 Where's my allergy pills? All right, it's allergy season, everybody! Woohoo! And it's time for twists. Nothing to sneeze at. Just a science podcast that's coming up right now. And if you have not yet subscribed to Things, make sure you hit all that subscribe and like, and make sure you get all the notifications right now! Because you want to get this every single week. This show right now is going to be the live show. We're going to edit it down a bit afterwards, and that'll go out as a podcast. So you are getting the full, unedited, warts and all version. Starting... I don't know, Justin, starting about now? Yeah. That's the moment which he can do. Starting in... Three... Two... This is... Twist. This Week in Science, episode number 829, recorded on Wednesday, June 16th, 2021. Why are bats disease vectors? Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kiki, and tonight on the show, we are going to fill your heads with filaments, microbes, and bats. But first... Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer! John Stewart recently went on the late show with Stephen Colbert and suggested COVID-19 had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. That might be true. It's possible for that to have happened. Things like that have happened before, because even a level 4 biosafety lab is only as safe as its weakest followed protocol. Also, it happens to be located in a country without a free press where the government controls information like an authoritarian cheerleader mom with next level deep fake skills. Also, it might not have. The Spanish flu of 1918 most likely started on a farm in Kansas. It just got identified in Spain. But John is an anti-farm. In fact, he has one. One of the reasons there are often emerging novel coronaviruses from East Asia is not because East Asia has an inordinate amount of labs. It's because that's where one in five humans live. Greater numbers of humans, denser urban areas leads to a higher number of novel pathogens, making the leap into humans. Add in a temperate environment with some help from global warming, another thing science is trying to save you from. And you have near constant conditions conducive to transmission. There are many thousands of coronaviruses and bat reservoirs around the world. Globally, bats represent one out of five mammal species and 40% of the mammals in East Asia. These viruses don't affect the bats, but they can be lethal to humans in extremely rare cases, which is why studying them is so important. And yes, there is a lab that studies them in Wuhan, a city with 2.5 million more people than New York City. And yeah, maybe they should put a lab like that out in the country near, say, a farm in rural New Jersey to keep them better isolated from human civilization. But what's worse, John blamed science for COVID-19, saying the pandemic was more than likely caused by science, which...stop. Anti-science talk like that is hurting America. It's why we can't get meaningful action on global warming, it's why we relied on Russian rockets to go to space for a decade, and it's why the pandemic hit the United States so hard, and why it still isn't done spreading. So stop. Stop hurting America. And think of what halting all research on viruses would even look like. We knocked out smallpox, chickenpox, measles, mumps, rubella, and polio. Remember polio? No, because you didn't have to live through it. But the people who did were losing their children to these diseases. So they fought back with science. What about AIDS? Should we end all AIDS research? It's a race for the cure, not a run from the research. And yes, working with pathogenic viruses is very dangerous. The frontline researchers who study them know this all too well. There's a constant risk that a pathogen will escape containment despite the multiple layers of precautions that are in place. And they occasionally fall ill from the very thing they are studying. It's dangerous work that scientists do while responding to these threats. But these are people who care about the experiment of humanity and keeping it viable. And the next time you want to blame science for something? Look no further then, this week in Science, coming up next. I've got the kind of mind that can't get enough. I want to learn everything on every day of the week. There's only one place to go to find the knowledge I seek. Good science to you, Kiki, and hey, where's Blair? Aw, Blair's out for tonight. She's not feeling well. So I hope you all send her some well wishes. But we are here with good science for you at this week in Science. I hope you're ready for another amazing episode. Well, full of science, because that's what we're going to talk about. All sorts of scientific stories. I have whirling filaments, plastic microbes, and I've also, at the end of the show, if we get there, I've got zebra finch songs. What did you guys do? I've got misleading research titles. Why Hoppy Beer is Good for You, Swiss Bat Viruses, and Underwater Archaeology. Fantastic. We're also going to be joined by not one, not two, but three amazing researchers who are here to talk with us about the immune systems of bats and what makes them so amazing. And we will be speaking with them in just a little bit, so stay tuned. And as we jump in the show, I just want to remind everyone that if you have not yet subscribed to this week in Science, you can find us all places podcasts are found. Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, Spreaker, TuneIn, all the places look for this week in Science. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. We're also on Instagram. And our website is twist.org. Okay, Justin, are you ready for science? Yeah? Okay, let's start with whirling dervishes in space. What? Sufis in space? How did they get up there? Yeah, no. Whirling, whirling, whirling structures in space. This is such a fun discovery. When you think of swirling and whirling objects in space, what do you think of? Well, I just think of this as slow motion, but it looks like it's spinning. It's like a galaxy. Right. Right, galaxies, they've known very slow spin to them. I don't know how fast they are moving. They might be moving really fast. Well, it's fast, but not that fast. I mean, on a galactic scale, yeah. And then we've got black holes can have some spin, pulsars have some spin. Like there are objects in space that have spin, but when the big bang occurred, spin was not really this thing that was imparted on anything. Like angular momentum was not that it was a big cloud of dust. And then the dust started congealing into things. And in that process, all sorts of structures came out of it and some of them bumped into each other and started spinning because of that. And in the structure of the universe, there are also galactic filaments. These galactic filaments, they stretch between areas of space and they contain galaxies. They contain dust and gas and everybody just kind of always went, yeah, they're filaments. They're not going to be spinning, but hey, look what you see when you actually go looking for it. Researchers just publishing in Nature Astronomy have said that they have possible observational evidence for cosmic filament spin. And so these massive filaments that contain galaxies, they're massive. Are spinning at over 200,000 kilometers per hour. Like they're spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning large scales. For those not familiar with kilometers, 200,000 kilometers is approximately the same as 200 million meters. So that's really moving. It's moving, right? These are large objects in space moving very quickly. And these researchers have said, hey, we never really thought this was a thing that spun because why would it? Why would these filaments in space actually spin? And now that they know that they do, they have discovered that, yeah, there's these big spinning filaments in space. And so the big question is why? And they don't know why. And so that is now going to be one of the big questions that they will be looking for. They think that there are powerful gravitational fields of the filaments as they pull on gas and dust and other material. And that creates shearing forces that result in spin, but they really have no idea. Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything in space that isn't spinning. Solar systems are spinning, planets are spinning, even down the atoms even have spin. Electrons have spin, everything's spinning. Why is it spinning? My mind is spinning with the possibilities. Tell me about some mice. Yeah, this is just my quick story for the night. I think these researches study published in Public Library of Science, online biology by Marcia Tuneful at the Humane Society International. They were looking at titles of stories that get picked up by popular press. And they found that if in the title you don't say mice, if you don't mention that it's a mice model, it's tremendously more likely to get picked up and run with as if it applies to humans immediately. Meaning most journalism is not reading beyond the title of the paper. Yeah, so this happens apparently a lot with Alzheimer's. Mice don't get Alzheimer's, but we have mice that can exhibit Alzheimer's-like qualities and we can do research on them. And one of the things that's also true about that research is that almost none of the studies that are done in mice translate into humans under this modelage. There's things that are learned along the way, but it's not that it will have that effect on humans. So yeah, so you have to know whether or not, because it's true at some point we're going to cure probably every disease known to mouse kind. And even some diseases that they've never been able to get will cure in mice. But it doesn't always translate into humans. However, in doing so, we learn pieces of the puzzle that we can later put together on the human model at some later date. But yeah, just leaving mice out of that title makes people think that it applies to humans immediately. So this is starting from the research itself, though. If the research doesn't have mice in the title, then journalists- In the title of the paper! Of the paper, then journalists don't report it correctly and then people reading further. It just is a bad game of telephone all down the line because people forgot to specify. But that's just- I guess. That makes me sad for the field of science journalism and makes me actually wonder- Well, I don't even know if it's science journalism. I wouldn't even put it there because it's not like these are- It's pop culture journalism. It's not even journalism. It's just pop culture. So they're not really journalists who are trained to talk about science? No, but they will appear in a local news segment, which you assume has journalists behind the scenes. So this is just part of the problem. So it's just kind of just encouraging maybe researchers to put mouse models in mice. Yeah. At the end of every paper title about what they've done with mice, dot, dot, dot, in mice. Yes. We cured cancer, dot, dot, dot, in mice. In mice. Yes. Oh my goodness. Reporters, do your work. Make it better. Sad that the scientists had to clarify that in the title. Yeah. Next story I got is out of Oregon State University. Research has found a pair of compounds originating from hops that can help prevent the buildup of fat in the liver, which is huge because apparently there's like a quarter of people in the world that have this fatty liver disease. Often it's brought about by drinking, but people who don't drink can get it as well. There's a non-hobboholic version. Yeah. 25% is made up of both of that. The good news is, hoppy beer prevents liver failure and it's now safe to over-indulge. Oh? Yeah. In the study, 60 mice were... Oh man. Ah, it's a mouse study. There you go. All right. Well, in a mouse model study, researchers showed that the compounds xanthohuml and tetrahydroxanthohuml abbreviated xan and txn can mitigate diet-induced accumulation of fat in the liver. So they gave these mouse models a low-fat diet, a high-fat diet. They supplemented some with the xan, a high-fat diet with the xan, a high-fat diet supplemented with even more, and then a high-fat diet supplemented with the txn. And they got really positive results. So this is the initial, this is the beginning of, as we often talk about, anything that's sort of medical and when you're getting that first exposure to some research, this is the first step in a mouse model to finding a possible pathway for, in the right conditions, a future drug or treatment for fatty liver. But it was some pretty positive results. In mice. Yeah, there's so often things don't work in humans when they have worked in mice and there are many reasons for that. We don't know all the reasons. We don't know all the reasons. One of the simple ones is, especially if you're talking about a compound, it could be how our microflores and metabolisms utilize or take up or distribute these compounds can be different in an animal model. I think there's lots and lots and lots of factors. However, sometimes it just works. Yeah. Yeah. So you're putting your hopes on this being one of the pieces of mouse research that makes its way very easily into humans. At this point, at this point, I'm still picturing this future where the Doogie Houser mice have inherited the earth from the remnants of humanity and they've gone back and they've read all of our research and it's just one more thing mice of the future won't have to worry about. Just one more thing. That's all. Just one more. Not in mice, but in chemistry, researchers have been working, working, working so hard to get rid of plastic, right? How do we get rid of all the plastics that we create? It's a real problem for our environment. Well, one of the kinds of plastics that is very prevalent is polyethylene plastic, PET plastics and or polyethylene terphthalate specifically is one of the types of plastic that is very abundant and is used around the world. And researchers have been trying to figure out how we can possibly use microbes to digest the plastic, turn it into something else useful for society and thus save the world from being drowned in our own plastic garbage piles. Reporting in Green Chemistry, researchers Joanna Sadler and Stephen Wallace have published their paper, microbial synthesis of vanilla from waste polyethylene terphthalate. So what they've done is they have genetically modified E. coli, which is very common bacteria that's used in laboratories around the world, and they've created a novel pathway within E. coli. They shoved a whole bunch of instructions into this bacteria that aren't normally in E. coli and they said it was very complicated to actually get all of the steps in