes with the experimental research. We had a previous experience using the nanofluid in a thermohydraulic loop and we knew that the compatibility with the materials in pipes and pumps was very important to avoid oxidation and corrosion. If the solar collector was made to transport water, the addition of the nanoparticles should not have caused any problem. However, the acidic conditions needed to stabilize the nanoparticles in water promoted the oxidation of the materials and the corrosion of the copper tubes. Moreover, the contact of the concentrated nanofluid with the hot surface of the tubes caused a deposition layer as is shown in the paper. As a result, the enhancement theoretically predicted for the solar collector efficiency was not achieved due to the thermal resistance caused by the nanoparticle layer. The nanofluid initially white became orangish after the tests which confirmed that is highly recommended to check the compatibility of the nanofluid with the materials of the experimental facilities to ensure a good performance and to achieve the best results.
Bernhard Springer
Bernhard Springer, M. Sc. is currently a research associate at University of Applied Sciences Landshut (UAS Landshut) and a PhD student at Technical University Munich (TUM). He studied physics at the TUM from 2011 and finished his Bachelor’s degree in 2015. From 2015 till 2017 he studied Applied and engineering physics at the TUM and finished with a Master’s degree. Since 2017 he is working as a research associate at the Technology Centre Energy affiliated to the UAS Landshut. In 2018 he started with his PhD studies at the chemistry department of the TUM. Since 2019 he is working with his colleagues on the Project “SpinnAP”. His fields of research include Electrospinning, Lithium-Ion-Batteries and solid-state electrolytes.
Bernhard Springer’s paper in this collection: Springer BC, Frankenberger M, Pettinger K-H (2020) Lamination of Separators to Electrodes using Electrospinning. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227903. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227903
Can you tell us a bit about the beginning of this project that led to your PLOS ONE paper? If you weren’t involved in the study from the start, what was your first impression of the study?
BS: The project leading to my publication is “Spinning Technologies for Advanced Battery Production” (SpinnAP) and is funded by the Bavarian Research Foundation. The project aims to improve lithium ion batteries, both liquid and solid electrolyte systems, using electrospinning. An example for such an improvement is to enable lamination on different separators using electrospinning, like described in my paper. In addition, suitable production processes as well as an improved nanofiber output for industrial applications are part of our development focus. To achieve this, we also develop our own high-output electrospinning machine within the frame of the project. We are supported by our project partners 3M Dyneon GmbH, AKE Technologies GmbH and Brückner GmbH with their respective expertise.
Electrospinning seems like a very promising method for the future of lithium ion batteries. What do you think are the main advantages this can bring to the consumer or user of lithium ion batteries?
BS: For lithium ion batteries using a liquid electrolyte, lamination can achieve two main advantages: First, lamination is able to improve the charge and discharge capability, as shown by Frankenberger et al (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jelechem.2019.02.030). Unfortunately, not all separators are capable for lamination. Using electrospinning we want to enable lamination for all types of separators to combine the advantages of lamination with the advantages of the respective separators, e.g. lower production costs or safety enhancement. Second, lamination creates a firm connection between the electrodes and the separator. This can be positive for the production speed of the cells, since the individual layers can not be displaced during the following production steps. This can lead to an increased production output and more inexpensive battery cells.
As an early career scientist, how did you prepare yourself for the review process when submitting your first few papers? Is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known before that first submission?
BS: In preparation to my first submission, I intensely discussed with my colleagues from the Technology Center Energy, a research facility of the University of Applied Sciences Landshut, about their previous experiences. In addition, I read the guidelines provided by PLOS regarding the submission process carefully.
What hopes do you have for the future of research into sustainable energy solutions? Do you have a clear sense at this point where you would like to go in your career?
BS: I do not have a clear sense where I would like to go in my career yet, but I do intend to pursue an industrial career path. At the moment I strongly focus on my dissertation.
David López Durán
David is Professor in the Department of Physics of the University of Córdoba (Spain). He obtained the MSc degree in the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and his PhD in the Fundamental Physics Institute (FPI) of the Spanish National Research Council (SNRC) in Madrid. He has developed his work in La Sapienza, University of Rome (Italy), Argonne National Laboratory, IL (USA), and CIC Nanogune, San Sebastián (Spain), among others. His research topics are: weakly bound molecular clusters, collisions of molecules at low and ultralow temperatures, and potential energy surfaces of small molecular aggregates. Some recent scientific contributions are: (1) “The CECAM electronic structure library and the modular software development paradigm”, J. Chem. Phys. 153, 024117-1/024117-23 (2020) article promoted as part of the “Chemical Physics Software Collection” of the Journal of Chemical Physics (September 2021), and (2) interview in TV (May 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ71JPVdhtw
David López Durán’s paper in this collection: López-Durán D, Plésiat E, Krompiec M, Artacho E (2020) Gap variability upon packing in organic photovoltaics. PLoS ONE 15(6): e0234115. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234115
Can you tell us a bit about the beginning of this project that led to your PLOS ONE paper? If you weren’t involved in the study from the start, what was your first impression of the study?
