Astrobotic and Mission Control to partner on lunar rover mission

COLORADO SPRINGS — Astrobotic is partnering with Canadian space software company Mission Control on a small rover that will go to the Moon on Astrobotic’s next lander mission.

The two companies announced April 8 that they will use Mission Control’s Spacefarer software to operate Astrobotic’s first CubeRover, which will go to the moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander scheduled for no earlier than late this year. The CubeRover will be one of several secondary payloads on that lander, which will also deliver NASA’s VIPER rover.

The shoebox-sized rover will test its maneuverability and communications on this first mission. It will also demonstrate the Spacefarer software’s ability to control the rover, including semi-autonomous navigation across the surface and analysis of images taken by the rover’s cameras.

“We chose to work with Mission Control because of the extensive capabilities that they have in Spacefarer and also the very simple interface they built,” said Mike Provenzano, vice president of advanced development programs at Astrobotic, during a briefing at the 39th Space Symposium.

Spacefarer is a cloud-based mission operations tool, said Ewan Reid, founder and chief executive of Mission Control, providing easy access to telemetry and other data as well as the ability to command a spacecraft through a point-and-click interface. It provides, he said, “all sorts of different tools that users need to try to make the best smartest decisions in the shortest amount of time.”

The software will enable distributed control for CubeRover, with mission operations handled both at Astrobotic’s Pittsburgh headquarters and Mission Control’s Ottawa headquarters. “It’s truly going to be a joint mission with operators at both locations,” said Provenzano. “That’s really exciting and something that Spacefarer enabled.”

Mission Control flew a version of Spacefarer on another lunar lander mission, ispace’s HAKUTO-R M1 lander, but that spacecraft crashed attempting to land on the moon in April 2023. Reid said that the software would have been able to receive and analyze data from that lander but not command it.

Flying Spacefarer on CubeRover, he said, will help Mission Control open up new opportunities for his company, demonstrating that Spacefarer can handle operations of spacecraft. Those customers, he argued, can focus on their specific technologies, “and they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for an operations platform.”

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) stimulated the development of Spacefarer through its Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), intended to help Canadian companies demonstrate technologies for lunar missions. “The CSA recognizes that without that step in our development timeline, without having validated something that has flown and operated on a real mission, it’s very hard for us to sell it around the world,” Reid said.

“Commercial companies are at the very beginning of creating a new market and economy at the moon,” said CSA President Lisa Campbell. “LEAP was created to provide thias wide range of opportunities for Canadian science and technology activities in lunar orbit, on the moon’s surface and beyond.”

She said the agreement between Astrobotic and Mission Control is “validating something that we believe in at the agency, which is we need to try things, we need to be bold. The world wants more of what Canada has to offer.”

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AI may cut mammogram false positives without missing cancer




Using artificial intelligence to supplement radiologists’ evaluations of mammograms may improve breast cancer screening by reducing false positives without missing cases of cancer, according to a new study.

The researchers developed an algorithm that identified normal mammograms with very high sensitivity. They then ran a simulation on patient data to see what would have happened if all of the very low-risk mammograms had been taken off radiologists’ plates, freeing the doctors to concentrate on the more questionable scans.

The simulation revealed that fewer people would have been called back for additional testing but that the same number of cancer cases would have been detected.

False positives are when you call a patient back for additional testing, and it turns out to be benign,” explains senior author Richard L. Wahl, a professor of radiology at Washington University’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR) and a professor of radiation oncology.

“That causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety for patients and consumes medical resources. This simulation study showed that very low-risk mammograms can be reliably identified by AI to reduce false positives and improve workflows.”

Wahl previously collaborated with Whiterabbit.ai on an algorithm to help radiologists judge breast density on mammograms to identify people who could benefit from additional or alternative screening. That algorithm received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 and is now marketed by Whiterabbit.ai as WRDensity.

In the new study, published in the journal Radiology: Artificial Intelligence, Wahl and colleagues at Whiterabbit.ai worked together to develop a way to rule out cancer using AI to evaluate mammograms. They trained the AI model on 123,248 2D digital mammograms (containing 6,161 showing cancer) that were largely collected and read by Washington University radiologists. Then, they validated and tested the AI model on three independent sets of mammograms, two from institutions in the US and one in the UK.