place for this novel chemical metabolism pathway within this bacterium, but they did it. And they have in sense they have a single pot. They showed proof of concept from a plastic bottle that they picked up off the ground in wherever they are in Edinburgh. And they shoved it in the pot where they had the bacteria. They have different processes to take off the products that kill the E. coli that the E. coli don't like, but it results in the transformation of pet plastic into vanilla in a single pot. And vanilla, does this compound sound familiar to you, Justin? Can I use it in a root beer float? It's not the root beer float, no, but it's the flavoring of the ice cream that goes into a root beer float. So we can get vanilla, vanilla in the compound that creates the odor of vanilla from vanilla beans, but there is also synthetic vanilla. And synthetic vanilla can be used in food products. It can also be used in household products like candles and room sprays. It can be used in cosmetics. And the researchers think that since this is coming from this plastic waste and the process they're using, they don't know if they'll be able to make sure that it's clean enough to be food grade vanilla. You know where we used to get that flavoring. I don't think I want to know. Oh, yeah. I can't get fact checked because there's nobody else here. But I believe it came from the anal glands of beavers. No. Thank you. So I think that it came from bacteria in a plastic. Way better. Way better source. Way, way better source. Oh my goodness. Yes. So this is a very promising, new bacterial, microbially enhanced process for reducing the amount of plastics wastes that we have that will result in a beneficial compound that can be used. That is also in a lot of demand. We want people want vanilla. So this could solve two problems at once. Right. And then my final story for our opening. Did I have another study for the opening? I'm not sure that I do here. I do, I do. You do. Yeah. Okay, go for it. Yeah, this is where to go. An analysis of 18 species of bats living in Switzerland has discovered 39 different families of virus, including some with the potential of jumping to other animals, including, of course, humans. This is Isabel Hardmire, the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues presenting their findings in the open access journal plus one. It is exceedingly rare for disease causing viruses to make the switch from bats to humans. So some viruses carried by bats may jump to other animals, which then undergo changes that allow them to be transmitted to humans. So monitoring of viruses harbored by bats around the world improves our understanding and our detection of those that pose a risk to humans. So they're kind of, they did a lot of genetic analysis and they're proposing that this is the way you could just do it. You could sample bats, you could have the library that you track over time to see if anything is mutating towards a known previous pathogen. One of the things they did find was a MERS-related virus. So the MERS is the pandemic that we had back in 2012. If you don't recall that epidemic, it's because it was much more lethal than the current one. So it had a harder time spreading because it kept killing the hosts. Now the thing that they've identified that's related isn't going to do that. It would have to have some pretty big changes. But it's still enough to know that we have reservoirs across the world. And as I was talking about in the disclaimer, I didn't even know this. 20% of species on the planet are a bat or at least a mammalian species are bats. That's crazy. I didn't realize there was that bats were that prolific. I had no idea. So lots of bats, they have viruses, they don't get sick from them so we need to monitor them. And before anybody, we're going to be talking to bat people here in a minute so I probably shouldn't say too much. We should get rid of the bats. That's not the solution at all. Because if we get rid of bats, what we get instead is the mosquitoes. Other vectors of bats. We get unbridled, there's a cloud of mosquitoes who are also disease vectors but are much more annoying. I find this study interesting because it's out of Switzerland. You've got bats from different locations. And I think we always talk about bats that are in Southeast Asia. We talk about bats in China. We talk about that as being the hot spot, the hot zone. But there are bats everywhere and they live in these huge colonies all around the world. So I think that is another point of, you know, we've got these genes and we've got these various diseases. And yeah, interesting question to ask our next guests as we talk about how do we monitor and what do we know and what do we need to learn so we can protect ourselves in the future. This is This Week in Science and I would love to introduce our guests for the evening. We are joined tonight by three wonderful scientists. I would like to introduce doctors, Angelique Cortals, Liana Davalos and Diana Moreno Santian. We're going to be speaking about bat immunity. Dr. Cortals is a biomedical researcher and biological forensic anthropologist at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Davalos is professor of conservation biology at Stony Brook University's Department of Ecology and Evolution and Dr. Moreno Santian is a postdoctoral researcher at Texas Tech University. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for the invitation. I'm just really glad like those segments that you had earlier, they just kind of brought up two points like that I, you know, right here to talk about bats and to just introduce bats to this audience. You know, the first point is like when you were talking about in mice, all these studies in mice is that one of the issues, one of the key differences between mice and humans is that the mice, they have this really short lifespan, right? Like there's small animals and in mammals, smaller animals have shorter lifespan, but bats are actually an exception to that. So small bats can live long lives. So there have been bats that have been found that are the size of a mouse. You know, they weigh even less than a mouse like 10 grams, which is a very, very small bat that have been found to live for 40 years. 40? 40 years, 40. 40 years. Yes, yes, exactly. So they have this extended lifespan. So we're hoping like through a large consortium that we're part of called bat 1k, we're actually, we're actually saying, well, the genomes of bats are going to help us find out the secret of Mabelian youth, right? Of the ability for bats to, despite being really small, so in mammals, you know, larger animals, elephants live longer lives, whales live longer lives, but bats also for their size, they live longer lives. And if you ever need to advocate for bats, you just need to tell your audience that if there were no bats, there would be no tequila. That's right. The agave flower, right? And also that if you kill bats, you're going to kill the, the answer to the eternal youth. That's what we want. And tequila. So you can't, we can't do without it. Everyone has priorities. Everyone has different priorities. What's the point of life if you no longer have youth and tequila? Exactly. Oh my goodness. Angelique, we spoke almost a decade ago now. It's amazing that so much time has passed. And at the time you had published a paper on multiple sclerosis and you were, so you were interested in the immune system. And I think you were doing some work on the, the, the immune systems of preserved mummies. Correct. I think, yeah. How did you go from multiple sclerosis and autoimmune stuff and mummies to bat? I mean, bats are in caves too. Is that like the mummy bat connection? No, how did this happen? I just kept the Halloween theme going. So the answer is right here. I mean, Liliana, who's my spouse is actually a bat specialist. Actually, she's a chiroptorologist, but my interest in the immune system makes me one of these rare people to whom you can throw an alphabet soup of genes at. And I will know what those genes are. And so I can kind of get the full picture of, of where, you know, what gene does what in which pathway fairly quickly. And that's actually why we combine forces when the pandemic hit. We wrote with Diana and our colleague, Dr. David Ray at Texas Tech. We wrote one of the rapid National Science Foundation grants, which are part of the CARES Act for COVID research. And that's where our study of the immune system of bat came into play. That's wonderful. So we've got Liliana, you're the bat expert. We've got Angelique, your immune system and genetics. And Diana, how did you come to work with the two of them and work on this subject? Yeah, I have been interested in the immune system in mammals. I am interested in host pathogen interactions and evolution, within host and evolution from the pathogens. And then I started to get interested in bats because, well, they are like the perfect model to study host pathogen interactions. And Liliana and David, I was lucky enough that they got this grant to study longevity in bats. That it's also another thing that I'm interested in. And I entered to this amazing group. I'm studying my skills by informatics, genomics, and immunity. So if I can jump in here, this is also... So one of the things that we were talking about about all these viruses that are being found in bats. And I became really just kind of curious, are those viruses at all part of an immune system within a bat? Or is it just that their immune system isn't affected negatively by it? And I bring that up because in infant children, for instance, before an immune system has really gotten a chance to take root, there's viruses there that are doing the job of an immune system. No. I guess I think I'm going to start, and I'm sure Diana and Angelique have a lot to say about this. It's not as if... I think the evolution or the interaction between the bats and certain viruses is a very long standing one that has happened over millions and millions of years of evolution. And because these bats... To me, it keeps getting back to this life history. Because bats are not this kind of sort of born, mature, reproduced and brought dead, they're not, they kind of survive. There is this evolutionary advantage, there's this adaptive advantage to a bat being able to survive another round of reproduction, another round of reproduction, another round of reproduction and reach this long lives. And that's really very different from the models that we normally use as humans, which is mice, which is very different. Like these animals just kind of are born and then they get to reproduction and then they immediately start declining. So when you think about it that way, there's an evolutionary advantage for when bats, when bats species in the wild come into contact with certain viruses to evolve, there's an advantage to surviving for the next round. So to adapting your immune system to these challenges. And that is one of the things that our research that is about to be published in molecular evolution, that's our starting point in looking at what's special about that immune system of bats that is very different from our own. There is some parallel to what you're saying about children in the way that immune system operates. And I just want to kind of segue into the people who really understand the immune system better than I do. Well, so it's not that the immune system is not there, it's just that it's different, it's not primed. So when you have an immune system that's not primed by a series of pathogen, it kind of is ubiquitous. So it sort of has these mechanisms where the cells are a lot more active and a lot less discriminatory in terms of the pathogens. So basically, they will go for anything that they don't, that sort of is foreign to the body of the host. But what makes the bats super special is actually something that children also have and that as we grow older, we start losing is that they have less inflammation. And as we grow older, of course, we get more inflammation. And this is why any kind of diseases that are novel are going to affect us far worse as an older adult than as a young child, not automatically because, of course, there's always that clever pathogen that's found a way around that, that's adapted to that. And in fact, we're actually seeing that with SARS-CoV-2, it seems now that it's affecting younger people more often. And that's because it's adapting to the fact that older people are no longer, they're starting to get vaccinated in high concentrations. So it's harder to survive and it's adapting to that very situation. Diana, I can tell you more about the inflammation in bats. Yeah, we have found that actually it seems that the key of success in bats are that they are able to regulate immune response, so it's not going crazy. Sometimes immune response is the one that it affects more than the pathogen. Sometimes immune response is that aggressive that it can come to chronic inflammation, tissue damage, tissue death, and eventually... They have stuff like the, what is it? The cytokine storm. Right, where it's like that, it just goes crazy and then your body is really disadvantaged because of that. And it's your immune system, and it's your immune system doing that, like in a runaway chain reaction. And the bats don't do that? They have inflammation, but they don't have like a crazy inflammation like us or like other mammals. They regulate this inflammation because they have lost many genes that are involved in the activation of the crazy inflammatory response. Now the new question that we have is, okay, so now which genes are the one involved in the inflammation in bats that are making less aggressive? And it seems that... Yeah, sorry? Oh no, sorry, I was going to say, is that because they're the only mammal that flies? Oh, that's a great question. Because they're like... Sight into there. Most males, we run around for a little bit and we just stop, but they have those wings that they're constantly, constantly moving. So if they have a... I mean, I get sore just going for a brief jog now. That was going to be my next comment that this seems to be related with flight because flying is a high metabolic cost. So they generate a lot of reactive oxygen species that in us can cause cell damage or DNA damage, but bats have evolved really good mechanisms to repair all this cell damage. So one interesting thing is that it seems that this amazing immunity response in bats or this amazing regulation of the immune response is actually like flying, can ended up favoring this deregulation because can you imagine if you are... Well, the immune inflammatory response is activated either by pathogens or allergens that you were