By Claudia Caruana

New York

Genomic surveillance of a fungal disease that is destroying wheat crops around the world may help control its spread, researchers suggest, taking a cue from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wheat blast disease is described by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) as a “deadly and baffling fungal foe”. It infects the spikey head of the crop, causing bleaching, and can result in the loss of entire yields.

Genomic surveillance involves systematically following changes in the genetic codes of a disease-causing pathogen to track and control its spread.

A study published in PLOS Biology found that the technique can be deployed in the fight against Magnaporthe oryzae, the fungal pathogen that causes wheat blast disease.

“We have seen how the wheat blast fungus can potentially interact and mate with other infecting lineages which can have implications for many staple cereal crops.”

Sergio Latorre Ochoa, University College London

“Genomic surveillance adds a unique dimension to the coordinated response to infectious disease outbreaks,” said Sophien Kamoun, study co-author and researcher at the UK-based Sainsbury Laboratory, citing COVID-19 as a prime example.

Genomic surveillance emerged as a vital tool during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify and track the transmission of new variants.

Researchers looked at how it can be applied to wheat blast after the emerging disease spread to Africa and Asia from South America, with outbreaks in Bangladesh (2016) and Zambia (2018).

First reported in Brazil in 1985, wheat blast disease spreads through infected seeds, crop residues and spores that can travel long distances in the air.

“We need to remain vigilant and continue genomics surveillance of wheat blast in Africa and Asia to identify variants of concern as soon as they emerge,” added Kamoun.

Johanna Rhodes, a research fellow at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, says wheat blast disease is an even greater threat to wheat crops than the war in Ukraine.

“Wheat is a staple food for 35 per cent of the world’s population, so a disease that threatens pandemic potential could cause serious food security implications,” she told SciDev.Net.

Rhodes estimates that 25 per cent of this wheat is used for livestock and industrial uses, “so just cutting down on bread won’t help! The next pandemic may not hit humans directly but indirectly, by targeting crops”.

In the study, the researchers used genetic data collected internationally through the OpenWheatBlast collaboration.

“Thanks to the prompt and public release of genomic data by the international scientific community through the OpenWheatBlast initiative, we were able to detect, track, and characterize the fungal lineage responsible for recent wheat blast outbreaks,” said lead author Sergio Latorre Ochoa from University College London.

“This community was fundamental in rapidly sharing observations and genomic data related to the recent outbreaks of wheat blast in Asia and Africa, enabling us in a matter of days to draw hypotheses about the potential implications of a pandemic outbreak.”

To better understand emerging genotypes and lineages, the researchers genotyped and sequenced the genome of the pandemic wheat blast fungus and tested different lines of wheat for genetic resistance to blast fungus and susceptibility to fungicide.

“We have seen that a single clonal lineage of the blast fungus is responsible for the recent outbreak episodes in Africa and Asia,” explained Latorre.

“By studying and characterizing this pathogenic lineage, we could identify two short-term firebreak strategies to manage and alleviate the spread of the fungus by demonstrating plants carrying a specific resistance gene (Rmg8) display resistance and showing that Strobirulin fungicides can be effectively used to control the fungal spread.”

Latorre stresses, however, that the researchers have not found the silver bullet.

“The blast fungus still carries the ability to mate counterparts that infect different types of wild grasses which could create new variants that enhance the virulence,” he added.

“This clonal lineage can potentially become resistant to Strobirulin fungicides by the sole action of new mutations.”

Further studies, the researchers say, are needed to address the likelihood of crop diseases evolving resistance to pesticides and fungicides and to evaluate other potential strategies that reduce reliance on chemical inputs.

Latorre emphasizes that the blast fungus is a multi-host pathogen which can infect multiple plant hosts including rice, millets and different grasses important both for human and animal consumption.

“We have seen how the wheat blast fungus can potentially interact and mate with other infecting lineages which can have implications for many staple cereal crops,” he explained.

The researchers say that use of genomic surveillance coupled with testing in the laboratory can help inform disease management practices and help plant breeders develop disease-resistant crops.

Nick Talbot, executive director of The Sainsbury Laboratory, who was not directly involved in the research, says the work highlights the urgent need for genomic surveillance of plant pathogens “for many of the same reasons we needed genomic surveillance of COVID-19”.

