The case is a good reminder of the importance of working across disciplines and administrative barriers using the One Health strategy to more fully understand and address the links between animal, human and plant health and the environment, says Wondwossen Gebreyes, executive director of The Ohio State University’s Global One Health initiative (GOHi). One Health is a massive global undertaking characterized by widespread collaboration, and its relevance to individuals can be hard to explain.

Describing an E. coli outbreak from the point of view of those affected is an effective way to communicate to the public about how human, animal and environmental interactions can lead to disease, according to Barbara Kowalcyk, assistant professor of food science and technology at Ohio State.

Presenting at the One Health Day Symposium held at Ohio State earlier this month, Kowalcyk was part of a panel of experts discussing strategies for how to explain the implications of One Health to lay audiences at home and abroad.

“A tool I use a lot is storytelling. It’s effective for communicating science,” Kowalcyk told attendees.

Food safety is among the significant world problems that the One Health movement is trying to solve, along with antimicrobial resistance, zoonotic diseases that spread between animals and humans, climate change and environmental toxins.

GOHi leaders held the symposium to bring the local and global community together for an update on the initiative’s research, training and outreach efforts and in recognition of One Health Day, observed annually on Nov. 3.

Presentations made by representatives from Ohio State, state and federal agencies, and international partners reflected the various threats posed to human health and the environment as well as the university’s reach beyond U.S. borders to conduct training, field research and outreach seeking solutions to those concerns.

Liva Rakotondraibe, an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at Ohio State, reported on his development of a plant-based compound designed to control mosquitoes that transmit the Zika virus. This is the kind of research that has broad appeal globally and particularly in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, where biodiversity is high and herbal medicines are commonly used, but shortages in infrastructure and personnel with drug discovery expertise hinder production of medications.

“Why do we still struggle in the 21st century to make medicine available for Africans? It requires human capacity,” said Abebaw Fekadu, head of the Center for Drug Development & Therapeutics for Africa. “We have medical experts but not technicians to run the work in pharmaceutical companies. We have universities but no one to transfer discoveries to the market.”

One of GOHi’s major objectives is capacity-building to increase the number of professionals in partner nations with the skills to train new health-care practitioners, drug and vaccine developers, educators and leaders. In these mutually beneficial collaborations, Ohio State faculty and students conduct highly relevant research, gain clinical skills and enhance their own training capabilities.

The symposium highlighted Connect and Collaborate, an Ohio State initiative that funds and advises teams of university and community representatives to develop partnerships that provide sustainable benefits to the community while advancing strategic and scholarly priorities of teaching, research and service.

Connect and Collaborate grant recipient Barbara Piperata, associate professor of anthropology at Ohio State, has partnered with faculty colleagues Jiyoung Lee in environmental health and Rebecca Garabed in veterinary preventive medicine to lead a study in a rural Nicaraguan community. The team is analyzing how poor water quality and regular contact with livestock affect the balance of bacteria in children’s guts, hoping to determine whether these conditions contribute to diarrheal diseases that cause infant deaths in developing countries. The goal is to put the findings into practice in rural populations around the world.

“What we really try to do through Connect and Collaborate is plug in people who hadn’t thought to connect with each other,” said Stephen Myers, associate vice provost for outreach and engagement. “We bring together a huge group of funding partners on the front end and work with teams to build meaningful partnerships around the premise that we can’t operate in a silo if we’re going to be relevant and innovative and have great impact.”

GOHi, in fact, grew out of an Ohio State grant-funded partnership launched in 2010 with academic institutions, government organizations and service agencies in Eastern Africa to create sustainable collaborations in teaching, research and outreach aligned around the One Health approach. In addition to its campuswide office at Ohio State, GOHi is now a registered nongovernmental organization with a regional office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and is advised by an external board of 14 global leaders.

“The most powerful thing about GOHi is that it is built on relationships between people and organizations across the globe driven to make the world a better place for everyone,” Gebreyes said. “Connecting at this symposium gives us the opportunity to share information, celebrate successes and network to develop even more impactful partnerships.”