talking about, allergies at the beginning of the show, toxins, but also it can be activated by endogenous signals caused by cell damage or DNA damage. So can you imagine bats are flying and they are generating all these reactive oxygen species? Can you imagine if they are responding every time to all of these bioproducts, every time they fly, it will be impossible. So it's like co-adaptation in this flying and immunity, it's like everything's connected. Is there... I had also seen that there were within the paper some questions related to diet and like what bats are eating and how that has affected their ability to defend themselves with their immune system. So one of the things, there were kind of two big findings of the paper, like the first is sort of to confirm and corroborate with a much bigger sample, something that we had already, that had been reported previously and then last year we reported in another paper and it's that panel see that you're showing on the screen and it's that this inflammatory, this pro-inflammatory genes that are found in other mammals, they're conserved throughout mammals, we have them and mice have them and they are completely missing from all the bats that we examine, right? So this had been done before with like six different species and a couple of other species before and thanks to all of our work and especially Diana's, we actually confirmed that with 37 different species of bats that we went there and they were of very high quality and we confirmed that and so that's for genes that were really missing in bats, which is interesting because it's a way of evolving or a way of being different in which what the way that you're evolving is you have missing pieces, right? And it was kind of like our, you know, the paper has a lot of it is devoted to the interpretation of what would these missing pieces do, what predictions we can make so we can test it down line. But the second part of the paper was actually about genes that are present but they either expanded or contracted meaning the genes are present in bats it's not completely missing, they're there but they seem to have kind of expanded gene families expand when, you know, whatever it is that those proteins are doing is maintained, right? So it has some kind of selective advantage or the opposite. We were kind of, it was very interesting that for the most part those weren't immune at all so whereas for the missing genes that are completely missing in the bats we got a lot of missing genes that have to do with the immune system when we got to gene families that are expanded or contracted what we saw instead is that they were metabolic primary metabolic so they were taking us in a different direction instead of showing us variability at the immune level, I mean we did find one or two that we might get into the details of that were immune but most of them had something to do with metabolism and of course bats, even though ancestrally all bats seem to have been insectivores and most bats most bats species in today's world are insectivores. There are a few lineages of bats that have switched their diet in a dramatic way and one of them is the agave specialist, right? These are bats that feed on nectar exclusively or they feed on fruits exclusively and that's a huge matter, when you think about a bat that is feeding on nectar exclusively just consider it's kind of like a human that would switch their diet to just soda just imagine if you like switch your diet to just kind of like... That doesn't work for people I think people have tried that I mean we have one of those big giant two liter sodas I think we've tried that and that doesn't work so that doesn't work for us we're not evolving and we're not flying we're not being energetically active to the level that bats are but for bats so we propose and that's what we found we found a couple of genes that are presumably that have to do with this handling of the glucose and the handling of glucose that seem to be like gene families that seem to be duplicated in groups of bats that have independently evolved the ability to feed up mostly on the sugars this kind of simple sugars that come out of fruit and nectar so that's another avenue but the difference with the first type of results is that these results are within bats so different species of bats corresponding to different adaptations to their diet and did there seem to be like basically all of these bats had lost the immunity genes that you're talking about just to kind of across the board that have to do with inflammation so there was no variability there there was some the genes that we found that the immune system genes that we found that had some variability meaning expanding and contracting were really really special ones and I'm going to let Diana talk about those I can talk about Apalbeck if you want one of the ones that we found was the MHC class 1 that the MHC is a major histocompatibility complex and it's involved in recognition against viruses or intracellular pathogens so these genes were expanded in some bad species that it's something also that I think is really important and really amazing about this order because not because some bats have adapted to their own virus it means that all the bats are adapted to that virus actually there are some viruses that are lethal for bats like the Takari virus and actually some phylovirus has been related with a mortality event of bats in Spain bats are not immortal against bats as much as we now want to think they are, they're not they can be affected by some species and they are adapted to their own virus if you put a bat that haven't been in touch with another virus never in the history of their evolution is going to be susceptible there's a high chance that it's going to be susceptible for that virus so that's another interesting thing about this that the immune system it seems to be species specific because the interactions are species specific but these losses are constituted for all the order that's something and the MHC is one of the that are expanded and we think our hypothesis is that it might be expanded in order to overcome this lack of inflammatory risk about this dampening and inflammation because it's going to make more efficient to recognize viruses and they are, they have also been studies that we have found an insertion of 5 amino acids and 3 amino acids on the MHC class 1 exclusive from bats and this insertion could help bats to recognize longer peptides for viruses okay so the with the expansion of this major histocompatibility complex they're able to recognize and so their bodies if they come in contact with something they can potentially recognize it and then do whatever immune response needs to happen it's just not as big of an immune response as another animal might have or as inflammatory the other thing is that these expansions are enough that they would actually yield a greater diversity of recognition right like the capacity to recognize a wider diversity of pathogens that they may encounter then the other immune whereas so like just to pop in for one second on the importance of recognition whereas what we're dealing with when we talk about a novel coronavirus is that our immune system has no way of recognizing it to fight it off our adaptive immune system has never met it doesn't know what to do with it and so it's just kind of like I don't know what to do and so you're just dealing with the natural immune system the native immune system even within humans there are some humans that are able to recognize and that are the ones that are symptomatic right so they seems to be better because they have those adaptations of those variation of the MHC class 1 there was a really cool study about the MHC that they found some variants from the MHC class 1 that are really efficient against these new SARS-CoV-2 so that's important of the MHC the MHC is really it's high specific so the more variable you are or the more polymorphism you have of this family the wider pathogens you can recognize so even humans we carry some humans carry carries those variables some of them I want to find out if I'm one there is a way it's just rough yeah you can still make this happen and the other group of genes that we found with immune system that had a lot of variability within bats it's called apobec 3 and the great thing about apobec so the apopart is an apolipoprotein but the apobecs in particular they are a big family of genes that actually specializes in introducing mutations into single stranded DNA so they are specialized so apobec 3 in particular has been found in model systems has been found to cause this mutagenesis in responsive viruses so imagine you can imagine like there's a single stranded DNA it's coming from the back translation of an RNA strand that's coming from a virus and it's floating around and then there is this molecule apobec 3 several different apobec 3s in the cell that's capable of introducing mutations into it and rendering it less affected as a pathogen so in bats what we found was that some bats seem to have a lot of different apobec 3s like 13 different apobec 3s some bats have fewer so primates including us we have 7 different ones but then some other like dogs have 3 and in bats we see lots of variation from having like 3 to having like 13 lots of expansion in these apobec 3s and we hypothesized that these variation is associated with just different adaptations to dealing with viruses in their natural environment and to coping with those viruses by using this part of the innate immune system that's just responded by introducing mutations into pieces of DNA that are sitting around and so one of the consequences of this that we're exploring now or we're hypothesizing in some follow-up research is that this co-evolution so you can imagine you're a pathogen like you're a virus, like your job you're just like a piece of genetic information with a little with a little bit of a capsid around you that's it, that's all you are you're just trying to get your genetic information into a cell so that they make more copies of you so that there would be this evolutionary arms race that you would enter the bat apopec 3s and the virus genome such that the genome in order to because the apopecs have a recognition pattern there's a particular sequence of of this DNA that they recognize so that the genome would evolve away from that recognition pattern and therefore when this virus when this particular virus finds itself in a different host accidentally when it lines in a different host it's going to have a pattern of evolution that is shaped by that evolutionary history with the bats, with the apopec 3 so we're exploring that idea of course it's right now that's nothing more than a hypothesis but it's an intriguing one because it takes us back to the evolution of this apopec 3 family and that kind of gets back to the study that Justin brought up before your interview from the Swiss researchers and the bats finding MERS in that population of bats MERS related in that population of bats like I said there are bats all around the world there are massive bat caves in Arizona and we talk about Southeast Asia and so would it be necessarily then say you know drier ecosystems wetter ecosystems how those environments tend to I guess tend to affect mutations because of adaptations as the bats are evolving in these locations and then how various viruses come along with them along in these different locations and so would we expect different populations around the world to have different apobacs? Yes so what we found so we're not thinking about environment when we're talking about host environment not necessarily the climate conditions although climate conditions are important because of course the entire planet we know that there's for mammals there's a lot more species when it's hot and wet and a lot fewer species when it's cold and there are no bats in the North Pole and there are no bats in Antarctica right so we do know that there's a very strong there aren't parkas that are small enough for them it doesn't work like that so we do know that there are this diversity there's a cold latitudinal diversity gradients right and bats follow that the latitudinal diversity gradient so there's to the extent that that's true that's the case but what we're seeing is that these apobac threes right they're very just just like the MHC one that Diana talked about the apobac threes are species specific meaning some species have a lot of them some species has have fewer and what we think is happening is that this is going to shape the evolution of the viruses that coexist with those species that have the particular apobacs and it's going to shape like what even the genome of those viruses looks like the sequence that it has and therefore the potential the potential for when it finds itself in a different host environment meaning in a different species of mammal to evolve rather rapidly because it's got you know because it's no it's no longer facing its long time adversary the apobac three of the bat right is now facing the apobac three of the camel or the apobac three of the civet and it's not quite the same game that that they had with that you know it's not the same arms race that they had this is very very hypothetical at the moment but we do the the basis for thinking this way is that variability that we find so what does this mean for you know how how we as humans go about thinking about these populations of bats as we're searching for new coronaviruses pop possible reservoirs of other diseases that could have pandemic potential and if I could if I could add on to that too we're looking for these these reservoirs I don't even know what the the range of a bat is I have this this comic book picture they live in a cave they come out they go somewhere and then later they come back I don't know how far they went so how big is the region of their territory and and well someone some some bats when it went as far as Hawaii so yeah some bats you know the Horibat the Horibat from North America twice colonized the island of Hawaii and it's the only endemic land mammal of Hawaii and and the genetics tells us that it didn't arrive there the ones and we produce there's two different groups of Horibats that at different times colonized the island of Hawaii so some bats have very wide range like the Horibat has this super wide range that includes the island of Hawaii and some bats have very narrow ranges and are just distributed in a relatively small area or they're tied to a certain resource so for example the ones that pollinate the agave nectar they actually migrate along the flowering of the agave nectar like up and down in from Mexico into