DL: This article came up as part of the work supported by the “Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire” (CECAM), which is formed by several institutions in Europe and funds multiple activities, one of them a partnership between some of these institutions, network called “E-CAM”, and to which I belonged. One of the targets of E-CAM was to bring closer the academic and the industrial worlds through several initiatives, for instance a collaboration between two nodes with different profiles. This manuscript came up due to the work developed in my former institutions, CIC Nanogune (San Sebastián, Spain) and University of Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), and the industrial partner Merck Chemicals Ltd. (Southampton, United Kingdom). The climate change and global warming are, unfortunately, a hot topic in science and we tried to contribute to its solution studying organic photovoltaics. Specifically, we addressed the problem of the arrangement of the molecules in order to maximize the electric current.
How do you think that the results you obtained in this study will impact the development of organovoltaics in the future?
DL: The design of a device to generate energy based in any kind of photovoltaic molecules must include the analysis of several factors in order to obtain the maximum performance. One of them is the HOMO-LUMO band gap of the constituent molecules, which are usually a donor-acceptor pair, magnitude which dramatically depends on the geometry arrangement of these pairs. As this gap becomes smaller, the electronic transference is easier and, therefore, the generation of electric current. But to be small this gap is necessary that the molecules were arranged in a convenient way one with respect to the others, i. e. with their active electronic areas clearly accessible. In this work we study a great number of configurations of an organic donor-acceptor pair in gas phase, as previous step before moving to the solid phase of a real device. Our study will impact the subsequent research because now there are available some hints about the optimal geometry configuration of the molecules.
Was there anything that surprised you during this study, or did everything go exactly according to plan?
DL: The donor-acceptor pair that we studied is 4modBT-4TIC, molecules which are based on others extensively employed in the organic photovoltaics field. We found several surprises, the first one being that the variation of the gap in all the studied configurations was around 0.3 eV, which is significant considering that the gaps in this context are not larger than 1 eV. The second surprise was the lack of correlation between the binding energy of the pair and the HOMO-LUMO band gap: the arrangement with the maximum binding energy was not that with the maximum gap and, in turn, the configuration with the maximum gap was not that with the maximum binding energy. A third surprise was that the arrangement with the maximum binding energy were much more bound that the rest. All these findings pose new questions and, therefore, further research is needed.
What’s the most unusual or unexpected collaboration you’ve been a part of during your research?
DL: I have never had an unusual or unexpected collaboration during my scientific career. However, I would like to mention that I feel very lucky because I have known people from all over the world. These experiences enrich you and make you think in a more broad and comprehensive way.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.
In July, we updated our Nanomaterials Collection, featuring papers published over the past few years in PLOS ONE. This collection showcases the breadth of the nanomaterials community at PLOS ONE, and includes papers on a variety of topics, such as the fabrication of nanomaterials, nanomaterial-cell interactions, the role of nanomaterials in drug delivery, and nanomaterials in the environment.
To celebrate this updated collection, we are conducting a series of Q&As with authors whose work is included in the collection. Next out is our conversations with Roberto Vazquez-Muñoz from the University of Connecticut Health Center, Roselyne Ferrari from Université de Paris and Yerol Narayana from Mangalore University. They discuss the future potential of nanomaterials research, the value of open science practices, and their experiences of pursuing unexpected effects seen in the lab. We will be adding more author interviews over the next few weeks, so please do keep checking back.
Roberto Vazquez-Muñoz – University of Connecticut Health Center
Currently, I work at the University of Connecticut Health Center (UConn Health), USA. I’m a nanomedicine scientist with a multidisciplinary background: B.Sc. with a concentration in Biology, with postgraduate education in Microbiology (M. Sc.) and Nanotechnology (Ph.D.). My research focuses on the complex systems’ interactions between antimicrobial nanomaterials (nanoantibiotics), microbial cells (pathogens and probiotics), antibiotics, and the environment. My goal is to develop affordable, novel nanotechnology-based solutions to combat multidrug-resistant infectious diseases, particularly for communities under limited resources. My network includes international and transdisciplinary research teams to develop applied nanotechnology solutions for the agricultural, veterinary, and clinical sectors. My work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, and I have developed patented and commercial products. I’ve been awarded by different institutions such as The Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education (Mexico), Rotary International’s Rotaract, the International Network of Bionanotechnology, and the New England I-Corps (MIT)/Accelerate (UCONN) program.