First, the researchers figured out what the doctors did: how many patients were called back for secondary screening and biopsies; the results of those tests; and the final determination in each case. Then, they applied AI to the datasets to see what would have been different if AI had been used to remove negative mammograms in the initial assessments and physicians had followed standard diagnostic procedures to evaluate the rest.

For example, consider the largest dataset, which contained 11,592 mammograms. When scaled to 10,000 mammograms (to make the math simpler for the purposes of the simulation), AI identified 34.9% as negative. If those 3,485 negative mammograms had been removed from the workload, radiologists would have made 897 callbacks for diagnostic exams, a reduction of 23.7% from the 1,159 they made in reality. At the next step, 190 people would have been called in a second time for biopsies, a reduction of 6.9% from the 200 in reality.

At the end of the process, both the AI rule-out and real-world standard-of-care approaches identified the same 55 cancers. In other words, this study of AI suggests that out of 10,000 people who underwent initial mammograms, 262 could have avoided diagnostic exams, and 10 could have avoided biopsies, without any cancer cases being missed.

“At the end of the day, we believe in a world where the doctor is the superhero who finds cancer and helps patients navigate their journey ahead,” says coauthor Jason Su, cofounder and chief technology officer at Whiterabbit.ai.

“The way AI systems can help is by being in a supporting role. By accurately assessing the negatives, it can help remove the hay from the haystack so doctors can find the needle more easily.

“This study demonstrates that AI can potentially be highly accurate in identifying negative exams. More importantly, the results showed that automating the detection of negatives may also lead to a tremendous benefit in the reduction of false positives without changing the cancer detection rate.”

This work was supported by funding from Whiterabbit.ai Inc.

Washington University has equity interests in Whiterabbit.ai Inc. and may receive royalty income and milestone payments from a “collaboration and license agreement” with Whiterabbit.ai to develop a technology evaluated in this research. Wahl is the principal investigator on a research contract from Whiterabbit.ai. These agreements are managed by the Washington University Institutional Conflict of Interest Committee.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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Birth defect discovery could advance early detection, prevention




A new study reveals a potential shift in our basic knowledge of the origins of birth defects and offer new targets for early detection and prevention strategies.

Birth defects affect about 3% of babies born in the United States each year.

The work, published in the journal Science Advances, identified crucial genetic interactions during the earliest stages of embryonic development that predicted birth defects characteristic of Cornelia de Lange syndrome and may offer clues about the genetic origins of many types of birth defects.

Cornelia de Lange Syndrome is a genetic condition that affects many parts of the body, characterized by distinctive facial features, growth delay, intellectual disability, and limb abnormalities. The syndrome is caused by mutations in genes involved in the regulation of gene expression and development.

Researchers made a profound discovery relating to the gene Nipbl—a deficiency of which causes most cases of Cornelia de Lange syndrome—and its intricate interplay with another gene, Nanog.

“Our data suggest that Nipbl and Nanog are more than just necessary players in early embryonic development. They are critical regulators that, when misregulated together, have far-reaching impacts on embryogenesis and the development of many tissues and organs,” says coauthor Stephenson Chea, a graduate student researcher in the developmental and cell biology department at the University of Califo0rnia, Irvine.

This pivotal venture began with a cutting-edge approach to mapping gene expression in early embryonic cells. By employing single-cell RNA sequencing and innovative bioinformatic techniques, the team charted the gene expression profile of every cell population present during gastrulation, a foundational stage of development.

The differences observed in gene expression and cell population sizes between normal embryos and those that were Nipbl-deficient provided unprecedented insights into the earliest origins of birth defects.

“This is the first time in this complex developmental syndrome that we’ve been able to uncover such profound gene expression differences at a vital developmental juncture, leading us to believe that we are beginning to understand a fundamental aspect of the way in which congenital birth defects originate during early development,” says coauthor Anne Calof, professor of anatomy and neurobiology.

The implications reach far and wide. Pinpointing the stages in which the developmental pathways of different tissues diverge due to genetic anomalies introduces the possibility of intervening medically.

“Understanding this precise timing opens a window not just for diagnosis but, potentially, for identifying biomarkers that would be important for developing therapeutic interventions as well. This is where our research connects with real-world application,” says team member Arthur Lander, professor of developmental and cell biology.

Early detection of and intervention for birth defects can significantly improve life outcomes and reduce long-term health care costs, benefiting affected individuals, their families, and society in general.

