Category: Science

New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveal for the first time galaxies with stellar bars at a time when the universe was a mere 25% of its present age.

“I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!’”

Stellar bars are elongated features of stars stretching from the centers of galaxies into their outer disks.

The finding of so-called barred galaxies, similar to our Milky Way, this early in the universe will require astrophysicists to refine their theories of galaxy evolution.

Prior to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), images from the Hubble Space Telescope had never detected bars at such young epochs. In a Hubble image, one galaxy, EGS-23205, is little more than a disk-shaped smudge, but in the corresponding JWST image taken this past summer, it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy with a clear stellar bar.

“I took one look at these data, and I said, ‘We are dropping everything else!’” says Shardha Jogee, professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” she says, describing data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by UT Austin professor, Steven Finkelstein.

“It’s like going into a forest that nobody has ever gone into.”

The team identified another barred galaxy, EGS-24268, also from about 11 billion years ago, which makes two barred galaxies existing farther back in time than any previously discovered.

In an article accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they highlight these two galaxies and show examples of four other barred galaxies from more than 8 billion years ago.

“For this study, we are looking at a new regime where no one had used this kind of data or done this kind of quantitative analysis before,” says Yuchen “Kay” Guo, a graduate student who led the analysis, “so everything is new. It’s like going into a forest that nobody has ever gone into.”

Bars play an important role in galaxy evolution by funneling gas into the central regions, boosting star formation.

“Bars solve the supply chain problem in galaxies,” Jogee says. “Just like we need to bring raw material from the harbor to inland factories that make new products, a bar powerfully transports gas into the central region where the gas is rapidly converted into new stars at a rate typically 10 to 100 times faster than in the rest of the galaxy.”

Bars also help to grow supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies by channeling the gas part of the way.

The discovery of bars during such early epochs shakes up galaxy evolution scenarios in several ways.

“This discovery of early bars means galaxy evolution models now have a new pathway via bars to accelerate the production of new stars at early epochs,” Jogee says.

And the very existence of these early bars challenges theoretical models as they need to get the galaxy physics right in order to predict the correct abundance of bars. The team will be testing different models in their next papers.

JWST can unveil structures in distant galaxies better than Hubble for two reasons: First, its larger mirror gives it more light-gathering ability, allowing it to see farther and with higher resolution. Second, it can see through dust better as it observes at longer infrared wavelengths than Hubble.

Undergraduate students Eden Wise and Zilei Chen played a key role in the research by visually reviewing hundreds of galaxies, searching for those that appeared to have bars, which helped narrow the list to a few dozen for the other researchers to analyze with a more intensive mathematical approach.

Additional coauthors are from UT Austin and other institutions in the US, the UK, Japan, Spain, France, Italy, Australia, and Israel.

Funding for this research came from, in part, the Roland K. Blumberg Endowment in Astronomy, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and NASA. This work relied on resources at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Source: UT Austin

Researchers are using techniques from metal additive manufacturing to embed a hidden cache of information within products to help combat counterfeit goods.

Ensuring manufactured goods and components have not been copied and replaced illegally by counterfeit goods is a high-priority concern of the manufacturing and defense industries in the United States and around the world.

A potential solution could affect areas ranging from enhancing biomedical implants to protecting national defense assets.

Researchers from Texas A&M University have developed a method of imprinting a hidden magnetic tag, encoded with authentication information, within manufactured hardware during the part fabrication process. The process holds the potential to expose counterfeit goods more easily by replacing physical tags—such as barcodes or quick response (QR) codes—with these hidden magnetic tags, which serve as permanent and unique identifiers.

The team recently published its research in the journal Additive Manufacturing.

Ensuring security and reliable authentication in manufacturing is a critical national concern, with the US investing billions of dollars in manufacturing. Without such a method readily available, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate an authentic part or component from its counterfeit copy.

“The issue is that when I come up with an idea, device, or part, it is very easy for others to copy and even fabricate it much more cheaply—though maybe at a lower quality,” says Ibrahim Karaman, professor and department head of the materials science and engineering department. “Sometimes they even put the same brand name, so how do you make sure that item isn’t yours? [The embedded magnetic tag] gives us an opportunity and a new tool to make sure that we can protect our defense and manufacturing industries.”

The team is implementing metal additive manufacturing techniques to accomplish its goal of successfully embedding readable magnetic tags into metal parts without compromising performance or longevity. Researchers used 3D printing to embed these magnetic tags below the surface into nonmagnetic steel hardware.