In a new study, a team of researchers at The Ohio State University traced the animals’ genetic history back 3.4 million years and found some head-scratching details – primarily that they seem to have gone for millions of years without any DNA contributions from male salamanders and still have managed to persist. The research appears in the journal Evolution.

First, a bit about the unisexual Ambystoma salamander: They’re female, and they reproduce mainly through cloning and the occasional theft of another salamander species’ sperm, which the males of sexual species deposit on leaves and twigs and the like. When this happens, it stimulates egg production and the borrowed species’ genetic information is sometimes incorporated into the genome of the unisexual salamanders, a process called kleptogenesis.

Scientists who study these amphibians and their relatives, which are also called mole salamanders, have theorized that the theft of sperm is part of what has kept the unisexuals around so long. If all they ever did was clone themselves, biologists reason, they’d be vulnerable to all kinds of problems that unfold when you don’t mix up the DNA pool and would disappear from the earth fairly quickly.

Going into the study, the Ohio State team figured this sperm-borrowing happened with regularity throughout history, said study co-author H. Lisle Gibbs, a professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology.

But findings revealed that the salamanders rarely dip into the other-species pool for genetic variation.

“This research shows that millions of years went by where they weren’t taking DNA from other species, and then there were short bursts where they did it more frequently,” said Rob Denton, who led the project as an Ohio State graduate student and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut.

“Surprisingly, it doesn’t look like they’re suffering any ill genetic effects. It’s a mysterious scenario that an animal can avoid sexual reproduction for millions of years and not suffer the consequences of that.”

Using newly available technologies and a novel and complex approach to sequence and evaluate about 100 DNA samples from the salamanders, the Ohio State researchers developed a genetic blueprint for what unfolded in the last 3.4 million years.

“When interbreeding happens, or there are adaptations to new changing environmental conditions, that all gets captured in the patterns of their genetic variation,” Denton said.

Under normal circumstances in nature, one would expect these salamanders to be long-gone, Gibbs said.

“Most asexual lineages blink out after 100,000 years. We think these have been around for 5 million years,” he said.

A puzzling detail that emerged in the study is that the sampling of DNA from other species appears to have increased in frequency in recent times, he said.

“The reasons for this are sort of tantalizing, and make you wonder: Did this happen because of some sort of environmental change or specific interactions with other species? We don’t know those answers but now we have some provocative questions,” Denton said.

He also noted that the evolutionary history of the unisexual salamander is far different from the history of other unisexual species, such as Amazon mollies.

“The mollies live fast and die hard, in less than a year, but these salamanders live slow and for long periods of time, into their 20s and 30s. And they reproduce every few years,” Denton said.

“These salamanders are just sort of plodding through evolutionary time doing strange and surprising things.”

The researchers noted that the study looked only at salamander DNA samples from Ohio and Michigan, so it’s unclear if the same patterns would be seen throughout Eastern North America and Canada, where the unisexual Ambystoma is also common.

Gibbs said it’s possible that this research could inform other areas of study, including plant science, because many plants are – like the unisexual salamanders – polyploid organisms. That means that they have more than two sets of chromosomes.

“If we can find patterns in common with these plants and animals, it would help us understand how these organisms evolve and how the molecular machinery of species with more than two sets of chromosomes works,” Gibbs said.

Ohio State graduate student Ariadna Morales Garcia also worked on the study.

The National Science Foundation supported this research.

Researchers at The Ohio State University believe we can learn from nature’s design of the mosquito to create a painless microneedle for medical purposes.

“Mosquitoes must be doing something right if they can pierce our skin and draw blood without causing pain,” said Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State.

“We can use what we have learned from mosquitoes as a starting point to create a better microneedle.”

In a recently published paper, Bhushan and his colleagues reported on their detailed analysis of the mosquito’s proboscis – the part that feeds on us. They identified four keys to how the insects pierce us without pain: use of a numbing agent; a serrated design to the “needle”; vibration during the piercing; and a combination of soft and hard parts on the proboscis.

“We can incorporate all of these elements into a microneedle design,” Bhushan said. “Right now, needles are very simple. There hasn’t been much innovation and we think there’s a way to try something different.”