Roberto Vazquez-Muñoz’s paper in the Nanomaterials Collection: Vazquez-Muñoz R, Meza-Villezcas A, Fournier PGJ, Soria-Castro E, Juarez-Moreno K, Gallego-Hernández AL, et al. (2019) Enhancement of antibiotics antimicrobial activity due to the silver nanoparticles impact on the cell membrane. PLoS ONE 14(11): e0224904. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224904
What motivated you to work in this field?
RVM: My motivation to work in this field comes from my interest in the impact of infectious diseases through history and our ability to create solutions to combat them. This interest led me to focus on the interactions between nanomaterials, microbial cells, and antimicrobial substances for combat infection. Additionally, as current treatments are less and less effective against pathogens, nanotechnology has proven to be an effective strategy to fight the crisis of infectious diseases.
Nanomaterials research has increased in popularity over the past few years as a research topic. Do you envision that the field can continue to grow this way, and do you see any challenges on the horizon?
RVM: Yes, nanomaterials research has increased in popularity worldwide, and we have seen exponential growth in publications. The field will continue to grow for years as we constantly discover nanomaterial’s novel structures, properties, and applications. Additionally, we continuously develop novel synthesis methods and understand the interactions between nanomaterials and other systems (organisms, materials, environment, etc.).
However, there are several challenges on the horizon. A critical challenge is understanding the impact of nanomaterials on living organisms and the environment. It is crucial to expand the research on human and ecological nanotoxicology and the fate of “nano-waste” on the environment. Another challenge is the standardization of research data. As nanomaterials research is a multidisciplinary field, there is still a lack of standard criteria for conducting and publishing research, leading to difficulties in comparing data from different studies.
Can you tell us about an experience during your research, whether in the lab or at the computer or in conversation etc., where something finally clicked or worked?
RVM: One of my experiences during my research is when I was working on how nanomaterials increase the antibacterial activity of antibiotics. Different published studies showed the impact of nanomaterials on cell structure and metabolism. At the same time, other studies reported synergistic – or antagonistic – activity between nanomaterials and antibiotics; however, their explanations about the mechanisms were primarily theoretical. Unfortunately, there was no apparent connection between the proposed mechanisms and the synergistic activity reported by other groups. To fill that knowledge gap, we conducted experimental work to evaluate the physical and chemical interactions in the nanomaterials-antibiotics-microbial cell complex system. Then, when we compared our data with the literature, we started to see the connecting dots that could explain the synergistic activity of antibiotics. Moreover, our model could also explain some results published from other groups. That project was a stimulating and satisfactory experience and contributed to a better understanding of the synergistic activity of nanoparticles with antibiotics.
Is there a specific research area where a collaboration with the nanomaterials community could be particularly interesting for interdisciplinary research?
RVM: There are many research areas where interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration with the nanomaterials community is exciting. Nanomedicine is my first pick. The novel properties of nanomaterials have raised a lot of interest from the medical community, particularly for drug delivery, controlled release, reducing toxicity, among others. Additionally, beyond treatments, the development of new instrumentation, biosensors, analytical kits, sanitizing formulations, and other related applications for the healthcare sector is on the rise, creating more opportunities to work in diverse, interdisciplinary environments. In this regard, I have an interdisciplinary background (microbiology and nanotechnology), and my work focuses on medical applications, which allows me to participate in different research groups.
Roselyne Ferrari – Université de Paris
I am an Associate Professor in the Paris Diderot University (now Université de Paris) since 1994. I defended my PhD thesis entitled “Investigation of foliar lipid peroxidation in higher plants and evaluation of antioxidant capacities of sensitive or drought-resistant plants” in 1992 (Paris Diderot University, France) in the field of Tropical Plant Biology. I then got interested in microorganisms and studied a class of enzymes capable of detoxifying fatty acid hydroperoxides: “the alkylhydroperoxide reductases”. I then investigated the ability of Escherichia coli to detoxify emerging pollutants in aquatic environments and in particular man-made metal oxide nanoparticles. I participated for 10 years in the development of laboratory tests to assess the toxicity of zinc oxide and titanium nanoparticles in natural aquatic environments. I showed, through metabolomics and proteomics, that E. coli tries to overcome the stress caused by nanoparticles by increasing its oxidative and respiratory capacity. More recently, I started to work again on polyunsaturated fatty acids and peroxidation phenomena, but this time on fungi. Recently I am also interested in the ability of some microscopic coprophilous fungi to destroy lignocellulose. These ascomycete fungi are over-equipped with hydrolytic enzymes, such as oxidases or oxygenases.