Arizona and then back right following the flowering of this resource so they're very like the monarch butterflies of the bat world they're like uh I guess that's migratory then yeah those are those are migratory yeah but there's other but but not all bats like that you know like it really varies so for example there's there's like there's an endemic bat a flying fox that's endemic to the island of the Komoros and it's there in the Komoros and that's the only population that there is of that species living so so so it really varies so one of the one of the things to sort of take in that's I think it's very difficult for most of the public to to to contemplate is that when we're saying there's 1400 species of bats is there 1400 species of bats they're all different there is different in many cases you know we're talking about being as different as a dog is to a fox is to uh you know like a wolf like it's it's you know some are more closely related some are more distantly related but they're just you know like envision for example like imagine if you have a jaguar and a puma and a tabby cat pet and now multiply that that's 3 now multiply that times 500 that's how many species of bats there are and they're each unique just like you wouldn't say you want to say oh here's that cheetah and here's that puma they're the same thing they have the same viruses you would never say that you would never ever say that and when we say bats that's what we're saying right because we're not I mean there are certain personalities like what we found in our report which is that there's dismissing genes that have to do with inflammation right but the individual species of bats are very divergent right so so if you you know like I imagine all those big cats and small cats that are different species and now multiply them until you just you reach 1400 and that's how many bats there are species bat species and you so with this study there were 37 genomes that you looked at I mean how representative of the 1400 species you think this 37 is like it's like scratching the surface of what's potentially there yeah I mean we we tried our best so if you look at this picture I mean I you know like we can just give us more money we'll keep studying that but if you look at this picture we have a blue and a red and a red bit right and those are two big groups of bats right one group one group of bats I mean you don't really need to know the names but there's two big groups of bats the yin and the yang I know this man called Carl Kupman helped name them so one is called yin terochiropter and the yin bats and then there's yang rochiropters the yang bats the yin and the yang and so this blue and the red there are two very large groups one has the flying foxes and the horseshoe bats and the crescionecter is how do you say crescionecter how what's the common name of crescionecter is anyway some tiny tiny bat that's amazing right and then the other group is the bats it's the bats it's bats around the world that we have heard about we it includes like the little brown bat the big brown bat the vampire bat the tequila bat yeah this modus rotundus the tequila bat and they're all in this other group of called yang rochiropter so we tried to within this two large groups as many species as possible that were as divergent as possible but yeah we have a lot we have a long way to go before we take into the great diversity this is this is just a shop question what's the platform that you're sequencing on oh that's a really good question so yeah do you want to talk about that yeah for this study we use back bio but the bat 1k use a lot of more platforms do they combine the high c alumina back bio so we use just to kind of translate that into english so we have high accuracy short read technology high accuracy long read technology and optical mapping and that's what the that's about one case standard we're like the scrappy american team and so we went with the short read and the long read and we're now working on the optical mapping for some of our future things but we didn't get it for this one for the new genome that we're reporting in this paper and so were these genomes part of bat 1k already or were they did you add to bat 1k in the process of doing the study we use some genomes from the bat 1k and some from the Broad Institute sorry go ahead I just want to say we generate one genome for this for the study we are taking advantage of the public data it's already available we took it back and we also had to account for the differences in quality there's a lot of there's a lot of variability that's why the bat 1k that we published from bat 1k last year are sort of a gold standard and we were trying to demonstrate that we could using just the short read and the long read we could get to like 96% of the gold standard we wouldn't get to 100% but we could get close enough and now we actually have several more genomes in the pipeline including all the technologies because that technology has been evolving so rapidly in the last 5 years even that if the public database is mostly 15 years old or something like that the quality is not going to be anywhere near what you can get in a nice afternoon on a nano or overnight in an Illumina yeah ours we actually had nano port in there as well we wanted to see how nano part we wanted to see how nano port performed performed in this but the prices of we probably covered this PacBio was bought out by Illumina and PacBio prices have come down as well and PacBio is higher accuracy than the nano port and we see that in the results but it's amazing so in bat 1k our next big thing is the 21 families so we want to have every single family representative some families of bats like Christian Hectoris the bum will be bat yes the bum will be bat like the bum will be bat which is like a single species in a single genus in a single family or like for example rhinopoma which is a family of bats that's found exclusively in deserts in the old world and so we think that there's going to be adaptations they're like really unique adaptations to this water balance being very different and there's no way that we could explore any of that because we simply don't have the genomes of the species yet as the costs come down I just can't wait to see more and more and more genetic data but you know then this is all of this is Deanna this is your future in bioinformatics data management and analysis now we have too much data we need more scientists data is too much yeah it's all the data so to go back to the question though all this research into the bat immune system and what you're learning of which genes are no longer part of their genome no longer acting as part of the inflammatory part of the system not regulating that how how do we use this information what is this kind of information tell us or does it inform us in our future pandemic avoidance the point of this paper or the way we can take this paper and move it to a translational domain which is basically take this and maybe use the information from the paper to translate it to humans is we could actually find treatments for example to prevent that famous cytokine storm and the treatment would be block the genes that are missing in the bats that are allowing the bats to be tolerant block them in humans so that humans become more like bats and they are able to avoid the cytokine storm and it's really important because a lot of the antiviral therapies that were pre-existent to COVID have proven to actually really fail think of remdesivir for example where a lot of noise was made about remdesivir early on and it's like oh it's going to like it failed for Ebola and it failed for SARS-CoV-2 which is kind of sad and there's a reason for that is that instead of targeting the cell mechanism of entry of the virus etc etc which can be extremely deleterious to humans imagine blocking the ACE2 receptors for humans that you know wouldn't go so well no so instead of doing that be more like a bat downgrade downplay the information and this is actually this has actually been shown when people were put when patients were put on dexamethasone which is a dampener of the inflammatory response they were doing much better than on any antiviral that is currently available so for that that particular kind of respiratory viruses which lead to a cytokine storm the way to go is to make people more like bats by dampening their inflammation so it's either just dampen our inflammation or we can go the guided evolution pathway and make us all flying nocturnal vegan creatures and then maybe those adaptations will come exactly we have to go after the we have to also drink blood eat nectar and insects those are all different bats though are they all specialists or are there some that do kind of there are some there are especially the group that I had been I sort of started my career and have continued my career is called the neotropical leaf nose bats that includes the agave set a bunch of nectar bats and it also includes the vampire bat in addition to a bunch of insectivorous bats and in those bats there's a lot of omnivorous bats meaning bats that can eat insects and can mix and match they can eat pollen, they can eat fruit they can eat nectar there's a whole bunch of very successful very wide ranging bats that are omnivorous but not with blood though yeah the blood the blood specialists the vampire bats are specialists they're completely specialized they're special specialists I was about to ask if they live longer than other bats but I'll leave that one they kind of do I mean for the body size the common vampire bats the common vampire bats have a longish lifespan given its body size we measure that in something called the longevity question but it's interesting because the vampire the common vampire lives longer but the other vampire live doesn't show it's a higher longevity question so again it's a special specific adaptation so if we all are doing the vampire diet if we all do the bat diet though it's going to be tough to do the bat diet because we'd have to there could be anything we almost choose yeah pick one yeah there's a frog eating bat too again among that group of bats that is the neotropical leaf nose bats it includes the frog eating bats for instance carnivorous bats there's all these carnivorous bats actually that are specialized it includes a fish a close relative is a fish eating bat as well so the family includes a huge diversity and then its close relatives also have some diversity in their diet it's amazing I mean imagine with 1400 bats to choose from you probably have examples of just about every dietary style that's somewhere within there yeah we have exclusively nectar we have nectar with some other things exclusively insects exclusively gleaning insects exclusively on the wing insects all kinds of specializations yeah it's fascinating now I also want to know everything about bat microbiomes how there's a related no that's an incredible and there are metabolism too right I mean let's not forget the immune system is ramped up or ramped down by the metabolism and so that the diet has something to play into so they fly do they have birds have songbirds especially have a higher body temperature and that is part of how their immune system works is just by having a naturally higher temperature bats have a relatively higher temperature is that part of their metabolism yeah I mean Deanna you want to talk about the flight dust fever the flight dust fever hypothesis yeah it can go to 47 Celsius the temperature from the bats so it can emulate the fever in like in us and that's why that's another hypothesis that why that's 16 degrees yeah that's that's not just a fever in us that's dead yeah so there's this hypothesis that Deanna should explain that's called a flight a sphere hypothesis bacteria and pathogens cannot survive to that temperature I mean not even so that a bats that maintain these high temperatures they avoid this vital replication or bacterial infection but that's a hypothesis yeah that's one hypothesis but the corollary of that hypothesis is that if a virus has evolved to live in bats to survive this high temperatures that some bats can have then when that virus finds itself in another host that is not a bat that doesn't reach that temperature then that other host fever is not going to do anything to it because in the bats it was a normal thing to every day at the peak of activity experience this high temperature so that's why this fear hypothesis now I want to go searching in those high temperature bats for extremophiles exactly yeah with global warming and raising temperatures too the general environment that bats themselves in will have higher heat that will make that maybe more possible to encounter in the future as things evolve to handle probably not viruses maybe it's more just the general pathogens or bacteria that will slowly be able to handle higher and higher heat as the temperatures rise and again I just want to emphasize that bats are just so there are so many different species for example one of the where which was actually in the islands of the Caribbean and I don't know if you've ever been in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic you know the islands of the Caribbean there's this very special ecosystem that the bats have created themselves and it's called a hot cave have you heard of hot caves and in these hot caves so imagine okay so imagine a karst so imagine like karst and then water runs at the bottom and it kind of opens up a cave but it's close to the it forms a cul-de-sac right and then bats colonize it in the hundreds and thousands and they colonize the bat cave and they raise the temperature inside the cave and there's usually running water at the bottom so the humidity reaches excess of 90% right and the temperature is extremely stable so whereas you know we're just discussing how bats for example can their temperature can raise there are some species of bats for example in the Caribbean that they actually must live in that hot cave right they must like when the hot cave disappears when somebody pierces a hole at the top or just erosion pierces a hole at the top and the cave disappears they have to go find another hot cave to live in because they require this very high humidity very high temperature environment to maintain their metabolic you know to maintain homeostasis they must they must live inside inside these environments so again we have to be kind of like really cognizant of this variation at the other extreme with that bats that are adapted right up here in New York so one of the things that one of my students is studying is of course white bone syndrome right these bats are hibernating and that's