Other applications for this method include traceability, quality control, and more, largely depending on the industry that uses it.

Once embedded into a nonmagnetic item, the magnetic tag is readable using a magnetic sensor device—such as a smartphone—by scanning near the correct location on the product.

While other methods exist for imprinting information, they primarily require sophisticated and costly equipment.

“Different approaches have been used to try to locally change the properties of the metals during the manufacturing process to be able to codify information within the part,” says Daniel Salas Mula, a researcher with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.

“This is the first time that magnetic properties of the material are being used in this way to introduce information within a nonmagnetic part, specifically for the 3D printing of metals.”

Doctoral student Deniz Ebeperi says that to map the magnetic reading of the part, the team created a custom three-axis magnetic sensor capable of mapping the surface and revealing the regions where the embedded magnetic tag was accessible.

While the system is more secure than a physical tag or code located on the exterior of an item, the team is still working to improve the complexity of the method’s security.

As the project continues, Karaman says the next steps include developing a more secure method of reading the information, possibly through the implementation of a physical “dual-authentication” requiring the user to apply a specific treatment or stimulus to unlock access to the magnetic tag.

Additional collaborators are from Texas A&M University and Purdue University. The project had support from the SecureAmerica Institute.

Source: Texas A&M University

WASHINGTON — After technical and licensing delays, Virgin Orbit is gearing up for its first launch from the United Kingdom as soon as Jan. 9.

A maritime navigation warning issued Jan. 4 identified a zone for hazardous operations for “rocket launching” off the coast of Ireland late Jan. 9, with a backup date of Jan. 18. The zone is consistent with the drop zone for Virgin Orbit’s “Start Me Up” LauncherOne mission flying out of Spaceport Cornwall in England.

Virgin Orbit spokesperson Allison Patch confirmed to SpaceNews that the navigation warning was for the upcoming launch, but said the company was not yet ready to formally announce a launch date for the mission. “All launch partners are currently working towards launch fairly soon,” she said, with a confirmation of the company’s launch plans expected in the coming days.

A separate marine notice issued by Ireland’s Department of Transport Jan. 4 listed a similar hazard area explicitly linked to the Virgin Orbit launch. In addition to the Jan. 9 and 18 launch dates, the Irish notice including potential launches on Jan. 13, 15, 19 and 20.

The hazard notices are in the event of a launch mishap involving the air-launched LauncherOne system. “Where the launch attempt proceeds as planned, no debris will enter the marine hazard area,” the Irish notice stated. “However, there is a low probability for the vehicle to produce dangerous debris if a mishap were to occur.”

Virgin Orbit had planned to conduct the Start Me Up mission last fall, flying its Boeing 747 aircraft, launch vehicle and related systems to Spaceport Cornwall in October. At one point, the company targeted a mid-December launch, only to postpone the launch days later, citing “additional technical work” on the launch system and a pending launch license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

The CAA awarded that launch license to Virgin Orbit Dec. 21, clearing the final regulatory hurdles for the launch. “At this time, all of Virgin Orbit’s systems are green for launch,” Dan Hart, chief executive of Virgin Orbit, said in a Dec. 22 statement. The company reported that both the vehicle and its payloads were in “good condition” to launch, but said only that a launch date would be set in the “coming weeks.”

The Start Me Up mission will place into orbit seven payloads from a variety of customers, including the U.K. Ministry of Defence, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the first satellite for the government of Oman.

Glassfrogs make themselves transparent while they rest by taking red blood cells from circulation and concealing them in their livers, research finds.

It’s easy to miss a glassfrog in its natural environment. The northern glassfrog, Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni, measures no more than a few centimeters, and they are most active at night, when their green skin helps them blend in with the surrounding leaves and foliage.

But these amphibians become true masters of camouflage during the day when they’re asleep.

“When glassfrogs are resting, their muscles and skin become transparent, and their bones, eyes, and internal organs are all that’s visible,” says Carlos Taboada, a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a co-first author of the paper. “These frogs sleep on the bottoms of large leaves, and when they’re transparent, they can perfectly match the colors of the vegetation.”

Many animals in the sea can change the color of their skin or become completely transparent, but it’s a far less common skillset on land. One reason transparency is so difficult to achieve is because of red blood cells in the circulatory system. Red blood cells are adept at absorbing green light, which is the color of light usually reflected by plants and other vegetation. In return, these oxygen-rich cells reflect red light, making blood—and by extension the circulatory system—highly visible, especially against a bright green leaf.

