In a cover story published in The Plant Journal, researchers used genetic engineering methods to produce new potato varieties that produce special proteins. These proteins act as a biological sensor that can be sent, for example, to the chloroplasts in the plant’s cells, where photosynthesis occurs.

The researchers used sensitive cameras that can detect sensor signals that obtain spatial information about the entire plant and monitor the plant’s physiological state throughout the development of late blight in the potato.

The study was led by doctoral student Matanel Hipsch under the supervision of Dr. Shilo Rosenwasser of Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture. They collaborated with Dr. David Helman from Hebrew University’s Department of Soil and Water Sciences, who developed an AI-based algorithm capable of analyzing the fluorescent images and distinguishing between healthy and infected leaves.

The research also revealed that the protein detected diseased areas of the leaves even during the first invisible stages. Another fascinating finding suggests that the areas infected with late blight are characterized by higher photosynthetic activity compared to the rest of the leaf. This indicates how the pathogen maintains and even improves leaf productivity in the early stages of the disease to ‘disguise’ its development in the plant, according to the researchers.

“The development of advanced biotechnological tools for early plant disease detection can lead to a future research breakthrough in understanding the pathogenicity process and minimize agricultural damage,” Dr. Rosenwasser says.

Hebrew University researchers Dr. Nardy Lampl and Omer Sapir of the Institute of Plant Sciences, Dr. Yaron Michaeli of the Advanced Institute for Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture, and Prof. Yigal Cohen from the Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University also participated in the study.

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (No. 827/17) and ICA in Israel foundation.

“I am excited and honored to receive this significant award as the first global recipient,” says Amal, a professor at the Hebrew University School of Pharmacy, Institute for Drug Research, Faculty of Medicine. “This grant will enhance our research initiatives to develop ASD therapeutics that will help millions of children and families around the world.”

The grant is funding Amal’s groundbreaking research on the role of nitric oxide (NO) in ASD pathology. Amal published the first paper linking nitric oxide with ASD, a key step toward identifying a drug target for the disorder. NO is a multifunctional signaling molecule and a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in physiological and pathophysiological processes.

Recently, Amal co-founded and is Chief Scientific Officer at Point6 Bio Ltd, a computational biology company for the diagnosis and treatment of ASD. He is also partnering with a NASDAQ-traded U.S. pharmaceutical company to research and develop ASD drugs.

In his Laboratory for Neuromics, Cell Signaling, and Translational Medicine, Amal leads a group of scientists whose goal is to discover therapeutics and biomarkers for ASD, Alzheimer’s, other brain disorders, and diseases.

He has received many awards including the Wolf Foundation’s prestigious Krill Prize, the Prusiner-Abramsky Research Award in Clinical and Basic Neuroscience, the Kaye Innovation Award, the Golda Meir Lectureship Award, and the Brettle Center for Research Award. Among the numerous grants he has received include funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israel Science Foundation. Prof. Amal was listed among the 40 under 40 most promising people in Israel by The Marker Magazine, a major business publication.

Prior to joining Hebrew University, Amal was a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT and an affiliate in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the MIT Broad Institute and Harvard. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Nanotechnology and Chemical Engineering. Amal received his M.S. in Pharmacology at Tel Aviv University in 2009 and a B.S. in Pharmacy from Hebrew University in 2007.

These species join a large number of invertebrates recently found in Israeli caves that are new to science. The study was recently published in the Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution journal and has extensive scientific implications for uncovering the evolution of speciation in caves and the historical, geographic, and climatic processes that occurred in Israel.

Doctoral student Shlomi Aharon led the study under the guidance of Dr. Efrat Gavish-Regev, from the Hebrew University National Natural History Collections and Prof. Dror Hawlena from the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior.

“In many cases, these adaptations will lead to the creation of new species, whose distribution is geographically limited in areas with unique ecological conditions, such as a single cave or a system of connected caves,” Aharon says. “In this study, we sought to understand the evolutionary relationships between funnel web spiders with normal eyes that are found at the cave entrance, with those that are further in the cave and are pigmentless, eye-reduced, and even completely blind.”

In the study, the researchers collected the spiders by hand and then conducted a series of microscopic examinations, recorded the morphology, and extracted DNA from each to compare them to sequences of known species of the same genus that exist in GenBank.

“Among the spiders we found, five were unique to different caves, and the two other species were found in several caves in the Galilee and in caves situated at the Ofra karst field, which is now under threat from planned construction,” says Dr. Gavish-Regev. “One of the surprising findings in the study shows that the new species are evolutionarily closer to species from caves in Mediterranean areas in southern Europe than to species living in close proximity to them at cave entrances in Israel.”

Five of the new species described had reduced eyes, while the other two were completely blind. The researchers suggest that the new species developed adaptations to life in underground habitats and speciated in caves, after or simultaneously with the extinction of the ancestor species from which they evolved, which lived outside caves and became extinct due to historical regional climate changes.