The study underscores a critical transition from observation to action in genetic research. The knowledge gained provides a framework for further research that could one day lead to preventive treatments, ensuring that children worldwide have a healthier start in life.

Additional coauthors are from UC Irvine and the University of Southern California.

The National Institutes of Health supported the work.

Source: UC Irvine

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ISS schedule conflicts delay Starliner crewed test flight to May

WASHINGTON — The first crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has slipped from late April to early May because of International Space Station schedule conflicts and not due to any issues with the spacecraft itself.

In a media advisory released by NASA late March 8, the agency said the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, previously scheduled to launch no earlier than April 22, was now scheduled for early March. The agency said the slip was “due to space station scheduling” but did not elaborate.

At recent briefings, NASA managers said the key factor in the schedule for CFT was other missions to the station. “What we’ve been doing is watching how we progress with the Crew-8 launch and the CRS-30 mission,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, in a briefing after the March 3 launch of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission to the ISS.

SpaceX’s CRS-30 cargo mission is scheduled for launch in mid-March and will stay at the station for about a month. After it departs, the Crew-8 spacecraft will move from its current forward docking port on the Harmony module to the zenith port to allow Starliner to use the forward port. Those ports are the only two available on the station for both Starliner and Dragon spacecraft.

“The thing that’s pacing when we go fly is really this complicated traffic management,” Stich said.

At that briefing and earlier ones, Stich said that preparations for Starliner itself were going well. “The spacecraft is in really good shape. There’s not much work left to go,” he said at a Feb. 25 briefing.

He said then that NASA and Boeing had addressed technical issues that delayed CFT from last summer, including performing a final parachute test in January to confirm the performance of redesigned links in those parachute lines to increase their strength as well as the removal of wiring tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable. They also resolved issues with valves in a thermal control system.

“Those three big issues that we had last summer have been resolved and we’re in the middle of some final certification work on the parachutes and a few other things,” Stich said.

The CFT mission, launching on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5, will send NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS. They will remain on the station for up to two weeks before returning to Earth. A successful flight would clear the way for NASA certification of the spacecraft for crew rotation missions, starting with Starliner-1 in early 2025.

NASA separately announced March 8 plans for the return of Crew-7, which has been on the ISS since late August 2023. The agency said that the four members of Crew-7 — NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA’s Andreas Mogensen, JAXA’s Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos’ Konstantin Borisov — will depart in their Crew Dragon spacecraft at 11:05 a.m. Eastern March 10. The spacecraft would splash down off the Florida coast March 12 at 5:35 a.m. Eastern.

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The longer a task takes, the more your mind wanders




New research shows that a person’s ability to sustain their attention while performing a task decreases over time.

The longer a person spends on a task, the more their mind starts to wander—regardless of whether the activity is difficult or easy.

In fact, toward the end of the task, individuals are typically thinking about something else at least 50% of the time, according to the new study.

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, represent the most comprehensive research to date on typical rates of mind-wandering while completing tasks. While some people are better at staying focused than others, everyone’s mind tends to wander more frequently over time, the researchers found.

“It was somewhat surprising to us that we didn’t see differences in different types of tasks and activities participants engaged in,” says lead researcher Anthony Zanesco, a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral associate in the psychology department at University of Miami.

“You might expect that it’s harder for people to pay attention during more difficult tasks or that maybe during easy tasks, people feel bored, and their mind wanders more. But we didn’t find any systematic differences between those types of tasks. Our minds wander more and more regardless of what we are doing.”

For the study, Zanesco and University of Miami researchers Amishi Jha and Ekaterina Denkova, analyzed and combined data from more than 10,000 people who had participated in 68 different mind-wandering studies. Participants in these studies completed tasks of varying types and difficulty while researchers periodically interrupted them to check on their level of focus. These tasks mostly took place in quiet environments with no outside distractions.

“We often blame our phones or social media for why we are distracted. But our minds will drag us off-task even without these external distractions,” Zanesco says.

The findings have wide-ranging implications outside the lab. Previous research has indicated that performance tends to worsen over time in tasks that require us to stay focused. But the reasons for this decline are still unknown. Researchers have proposed several possibilities for our short attention spans, including that our minds tend to wander to our thoughts more frequently over time.

