Department of Biology Archives - News@91��ɫ

We should all ditch the clocks, or, at the very least, Daylight Saving: 91��ɫ expert

egamulin — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:15:08 +0000

Biology prof available to comment to media on internal clocks, how our bodies are adversely affected by time switches and potential ways to mitigate

Biology Porf. Patricia Lakin-Thomas is an expert on daily circadian rhythms.

TORONTO, Oct 30, 2024 – This Sunday our bodies will get a long-needed pause from the detrimental effects of Daylight Saving Time. With a vast body of research showing the various health risks associated with the springtime switch, a 91��ɫ expert on biological clocks says the time is long overdue to make that pause permanent.

“When we spring forward, we lose an hour of sleep and we're also moving our social clock away from the sun, which our body wants to follow. So it's like we're making ourselves an hour jet-lagged every day. Your body doesn't immediately adapt to that and can actually lead to some negative health impacts,” says Faculty of Science Professor , an expert in biological clocks who studies the molecular and biochemical basis for circadian rhythmicity. Lakin-Thomas says Daylight Saving is shown to contribute to higher numbers of car accidents, heart attacks and strokes and workplace injuries. Lakin-Thomas also sits on the board of the Canadian Society for Chronobiology, which represents scientists across Canada who work on circadian rhythms, who call for Daylight Saving Time to be ditched forever.

“Ideally we would all follow the sun, scrap our clocks, and do what they did in the Middle Ages, before we had regulated clocks, do what farmers do, and get up with the sun. People in cultures that don't have electricity don't bother with clocks. That would be ideal. We can't do that, but we can get rid of Daylight Saving.”

Lakin-Thomas is available to comment on:

Social clocks versus body clocks and why spring forward is much harder than fall back
Why the first light of dawn is crucial for keeping our internal clocks in sync
Chronic and acute effects of having your internal clock misaligned and how Daylight Saving Time comes into play

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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Unexpected diversity of light-sensing proteins goes beyond vision in frogs

egamulin — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 14:31:34 +0000

91��ɫ U prof fills gaps in current understanding of opsins responsible for circadian rhythms

TORONTO, June 17, 2024 — This Thursday marks the first day of summer in the Northern hemisphere, the longest day of the year. Living beings have evolved over many millennia to react to varying amounts of sunlight exposure, governing everything from sleep-wake cycles, seasonal changes and more, but the proteins responsible for responding to different light environments for non-visual purposes are an under explored area of science. , led by a 91��ɫ Faculty of Science professor and a former 91��ɫ researcher, found that frogs have maintained a shocking number, and diversity, of these light-sensing proteins, called opsins, over evolutionary time.

Assistant Professor Ryan Schott

“We, and other animals, have many different types of nonvisual opsins and they can be present in different parts of the body including the eyes, brain, and skin. Right now, the days are getting longer as we approach summer and nonvisual opsins are involved in how our bodies respond to those differences,” says in the Department of Biology & Centre for Vision Research. “We found that frogs, despite being a largely nocturnal group, actually maintain more of these nonvisual opsin genes than any other group that is ancestrally nocturnal.”

Nonvisual opsins are found throughout the animal kingdom. In humans and other mammals, information about lighting conditions enters through the eye and is sent to the pineal gland, which will respond to light by suppressing or secreting hormones. This is an indirect process, but frogs still have a directly light sensing “third eye” that others in the animal kingdom lost long ago.

“There are several nonvisual opsins present in that organ in the top of the head, and that is going to help them regulate their day and night cycles,” says Schott. “Something interesting we found though was that most of these opsins are also still expressed in the eye, so the eye is still having a large role to play in light detection functions that aren't directly related to vision.”

Frogs, the researchers said, provide an opportunity to study the proteins under diverse ecological conditions. To investigate this diversity in frogs, the researchers combined genetic data from transcriptomes — the genetic sequences of all genes expressed in an organ — from the eyes of 81 frog species with publicly available genomes and multi-tissue transcriptome data from 21 additional species. These 102 species provided a broad sampling of frogs with different ecological adaptations.

“Frogs are cool because different species can live in the water, on land, in trees, or even underground,” says former Schott and Bell lab researcher Jack Boyette, lead author on the paper and current doctoral student at Penn State. “This gets further complicated by things like activity period — a lot of frog species are active at night, but some are active during the daytime. As you can imagine, all these different habitats have very distinct light environments, which has implications for the evolution and the function of sensory systems.”

The researchers say several groups, including mammals and snakes, have lost many opsin genes through the course of evolution, which might be explained by going through an evolutionary period where they lived nocturnally and the ability to sense light was not as important.

Frogs are also an ancestrally nocturnal group, so the researchers expected to find reduced nonvisual opsin diversity in frogs. Remarkably, the frog genomes assessed in this study contained all 18 ancestral vertebrate nonvisual opsins. This surprising finding may result from complex life histories.