The study was jointly led by Bhushan and Navin Kumar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar. Ohio State doctoral student Dev Gurera is also a co-author. Their results are published online in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials.

Bhushan has long used nature as a guide to creating better products, including high-tech surfaces inspired by butterfly wings and better fake leather and waterproof coatings inspired by plants.

For this study, the researchers extensively reviewed work already done by entomologists about mosquitoes, but with a particular focus.

“We used our engineering background to characterize the parts of the mosquito to figure out how they may contribute to painless piercing,” he said.

In addition, the researchers analyzed the outer cover of the proboscis, called the labrum, on female Aedes vexan mosquitoes, which is the most common mosquito in North America.

They used a technique called nanoindentation to probe how hard and stiff the tip of the labrum was in seven different places. They found that the labrum was softest near the tip and edges and became stiffer and harder farther in and up the labrum.

“This is important because a softer and more compliant tip may cause less pain when it pierces the skin because it deforms the skin less,” Bhushan said.

That was one of the four keys to painless piercing, according to the researchers. They identified the other three through their analysis of existing studies.

Another key is the fact that the part of the proboscis that actually draws blood – called the fascicle – has a serrated design, like a saw. That may sound painful, but it is helpful because it makes for easier insertion. The fascicle also vibrates as it is inserted, which also helps lessen the force needed to pierce skin.

Other research has shown that mosquitoes use an insertion force that is three times lower than the lowest reported insertion force for an artificial needle, which could be the result of the vibration and serrated design, Bhushan said.

The final key to pain-free piercing is the mosquito’s use of a numbing agent. Once the proboscis is inserted, the insect releases saliva, which contains a protein that lessens pain.

Based on these findings, Bhushan envisions a microneedle with two needles inside. One would immediately inject a numbing agent. The second needle would draw the blood or inject the drug. This second needle, like the fascicle of the mosquito, would have a serrated design and be most flexible and softer at the tip and sides. It would also vibrate as it is inserted.

Bhushan said that a microneedle like this would be more expensive than a traditional needle and probably could not be used for such needs as pumping intravenous fluids or drawing a large amount of blood.

But it could be useful for children or adults who are particularly phobic about the use of needles.

“We have the materials and knowledge to create a microneedle like this,” Bhushan said. “The next step is to find the funding support to create and test such a device.”

New research from The Ohio State University found that mice housed in groups had better memories and healthier brains than animals that lived in pairs.

The discovery bolsters a body of research in humans and animals that supports the role of social connections in preserving the mind and improving quality of life, said lead researcher Elizabeth Kirby, an assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience and member of the Center for Chronic Brain Injury at Ohio State. 

“Our research suggests that merely having a larger social network can positively influence the aging brain,” said Kirby, who is a member of the Neurological Institute at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.Her research appears in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“We know that in humans there’s a strong correlation between cognitive health and social connections, but we don’t know if it’s having a group of friends that’s protecting people or if it’s that people with declining brain health withdraw from their human connections,” Kirby said.

This study was designed to answer that hard-to-crack question with an animal model.

Some mice lived in pairs, which Kirby refers to as the “old-couple model.” Others were housed for three months with six other roommates, a scenario that allows for “pretty complex interactions.”

The mice were 15 months to 18 months old during the experiment – a time of significant natural memory decline in the rodent lifespan.

“It’s like mouse post-retirement age. If they drove, they’d be forgetting where the keys are or where they parked the car more often,” Kirby said.

In tests of memory, the group-housed mice fared better. 

One test challenged the mice to recognize that a toy, such as a plastic car, had moved to a new location. A mouse with good brain health will gravitate toward the novelty of something that has been relocated.

“With the pair-housed mice, they had no idea that the object had moved. The group-housed mice were much better at remembering what they’d seen before and went to the toy in a new location, ignoring another toy that had not moved,” Kirby said.

In another common maze-based memory test, mice are placed on a well-lit round table with holes, some of which lead to escape hatches. Their natural tendency is to look for the dark, unexposed and “safe” escape routes.

Both groups of mice improved their escape-route search strategies with practice – but the research team was struck by the differences in the groups’ response to repeated tests, Kirby said.