Zanesco and his colleagues investigated this question directly. Their research suggests that our tendency to get stuck thinking about something other than what we are currently doing may be one reason why we struggle to pay attention. Finding effective strategies for curtailing mind-wandering is an important next step.

“This kind of research can make us aware that our attention is vulnerable,” Zanesco says. “It’s important that we recognize that our attention can be vulnerable and that we have a strong tendency toward mind-wandering so we can work to guard against it.”

The findings suggest that it might be beneficial to tackle the most important material early on in an academic lecture or meeting, Zanesco says, when participants’ minds are not wandering as frequently. The lecturer or meeting facilitator may also want to pause periodically to remind participants to refocus if their minds have drifted into unrelated thoughts.

Mindfulness exercises can also help individuals to better notice when their minds have started to wander and to refocus on the task at hand more easily, Zanesco adds, citing previous research he and Jha have conducted.

“Our mindfulness research has found that people report mind-wandering less and are better able to focus after mindfulness training,” says Jha, a psychology professor and the director of contemplative neuroscience for the UMindfulness Initiative at the University of Miami.

“This includes protecting against attentional lapses and mind-wandering in high-stress and time-pressured settings, such as performing surgery, battling a fire, or controlling air traffic, where drifting off-task can have life or death ramifications.”

Source: Kyra Gurney for University of Miami

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Webinar – Beyond Earth: Blueprint for Small Medium Business (SMB) Innovation

Date: March 14th, 2024
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: 1 PM ET

Dassault Systemes

Join us on Thursday, March 14, 2024 to unlock your business’s potential with our webinar on Space Innovation. Register below.

SpaceNews host Matt Alderton discusses Dassault Systèmes Blueprint for Small Medium Business (SMB) Innovation with Jason Roberson and Lauren Cooper.

Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, is a catalyst for human progress.

We provide business and people with collaborative virtual environments to imagine sustainable innovations.

By creating ‘virtual twin experiences’ of the real world with our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and applications, our customers push the boundaries of innovation, learning and production.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud provides you with a complete suite of industry-leading apps and software. It gives you everything you need to bring your ideas to reality, including design & engineering, manufacturing & production, simulation, governance & collaboration.

Learn more about the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud and the future of space technology.

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Why people blame the victim




New research examines why people blame the victims of misfortune.

In an age of GoFundMe campaigns, it’s easier than ever to help family, friends, and even strangers in times of need. It’s also easy to look the other way.

“Most people see themselves as cooperative and generous, but there’s a cost to helping people who can’t reciprocate,” says Pascal Boyer, a professor of collective and individual memory at Washington University in St. Louis.

In a new study in Evolution and Human Behavior, Boyer and coauthors suggest that many people resolve this inner conflict by finding shortcomings in the person needing help.

“It’s a pervasive phenomenon, but it has barely been studied,” he says.

For the study, Boyer and coauthors—including Eric Chantland, a data scientist in the anthropology department—presented test subjects with a variety of fictitious news stories describing cases of misfortune, such as someone in a car accident while texting and driving, someone shot by an unsecured gun, and someone attacked by a bear while hiking.

Participants thought the stories were real, but each scenario was carefully designed to test a person’s empathy and willingness to help. After reading each story, test subjects were asked to rate the character of the victim and their level of blame for the mishap. In some experiments, participants were offered a chance to donate their total compensation for participating in the study, up to 60 cents, to help the victim. In others, they were asked if they would hypothetically be willing to help the person with their own money. After the experiments were completed, participants were reassured the stories were made up for the study.

Results suggested a general lack of generosity. For example, participants in one experiment offered to donate an average of about 15 cents to the victim, less than a third of the maximum amount possible. A closer look at the data across multiple experiments revealed an intriguing trend: The more character flaws participants saw in a victim, the less willing they were to donate.

“They’re saying that the victim doesn’t deserve help,” Boyer says.

The finding goes against a long-held assumption about human nature. In the 1960s, psychologists suggested people were reluctant to help victims of misfortune based on a fundamental belief that the world was fair and bad things only happened to bad people.

But Boyer says the idea of a just world is both uncommon and unfounded.

“In most places, people think the world is deeply unfair,” Boyer says.

Instead of making a blanket assumption that all victims somehow deserve their misfortune, people go out of their way to find fault in each victim on a case-by-case basis, Boyer says.

