The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week's SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Jenna Beffel, a 4th-year doctoral student in MSU's Department of Human Development and Family Studies and the lab manager of the Family Stress Lab. Jenna's research through the Family Stress Lab focuses on families with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)- specifically, the outcomes and experiences of the typically developing siblings (TDS) in these families. A lot of the past research on TDS focuses on negative outcomes for TDS as a result of having a sibling with ASD, but TDS provide critical help/support to their families and others and do experience a variety of positive outcomes- which is a large focus of Jenna's research. Specifically, she has examined TDS' experiences of childhood caregiving (called Parentification), intentions to care for their sibling with ASD in the future, general prosocial (e.g., helping) behavior, and adult TDS' selection of a helping profession (e.g., a profession focused on helping others, such as a doctor or psychologist). In some of her most recent research, she's explored how these different types of helping/caregiving behaviors influence each other, such as how Parentification predicts TDS' prosocial behavior (Beffel & Nuttall, 2020) or the selection of a helping profession (Beffel et al., under review). Currently, she is working on obtaining funding so that she can code TDS prosocial behavior among a sample of teen TDS, and explore how TDS prosocial behavior influences these teen TDS' intentions to provide care to their sibling with ASD in the future, when their parents may no longer be able to care for them. Overall, the goal of researching all of these instances of TDS helping/caregiving is to first, help the field recognize just how important TDS are and, second, determine how to best support TDS so they can continue to provide help/care without feeling highly stressed, overburdened, etc.
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On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kylie Smith. Our brains are protected by a tight-knit biological wall called the blood-brain barrier. This barrier prevents potentially dangerous substances in our blood from accessing sensitive brain tissue but also restricts access to therapeutics or imaging agents intended for brain delivery. Kylie's research focuses on how to deliver material to the brain via a direct transport pathway in the nose, bypassing the blood-brain barrier completely. Her research combines nose-to-brain delivery with medical imaging to optimize the delivery technique by noninvasively tracking drugs as they transit to the brain. By quantifying the amount of drug that reached the target site using imaging tools like positron emission tomography, we can test different versions of the drug, loading solutions, or delivery approaches. This work could reduce barriers to treatment for patients that cannot take ingestible or injectable therapeutics and lead to expanded treatment options for brain diseases without a cure.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Andrew Kearney. Andrew is a student in the MSU Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering. Due to the low water activity (aw) and high osmotic pressure, sugar is generally recognized as a low microbiological risk source to human health. As a low moisture commodity sugar may receive little to no additional processing in a home environment.  Other low-moisture commodities, such as flour, were once also generally recognized as safe. However, following foodborne pathogen outbreaks in flour in recent years, there is interest in evaluating other low moisture commodities for foodborne pathogen risks. In response to outbreaks of pathogens in connection to flour, U.S. FDA guidance has suggested not to consume raw flour. This development has made assessing the risk of other shelf-stable commodities, like sugar, important to evaluate before a similar outbreak event occurs, despite no outbreaks of foodborne pathogens in added sugar within the U.S. having been reported to date. The objective of this study was to assess the survival of Salmonella in multiple sugar products during long-term storage. Granulated, powdered, brown, and liquid sugar obtained from commercial suppliers were inoculated with a 5-strain Salmonella cocktail via dry transfer. Samples were stored at three temperatures (4, 25, 37°C) in sealed containers, and sampled 12 times up to ~1,000 days.

