UC Science Today

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been busy fielding requests to use their microarray technology. The Microbial Detection Array can be used for a whole host of applications – from cancer research to identifying a plague victim from 14th Century England. Biologist Crystal Jaing says the applications for this technology are huge.

"We have used it for looking for food pathogens in food samples and recently, we applied it to agriculture to look at animal pathogens and food safety. It’s been really exciting using a technology like this to look at public health, look at environmental safety and look at food safety and drug safety."

There are even biodefense applications.

"Recently we have used this technology to analyze pathogens in wounded soldiers. And what we have found is that this technology is more sensitive than traditional technologies where very often a pathogen cannot be identified and that really delay how a soldier can be treated."

Are you a dog person or a cat person? How about both? In a new study led by the University of California, Berkeley, researchers looked at how people’s personality traits and their identification as a cat or a dog person influenced their relationships with their pets. Co-author Mikel Delgado says that those who expressed the most affection towards their pet also rated among the most conscientious and neurotic.

"People who said they were a dog person or that they were both a cat and a dog person did tend to score higher on that affection relationship. And we also found that people who scored highly in neuroticism and conscientiousness were also more likely to have a more affectionate relationship towards their pet."

Delgado says that these types of traits tend to work better with pets because pets require lifelong caregiving. The next step is to see if high affection means actually taking good care of your pet.

"Does that mean that you actually take them to the vet and feed them appropriate food and give them exercise and mental stimulation and enrichment?"

People react differently to different drugs based on their genetic make-up. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, medical scientist Mike Malfatti says they’re using their accelerator mass spectrometer to test what’s called microdoses of chemotherapy drugs.

"Where you give the person a very low level dose, one one-hundredths of what the therapeutic dose would be. It has a carbon-14 label tag on it. And with the chemotherapeutic drug that we’re working with, it binds your DNA and then that will kill the tumor cells if you have a high degree of binding in the DNA. And if you have a high degree, it’s a good indication that you will hopefully respond favorably to the drug."

The hope is to personalize cancer treatment. Malfatti and his colleagues are teaming up with the University of California, Davis’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"So, it’s a very good collaborative study between technology that we have here at the Lab and then the clinical patients that UC Davis has."

Are certain life goals healthier to pursue than others? In a recent study psychologist Sheri Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley found that people who pursued extrinsic life goals such as fame and wealth were at a much higher risk for mental health issues such as mania, depression and anxiety. Johnson explains that people generally strive for either extrinsic or intrinsic goals.

"Some kinds of goals are very extrinsic. I'd like to be very powerful, I'd like to be very famous. Those are very extrinsically oriented goals where your chief hope is that you're going to be admired, respected, recognized by other people. There are other kinds of goals that we would think of as being intrinsically motivated that are about finding very satisfying moments in your life."

Johnson says the key is to have your intrinsic goals outweigh your extrinsic ones.

"Be focused on other issues in your life, like did I have a nice day, a nice conversation with somebody I love."

Dealing with serious disease and end-of-life care is oftentimes the ‘elephant in the room’ for patients and their families. Dr. Steve Pantilat who directs the Palliative Care Program at the University of California, San Francisco, says in many cases, once the topic is broached, the floodgates open.

"You often see this with patients and families. That finally having this conversation is a relief. The patient knows that they’re sick. I mean, they get it. We all hope that somehow these treatments are going to make our serious illness go away and they do, often for a long time, but we haven’t changed the fact that we’re all going to die one day and that is also a part of life. And in palliative care, we recognize that – our goal is to help you live as long, as well as possible, for as long as possible, but we don’t ignore the fact that people will make different decisions if they understand really what the future holds and that they can make choices about how they want that to be."

Is fruit juice better for you than soda? That’s a question that nutritional biologist Kimber Stanhope of the University of California, Davis says she’s asked all the time.

"And it drives me crazy that I don’t know the answer for sure. I haven’t found any studies in the scientific literature that have actually compared the consumption of a sugar sweetened beverage compared to a fruit juice sweetened beverage for one day."

So, Stanhope intends to do a two-week pilot study comparing the two. And she says it’s important that this study get done because many scientists have made the assumption that fruit juice is just as bad as sucrose because the fiber is removed. There’s also some evidence supporting that fruit juice is protective against risk factors for metabolic disease.

"There’s also a couple of studies that suggest they’re just as bad, so I’m really looking forward to getting some preliminary data to answer this question."

The human brain is remarkably effective at tuning into certain sounds in noisy settings. But this can be challenging for those with hearing deficits because traditional hearing aids typically amplify all sounds in an environment. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are developing a hearing aid that would process sound the way the brain does.

"One of the things that people that wear hearing aids complain about is if you go into crowded places, that all the sounds are amplified, right, and it becomes really uncomfortable. It doesn't make the task of listening to the person next to you any easier. What our algorithm is doing is more in the realm of getting rid of the background noise and extracting the signal and the idea is that—signals such as speech have a signature which is different than the background sound."

Neuroscientist Frederic Theunissen adds that although testing is still in its early stages, he hopes that the hearing aid will be commercially available in the future.

"It’d be wonderful to be able to help people that have hearing difficulties and really design something that they’re happy to wear in conditions where they’re not happy to wear it now."

The amount of water in a standard can of beer is about 92 percent and for the brewing business, it’s not just the water going into the cans, it’s the water used to clean tanks. Charlie Bamforth, a distinguished professor of Malting and Brewing Sciences at the University of California, Davis says even before the drought in California, beer brewers were very conscience of how much water they used.

"You need a lot more water than ends up in the beer. Because you use water for cleaning, and you use water to make steam, which is used to heat the vessels. And you need water for cooling and so on. So the best run breweries are somewhere around three to one. Three barrels of water for every barrel of beer."

Bamforth says the more beer you make, the more efficient the water use.

"If you’re brewing beer, and you’re filling a tank, and that tank has a pipe attached to it and you’re serving it upstairs in a pub, that’s very different than putting beer into bottles. You use a lot of water when you’re bottling beer in terms of cleaning, if you’re pasteurizing to operate the pasteurizer and so on."

When did you last feel awe? This is Science Today. Psychologist Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, which focuses on emotion, morality, power and culture. Keltner is now looking into how feelings of awe affect us.

"When we ask people, they’ll say, “when I first saw Notre Dame” or “when I went to Yosemite” – just all these experiences, it’s just this incredibly fertile area of human experience and people say that these experiences changes their lives."

And now Keltner’s lab is finding that feelings of awe actually reduce the body’s inflammation response.

"It’s because of how it changes your immune profile, so we are in conversation with programs that take stressed-out kids to the woods and now we can have a sense of the benefits that will arise out of that. So it’s really exciting."

The Lawrence Livermore Microbial Detection Array can detect, within 24 hours, viruses and bacteria with the use of 388 thousand probes that fit on a one inch wide, three inch long glass slide.

"All the DNA sequences that it corresponds to, those thousands of viruses and bacteria are printed in this glass slide. So, it’s really a lab on the chip."

That’s biologist Crystal Jaing, part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team that developed this breakthrough technology. Jaing says it can be used for many different applications.

"Because this device can analyze any of the sequenced pathogens, we can use in biodefense; public health and drug safety and food safety."

The technology is even being tapped to analyze ancient pathogens …

"We recently used this technology to identify a plague victim from 1348. So, that was really interesting because those samples are so degraded and so old and we can pick up that pathogen, which is really amazing."