Glassfrogs are some of the only land-based vertebrates that can achieve transparency, which has made them a target for study. Taboada first began studying glass frogs as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke who specializes in studying transparency. Working with Jesse Delia, who traveled around the world collecting different glassfrogs for the study, they observed that red blood cells seemed to be disappearing from the circulating blood whenever the frogs became transparent.

They conducted additional imaging tests on the animals, proving via optical models that the animals were able to achieve transparency because they were pushing red blood cells out of their vessels. He suspected that the cells were being stored in one of the frog’s inner organs which are packaged in a reflective membrane. The finding appears in the journal Science.

For a see-through animal, its biology was shockingly challenging to decipher. The research drew on the expertise of biologists and biomedical engineers at Duke and at the American Museum of Natural History, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California.

“If these frogs are awake, stressed, or under anesthesia their circulatory system is full of red blood cells and they are opaque,” explains Delia, now a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. “The only way to study transparency is if these animals are happily asleep, which is difficult to achieve in a research lab. We were really banging our heads against the wall for a solution.”

But Taboada had learned about an imaging technology called photoacoustic microscopy, or PAM, when he was studying biliverdin, the compound that gives certain species of frogs their signature green color. PAM involves shooting a safe laser beam of light into tissue, which is then absorbed by molecules and converted into ultrasonic waves. These sound waves are then used to make detailed biomedical images of the molecules. The imaging tool is non-invasive, quiet, sensitive, and, in a stroke of luck, available at Duke.

“PAM is the ideal tool for non-invasive imaging of red blood cells because you don’t need to inject contrast agents, which would be very difficult for these frogs,” explains Junjie Yao, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke who specializes in PAM technologies. “The red blood cells themselves provide the contrast, because different types of cells absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light. We could optimize our imaging systems to specifically look for red blood cells and track how much oxygen was circulating in the frog’s bodies.”

In their imaging set-up, the frogs slept upside down in a petri dish, similar to how they would sleep on a leaf, and the team shined a green laser at the animal. The red blood cells in the frog’s body absorbed the green light and emitted ultrasonic waves, which were then picked up by an acoustic sensor to trace their whereabouts, with high spatial resolution and high sensitivity.

The results were startlingly clear: When the frogs were asleep, they removed nearly 90% of their circulating red blood cells and stored them in their liver.

In further tests, the team also saw that red blood cells flowed out of the liver and circulated when the frogs were active, and then re-aggregated in the liver while the frogs were recovering.

“The primary result is that whenever glassfrogs want to be transparent, which is typically when they’re at rest and vulnerable to predation, they filter nearly all the red blood cells out of their blood and hide them in a mirror-coated liver—somehow avoiding creating a huge blood clot in the process,” says Johnsen. “Whenever the frogs need to become active again, they bring the cells back into the blood stream, which gives them the metabolic capacity to move around.”

According to Delia and Taboada, this process raises questions about how the frogs can safely store almost all their red blood cells in their liver without clotting or damaging their peripheral tissues.

One potential next step, they say, could be to study this mechanism and how it could one day apply to vascular issues in humans.

This work also introduces glassfrogs as a useful model for research, especially when paired with the state-of-the-art photoacoustic imaging. As long-time glassfrog researchers, they are excited about the new avenues of study now available to them and interested collaborators.

“We can learn more about the glassfrog’s physiology and behavior, or we can use these models to optimize imaging tools for biomedical engineering,” Delia says.

This work had support from National Geographic Society; the Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellowship; the Gerstner Scholars Fellowship provided by the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History; start-up funds from Stanford University and start-up funds from Duke University; the National Institutes of Health; the National Science Foundation CAREER Award; the Duke Institute of Brain Science Incubator award; the American Heart Association Collaborative Sciences award; and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Source: Duke University

TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium has entered into a service provider agreement with a company widely expected to be Samsung to connect its satellites to smartphones.

The U.S.-based satellite operator said it is due to be paid royalties, development and network usage fees from the deal in a Dec. 30 regulatory filing that provided no financial details or timings.

“To protect each company’s investment in this newly developed technology, the overall arrangements include substantial recoupment payments from each company for commercializing a similar capability,” Iridium said.

The announcement comes after Iridium said in July that it had signed a development contract with a company to enable its satellite technology in smartphones. 

Iridium said both agreements are still contingent upon successfully developing the technology.

Samsung plans to use Iridium’s constellation to bring satellite connectivity to its range of Galaxy S23 range of smartphones this year, South Korean media publication ETNews reported Nov. 24.