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On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Ti'Air Riggins. Have you ever wondered what it's like to wake up one day and realize that you can move anything below your neck? For some people who have a stroke or have been in major accidents, this is a reality for them. Fortunately, there has been a recently developed technology called implantable probes also known as microelectrode arrays which are little metal or polymer sticks you can implant into the brain. They receive signals from specialized brain cells called neurons that help communicate to a computer for that person to move a limb again. The problem is another specialized cell called astrocytes acts as the bodyguards of the brain and attacks the probes. In the process they kill neurons. The goal of Ti'Air's research is to look at intervention strategies to minimize astrocytes from flipping from normal function to attack mode so that the probes can perform longer in patient brains.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Abdo Korayem, Daniel Maldanado, Max Manz, and Maria Milan about their research projects. This episode took place live at the COGS Fall Welcome Back event.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Yoni Lewis Israeli. Heart disease is a leading cause of death around the world, and heart defects at birth are the most common of all birth defects in humans. Modeling the developing human heart in the lab using 3D heart organoids (or miniature hearts) allows access to developmental stages that cannot be studied in humans. Yoni's research focus is on creating heart organoids from human stem cells. Unlike previous models of the heart, these organoids have all the major types of cells that are present in the human heart, and they develop internal chambers as well as a vessel-like network. These organoids can be used as tools to provide new insight into human heart development. They also allow him to investigate the onset of diseases that affect human fetal heart development. For example, he is currently looking into the effect of diabetes during pregnancy which is known to increase the risk of congenital heart defects in humans. This organoid system allows him to both investigate the causes of these defects, and also screen for potential therapeutic agents. You can read more about his research here.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Isabel John and Lauren Wiklund. Mental health stigma is a significant barrier to receiving mental health care. The two primary approaches to reducing mental health stigma are normalcy and solidarity. Normalcy refers to efforts to reduce stigma by increasing understanding of the frequency and prevalence of mental illness and the similarities between those with and without mental illness. This method aims to normalize the experience of mental illness for those experiencing symptoms and for those interacting with others who have a mental illness. Solidarity approaches attempt to increase support for those with mental illness and acceptance of differences among those with and without mental illness. The current literature is unclear whether one approach is more effective than another in reducing mental health stigma initially and over time. An initial exploratory study of 120 undergraduate students suggests that normalcy messages were more effective in reducing stigmatizing opinions against those with mental illness, while solidarity messages reduced the likelihood of engaging in stigmatizing behaviors toward those with mental illness.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Conor Bertucci. With the projected population growth of over 2 billion people in the next 30 years, food and energy production will have to increase drastically to keep up with our demands.  Fresh water and arable land are finite resources that are constantly diminishing due to environmental stresses. The cultivation of microalgae shows much promise as it does not require arable land or freshwater.  Unfortunately, harvesting costs currently hinder the progress and affordability of microalgae as a commercial-scale biofuel or food source.  Utilizing filters made from fungi to harvest microalgae can not only decrease operational costs but also increase overall biomass production.  This research focuses on the development of an algae filtration system that can be scaled up to a commercial level.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Cameron Bennett. Cameron is a recent graduate from Lyman Briggs College who majored in genomics and molecular genetics and human biology. Since her sophomore year at MSU, Cameron has done research with the Braasch lab in the Department of Integrative Biology studying the function of duplicated endothelin genes unique to a group of fish called teleosts. The endothelin gene family she studies has an important role in controlling what type of cells that neural crest cells become during early development. Neural crest cells are special as they are unique to vertebrates like fish and humans and they can become many tissues, including heart, pigment cells, enteric (gut) nerve cells, and parts of the skeleton making up the head and face. Over the course of evolution, vertebrates underwent two whole-genome duplication events. The endothelin system consists of three proteins in most vertebrates: Edn1, Edn2, and Edn3. In contrast, following a third whole-genome duplication, the endothelin system in teleost fish consists of six proteins: Edn1, Edn2a, Edn2b, Edn3a, Edn3b, and Edn4. Not only are there extra copies of Edn2 and Edn3 in this fish group, but the presence of an additional unique protein, Edn4. Currently, the function of most Edn proteins remains a mystery. Cameron's research project aims to better understand the developmental role of the Edn proteins in the teleost fish zebrafish, Danio rerio. She has been working on this by developing lines of zebrafish with combinations of mutations across the endothelin gene family using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technique.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Kewalin Samart. Drug discovery takes a significant amount of time and fundings due to its complicated clinical process to get new drugs approved. Computational drug repurposing is an efficient alternative that is more cost- and time-effective in discovering new drug indications from existing drugs. One important concept of drug repurposing is that we need to find efficacious drugs that can reverse the disease signature. Kewalin's research reconciled different methods from various studies in the past 15 years that have been developed to find disease-drug reversal relationships. Due to the lack of consistency in notations and terminologies of the existing methods, they redefined them using a unified scheme and described their relationships based on mathematical and statistical concepts. Their work allows other researchers to compare the efficiency of each method and implement new methods easily. The work is available as a live document coupled with a GitHub repository that any researcher can build on and push changes to. Their ongoing project is integrating these multiple methods to develop a computational framework for gene expression-based drug repurposing.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!