Gizmorama - March 25, 2015

Good Morning,

Allergy season seems like it's going to get a little longer. Research has shown that air pollutants that are linked to global warming are making airborne allergens much more potent.

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Air pollutants may bolster airborne allergens --*
DENVER (UPI) - New research suggests a pair of air pollutants linked with global warming may bolster the potency of airborne allergens. As higher temperatures become the norm, so might runny noses and itchy eyes.

Researchers have previously theorized that climate change could heighten the strength of allergens. But the new study, for the first time, highlights the chemical mechanism that scientists believe are making allergens more prevalent and powerful.

The new research was presented Monday at the annual American Chemical Society conference, held this week in Denver. The findings finger rising levels of nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone as the main culprits in facilitating growing allergy problems. Motor vehicle traffic is one of the most common sources of nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone. Ozone is one of the main components of smog. The two gases appear to prompt chemical changes in the efficacy of common allergens.

"Our research is just a starting point, but it does begin to suggest how chemical modifications in allergenic proteins occur and how they may affect allergenicity," Ulrich Poschl, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said in a press release.

Using their understanding of how airborne chemicals interact, Poschl and his colleagues constructed a computer model to predict how increasing levels of nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone would affect a common birch pollen allergen called Bet v I.

The model showed that ozone oxidizes an amino acid called tyrosine, aiding the allergen's protein production. More than just stimulate protein proliferation, ozone's presence sets off a chemical reaction that encourages protein binding. As these proteins bind, they become more potent.

The model also predicted that NO2 alters the polarity and binding capabilities of Bet v 1 proteins. Together with O3, the two gases may make allergens provoke an increasingly strong immune response -- especially in humid environments suffering from smog problems.

"Our research is showing that chemical modifications of allergenic proteins may play an important role in the increasing prevalence of allergies worldwide," said researcher partner Christopher Kampf. "With rising levels of these pollutants we will have more of these protein modifications, and in turn, these modifications will affect the allergenic potential of the protein."


*-- Scientists engineer faster-growing trees ideal for biofuel --*
ATHENS, Ga. (UPI) - Most genetic manipulation efforts have been trained on cash crops and flowers, but trees are big business too, and designing them to work better for what the market demands is important work.

Scientists at the University of Georgia recently showed that the manipulation of a single gene in a hardwood tree species makes it grow faster and break down into fuel more easily.

The growth rate increase was a surprise. Researchers at Georgia were focused on weakening the species' defenses to enzymes and chemicals used to draw out the sugars used to create biofuels. They were able to zero in on a gene called GAUT12.1, which reduces xylan and pectin production, important components of the protective cell walls in plants.

"This research gives us important clues about the genes that control plant structures and how we can manipulate them to our advantage," study co-author Debra Mohnen, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Georgia, explained in a press release.

"The difficulty of breaking down the complicated plant cell wall is a major obstacle to the cost-effective production of biofuels, and this discovery may pave the way for new techniques that make that process more economically viable," Mohnen added.

In the lab, researchers engineered 11 transgenic trees, with genomic presence of GAUT12.1 diminished by approximately 50 percent.

"Our experiments show that the trees we created were less recalcitrant, meaning that it would be easier to extract sugars from the plant cell walls," said lead study author Ajaya Biswal, an assistant research scientist in Mohnen's lab. "But we were particularly happy to see how quickly these trees grew compared to what one would observe in with the wild type."

The trees grew especially fast. Eastern cottonwoods, the employed species, are already prized for their rapid growth. The transgenic trees matured even faster -- boasting a 12 to 52 percent increase in height and a 12 to 44 percent increase in diameter when compared to the control group.

"We've already learned a lot from this process, but we are confident that we can expand and improve on our research to achieve even better biomass and understanding of how it is produced," Mohnen concluded.

The study was published recently in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels.

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