The “couples” mice didn’t get faster at the test when it was repeated over the course of a day.

“But over the course of many days, they developed a serial-searching strategy where they checked every hole as quickly as possible. It’d be like walking as quickly as possible through each row of a parking lot to look for your car rather than trying to remember where your car actually is and walk to that spot,” Kirby said.

The group-housed mice improved with each trial, though.

“They seemed to try to memorize where the escape hatches are and walk to them directly, which is the behavior we see in healthy young mice,” Kirby said. “And that tells us that they’re using the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is really important for good memory function.”

The serial searching employed by the pair-housed mice is simpler, easier and doesn’t use that part of the brain, she said.

In humans, mice and many other animals, brain function in the hippocampus markedly declines with age, even in the absence of dementia. Exercise and social ties are known to preserve memory in this region in people, Kirby said.

After the housing experiment, the researchers examined the brain tissue of the mice and found increased inflammation in the pair-housed mice – biological evidence of eroded cognitive health.

“The group-housed mice had fewer signs of this inflammation, meaning that their brains didn’t look as ‘old’ as those that lived in pairs,” Kirby said.

The researchers also looked for evidence of new neuron growth in the hippocampus and found no differences between the groups.

Previous research in this area has primarily focused on mice that have highly enriched environments with lots of toys and opportunities for exercise and compared them with mice without as much to do.

This study goes further by showcasing differences that appear to be due to socialization alone, Kirby said. Future research should explore the molecular explanations for the connection between socialization and improved memory and brain health, she said.

Kirby said that people who are aging would do well to consider how their choices about where to live might impact their ability to be social.

“Something as basic as how long it takes to drive or walk to a friend’s house can make a big difference as we get older,” she said.

“A lot of people end up isolated not by choice, but by circumstance. ‘Over the river and through the woods’ might be fun for the kids, but it’s probably not so great for Grandma,” Kirby said.

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Bryon Smith and Xinyue Yao.

**DOWNLOAD MULTIMEDIA HERE:http://bit.ly/2s8jzex

Researchers at The Ohio State University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands collaborated to better understand the new virus and its potential reach. Their study, the first to point to possible transmission of this virus between species, appears online in the journal PNAS.

Porcine deltacoronavirus was first identified in 2012 in pigs in China, but it was not associated with disease. It was first detected in the United States in 2014 during a diarrhea outbreak in Ohio pigs and has since been detected in various countries. Young, infected pigs experience acute diarrhea and vomiting. The disease can be fatal. As of yet, no human cases have been documented, but scientists are concerned about the possibility.

“Before it was found in pigs – including in the Ohio outbreak – it had only been found in various birds,” said study senior author Linda Saif, an investigator in Ohio State’s Food Animal Health Research Program at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), in Wooster.

“We’re very concerned about emerging coronaviruses and worry about the harm they can do to animals and their potential to jump to humans,” said Saif, a distinguished university professor of veterinary preventive medicine.

Emergence of the new virus is especially worrisome to veterinary and public-health experts because of its similarity to the life-threating viruses responsible for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) outbreaks.

The potential for a virus to jump from one species to another is highly dependent on its ability to bind to receptors on the cells of the animal or human, said lead researcher Scott Kenney, an assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine based in the Food Animal Health Research Program at OARDC.

“A receptor is like a lock in the door. If the virus can pick the lock, it can get into the cell and potentially infect the host,” he said.

This study looked at a particular cellular receptor called aminopeptidase N that the researchers suspected might be involved.

“We know from other coronaviruses that these receptors on the cells are used and that they’re found in the respiratory and digestive tracts of a number of different animals,” Kenney said. “Now we know that this new virus could go into cells of different species, including humans.”

Saif said it’s important to recognize that, for now, the only known infection in humans and other species is in the laboratory, using cultured cells.

Their investigation confirmed that the virus could bind to the receptor in pigs, which was not a big surprise.

But it also was able to bind to the receptor in human cells, and to cells from cats and chickens.

“From that point, it’s just a matter of whether it can replicate within the cells and cause disease in those animals and humans,” Kenney said.