“If I tell you a person was burned in a kitchen fire, you’ll be sympathetic at first, but it’s very likely you or someone else will at some point suggest he must have been doing something stupid.”

Our willingness to find fault can sometimes take a dark turn. While it wasn’t part of the study, Boyer notes that victims of sexual assault are often denigrated for wearing provocative clothing or putting themselves in unsafe circumstances when the actual blame lies squarely and completely on the person committing the assault.

“It’s a classic example of blaming the victim,” he says.

A researcher studying at the intersection of anthropology and psychology, Boyer has long been interested in the ways humans treat less fortunate members of society. From the anthropological perspective, he notes, people have a long history of cooperation. Scientists have found remains of prehistoric hunters and gatherers who lived for many years after a debilitating injury, irrefutable evidence they benefited from the generosity of others.

At the same time, human history is full of examples of people being blamed for their own illness or misfortune, perhaps because they broke a taboo or angered a god.

As a psychologist, he’s intrigued by the thought processes that can lead people to abandon the basic impulse to help others in need.

“We’re trying to create a model of what happens in a person’s head to produce these ideas.”

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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Webinar: One-on-One with SDA Director Derek Tournear

Date: March 6th, 2024
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Join us on Wednesday, March 6, 2024 for an exclusive online event with Derek Tournear, Director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), as we take a look back at SDA’s remarkable journey over the past 5 years.

In just half a decade, the SDA has been at the forefront of space innovation, utilizing government demand in new ways to build the Defense Department’s first low Earth orbit constellation, known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture.

Director Tournear will share the most significant lessons SDA has learned from its projects and collaborations with the private sector, and how these lessons will influence the agency’s strategies moving forward.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from the leader of one of the most dynamic and innovative agencies in the space sector.

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Black hole caught ‘flipping table’ while chowing down

Black holes spill food all the time, but researchers using the European Space Agency’s X-ray telescope XMM-Newton have caught a black hole in the act of “flipping over the table” during an otherwise civilized meal.

This act prevents the galaxy surrounding the black hole from forming new stars, giving us insight into how black holes and galaxies coevolve.

The research appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the heart of every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, whose immense gravity draws in gas from its surroundings. As the gas spirals inwards, it bunches up in a flat accretion disc around the black hole, where it heats and lights up. Over time, the gas closest to the black hole passes the point of no return and gets gobbled up.

However, black holes only consume a fraction of the gas spiraling toward them. While encircling a black hole, some matter is flung back out into space, much like how a messy toddler spills a lot of what lies on their plate.

In more dramatic episodes, a black hole will flip over the entire dinner table: gas in the accretion disc gets flung out in all directions at such high speeds that it clears out the surrounding interstellar gas. Not only does this deprive the black hole of food, it also means no new stars can form over a vast region, changing the structure of the galaxy.

Until now, this ultra-fast “black hole wind” had only been detected coming from extremely bright accretion discs, which are at the limit of how much matter they can draw in. This time, XMM-Newton detected ultra-fast wind in a distinctly average galaxy which you could say was “only snacking.”

“You might expect very fast winds if a fan was turned on to its highest setting. In the galaxy we studied, called Markarian 817, the fan was turned on at a lower power setting, but there were still incredibly energetic winds being generated,” says University of Michigan undergraduate researcher Miranda Zak, who played a central role in the research.

“We have observed a black hole to be flooding its host galaxy with enough gas to alter the nature of the host galaxy,” says University of Michigan astronomer and lead author Jon Miller. “We have long inferred that this must happen because galactic centers have been swept of cold gas that could form new stars, and therefore have few new stars, but it has been very difficult to catch a black hole expelling gas with enough power to verify this key interaction. We have found an example, and it is particularly striking because the black hole doesn’t even have its throttle at max.”

Active galactic centers send out high-energy light, including X-rays. Markarian 817 stood out to the researchers because it went awfully quiet.

“The X-ray signal was so faint that I was convinced I was doing something wrong,” Zak says, after observing the galaxy using NASA’s Swift observatory.

Follow-up observations using ESA’s more sensitive X-ray telescope XMM-Newton revealed what was really happening: ultra-fast winds coming from the accretion disc were acting like a shroud, blocking out the X-rays sent out from the immediate surroundings of the black hole, called the corona.