kind of the opposite right like they live in this cave and they drop their temperature and they change that so we must be you know like this is like a call for understanding that bat diversity because without understanding that bat diversity in the ways that they live in the ways that they're adapt we're not going to understand how this virus circulates right yeah and understanding how they move within population within individuals within populations how they move between populations how those populations come into contact with other species exactly all of those interactions that's right that's exactly right so we can't we can't just say well climate change is going to do you know raising the temperature is going to do this well we have to understand what the bats are actually doing because there's so many pieces to the puzzle that it's not it's not an easy but if you go to the Caribbean look for the hot caves ask around yes that would be amazing but don't go in the hot caves don't go in the hot caves that sounds like hot death no no don't go in the hot caves go in with a gas mask maybe well we actually you have to have a respirator you'll be waiting in poop up to your waist yeah it's like guano like guano to the gas yeah no it's hot caves we have the best vacations it sounds like you have the most amazing vacations you know there's some hot caves ok there's hot caves in the past that you can drill down into the guano into the last 10,000 years of the history of that bat poop because that's an environment again in which the bats are going in there and this is the environment they must live in and not all bats so just to also to bring up not all bats live in caves lots of bats don't live in caves at all they're roosting trees they live under a bridge so there's this flexibility the most important thing is don't encroach on the bat's territory let's stop having human encroaching to the bat's territory that's really that's the most important part and let the bat be because they're rendering a tremendous service to humanity without bats there would be no humans left because the food source will disappear the pests will will overtake the more we encroach on their territory the more problems there's going to be I think that's a wonderful note to kind of start winding this up on we're going rather late and I know you're up late right now so we're just having so much fun talking to you so just for each of you if there's just a final thought about bats or about this paper in particular and what you'd like people to understand what you want people to take home with them what's your opinion Diana do you want to I think I will say that stop blaming bats stop being afraid of bats I mean it's normal to be afraid of the unknown just embrace them learn about them and yeah respect bats do not embrace them too close though embrace them metaphorically metaphorically embrace by donating money for genome I love the dual message you need to get to know bats embrace them but stay away from one don't be scared of them but if you see one don't go anywhere near you yeah it's like there's just messages I think we should use that meme that Diana made the meme that Diana made from her that really is the meme from her twitter talk was it's a really good one for that's the message of the paper I don't know if you can project it I think it is hold on what a second if you can't project it that's really is it this one yeah yeah bats are different their immune system differs it differs from our models that we've studied so we've cured all these diseases in mice this mice is our model for everything and it's also different from ours so it's a different it's amazing to just we get to share this earth with this live forms that are completely distinctive and then have this combination of traits that no other group of mammals has and so yeah there's that diversity there that we have only begun to explore there's so much more to learn from bats and to finish this did you know Kiki that our first date was actually having a field trip in the Caribbean no and our relationship survived if you can survive a first date like that I mean you're going to survive anything oh yes Tamana is a hot cave it is a hot cave Tamana cave in Trinidad is a hot cave I think it was a trial by fire the secret of love is getting buried in Huano yes exactly Huano happens thank you all so much it has just been wonderful to get to speak with you and all of the information that you've shared and I do hope that people do take your words with them and appreciate bats and stop being so afraid and start appreciating them for their diversity and for all of the things they can offer like really they could be saving us from the next pandemic they could also help us live longer it's all upsides if you're thinking of a field of study that will allow you to choose any destination in the world apparently some really nice spots study bats yes yes don't end up studying that thing that only lives in a desert you get tired of deserts eventually don't only study the thing that's way under the water you're not going to get into its environment very often study bats you can travel the world and there's always something to study it sounds like especially ten thousand years of poop in a hot cave that's year two you don't bring that up the first to the first that comes later all right we will post your twitter accounts and a link to the paper on our website and I just want to say thank you again it's just been really really wonderful getting to talk to you tonight thank you for having us this was brilliant have a good night good night good night alright everyone this is this weekend science we are moving on to some more science stories we have more science hey do you like this show you enjoy this weekend science well maybe tell a friend and help share it with a friend today share twists we can all enjoy it what's Justin doing I hope he's getting a story because it's his turn to talk about science were we supposed to bring more stories but like we already brought the amount of story I thought you had one story come on I do I gotta find it oh yeah so this is under underwater archeology University of Texas at Arlington is part of research team that's studying a 9000 year old stone tool artifact or a bunch of artifacts I guess that they discovered in Lake Huron that originated from an obsidian quarry that was 1000 miles away in central Oregon so the obsidian flakes from the underwater archeological site they think is the oldest and farthest east confirmed specimens of western obsidian ever found in the continental United States it's just one of these things first of all you had to go again to the bottom of a lake to find it but yeah 4000 kilometers away of course 4000 kilometers for those not familiar with that is 4 million no 400,000 so wait I'm confused so this the quarry was in central Oregon and the lake was 2000 miles away 2000 miles away did you get there? it floated apparently or just got moved I don't know did not explain it very small pieces that have very large stories to sell so it could be it could be that this was trade routes and the rest of it it could be I think that's actually what they're going to say yeah the site was under water the point is the site was under water that was the whole point of bringing up that story in the first place we need more underwater archeology water levels are rising and have risen over history so much of our history as humanity is now below water being such a shore bound peoples close to the sea I gotta go sneeze like four more times I'll be right back alright Justin's allergies are giving him some problems so let's have a calm moment and talk about birdsong because birds are amazing researchers are using zebra finches to try and use brain signals to translate birdsong into birds brain activity into song birds sing songs their brains have vocal centers that have been shown to be much in parallel to human vocal centers there are all sorts of things that are very similar and so the neural signals that are involved in creating a birdsong from its initiation in the bird brain all the way down through the motor neurons to the syrinx of the bird and the song that actually is produced there are parallel structures very similar in the human brain that allow for the production of our speech and so to be able to someday be able to interpret brain activity and produce voice sounds for people who have paralysis of the vocal cords or paralysis from neck down that does prevent them or locked in syndrome or any number of disorders that keep people from being able to speak potentially we could take neural signals and technologically produce the sound so these researchers publishing in current biology they are at San Diego University of California San Diego and they whoa my computer just freaked out I hope everything's good we still there everybody woohoo I'm still here I see you my computer just just turned off my screen just turned off for a second I don't know what just happened there anyway the researchers used representations of the birds vocalization patterns and they are mathematical equations that model the changes in pressure and tension in the syrinx so they're using these algorithms to map the neural activity to the representations so it's this this kind of mirroring of the neural activity to actually turn it into something that could be song but in the end they are we're able to create zebra finch song based on their work and they're going to try and model it more more closely to be able to create better vocalizations and to actually get more nuance but the simple representation allows the system to learn mappings that they say are more robust and more generalizable to a wider range of conditions and behaviors so that they're hoping to be able to take this new technology and not just create bird songs not just record bird brains and then play bird songs in your speakers but to help people who need to speak in a number of different situations which will be pretty cool and then my final story has to do with vitamin D because it's summertime and at least here in the northern hemisphere and vitamin D has been a topic of interest for quite some time when it comes to research into health a new study in science advances in mice I'm going to say that right now study in mice not in people found that mice with low vitamin D levels had exaggerated cravings for opioids and they felt the effects of the drugs more strongly and they the researchers publishing in science advances they first looked at data from about 20,000 participants in the national health and nutrition examination it was a survey they looked at these retrospective data sets and then a second study had 3000 patients that were admitted to a hospital between 2014 and 2016 that had an opioid use disorder that had 8000 match controls and so they looked to see whether or not people with insufficient vitamin D were more likely to have opioid use disorders and they were so they found that in the first data set patients with insufficient vitamin D were 50% more likely to use opioid painkillers compared to patients with normal vitamin D levels those that were deficient or severely lacking were 90% more likely to take opioids and those that were in the data set for the opioid use disorder were more likely to be classified as vitamin D deficient or insufficient which I find very interesting so they thought hey we should look at this further and this is where the mice come in they used vitamin D deficient mice that had a diet deficient in vitamin D they also had transgenic mice that lacked a vitamin D receptor and then they looked at these mice and how they wanted to how much they wanted to use morphine as they passed through a morphine chamber during a conditioned place preference test and those that had the low vitamin D spent more time or those that had the low vitamin D and no vitamin D receptor spent more time in the morphine chamber than other mice they took this even further and they wanted to know how the mice responded to the opioids they put these control and deficient mice on hot plates hot plates to measure how their pain response worked and then they gave them morphine and ran the test again vitamin D deficient mice stayed on the plate longer and then the morphine acted more effectively acted more effectively as a pain killer so their pain response was different and the morphine also worked more than mice that did not have the vitamin D and the effect was reversed when they restored the vitamin D levels there were more experiments that they did they linked it to sunlight and UV radiation as well and the bottom line to all of this is that this is potentially knowing somebody's vitamin D status before coming in or when they come into the hospital you might know better how a patient will respond to opioid pain killers how much more likely they might be to need more of them than somebody else and so vitamin D could potentially be a cheap and easy intervention moving forward and something that could be it's not something that would need a lot of clinical trials for doctors to be able to start implementing it also but this is really just a fascinating link between you know the UV the way that vitamin D is produced in the body as a response to UV exposure the UV the vitamin D receptors and then also kind of this linking of when you're in the sun and your body's making vitamin D there is an endorphin release and you feel better and so there's a link there also with the opioids if you don't have the vitamin D opioids can also make you feel better and so there's a really interesting link in here between sunlight vitamin D and opioids which was really curious to me very curious take your vitamin D folks if you're in the summertime season wear your sunscreen you know because that's good but you know spend some time make sure you've got your vitamin D I know I will Justin you look like you are done like you your allergies you need some vitamin D you need to go to sleep and then get some vitamin D tomorrow so I'm fine I can't see anymore because my eyes are watering and my nose keeps running and occasionally I have to I have to sneeze I don't know what it is it's not bad for me today I need to I need to go consult with the bats like I need a little less of a reaction you need a little less inflammation is what you need I think you do I think you need a little bit less of a reactive immune system at this point in time yeah maybe not just maybe not just helping us in our immune and our cytokine storm responses help us with our just normal allergies because those are getting worse oh everyone we have made it to the end of another show and I do want to say thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed the show tonight and many thanks to our guests tonight Dr. Angelique Corthals, Liana Davalos and Diana Moreno-Santian it was just a wonderful conversation and I hope that you all learned a lot shout outs time for shout outs, shout outs too Fada for your help with social media and show notes, Gord thank you for manning the chat room Identity 4 thank you for recording the show Rachel thank you for your assistance and I would love to thank our Patreon sponsors for all of their generous support to the show thank you too Pierre Velazade Ralph E. Figueroa John Ratnaswamy Karl Kornfeld Witty MS Chris Wozniak Dave Bunn John Lee Elikoff Andrew Swanson Brian Carrington Greg Riley Gene Tellier Azeema Ken Hayes Howard Tan Johnnie Gridley Greg Briggs John Atwood Rudi Garcia Dave Wilkinson Rodney Lewis Matt Sutter Kurt Larson Sarah Chava Erin Luthin Bob Calder Paul Stanton Jill Ulysses-Adkins Brian Kondren Jason Roberts Patreon For those of you who are interested in supporting us on Patreon you can find that Patreon button at twist.org On next week's show We will be back Wednesday 8pm pacific time broadcasting from our youtube and facebook channels as well as twist.org slash live live live live Want to listen to us as a podcast? Just search for This Week in Science wherever podcasts are found and if you enjoyed the show get your friends to subscribe too For more information on anything you've heard here today show notes and links to stories will be available on our website www.twist.org or you can also sign up for a newsletter that might come out you can contact us directly email Kirsten at kirsten at thisweekinscience.com Justin at twistminion at gmail.com or Blair at BlairBazz at twist.org just make sure you put twist in the subject line so your email doesn't get oh lost from the immune system of a bat You can also hit us up on the twitter where we are at twist science at Dr. Kiki at Jackson Fly and at Blair's Majory love your feedback if there's a topic you'd like us to cover or address a suggestion for an interview a haiku that comes to you in the night please let us know and we hope you'll be back here again next week for more great science news and if you've learned anything from this show remember it's all in your head This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science It's the end of the world So I'm setting up a shop Got my banner unfurled It says the scientist is in I'm gonna sell my advice Know them how to stop their robots With a simple device I'll reverse global warming With a wave of my hands And a little regret Coming your way So everybody listen This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science This Week in Science I've got one disclaimer And it shouldn't be news That's what I say May not represent your views But I've done the calculations And I've got a plan If you listen to the science You may just at understand We're trying to threaten your philosophy We're just trying to speak in science This Week in Science This Week in Science Science A laundry list of items I want to address From stopping global hunger To dredging Loch Ness I'm trying to promote More rational thought And I'll try to answer any question you've got So how can I ever see The changes I seek All inside of shop one Of what we say This Week in Science This Week in Science And that is the end of the show We are in the after show Justin has disappeared You stayed And watched the end of the show Look at this bird But it's fantastic Oh Justin's back Justin's back again So this is not on the air This is on the air We are still on the air This is called the after show So in the after show We Sometimes we'll ramble on About the story that we didn't cover The point we didn't make that we should have Or we look to the To the audience who's in chat To see if they have questions That they didn't get answered Or if they have more inquiry That sort of thing From the bad cave Yes Yes This should really be a background But The background You should have a back cave background I mean Why don't we think of that No So but this Actually isn't This is not a background I am actually broadcasting from the moon I don't know if we mention that Yes Lives on the moon That's awesome And the vacuum is not at all affecting you No Apparently I'm allergic to moondust though This is an oversight When did that happen This has been An ongoing thing Where I laugh at people for having allergies Because I'm not affected by anything And then suddenly I was Yes Allergies accumulate it So you don't have it until you have it And I've done nothing To avoid them my entire life So yeah So I think what happened was It cooled off a little bit last night So I just opened all the windows Opened all the windows And I'm like yeah that's This is nice breeze and everything So there's something out there That's getting me There's that hot species of plants That's killing you And I just got to wait until that plant To the mold or whatever the thing is Knocked down again Finishes doing what it needs to do And then I'll be fine And then I'll go back to making fun Of people with allergies But until then it's a serious problem You should not make it It's really horrible It's awful in there And I took all that Because I don't even know what I went and got like the super strength This will knock out Anything that Either not kicked in Or just doesn't seem to work on It's the wrong stuff I don't want to say the brand But it's a major brand Of a thing That you would use to Drill down on an allergy Ah yeah We'll take five I'll take more Is that really what it is? If it's not working at I used to know people who That's okay Wasn't there one Brand that you had It wouldn't work in one day You were supposed to take it for a week Or two before it would build up Slowly build up In your system to block your Allergy response So I'm just doing it wrong I'm just an amateur at this But what you can do Right before bed If you've got the little pink You know those will knock you right out No There it is There it is Before Being more like a bat Being more like a bat That's the thing I'm not eating my local honey I haven't I used to do that a lot Maybe it's been the honey the whole time Now I have to do a whole experiment Where I hope this pollen stays there While I try different honeys For your For your end of one Yes But you know what That's all I care about In this whole experiment That's the only problem I'm trying to solve Is the end of one Good night What was that You know The mice thing Is really interesting that you In the beginning of the show Because Every time I present On the multiple sclerosis Research Which has evolved now And actually partnering With the pharmaceutical To put that into the translation Yes Interesting But every time I present on it My one slide is Why mice models Anything And so I have All the explanation is If you're going to be talking about metabolism You can't use mice Because mice don't have the same metabolism As humans do To start off with They're missing an entire component Of metabolism They don't have the HDL component So Why do people keep using mice When they do metabolism When they have short lifestyles You can And they're easy to breed Or you also order them from a catalog To It's a convenience Instead of bat I'm going to tell you right now It's a lot more convenient than a bat If I had a catalog From and said send me this It cost me 20 Bats And they're all kind of Genetically Or they've been sort of Read through many generations To be more or less the same And I can standardize them That's like a dream I was really fascinated We interviewed Some folks from the Jackson labs Yeah It was Is there a call A pretty intense conversation About just what they're capable of And what scales they're operating Yeah And you can knock in And knock out genes There's so much you can do It's a wonderful model Why do we study them all It's like You can keep them in Whatever I'm dreaming of the day Where we don't have to use This program Mice and rats Imagine if you could have A panel with all the pathways And just Put your compound and see It goes through all the pathways Like a pinball machine And see what it knocks And what it doesn't knock That is my dream So it's just Basically With no organism But just Molecular genetic Interactions At some point You're going to have to test it Yeah, it's actually At least you'll have a better More robust and simple Testing capacity So if there's any here In the Acer Yes That's what the supercomputers are for To be able to Test all the different combinations And see what things bounce into other things So if you're learning wants to do it The only problem is We have to give it that information We have to give it every parameter In the first place And if we were having this conversation Gosh, I don't know If it was 10 or 15 years ago Whenever When we very first started the show I don't even think I think we're just maybe Beginning to get into What the microbiome effects Microbiome has a connection To your brain And now it's like a given how much That interconnection is Actually responsible for Gosh, even behaviors or Desires to seek out nutrients Or regulating Everything, you know It's such an integral part And then everything we've learned about nutrition All those books can't even be Opened now Because it's not straight molecular It's a whole other environment it has to pass through To have an effect To interact to So, yeah, we're still at the Beginning of so many of these things My microbiome Mommy wants cake You have the Cake microbiome That's good Mine is Chocolate, give me all the chocolate Yes It's like being Belgian It's true What would be a one step Better than a mouse that's currently Or what's the The ideal Still animal model Right, I guess it depends on What we look at, right? Because there's Hamsters that are good for liver Golden hamsters Yeah, hamsters are better Actually, it can answer that Hamsters are better for Infection disease Particularly for Vaccines Hamsters are better But of course if you really want A much better Model Than you go into Then you're in primate, right? Yeah, primates or cakes Actually Very uncomfortable To use models Of course It's a true order So you don't want to do that That's why the pie cells are easy Yeah, I was Working, I had a high school Job Long, very long time ago And I was working in the orthopedics research lab But they had all sorts of other cross Collaboration stuff going on And I remember the lab director Telling me about working with Especially the larger animals One of the things that they were working on Is actually became the robotics Behind how they do hip replacements now But They were taking volunteer dogs People's pets Largely As well as Animal animals that were going to be put down That had That had hip problems naturally I think they were working mostly on labs They have Shepherds, maybe Shepherds, yeah And so They were testing out It was early and not all the dogs make it And that sort of thing But one of the things he was telling me about Was that his hope was For just a database Just a database Of All the research That was performed on animals And it morphed into my head No result We can see all the things that didn't work So that if you've got Ideas of something or a pathway Or an experiment that requires You to use an animal model You can easily access And see if it had been done before It's been done multiple times Maybe this idea has occurred to people 50 times And they've run this animal experiment And 50 silos of research Never worked Or published But knowing that could prevent So much unnecessary time Money and then of course The need for those animal models That's actually brilliant I think That's something that I find problematic Is that failure Is never reported So you keep trying to reinvent The wheel of that failure Because it hasn't been reported That's something that we've talked about So it would just be like a searchable The problem is who would host it And pay for it It always comes down to this money thing That was the failure The general results Yeah the general results And just to have a searchable Database if you're thinking about your experiment You plug it in And you see okay Wow this is alright And then how much does that speed up It's well done You assume it's well done research Or see a number of times It's been done And see the methodologies that they use And say okay now I'm looking at this experiment That didn't work Here's something about the way they performed This experiment that I would have totally done differently And I only need to tweak Two or three or four factors And now maybe it's worth running again Or wow They really It was an experiment It had the null result Now you can shift focus To another approach Without having to have gone all the way down that path I think it's brilliant I think it would excel our research promise Nobody wants to pay for it No one is hosting This would actually also Make the life Of viewers At granting Foundations Federal agencies So much easier Because it could literally Go throughout the different Experiments and say This is impossible Research and not Five or six researchers Researchers that may be doing Like repeating an experiment That isn't going to work Yeah And on top of that too Just Just the You could also Sight Why you didn't do something With a null result And then so it's worth publishing You may get Thousands of sightings of your paper's favorite experiment Because everybody looked at that And here's why we didn't look at this And now you're sighted for your research It had nothing to do with your research Isn't all about the result anyway It's you doing the work The work is still then recognized From the perspective Of the publisher Parish environment Of academia Would it count to publish A null result In the journal of null results I know there is a There is a journal that does take Failed experiments I wonder if it would actually count To be able to do that I wonder actually I would also increase If you're getting hundreds of sightings This person didn't Failed and this is why we didn't do this It would increase Your age index And universities look at the age index For tenure But If you have colleagues So the tenure thing Just starts at the department And what the Colleagues generally do is They look at the title of the journal It's true that as it Clients, as the information for tenure cases Clies up It becomes more and more quantitative There's a null saying that These can't read but they can count So like Your colleagues, they can read We can actually kind of read Like this is a journal that we think The journal always does not But as it travels out the chain Then it becomes a