Added Saif, “This doesn’t prove that this virus can infect and cause disease in these other species, but that’s something we obviously want to know.”

She said the next step in understanding this virus and its potential for human infection will be a study looking for antibodies in the blood that would serve as evidence that the pig virus has already infected people.

“We now know for sure that porcine deltacoronavirus can bind to and enter cells of humans and birds. Our next step is to look at susceptibility – can sick pigs transmit their virus to chickens, or vice versa, and to humans?” Saif said.

In 2002 and 2003, a SARS outbreak that began in China was linked to more than 8,000 cases and 774 deaths in 37 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Scientists have since discovered that SARS originated in bats before spreading to people. An ongoing MERS outbreak in Saudi Arabia has led to more than 1,800 cases and more than 700 deaths, according to the WHO. The virus has been found in camels, and some of the infected people have had close contact with the animals.

This study was supported by ZonMW (The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development).

Ohio State researchers Kwonil Jung and Moyasar Alhamo also worked on the study.

But new research shows there’s likely a useful tradeoff to calmly accepting these parasite ants into the fold: They have weaponry that’s effective against their host ants and a more menacing intruder ant. The study appears online in the journal Animal Behaviour

Rachelle Adams, an ant expert at The Ohio State University, wanted to better understand the dynamics of the symbiotic relationship between parasitic Megalomyrmex symmetochus ants and Sericomyrmex amabilis hosts.

The host ants spend their lives farming fungus. The party crashers come in, don’t contribute to the work and eat both fungus and ant larvae. This lopsided arrangement goes on for years.

When they began the study, Adams and her collaborators knew that there were some obvious explanations for such behavior in nature. It could be that the parasites smell like the hosts and therefore go unnoticed, a situation called “mimicry.” It could be that they smell like nothing and are essentially invisible intruders, a strategy called “insignificance.”

But when the researchers analyzed the odiferous hydrocarbons on the ants’ bodies – the ant world’s way of cueing the insects into whether they’re encountering a nest mate or an outsider – they found that neither of these explanations told the entire story. The compounds on the intruders’ backs were subdued, but that didn’t seem to account for the accepting behavior of the host ants.

Instead, the host/parasite relationship appears to be built on mutual protection from a more fearsome foe, said Adams, an assistant professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology.

The parasitic ants possess a volatile alkaloid-based venom that the host ants detect from a distance. The parasite ants’ potent chemical weaponry is known to work against a more-lethal invader ant.

“It’s likely a scenario where the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” she said.

To better understand the interplay between the ants, the researchers introduced the parasitic Megalomyrmex ant to Sericomyrmex host ants in a laboratory-controlled face-off.

“When confronted with a parasitic ant, the farmer ant will at first lunge at the intruder, but then instead of biting, she’ll pull away and bow her head down, in a submissive response.”

There are more than 250 species of these fungus-farming ants in the United States and in Central and South America, she said. The ants studied in this research live in Panama.

“These fungus farmers start little farms and care for the fungus garden by feeding it and protecting it from pathogens,” Adams said.

The crops are bountiful – more than what the host colony needs – so when the parasites invade it doesn’t cause a tremendous amount of stress to either the fungus or ants, she said.

And while they do eat some of the ants’ protein-rich brood, they don’t kill the queen and the host colony remains healthy.

Going forward, Adams hopes to discover whether or not this parasite-tolerance behavior is transmitted from parent to offspring colonies. Not all Sericomyrmex amabilis colonies live with parasites in their midst. Scientists estimate that about three-quarters of colonies host parasites.

“From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re interested in the ongoing relationships between hosts and parasites and what drives these seemingly unfair cohabitations,” Adams said.

“We now know that we need to not just consider hydrocarbons but consider other ant-derived chemicals that influence their behavior.”

Other researchers involved in this study were Alexandria DeMilto of Ohio State, Stefanie Neupert of the University of Konstanz in Germany and Falko Drijfhout and Simon Speller of Keele University in the United Kingdom.

The ant video above can be downloaded  here. A video of Rachelle Adams explaining her work can be found here.