“Within the lifetime of a single animal, many frog species transition between drastically different light environments,” Boyette said. “Even though a lot of adult frogs are nocturnal, that's not necessarily true of the larval tadpoles.”

Additionally, the researchers identified genetic differences in opsins between groups with differing ecologies, life histories, and body types. This could potentially indicate that frog nonvisual opsins have adapted to specific lifestyles or environments, similar to findings in Schott’s last study which looked at the visual opsins in frogs’ eyes.

Other members of the research team include Rayna C Bell, California Academy of Sciences and National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; Matthew K Fujita and Kate N Thomas, University of Texas at Arlington; Jeffrey W Stretcher and David J Gower, Natural History Museum of London.

The findings were published today in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Schott says this study has given first hints about how opsin genes whose functions are currently unknown might operate in frogs and they’ve identified a candidate gene that may be involved in regulating seasonal breeding in frogs.

“We still need a better understanding of the specific functions of each type of nonvisual opsin and how those functions have evolved and adapted in different animals, like the frogs in our study, to meet their specific needs,” says Schott. “It's a really exciting step towards a better understanding these seasonal patterns and how frogs and other animals use light in different ways to regulate their biological functions.”

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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What you need to know about the whooping cough in Ontario

egamulin — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 15:35:45 +0000

The post What you need to know about the whooping cough in Ontario appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

The life aquatic: a game changer for frog vision, but little difference between night and day, 91��ɫ-led study finds

egamulin — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:09:01 +0000

Ancestral legacy and continued present-day advantages may explain why diurnal frog species kept genes adapted to night vision

April 4, 2024, Toronto – Frogs display a remarkable diversity of species as a whole, but does the same hold true for their visual abilities? led by 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Science sought to answer this question by collaborating with researchers in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, French Guiana, Gabon, Seychelles, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States, to get a sample of a diverse array of frogs to study the visual pigments found in their eyes.

Frogs display a large amount of diversity in their eye pigments, but the study did not find a large difference between nocturnal and diurnal frogs.

Prof. Ryan Schott

“Through this large international collaborative effort, we were able to study the pigments of frogs from all over the world who have adapted to myriad environments, and for the most part, we found this diversity is ‘reflected’ in the pigments in frogs’ eyes,” says research lead and Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology Ryan Schott.

“We saw this pattern of visual evolution being driven by differences in species that are either aquatic as adults, or that are living on the ground, or trees. On the other hand, we didn’t find much of a difference with the small groups of frogs that have adapted to daytime conditions as opposed to their nocturnal cousins.”

The study, published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution, examined the frog visual system by looking at the visual pigments and other genes in the eyes of a diverse selection of frogs living in vastly different light environments. Visual pigments are the molecules in the photoreceptor cells of the retina that are responsible for detecting light and then sending signals to the brain to perceive that light.

“We humans, as well as many animals, have these pigments in our eyes that actually absorb and respond to light,” explains Schott, also with the Centre for Vision Research at 91��ɫ and former research associate with the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “It's the differences in these pigments that allow us to see at night versus in the day, and allow us to perceive colour differences. So, we were interested in how these pigments have evolved in these frogs in different light environments.”

Schott, who studies the visual system of vertebrates in his lab located at 91��ɫ’s Keele Campus, has previously looked at vision changes of southern leopard frogs as they metamorphose from aquatic tadpoles to frogs living on land, and found a lot of differences. However, the lack of difference between the diurnal and nocturnal frogs came as a surprise. While it is possible that differences were not captured in the method of research, Schott says their evolutionary heritage may provide an alternate explanation.

“Most frogs are nocturnal, and so ancestrally, they really have this visual system that's adapted to these nocturnal environments,” he says. “This is probably suggesting that even the diurnal animals need these adaptations to survive because of course, they could say, get woken up in the night by a predator and then need to use their visual system to escape.”

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ’s fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario’s Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contacts: Emina Gamulin, 91��ɫ Media Relations and External Communications, 437-217-6362, egamulin@yorku.ca

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Would stopping Daylight Saving Time help your natural body clock?

roshanp — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 15:31:11 +0000

91��ɫ biological rhythms expert available to explain how internal clock works

TORONTO, October 30, 2019 – When Canadians turn back their clocks one hour at 2 a.m. this Sunday, November 3, many will experience a shock to their bodies’ internal clock much like the jet lag experienced after flying across time zones, according to , associate professor in the Department of Biology in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Science.

Lakin-Thomas is a leading expert on cell biology and chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms in living organisms, who strongly supports abolishing Daylight Saving Time.

She believes that a return of Standard Time throughout the year would be better for our health and well-being, pointing to research that shows a disrupted internal clock can cause increased rates of car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, weight gain, anxiety and workplace injuries.