Unlike the direct-to-smartphone service Apple launched Nov. 15 with Iridium’s rival Globalstar, ETNews said Samsung’s service would extend beyond basic SOS messaging to enable texts and low-resolution images to be sent outside terrestrial networks. 

While Iridium and South Korea-based Samsung have declined to comment on the ETNews report, Lee Seung-gwan, a senior executive at Samsung Electronics’ communications team, said a “smartphone-satellite connection is something we should pursue, obviously.”

The partnership would make sense for Iridium following Apple’s Globalstar tie-up, according to William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma, who expects the Galaxy S23 line-up to be released in February.

Globalstar’s willingness to allocate 85% of its satellite network to Apple helped seal its deal with the company behind one of the world’s most successful smartphones. 

But that level of commitment was not feasible for Iridium, DiPalma said in a note to investors Nov. 25, because thousands of blue chip customers including the U.S. Department of Defense currently rely on its network.

Even still, Iridium’s $3 billion 66-strong constellation is “considered significantly more advanced” than Globalstar’s network of 24 satellites, he said.

“In our view, the Iridium smartphone functionality will be more expansive than the Apple-GlobalStar iPhone14 partnership,” he added.

During Iridium’s latest earnings call Oct. 20, CEO Matt Desch hinted that “you can do a lot more than just push an emergency button” with a smartphone connected to a satellite. 

Apple has kept its future direct-to-smartphone plans close to its chest as it invests $450 million to upgrade Globalstar’s network.

Meanwhile, other established and startup satellite companies are preparing to offer more than just basic emergency messaging when they launch their direct-to-smartphone services in the coming years.

Texas-based AST SpaceMobile is preparing to start deploying operational satellites from late 2023 to bring 5G connectivity directly to smartphones.

Samsung Next, Samsung’s investment arm, was an early investor in AST SpaceMobile.

DiPalma expects an Iridium partnership with Samsung would contribute $20 million in revenues in its first year, although “that estimate may be conservative.”

SpaceNews correspondent Park Si-soo contributed to this story from Seoul, South Korea.

WASHINGTON — Airbus Defence and Space is joining a commercial space station project led by Voyager Space, a move that could potentially make it easier for European governments to use the station after the retirement of the International Space Station.

Denver-based Voyager Space announced Jan. 4 a partnership with Airbus on its Starlab commercial space station project. Airbus will provide “technical design support and expertise” for Starlab, the companies said, but did not disclose additional details about the partnership or financial terms.

Voyager Space announced plans for Starlab in October 2021 working with Lockheed Martin. Starlab, as described at the time, would feature in inflatable module, docking node and bus, capable of hosting up to four astronauts at a time.

Voyager Space, through its subsidiary Nanoracks, won one of three NASA Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development, or CLD, awards from NASA in December 2021. The $160 million Space Act Agreement is intended to support design work on Starlab as NASA prepares to transition from the ISS to commercial space stations by the end of the decade.

That transition will also involve NASA’s international partners on the ISS, something that both Airbus and Voyager Space officials alluded to in the announcement of their partnership. “Working with Airbus we will expand Starlab’s ecosystem to serve the European Space Agency (ESA) and its member state space agencies to continue their microgravity research in LEO,” Dylan Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Voyager Space, said in the announcement.

“This collaboration is an important step in making Starlab a reality, providing a foundation for long-lasting European and American leadership in space,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, executive vice president of space systems at Airbus Defence and Space, in the same statement.

ISS partners have pondered how they will make use of commercial space stations run by American companies. Current ISS arrangements, where space agencies barter for services, are unlikely to apply to commercial facilities, where agencies may have to work directly with the station’s operator rather than through NASA.

“We need to find ways to work together, certainly in other ways than we did before,” said Peter Gräf, director of applications and science at the German space agency DLR, during a panel discussion at the AIAA ASCEND conference in October. “There are a lot of options available and the main players are in heavy discussions on that.”

Direct payments from European governments to American companies for use of commercial space stations could be politically problematic. “The taxpayers in Europe don’t want to pay directly to private American companies,” said Nicolas Maubert, space counselor at the French Embassy in the U.S. and representative of the French space agency CNES in the U.S., at the conference panel. Those concerns may be alleviated, though, if companies from Europe and other ISS partners are involved with the stations.