much more Numbers of a numbers game So I know It becomes a numbers game And also my understanding is It also needs to be Published in English For it to Oh yeah This country All my publications in Russia They didn't make it But it's An interesting thing, there's a new Like I've seen a new trend recently At least in equality and in disability People kind of probing that And quantifying like how much People who are not Speaking English, how much they're being held back So I'm originally Colombian And there was a Colombian researcher who published Like in plus one I think in plus one she published this thing About how just like how many barriers As A Spanish speaker, how much How many barriers that Colombian scientists I don't remember how she did it But anyway she did this analysis And put it in a paper, put it in a scientific paper I don't watch, and then imagine I mean that's like what if you're Indonesian Like I mean Spanish and English Share a lot, there's a lot of scenarios At some level, but life Your language is just completely different The barriers I imagine have got to be much greater And so people are only At least that I've become aware of Only recently started to quote that How much that's competing science Right, like the fact that Everyone has to be Adopting this lingual franco Right, but it's not Easy to everyone to adopt it So there's just barriers There's, yeah there's that But also the algorithm that does ranking Will Put a Spanish Published Paper with more Citations With more Well yeah, basically With higher levels of citations Lower than English ones With fewer citations That are less recognized I don't think, I wouldn't Find that surprising, I don't really know If it works, I've seen that sometimes When I search for something It tells me like, excuse all the things That aren't in English And then I think to myself, no I'm like exploring I'm exploring the history of Latin America, I actually need you To give me everything That you can find, not just English Yeah, for example So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised If this was one of the big products Of the way these things are optimized Conversely, there's also So You know, the big deal right now Since we're running out of Antibiotics, right? The big deal is Returning to the stage Approach Of Reading with infection Where you train your fingers For very specific bacteria And that actually Is research That Scientists in Russia All the USSR Had published in 1950 Wow It took people reinventing the wheel Now In the 2000s Because they couldn't read the Russian research To Re-do that whole research Yeah, I mean it's kind of English has become, because I think Western powers have probably Has to do with Western powers and Dominance and Colonialism and all sorts of Influences, but Yeah, English has become The common language as opposed To any other and It's Unfortunate, but I mean from a perspective of You know, just doing this show Right now, it's wonderful that Everybody was able to speak the same language To be able to have this conversation It's like Absolutely We could have tried French And I would have stumbled through it With great difficulty So would I I can't I mean All my scientific life Has been in English And so when I have to explain To my mother, for example What I do for a living She's constantly disappointed Because I keep stumbling On words and I don't know How to translate these words She probably takes your energy Yes, I know She's definitely Yeah, she's a kind of person Who would tell me The reason why you're not finding a job In parenthesis, I had a job But Well, the reason Is because you both are And you can't spell right In French Yes Thank you This is great Yeah, I mean It's sort of In mother's high standard It doesn't matter That you're out of PhD And that you took the form of the University It's like It's Massive deficiency Massive efficiency But you know It's interesting because sometimes I wonder Like with this business of the languages I actually had I could have totally missed that story For that book That I co-edited So I have this kind of Parallel scientific career Where I studied before station In a few years back And particularly in the Amazon And then a few years back I was actually trying to get The Andean countries There's an arc of deforestation That happens and that it's associated Where a lot of people want to make the argument that You know, coca cultivation Coca is the plant for which cocaine is made There's only three countries in the world That produce this plant For the scale of all You need all market And they're Andean countries And so a lot of people wanted to make the argument That you could stop deforestation If you could just stop Making up this plant If you could stop it So I wanted to kind of get behind that Like try to understand that better To go back from that And I started kind of probing into some early history Like what happened before the cocaine Like what happened And 80% of All the documentation was in German Oh my gosh Like 80% of the papers These were geography papers that were like That's a lot of software from Austria Software from Germany Everything was in German There had been this Sort of a big bump Like in the 1960s Starting in the late 50s Through the 70s There had been this kind of Sort of research Like German language dissertations From around the German speaking world You can imagine like graduate students From Europe are like landing In Bolivia They're like living in Putumayo in Colombia And they're moving there And documenting these projects To move the population From the Andes down into the Amazon And they're like Doing all of this and maybe there's like One tiny abstract in English And everything else is in German And I Yeah and I don't I really remember I think I came across like I was searching For a very old fashioned thing Where instead of just moving I was I was actually kind of searching in the library And I came across something and I thought Okay this is like inaccessible I'm going to have to interlibrary loan it And so I loaned like 20 different things And they start landing They start arriving And they have this amazing maps And they have this detail like for example Like the gender Disparity Like it was mostly men bringing it into Only by percent of the people who moved in were men And you know like this And the economy like what people were producing This is very very detailed social science And it's all in German language And there's only like a tiny You know like a one less than one page Abstract and I thought wow I could have missed you know Like I could imagine like I was going to find a lot of things In Spanish language right But it was a lot in German And it was this amazing I could have missed this amazing story I actually ended up editing a book With a comedy of mine who is an historian We published this book that was about About that history From different perspectives Mine was like an environmental perspective And I could have totally missed it If I had limited in my song The English language document The English language document So it was just like A series of fortunate accidents That led me there and so now I know that there's this gigantic history In Latin America In German That's in German language If you want to Find out what was happening In you know In the outskirts of Santa Cruz In Bolivia In 1965 You better Shape up on I'm German I'm German I mean it was a fascinating thing To document I was not a technician No, yeah I would have expected It would be local languages People Spanish language And the idea that All of the researchers who would have been Doing the documenting Would be from Germany That would not be expected I wonder how many things like that Because of people going different places And who's doing the documenting And who has the time The money The ability to actually Make those notes In different places How much has been missed because you're not You go, oh foreign language paper And you throw it away I'm not gonna Or it just doesn't come up Or it doesn't come up in the search at all The search was giving you that For me it was more Like Like you Grab that thread Like somebody in English Is citing that work And I'm looking at it and I'm like Oh it's in German but I'm gonna try to see I really want to see what they are saying And then from that And just doing this very old Fashion Scholarship Very old fashion Makes me feel ancient Searches Remember That existed Yes It was like following those leads Until I got to this library Library cards So I mean It was amazing I'm glad I did this history It's been a lot of hope To sort of bring that scholarship Into the front I'm wondering now How much we're missing When we're not searching There's a giant scholarship For example in Brazil A lot of journals That are published in Portuguese Bill I think if we went back To the The journals The Russian journals The 50s and 60s We'd be surprised about How much it might be there That's where the In general There were actually fairly advanced Yeah They were doing a lot of really interesting advanced work Right They had a huge budget They had Unlimited budget For research And it was all behind The Iron Curtain So nobody ever saw it Yeah There it is Searching out the language Let's look for things in all the languages Don't be afraid Don't be afraid Don't be afraid to Translate all of the Russian Journals From the 50s and 60s and 70s I mean it's just such an Incredible It's just something Justin said About Doing the things that people have already done You just kind of Access Access the minds of these people That the stuff is already written The experiments are already done And we just don't It is getting better There's a lot that Still needs to be on siloed But I was There are It is getting better But I have a number of times tried to I was Working for a research company And it was trying to Making To ask for people to present New project ideas New product and new project Venues to research So I went delving I'd get an idea And I'd go and I'd find We already did that I've got another idea There's something else that does that better It was But I never came up with the idea that didn't work That way I might not have ended up with a good idea But I didn't end up with a Presenting a thing that The company or another company had already done Tried to put a patent wall around Or whatever Whatever the outcome was It is Extremely important The google translate Stuff is getting better There is But yeah, if that stuff If those Russian Documents of that German text is still You know Bound Bound within a book somewhere It might, yeah That does sound like a neat project Google has not yet Taken all of the books Into the internet And the journal, so I Relyed for that kind of research I find a lot of interlibraries Where somebody physically Took their stack Ended and sent it to me And then I had to do OCR Like if I wanted to use Google So it looks like several layers Like OCR from a scan Someone did And translate But mostly I just hadn't really helped With the real critical stuff I just kind of got to just do it And translate And I was like does this really say What I think it does It is tough And I don't know if the technology For scanning is quite Sophisticated enough Or if we even have Some people may not remember this There was a point in time When we tried to do What the internet is now doing In preserving text It was called microfiche And I don't know I don't know what we did with it They showed these movies People go to the microfiche Movies that are like oh it's 1970 And the research I don't know what we did with all the microfiche I'm afraid we put it all in an Under air conditioned warehouse somewhere And then one hot day It just all fused I don't know All the microfiche from the libraries Is all kept in a Climate controlled storage Area Yes And it's cataloged well And it's cataloged well exactly I mean all the funding We give to our libraries You know How difficult it is For example for genomics How difficult it is to just Keep up with data That's generated and keep it Organized and keep it It is so difficult It is so difficult And it's not, I'm not even talking About the stuff That's like in hard drive stuff I'm talking about Like the format changes It is a battle Right now Yeah But I mean that's actually The problem with my variance I was completely Baffled When I was looking at The library in international history When we used to work with I said what's the biggest challenge Is it the air conditioning Is it the space, is it the stacks, is it the block And I said no, none of that Our biggest challenge Is obsolete technology And Obsolute computer technology Obsolute formats Obsolute I mean we all know that We started with the floppy disk We still find the floppy disk Drive And At some point They say okay the CD ROM Is going to be the gold standard For And if you're thinking That the cloud is doing all those things I have news for you For example we actually send DNA out To a company that sequences it And they charge us Because they buy a hard drive And they ship us a hard drive Just because it's easier than Loading it to the cloud It's faster for them Yes I mean there's A lot of companies that are also In the cloud and they're kind of like But at some point That quantity of data is such That they just put a line item Their overall they just put a line item Right Here's your hard drive They ship us a hard drive It's what they do That seems like the best possible solution Yeah think about that Think about that like this age of the Information technology and like this most Is easier for some companies To send us a physical hard drive That could fail or whatever And could lose all our data Then for them to upload it to the web And to wait for us to download it It's changing But it's just We can barely keep up actually With the growth, the data growth Like we can't We have difficulties keeping up We're constantly having to upgrade for storage And to actually It's You know like in our field of science Which is not very translational And that used to be Very kind of natural history oriented It was relatively hard To find pockets of money where you say I just need to constantly upgrade Like I need to constantly Get more computer equipment So we You know citizens do too I mean just when you're thinking About the space that a full Used to take 10 years ago And now With big pictures being Like 25 pixels Like a big megapixels You know you go from Making 0.5 megabytes To You know most of your video Like for a specific You know full And has the same thing We have the same situation To upgrade your hardware To pick up Yeah Yeah I mean They know it They do They want you to buy the new gadgets They