Roselyne Ferrari’s paper in the Nanomaterials Collection: Planchon M, Léger T, Spalla O, Huber G, Ferrari R (2017) Metabolomic and proteomic investigations of impacts of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on Escherichia coli. PLoS ONE 12(6): e0178437. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178437
What is your favorite thing about nanomaterials?
RF: I am interested in the toxicology of nanoparticles in the environment and more particularly in their dissemination in the 3 compartments (soil water air). I am also interested in the fixation of environmental metal oxide nanoparticles by the bark of urban trees.
Have you had any surprises in your research recently, where the result was not what you expected?
RF: I did indeed have some surprises in the results I got in the paper I published in PLOS ONE. I did not expect that the amount of ATP would increase in Escherichia coli bacteria after they were brought into contact with the titanium dioxide nanoparticles. Unfortunately I did not pursue this line of research and I remain on this question.
Did you have to adapt your work in light of the pandemic, and if so, how?
RF: I adapted like many researchers and continued my work following the recommendations of my University.
What do you see as the greatest opportunities for disseminating research in your field, or for communicating science in general?
RF: Social networks, media in general have allowed us to continue to disseminate to our fellow researchers as well as video conferencing.
Yerol Narayana – Mangalore University
Obtained MSc and PhD from Mangalore University. Presently the Professor and Chairman, Board of Studies, Department of Physics of Mangalore University. Area of research include ‘Environmental Radioactivity, ‘Radiation Biophysics’ and ‘Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications’. Published more than 150 research papers in International Journals and presented more than 250 research papers in conferences. Completed five major research projects and one major research project is ongoing. Guided 13 students for PhD degree and 8 students are currently working for their PhD degree. Received ‘Commonwealth Fellowship Award’ for Post-Doctoral research in the United Kingdom during 2000-2001, ‘Wington Tiular Fellowship award’ from ACU in 2013, ‘Dr A K Ganguly Award’ from Indian Association for Radiation Protection, India in 2016, ‘Best Teacher Award’ from Mangalore University in the year 2017 and ‘Best Research Publication Award’ from Govt. of Karnataka, India, in 2019.
Yerol Narayana’s paper in the Nanomaterials Collection: Suvarna S, Das U, KC S, Mishra S, Sudarshan M, Saha KD, et al. (2017) Synthesis of a novel glucose capped gold nanoparticle as a better theranostic candidate. PLoS ONE 12(6): e0178202. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178202
What route did you take to where you currently are in your career?
YN: I obtained my Masters degree in physics from, Mangalore University in 1989 and PhD degree from the same University in 1994. I joined the Physics Department of Mangalore University in 1995 as Assistant Professor and subsequently became Professor in 2010. I have done my Post-doctoral research at BGS, UK during 2000-01 under the commonwealth fellowship and subsequently at University of Stirling, UK in 2014 under Wighton-Titular Fellowship. Currently I am working as Professor of Physics at Mangalore University.
How important are open science practices in your field? Do you have any success stories from your own research of sharing or reusing code, data, protocols, open hardware, interacting with preprints, or something else?
YN: Open science practices are very useful in any field of scientific research. In my field, open access to published scientific materials have helped in a big way in designing experiments, data analysis and furtherance of research.
If you could dream really big, is there a particular material, function or material property that seems far away at the moment, but you think could be attained in the future?
YN: At present the major challenge in Radiotherapy is the radio-resistance of tumor cells and protecting the normal cells. Researchers are working on a concept of multiple therapy i.e. simultaneous chemotherapy, immunotherapy, hyperthermia therapy and radiotherapy to overcome the radio-resistance and it has been proved to be effective. Live tumor imaging is another big challenge. Some nanoparticles have shown potential to improve the aforesaid individual treatment and imaging techniques. At present, individual nanomaterials are being tried for treatment and imaging. The usage of multiple nanomaterials simultaneously would not be safe as their unique interaction mechanism may create unforeseen problems. Therefore, we need a single nanomaterial that is capable of supporting multiple therapy and live imaging to reduce the side effects and to assure safety. We believe that it will be a reality in the near future.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by contributors are solely those of individual contributors, and not necessarily those of PLOS.