ESA officials, who are beginning work on their post-ISS plans, are aware of those concerns. “Shall we pay directly to commercial providers in the U.S.? We can, of course, but that is euros directly supporting U.S. industry. Is that something Europe wants to do, that our member states want to do?” said Frank De Winne, head of ESA’s European Astronaut Center, in an interview during ESA’s ministerial council meeting in Paris in November.

How ESA will deal with commercial space stations is something the agency will study leading up to its next ministerial council meeting in 2025, but he said one option would be for ESA to fund development of a European crewed vehicle that could service those stations.

“If we talk to the commercial providers today, to the CLDs that are being funded by NASA, they all tell us the same thing: they are interested in transportation,” he said. “For them to keep their costs low on transportation, they want competition. It’s as simple as that.”

Airbus is not the first European company to be involved in a commercial space station project. Thales Alenia Space is building modules for Axiom Space that will initially be installed on the ISS but eventually be detached to form a commercial space station.

Twitter and online news articles show potential for tracking the timing and location of invasive insect spread, a new study shows.

The researchers say these sources are promising for filling in gaps when official data are not widely available.

“The idea was to explore if we could use this data to fill in some of the information gaps about pest spread, and ultimately, to support the development of better predictive models of where pest spread is happening, and when to use costly control measures,” says Laura Tateosian, associate teaching professor in the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University.

“Even though these are not formal scientific sources, we found that we could clearly see some of the major events that were occurring about two invasive pests in the news, and on Twitter.”

In the study, the researchers tracked past tweets about two insects—the spotted lanternfly and Tuta absoluta—compiled by a internet-based subscription service, Brandwatch, as well as online news articles aggregated by Google News and GDELT, or the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone Project.

The spotted lanternfly, which was first reported in the United States in Pennsylvania in 2014, is an insect native to Asia that can damage or destroy grapes, cherries, hops, certain lumber trees, and other plants. The research team tracked historical posts about spotted lanternfly in Pennsylvania in a single year in 2017, and then globally between 2011 and 2021.

Tuta absoluta, an insect also known as the tomato leaf miner, is native to South America. It was discovered in Spain in 2006, and has spread into parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It has been nicknamed the “tomato Ebola” because of the devastation it can cause to tomato crops. The researchers tracked posts about Tuta absoluta between 2011 and 2021.

“While some invasive insects have reached their global range, in both of these cases, the pests are actively spreading,” says Ariel Saffer, a graduate student in geospatial analytics.

“We launched this as a proof-of-concept study to see if it would be scientifically reasonable to use these sources to track pest spread. We compared information in places where the insects were known to be present to see if these sources accurately captured existing knowledge.”

The researchers found that activity on Twitter and in news stories tracked some of the patterns in official surveys. For example, the volume of Twitter posts and news activity about spotted lanternfly tracked the seasonal pest cycle, with more activity in the summer and fall.

In terms of location, they saw a high volume of tweets and news articles in areas located at the epicenter of outbreaks. In Pennsylvania, news articles captured a subset of counties confirmed in 2017 by USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service survey data, but also uncovered one county not listed in official records.

For Tuta absoluta, the team found posts on Twitter and in news stories often coincided with global pest spread, as compared to reports gathered by the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO). Information in news and Twitter posts also aligned with survey data for this pest in Nigeria, and sometimes before that information was widely available in scientific sources.

The findings suggest Twitter and news information could be useful to supplement official data sources, but more work is needed, the researchers say.

“News media and social media have the potential to give you more immediate insight into what’s going on, especially if scientific information on insect spread is not immediately published in scientific literature, or not widely available to other scientists,” Saffer says.

“Also, relying on data from scientific publications can sometimes offer a patchwork coverage of space and time, depending on when that study happened. It can be hard to get aggregated information in continuous time, especially at the global scale, as that information can be managed by multiple agencies.”

The study appears in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems.

Source: NC State

A common fatty acid found in the Western diet breaks down into compounds that contribute to increased temperature and pain—but not itch—sensitivity in people with psoriasis lesions, researchers report.

The finding could lead to better understanding of how lipids communicate with sensory neurons, and potentially to improved pain and sensitivity treatments for psoriasis patients.

Linoleic acid is a fatty acid found in vegetable oils, nuts, and seeds, and is one of the predominant fatty acids found in the Western diet. Metabolites from linoleic acid—the products formed when the body breaks it down through digestion—play a role in skin barrier function.

“We noticed high levels of two types of lipids derived from linoleic acid in psoriatic lesions,” says Santosh Mishra, associate professor of neuroscience at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the research in JID Innovations.