“We are currently witnessing the effects of climate change on many habitats, which obliges us to consider, maintain, and promote programs that include the preservation of underground habitats – many of which are at immediate risk,” concludes Professor Hawlena. “We must protect Israel’s unique nature, preserve its underground systems for the future, and further explore the processes that created these systems in the country.”

The team of researchers, led by Prof. Ruth Sperling of the Hebrew University Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, together with Prof. Stephen Stamm from the School of Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky, hypothesize that a new type of primate-specific proteins, translated from molecules of circular RNA, improves the brain’s function in relation to other organisms with a similar number of genes.

RNA is the mediator in turning instructions encoded in DNA into cellular proteins. As part of the process, the RNA is heavily modified: some pieces are cut out and the remaining parts are put back together, to assemble a new line of RNA – which fundamentally changes their composition. Sometimes, these parts form in circles, creating circular RNA.

Circular RNAs are mostly found in the brain and their formation is promoted by genomic elements specific to humans and other primates, called Alu-elements. The human genome consists of about 11% Alu-elements and their expansion in primates correlates with brain complexity.

“For the first time, the team of researchers will focus on new biological aspects of the circular RNA molecules, with the aim of revealing why humans have a stronger and more complex brain than other organisms with a similar number of genes,” Stamm says.

Prof. Sperling, a world-renowned expert in RNA processing, is seeking to understand how circular RNA is created by the splicing machinery in cells, to analyze when this occurs and how it is regulated in the brain.

According to Sperling, “If we do find that we have new proteins, this opens up a completely new research field with essential functions for the human brain.” Such a discovery may have wide implications, for example, on the detection of genetic materials correlated with schizophrenia, epilepsy, autism, or neurological disease.”

The hypothesis is that the new proteins, translated from these specific circular RNAs, substantially increase molecular complexity, which improves brain functions. “Do circular RNAs code for proteins? Do these proteins function? Can they be found in the brain? This is what we are analyzing. It has never been looked at,” Stamm says.

As part of the three-year project, there will be annual two-week RNA biology courses held in the summer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem led by Stamm and Sperling. Students from both universities will have theoretical lectures and do hands-on experiments during the course.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Number 2221921, and United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation under Award Number 2022602.

Referring to the cancellation of Israel's sweetened beverage tax, as "a grievous blow to public health," Hebrew University Prof. Aron Troen, and a renowned worldwide group of senior health scholars have published a letter in The Lancet prestigious medical journal seeking to overturn the harmful, hasty, and costly decision. See attached for text of letter.

Approximately 64 percent of adults in Israel are overweight, defined as a body mass index over 25 according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Childhood obesity is on the rise, and its poor populations carry the greatest burden of associated chronic disease, like diabetes. The direct and indirect costs of obesity to Israeli society are estimated at 20 billion NIS ($5.8 Billion) annually.

"Since its introduction a year ago, the tax has reduced the consumption of sweetened drinks by about 10%," says Troen who is a member of the World Federation of Public Health Associations. “The fact that world health leaders have responded shows what an important issue we’re dealing with. Canceling the tax is irresponsible, an act of public health malpractice, and an outrage.”

In the letter, the authors state that, "Revoking the tax will undoubtedly harm lives and increase the direct and indirect economic costs to Israel's health system and economy, both in the short term and long term. More broadly, this act undermines hard won progress made elsewhere around the world. It is a serious setback for evidence-based public health policy and will be celebrated by vested interests who promote their products and disregard the need for policies that uphold the public's health and welfare. This decision will be seen as prioritizing sectorial political interests over incontrovertible scientific evidence and public health best practice."

The scholars conclude the letter by, "calling on the Government of Israel to reconsider and retract this ill-conceived and hasty decision. Instead, let the revenue from the soda tax be used to combat chronic diseases including obesity, as well as promote nutrition security by increasing economic access to healthy diets, narrowing health disparities, improving the health and welfare of all Israeli citizens, and setting an example for world health leadership."

Other co-authors include Darius Mozaffarian, Dean for Policy at Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science who co-chairs the task force that informed the White House Conference on Hunger and Nutritional Security, Barry Popkin, a world-renowned health economist, and Hagai Levin from the Hebrew University School of Public Health and chair of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians.

About the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel's leading academic and research institution. Serving some 24,000 students from 80 countries, it produces a third of Israel’s civilian research and is ranked 12th worldwide in biotechnology patent filings and commercial development. Faculty and alumni of the Hebrew University have won eight Nobel Prizes and a Fields Medal. For more information about the Hebrew University, please visit http://new.huji.ac.il/en.

About American Friends of the Hebrew University

American Friends of the Hebrew University (AFHU) is a national, not-for-profit organization based in the United States. AFHU is headquartered in New York and has seven regional offices working in close partnership with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. AFHU provides supporters, Hebrew University alumni, and the public with stimulating programs and events, and organizes missions to Israel. The organization’s activities support scholarly and scientific achievement at HU, create scholarships, fund new facilities, and assist the university’s efforts to recruit outstanding new faculty.

For more information, please visit http://www.afhu.org.

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