These measurements were backed up by observations made with NASA’s NuSTAR telescope. A detailed analysis of the X-ray measurements showed that, far from sending out a single “puff” of gas, the center of Markarian 817 produced a gusty storm over a wide area in the accretion disc. The wind lasted for several hundreds of days and consisted of at least three distinct components, each moving at several percent of the speed of light.

This solves an open puzzle in our understanding of how black holes and the galaxies around them influence one another. There are many galaxies—including the Milky Way—that appear to have large regions around their centers in which very few new stars form. This could be explained by black hole winds that clear out the star-forming gas, but this only works if the winds are fast enough, sustained for long enough, and are generated by black holes with typical levels of activity.

“Many outstanding problems in the study of black holes are a matter of achieving detections through long observations that stretch over many hours to catch important events,” says Norbert Schartel, ESA’s XMM-Newton project scientist. “This highlights the prime importance of the XMM-Newton mission for the future. No other mission can deliver the combination of its high sensitivity and its ability to make long, uninterrupted observations

Source: University of Michigan

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Plant protein discovery could pave way for new anti-cancer drugs

Researchers have discovered new mechanism in plants with an unusual ability to form cyclic peptides—molecules that hold promise in pharmaceuticals.

Cyclic peptides are an emerging and promising area of drug research.

“This type of discovery doesn’t happen too often.”

University of Michigan College of Pharmacy researchers Lisa Mydy and Roland Kersten led the new study, which reveals a mechanism by which plants generate cyclic peptides.

Mydy identified the new plant protein fold and its novel chemistry, which she says had never been seen before. The protein can generate cyclic peptides, one of which holds potential as an anti-cancer drug.

“It’s extremely exciting,” says Mydy, a postdoctoral research fellow in the medicinal chemistry department. “This type of discovery doesn’t happen too often.”

Mydy and colleagues studied the biosynthesis of a class of macrocyclic peptides found in plants and known for their potential use as therapeutic drugs. They identified a “fascinating new protein fold that has a really unusual mechanism to form cyclic peptides. It is a new biochemistry that we have not seen before,” Mydy says.

The researchers also examined peptide cyclase, a protein called AhyBURP found in the roots of the peanut plant, a representative of the founding Unknown Seed Protein, or USP-type, which in turn is part of the BURP-domain protein family.

“There was no experimental information on our protein AhyBURP,” Mydy says. “The only hint we had for function was that the protein needed copper to cyclize a peptide.”

The research team studied the protein structures with X-ray crystallography and used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. In the process, they found that the “protein AhyBURP uses copper and oxygen in a unique way that we’re still investigating,” Mydy says.

“Most cyclic peptides need another enzyme to come in and do the cyclization chemistry,” she says. “However, AhyBURP can do it within the same protein on itself. Other copper-dependent proteins function by attaching oxygen somewhere on the peptide. We don’t observe that, and we want to know why. I see this as the first example of this type of chemistry that can happen with copper and oxygen within a protein.”

The discovery of the new protein grew from ongoing work in Kersten’s lab. The Kersten lab aims to discover and research new plant-based chemicals that can become drugs and ultimately cure human diseases.

“We use a modern approach where we screen the genetic sequences of plants, searching for genes connected to new chemistry,” says Kersten, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry at the College of Pharmacy. “That’s how we identified the cyclic peptide products and their underlying proteins as a target of interest.”

This class of peptides is of interest because their cyclization properties make them more structured and stable, increasing their potential to be used as drugs.

Many drugs, including chemicals derived from living organisms, are cyclic, meaning that they can bind drug targets and remain intact in a patient for a desired time. Nature has evolved many biochemical solutions to produce such cyclic molecules.

Kersten has isolated other compounds made by the same protein family that have been shown to have suppressing effects on lung cancer cells in lab tests, so there is growing hope that this discovery will have potential as a future anti-cancer agent.

“Now that we know what the protein looks like for one of the BURP-domain proteins, we can test more ideas about how the protein may influence the chemical reaction between the peptide, copper and oxygen to form cyclic peptides,” says Mydy, a structural biologist and enzymologist by training.

“It is a fantastic and challenging puzzle to figure out why this is happening and understand the structure. It’s extremely exciting to be part of this type of discovery that may eventually lead to effective pharmaceutical therapeutics.”

The research was published in Nature Chemical Biology.

Source: University of Michigan

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