Lakin-Thomas has conducted extensive research on the biological clocks that drive circadian rhythms in bacteria, plants, fungi and animals. Her goal is to describe the mechanism of a circadian clock at the molecular and biochemical level. An active member of the Canadian Society for Chronobiology, Lakin-Thomas teaches and has written or co-written more than 30 journal articles, including , published in April.

She can comment on:

What happens in human bodies during time switches for Daylight Saving Time
How internal body clocks affect our physiology and behaviour
The importance of biological clocks in our lives and what happens when they’re out of whack
How human circadian clocks work at the molecular and biochemical level
Why year-round Standard Time is better for us than year-round Daylight Saving Time

91��ɫ champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

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Is enough being done to prevent Ontario’s birds from window collision deaths?

roshanp — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 14:38:25 +0000

91��ɫ bird expert is available for comment

TORONTO, October 7, 2019 – The catastrophically high number of birds killed every year when they smash into glass windows is one of the main reasons why Canada and the United States have lost almost since 1970, according to 91��ɫ Professor .

Starting on Tuesday, October 8, 91��ɫ will be installing a bird-friendly, dot-patterned window treatment at several key sites at the university’s Keele campus to make the windows more visible to migrating birds and reduce bird deaths.

91��ɫ Professor Bridget Stutchbury

91��ɫ is one of the first universities in Ontario and among the first universities in Canada to install a bird-safety film to the windows of key older buildings known for a higher number of bird deaths. The bird-safety film has been shown to reduce bird mortality by 80 percent.

Stutchbury, a professor in the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science, and an expert on bird extinction and migratory songbird declines, leads 91��ɫ’s sustainability efforts to prevent bird deaths, along with her Masters student Lisa Horn.

An internationally-recognized expert on the ecology, behaviour and conservation of birds, Stutchbury is best known for her of the migratory behaviour of birds, in which tiny tracking devices were placed in miniature backpacks on the birds’ backs, and then retrieved a year later after migration. She has written or co-written more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles including , published last month.

Across Canada, about 25 million birds are killed each year when they accidentally fly into glass windows, while bird collisions with buildings are estimated at one to 10 million each year just in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Toronto is on a major migratory corridor and 91��ɫ, with its green landscaping and several woodlots, is a common spot for migrating birds.

Stutchbury estimates that at least 1,000 birds each year are killed by window collision at the Keele campus, which is to be expected given the many buildings and natural landscaping. She is available to explain how residents, businesses and institutions can prevent bird-window collisions, and provide insight on why birds are so highly vulnerable to reflective glass windows.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

The post Is enough being done to prevent Ontario’s birds from window collision deaths? appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

Is enough being done to prevent Ontario’s birds from window collision deaths?

roshanp — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 14:38:25 +0000

91��ɫ bird expert is available for comment

91��ɫ Professor Bridget Stutchbury

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

The post Is enough being done to prevent Ontario’s birds from window collision deaths? appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees

roshanp — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:54:30 +0000

91��ɫ to develop ‘BeeCSI’ tool to help Canada’s rapidly declining honey bees

TORONTO, September 18, 2019 – When Canada’s honey bees are thriving, they produce honey and pollinate valuable crops like blueberries, apples and hybrid canola seeds.

But the health of honey bees is declining, with more than a quarter of honey bee colonies dying each winter. These deaths have left beekeepers and government regulators struggling to find ways to quickly diagnose, manage and improve bee health.

The solution could be a new bee health diagnosis tool being created as part of a research project led by bee genomics expert Associate Professor , of 91��ɫ, along with Professor Leonard Foster, of the University of British Columbia. On October 1, they will launch a $10 million project to develop a new health assessment and diagnosis platform, supported by Ontario Genomics and Genome Canada.

“We need to think of innovative solutions to fix the bee health crisis. The current tools are just not cutting it,” said Zayed in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science.

Honey bees produce 90 million pounds of honey each year and are needed to pollinate some of Canada’s most lucrative crops. Their pollination services are valued at $5.5 billion per year in Canada alone.

The causes of bee decline are complex, variable, and difficult to identify. But beekeepers and government regulators need to rapidly identify the stressors impacting specific populations before they can make changes to improve bee health. Currently, the industry uses post-mortem analysis to test for the presence of a few known pathogens or toxins in dead colonies. These tests are often expensive, time consuming, and provide an incomplete picture of the stressors affecting bee health.

The research team is looking to modernize the industry by delivering a tool to quickly assess bee health in living colonies that would allow loss-mitigating strategies to be implemented.

“You can identify the stressors affecting a colony, not by searching for the stressor itself, but by looking for specific signatures of stress in the bee – what we call biomarkers,” explained Zayed. “The biomarker approach has a lot of potential for quickly screening stressors affecting bees before colonies decline.”

