Latest News Releases 14 September

Gut microbiota influences the ability to lose weight in humans, according to new research. The findings were published this week in mSystems, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.  “Your gut microbiome can help or cause resistance to weight loss and this opens up the possibility to try to alter the gut microbiome to impact weight loss,” said lead study author Christian Diener, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.

Researchers have discovered a material that is only four atoms thick and allows for the study of the motion of charged particles in only two dimensions. Such studies could lead to pivotal discoveries in solid electrolytes for batteries and other applications.

An international collaboration has identified what may be the oldest work of art, a sequence of hand and footprints discovered on the Tibetan Plateau.

Hospitalized patients with opioid use disorder died at a rate comparable to those who suffered heart attacks within a year of hospital discharge, according to a new study from Oregon Health & Science University. The study is the first to characterize the rate at which people with opioid use disorder died a year after they leave the hospital.

Yan Cui, PhD, associate professor in the UTHSC Department of Genetics, Genomics, and Informatics, recently received a $1.7 million grant from the National Cancer Institute for a study titled “Algorithm-based prevention and reduction of cancer health disparity arising from data inequality.” Dr. Cui’s project aims to prevent and reduce health disparities caused by ethnically-biased data in cancer-related genomic and clinical omics studies. His objective is to establish a new machine learning paradigm for use with multiethnic clinical omics data.

The study, published in Genome Medicine, found that predicting a patient's future rheumatoid arthritis prognosis could be possible by zeroing in on the trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that inhabit their gastrointestinal tract, known as the gut microbiome. The findings suggest that gut microbes and a patient's outcome of rheumatoid arthritis are connected.

Net of history, infant and postneonatal mortality rates are substantively higher under Republican-controlled state legislatures than under non-Republican–controlled ones, according to a new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier. Findings suggest that effects may be greater for Black infants than for White infants.