do but I mean that's also I mean just keeping up with the data Is one thing And being able to keep up with You know you're collecting new data And like you mentioned you get new formats And things have to be reformatted But then and Justin mentioned You know genomes from Years ago I would say 15 You know you're 10 years ago You've got these genomes How are we dealing with the preservation Of all this data Like how do you make sure that It is preserved For perpetuity and that's got to be just a huge You know it's not like Just printing something on acid Free paper Yeah well for the Genomes the government Is data pretty good job Yeah I don't know how they've Managed to scale it up But you know and so they are The genome archive Has Grown it's really a Pain to submit to Some of this But the fact that they still exist And they haven't collapsed That's already to me like Pops, old pops, non-pops to them Remember that And that they're still To actually Put in with your own data searches Yeah That is amazing The functionality of NCBI has Just been growing and growing and growing And it's got three dimensional models And then there's this short read archive Which is this number Because it's including pack bio There's like giant long leads In the short read archive And that's also growing exclusively Right now That's the federal government right there That's federal government infrastructure That is really important for this information That's great Publication level information It's more the pre-publication level You know the pre-publication It's kind of like when I See at those reads and they're in my web And I need to make sure that The people of the future have access To maybe that often End up getting published Exactly That we use for publication Like Dryad Which is basically where you put Your raw data So that tables Supplements And literally like the raw data So that other scientists Can replicate the raw data Even they are starting to They're starting To run out of space Literally And they're the gold standard That's not published with that You know what Decays faster than any of this Any type of Any buttons That you're using And getting a car And then you buy it and sell it It's like It's like buying a computer You're like From one year To the next Is my Environment You're running the same Script that you wrote a year ago And you're trying to run it again And you get dynamic library 22 error It is so I mean there are Tools Like there's snake make There are tools out there To try to grapple with this This is the thing that decays the fastest So and this is the other thing too You can't be A natural scientist And work with this stuff Because you need somebody in there Programming R or whatever Or working with you I was watching The I don't know if it's I basically call it the IT team Working with the bio and from magicians And There was like four different programs They were fine tuning Just to The things that they were getting Into A reliable Format Absolutely mind blowing How much time space and effort and energy That part of the job Takes up And away from the science There's a single You know how There's some concerns or there's been Like a debate in the Popular literature of This artificial intelligence Going to take over the world Right And every time I think So this When we were presenting That phylogeny That evolutionary tree of the bats With the two groups So that's been My bread and butter as a natural scientist For a long time I know how to make phylogeny So let me explain to you that The taxonomy of species changes Over time And so something has a name Like the genus And species name But the genus name Change over time Or people make typos So for example if you have A data point that comes From a geographic location And you've got a sequence of somebody And you just want to pull it all together And they have typos I would say that back in the day When we were making phylogeny When I was making phylogeny Not with the big pipelines But I was compiling by hand About 40% of my time You'd be going into putting Us in LA And to this day When I put that in a When my students are trying to Automate those things It's like that's the step that Requires biometric duration Requires manual curation There's a manual curation step That's not available The sort of homologizing taxonomy And dealing with the typos There's like this manual curation step And I'm thinking every time I see that I'm like The artificial intelligence is not going to take over Anything The computer The computer This is a typo That you know this Seven letter word Is matched everywhere except for this one letter Like I can't No it doesn't work It requires a human being Right And isn't this also Partly a problem With that 10-15 year old data That's in there Where people couldn't wait to name a gene Something The names of genes Oh my god the names of genes Oh my god The names of genes That's like a word Oh god Your reaction is priceless No this is So my Significant other is a bio And from magician That runs across this With Mostly working with fun guy But yeah all the time Where somebody somewhere Named a thing at some point Because it's the first time they've gotten it Sequence maybe Or fifth time Whatever The names of what genes Are and what they're purported to do It's almost like It's terrifying It's terrifying because as much data As we have It's not necessarily even Useable Data if everybody Calling things different things How do you correlate if it's Is it gene wiki Or something like that Gene card Gene cards So there's a big movement And actually the National Science Foundation Has been sort of funding A series of projects with gene ontologies Right So gene ontology For ontologies more generally Not just for genes but also for like Lins you know like for Organism right like lins And all of that and there have been several massive projects Attempted to do exactly that Right like where you're Actually coming into the field and trying to homologize Across vast expanses Trying to do that But if you look at those things That every gene Looks like a career criminal Because they have all these aliases Yeah Yeah In this experiment In the rat It's not just going It's this other acronym And by the way It changes name We actually When we were When we were doing the Data analysis for this paper We The first step Was Basically Have all the synonyms Of the genes correctly So we Various tools online That are now available But half of the genes that we Had were unknown So we had this Block of genes That were unknown To the machine And then to the search Tool And yet Put it individually into Google And Google would find a gene card Because it's a synonym that Had never been recorded before So we had to do that One lot of stuff by hand And you have to be very discriminating Because sometimes there's actually some tools That will like in the absence That kind of like look for the Nearest thing that you can get And that's it's not necessarily by spelling Because it's trying to kind of like Navigate all of these equivalences And so it would actually kind of give you That particular gene you remember Oh yeah There's that gene that really The function was unknown And there was no real data but But due to some kind Of proximity in the database It kind of gave you all of these answers And you had to kind of watch out So we would have to fill in both For the fact that The computational tools would miss A whole bunch of genes But once we got answers some other way We had to evaluate them as well And the thing is with the bats When we looked at this There were 700 missing genes There were hundreds of genes That were missing from the genes of bats A substantial portion of them Are relatively easy to deal with Because they're all factory subject And that's something you know Like this gene family Right now Right now we're just talking about All factory receptors, right? The largest protein coding family Of genes and mammals Right So anyway, so that's easy It's like okay There's all these olfactory receptors That are present in other mammals But not in the bats But are not, are absent In other mammals But not in the bats But are not, are absent From our batches That's okay, we can live with that by Right It's not what we're dealing with For this paper Not in this paper Why the viral olfactory receptors Yeah So that was easy That took care of a few hundred Yeah The vomeronasal Old vomeronasal This other Old form of infection that you heard about The vomeronasal That could subside You know when you're a dog When you're walking your dog Kind of goes on another dog's behind Or he goes on the wall Like with some pee, right? Have you ever wondered Have you ever wondered why the dog's doing that If they have such a great sense of smell So I, oh yeah I just figured it was like Go right up close Why do they do that? Because they're using a different sense of smell That we cannot even imagine because we don't have it It's the vomeronasal Oh the vomeronasal, yes They're getting the pheromones in there Exactly And that wet part It's traveling It's not traveling as a volatile It's not traveling in the air It's actually kind of more physical Right It's heavier Exactly, it's heavier And it's traveling in the moist part of it I don't think I've ever Heard anyone explain it that way before That's fascinating It's really tasting The odor Yeah, more tasting The pellets, so it really goes through So it's just It's a different sense of smell that we don't have So we don't really have a form of reference That dogs and cats have it But maybe if we went And we stuck our faces on Well Let's not do that The key is that The point is that there's this Vomeronasal receptors as well That are also actually That's a whole other story Bats are interesting Because most of them don't have Most of them don't have So they're like us Lost, you know, like a whole bunch of primates We inherited it From our primate ancestor The fact that we don't have them So they're not active But you can still see the Case where it was You can still see the vestigial Area where the vomeronasal Used to be Now where is it Back where it was Does it have to work? That's so fascinating I've never heard from people And even going through anatomy Courses and oh yeah We're searching for the Vomeronasal organ in humans Humans have to have it There's got to be one And it's so interesting that There's this place where it used to be You can see the vestigial Location That people are searching for it Because you know the channel The ion channel that communicates So You know I mean it's Consumably you could have something else But that's actually how we studied In the bats My student stubbornly decided To study the ion channel In the bats And by studying that ion channel She discovered that It had been lost 13 times In As many different ways Like it's just been lost over and over And over and over Well I can imagine If I was going to be in a hot cave With 10 feet of The last thing you'd like to know Is have a very sensitive sense as well Oh yeah It's a pretty bad day A little bit There's a cave in Jamaica That's one of the most biologically Diverse in all the Caribbean And it's called St. Charity Cave And it's got It's not called The Davalos Cave It has an area In the cave That has been rebuilt by the Davalos Cave This is where St. Davalos Just fell in Oh What happens is You have to understand that it's like It's There's water And you're like Toilet eyes And the surface of the water is covered in guano By water There's water And your surface of the water is covered in guano And like dead things That have fallen into the cave And things all eating the dead things And things like Treaters that are eating the dead things On the surface It's an ecosystem Everybody's enjoying it It's called the Inferno Passage Because Because of the temperature and humidity It's a very oppressive heat And I was just The whole time I was there I just kept thinking I was wearing my respirator I was wearing wet waders But I was also wearing my glasses And I just kept thinking I am I might trip over And then I will be Incapable Of being any use I will be useless to this expedition If my glasses If I travel on my glasses And I did not bring an extra pair This is not good So I kept just moving very cautiously Until I tripped Until I was holding a pair of binoculars Trying to find some vats And so forth So I was holding a binoculars I was trying for the binoculars not to fall into the water And so So I I hit full force against the lock And Just forward motion While holding the binoculars So I just went in Of course the water With the guano just flooded into the waders Oh The things we didn't expect But we fully Organized your next vacation What do I say I said One of the most biodiverse caves in Jamaica I think it's a fascinating location And Yeah, I know hot kids are special They're special kids Hot caves With guano baths I mean I want to see the Vacation posters Yay It was being an invitation for us Be very wary Believe it or not There was Someone at some point Wanted to Set up some kind of disco Oh yes At the entrance of the cave Disco Disco In fact One colony of baths In another part of Jamaica was displaced By somebody making it into a disco Oh wow Now I don't think it wasn't Maybe your disco's out of the back caves People When it's not An area For innocent people Oh yeah, that wasn't the Dominican Republic Yes Where You take your mistress to I think Why There are so many questions there Quiet It's secluded It's stinky and hot And you're going to come home smelling Like bat guano And not a mistress Exactly Nobody's going to perceive somebody else's Confused, that's right Oh my gosh Oh my goodness Anyway, it's not as bad Angelique makes it sound like it's really bad I mean it's I almost died Five different times On our first date But it's nothing It wasn't only because of the cave Okay There was a story involved There were other things There was a further lances The hot cave is not responsible For the further lances From that Danger This story was tragic It's already judged that It almost killed me Nothing happened with the further lances But it didn't So we're all glad Yes All swelled at ends All as well No I think I'm going to We're getting late here So what I'm going to do is end our broadcast For everyone It's even later where you are Well actually it's done all the way up to early It's early That's right So Justin Say the words Good night Justin You're almost there I got it Say good night Justin Good night Justin Say good night Dr. Kiki Good night Dr. Kiki Good night everyone Thank you for joining us For another episode of This Week in Science We hope you have a wonderful week And we'll see you next Wee