The researchers will use genomic tools to measure stressor-induced changes in bees to identify biomarkers for specific stressors. By the end of the project, the researchers envision a system where beekeepers can send their samples for biomarker testing and receive a report with both a health assessment and information on the most effective management strategies, which can then be applied in the field to improve the health of their colonies.

The research team is comprised of 22 researchers from across Canada including researchers from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), University of Manitoba, University of Guelph and University of Laval. The project is funded through Genome Canada’s Large-Scale Applied Research Project Competition: Genomics Solutions for Agriculture, Agri-food, Fisheries and Aquaculture. Funding partners include Genome Canada, AAFC, Genome British Columbia and Genome Quebec.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

The post Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees

roshanp — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:54:30 +0000

91��ɫ to develop ‘BeeCSI’ tool to help Canada’s rapidly declining honey bees

TORONTO, September 18, 2019 – When Canada’s honey bees are thriving, they produce honey and pollinate valuable crops like blueberries, apples and hybrid canola seeds.

“We need to think of innovative solutions to fix the bee health crisis. The current tools are just not cutting it,” said Zayed in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science.

The research team is looking to modernize the industry by delivering a tool to quickly assess bee health in living colonies that would allow loss-mitigating strategies to be implemented.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

The post Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees appeared first on News@91��ɫ.

Scientists discover novel genes responsible for regulating muscle cells

roshanp — Wed, 22 May 2019 13:36:42 +0000

91��ɫ research could lead to new muscle cancer therapy

TORONTO, May 22, 2019 – 91��ɫ scientists have uncovered a unique set of genes that play a role in muscle cellular gene expression and differentiation which could lead to new therapeutic targets to prevent the spread of muscle cancer.

The researchers analyzed gene networks in muscle cells and found that the Smad7 and β-catenin proteins work cooperatively inside the body to regulate muscle cell differentiation, growth and repair. When these regulatory proteins work in harmony, they control the pathway for normal gene expression, resulting in normal skeletal muscle cells.

Professor John McDermott and a team of scientists have discovered a set of genes which could lead to new muscle cancer therapy.

The study, published in the journal , indicates that a dysfunctional relationship between the Smad7 and β-catenin complex can lead to a situation of impaired muscle cell differentiation – a hallmark of some soft tissue cancers such as Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS). This rare cancer, which most often affects children, forms in soft tissue, mostly skeletal muscle tissue, and sometimes in hollow organs like the bladder or uterus.

“What happens in those rhabdomyosarcoma cells is that they have a muscle cell-like character, but the difference is that normal muscle cells stop dividing,” said , a professor in the Department of Biology in the Faculty of Science, who supervised the study and is a contributing author.

McDermott said these cells look like muscle cells, in terms of the way they function and their phenotype, but they don’t stop dividing, which is why they form tumors at various sites in the body.

“Our idea is that part of the reason why those cells are defective in the differentiation program, which would mean that they would stop dividing, is that the β-catenin complex is being degraded in those cells because of an anomaly in the signaling pathway that controls that,” said McDermott. “If we can stabilize the β-catenin and Smad7 complex in those cells, you could potentially encourage them to differentiate and stop proliferating, which would mean that you’d stop those cells from growing in the tumor.”

The research was conducted in 91��ɫ’s – the first of its kind in Canada – which focuses on the importance of skeletal muscle to the overall health and well-being of Canadians. This new molecular genetic finding could lead to strategies for cancer treatments that target these specific molecules.

The study also defines new molecular targets for therapeutic interventions in muscle wasting and cancer.

“Until you know how things work normally, it’s very hard to target anything specific, so identifying the normal function of molecules is essential before assessing abnormal function in cancer cells,” said McDermott. “This then allows therapeutic targeting of specific molecules in order to develop pharmacology to treat the condition, or in some cases pre-existing pharmacology would be used.”

The research team – led by PhD student Soma Tripathi and including Tetsuaki Miyake, a research associate and PhD – focused on understanding the role of transcription factors in orchestrating tissue-specific gene expression and differentiation. They did this by identifying DNA binding proteins that are involved in transcriptional regulation during muscle development. The study also identified new regulators of muscle regeneration which could also open doors for the pharmaceutical industry to develop new treatments to address the normal but debilitating loss of muscle in the aging population.

“Muscle regeneration is a highly complex process and is regulated by a variety of transcription factors which are essentially proteins that help turn genes on or off by binding to specific genes within the genome,” said Tripathi. “We believe two such transcription factors, Smad7 and β-catenin, play a key role in the specific pattern of gene expression required for muscle development and repair.”

Funding for the study was provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-736-2100 ext. 22097, vthomps@yorku.ca

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