“That led us to wonder whether the lipids might affect how sensory neurons in these lesions communicate. We decided to investigate whether their presence could be related to the temperature or pain hypersensitivity that many psoriasis patients report.”

The research team used mass spectrometry to create lipid profiles of skin from psoriatic lesions. They focused on two types of linoleic acid-derived lipids, or oxylipids: 13-hydroxy-9,10-epoxy octadecenoate (9,13-EHL) and 9,10,13-trihydroxy-octadecenoate (9,10,13-THL). The first form, 9,13-EHL, can convert into the more stable 9,10,13-THL form via interaction with certain enzymes.

The researchers found that while both forms bind to receptors on sensory neurons within the skin, the more stable form—9,10,13-THL—had a longer lasting effect than 9,13-EHL.

They also found that once the lipids bind to the neuronal receptor, they activate the neurons expressing TRPA1 and TRPV1 receptors that are involved in temperature and pain hypersensitivity, opening communications channels to the central nervous system.

Interestingly, the lipids did not have any effect on itch.

“It was surprising that these lipids could create hypersensitivity but not impact itch sensation, which is usually the most troublesome symptom associated with psoriasis,” Mishra says. “This most likely has to do with how the neuron is activated—a mechanism we still haven’t uncovered.”

Now that an association between linoleic acid and hypersensitivity to temperature and pain has been established, the researchers want to further explore exactly how this response is created. They hope that the answers may lead to solutions that can relieve these symptoms in psoriasis patients.

“We know that this lipid moves from one form to another, but don’t yet know what causes that,” Mishra says. “We also know what protein the lipids are binding to, but not where the bond occurs. Answering these questions may hopefully lead to new therapies—or dietary solutions— for some psoriasis sufferers.”

The National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health supported the work.

Source: NC State

Testing for the presence of a single immune system molecule on nasal swabs can help detect stealthy viruses not identified in standard tests, a new study shows.

As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, potentially dangerous new viruses can begin to spread in the population well before the global public health surveillance system can detect them.

“Finding a dangerous new virus is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” says Ellen Foxman, associate professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology at Yale University and senior author of the study in The Lancet Microbe. “We found a way to significantly reduce the size of the haystack.”

Public health officials typically look to a few sources for warning signs of emerging disease. They study emerging viruses in animals that may transmit the infection to humans.

But determining which of the hundreds, or thousands, of new viral variants represent a true danger is difficult. And they look for outbreaks of unexplained respiratory ailments, which was how SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was discovered in China late in 2019.

By the time an outbreak of a novel virus occurs, however, it may be too late to contain its spread.

For the new study, Foxman and her team revisited an observation made in her lab in 2017, which they thought may provide a new way to monitor for unexpected pathogens.

Nasal swabs are commonly taken from patients with suspected respiratory infections and are tested to detect specific signatures of 10 to 15 known viruses. Most tests come back negative.

But as Foxman’s team observed in 2017, in a few cases the swabs of those who tested negative for the “usual suspect” viruses still exhibited signs that antiviral defenses were activated, indicating the presence of a virus. The telltale sign was a high level of a single antiviral protein made by the cells that line the nasal passages.

Based on that finding, the researchers applied comprehensive genetic sequencing methods to old samples containing the protein and, in one sample, found an unexpected influenza virus, called influenza C.

The researchers also used this same strategy of retesting old samples to search for missed cases of COVID-19 during the first two weeks of March 2020. While cases of the virus had surfaced in New York State around that same time, testing was not readily available until weeks later.

Hundreds of nasal swab samples collected from patients at Yale-New Haven Hospital during that time had tested negative for standard signature viruses. When tested for the immune system biomarker, the vast majority of those samples showed no trace of activity of the antiviral defense system. But a few did; among those, the team found four cases of COVID-19 that had gone undiagnosed at the time.

The findings reveal that testing for an antiviral protein made by the body, even if the tests for known respiratory viruses are negative, can help pinpoint which nasal swabs are more likely to contain unexpected viruses.

Specifically, screening for the biomarker can allow researchers to narrow down the search for unexpected pathogens, making it feasible to do surveillance for unexpected viruses using swabs collected during routine patient care.

Samples found to possess the biomarker can be analyzed using more complex genetic testing methods to identify unexpected or emerging pathogens circulating in the patient population and jumpstart a response from the health care community.

Yale’s Nagarjuna R. Cheemarla and Jason Bishai are co-lead authors of the paper, as are former Yale researchers Amelia Hanron and Joseph R. Fauver.

Source: Yale University