“Dominance of the wheat exports by a small number of countries [such as Russia and Ukraine] places inherent vulnerabilities on the global food system.

“This is exacerbated by the intensifying threats for climatic instability on wheat export potential due to heat, drought, heavy rains, plus the increasing prevalence of certain diseases.”

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Courtesy: Sci. Dev. Net (Posted on April 17, 2023)

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Sian Hardingis

Heartbreak is nothing new. For millennia, humankind has written stories, crafted poems and sung songs about the link between our heart and our emotions. Even 5,000 years ago, hearts were aching. In one Ancient Sumerian proverb, carved into stone, an unknown author pleads with a goddess to ease their suffering:

My fingernail that hurts is clutched in my embrace. My foot that hurts is in my sandal. But who will find my aching heart?

May Inana pour oil on my heart that aches!

Over time, as science began to uncover the body’s secrets, the source of our emotional pain shifted. The brain became the seat of human emotion, and ‘heartbreak’ seemed destined to become nothing more than a metaphor. But even as science located emotions deeper within the brain, stories still circulated of hearts seeming to ‘break’: of long-married couples dying within days of each other; of parents dying after the loss of a child; or of physical heart-centered pain during periods of grief. Statistics are now bearing this out. You are almost twice as likely to die in the first three months after the death of a spouse.

But how much medical truth is there to ‘heartbreak’? This was a not a question that was taken particularly seriously – not until an unusual syndrome began appearing in Japanese hospitals in the 1990s. In X-rays, doctors saw the hearts of traumatized patients changing shape. They resembled takotsubo, the small clay pots used in Japan to catch octopus. The story of Takotsubo syndrome, and how it got its name, is the story of how heartbreak became more than a metaphor.

The reports began in the 1990s, in the wake of deadly earthquakes. Following each disaster, Japanese hospitals filled not only with patients who were physically injured, but also people with suspected heart attacks. The cause remained unknown until those suffering from heart attacks showed up at Hiroshima City Hospital, where doctors were using state-of-the-art imaging techniques to visualize the coronary arteries, the blood vessels that supply blood to the heart muscles. To determine the cause of a heart attack, cardiologists can inject an opaque contrast solution into the blood vessels and use an X-ray camera to see whether a clot or ruptured plaque has led to a blockage. Doctors in Hiroshima used a new procedure. They injected contrast solution directly into the heart and recorded moving images to reveal its shape as it contracted.

In some patients, they saw two things that amazed and puzzled them. First, there was no blockage, despite the patients having all the signs of a typical heart attack. Second, the heart was contracting into a shape that the doctors in Hiroshima had never seen before. The top of the heart near the atria (called the base) was contracting extremely vigorously, so much so that it was even blocking the flow of blood. But the bottom of the heart (or apex) was almost immobile. In X-rays, this produced a shape like a balloon or a narrow-necked pot. It reminded the Japanese doctors of the pots used for trapping octopus, called takotsubo. And so, the disease became known as ‘Takotsubo syndrome’, and later ‘stress cardiomyopathy’.

Heartbreak may be nothing new, but now it has a medical history. Experiencing the emotional pain of natural disasters, grief, trauma, arguments and even watching sports can potentially have very real physical consequences for our health and survival.

Once news of the disease spread, similar reports came in from all over the world. But the triggers were no longer just earthquakes and other natural disasters. They now included grief, trauma, arguments, even watching sport events. Bereavement seemed to be an especially strong trigger – the machinery of our hearts is exquisitely sensitive to emotional stress. It is this link with extreme grief that gave the phenomenon a third name: ‘broken-heart syndrome’. Sometimes a ‘broken heart’ is even associated with an ‘anniversary reaction’ where Takotsubo syndrome occurs around the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

Other features made this syndrome stand out to the doctors in Hiroshima. The first was that most patients were women, which was unusual as heart disease is more common in men – at least for younger or middle-aged people. Men younger than 64 years are twice as likely as women to have heart disease. That gap narrows in later life, after menopause, and many of the women with Takotsubo syndrome were postmenopausal. When we add up the figures of many studies, an astonishing 80-90 per cent of patients in the Takotsubo group are women. This had never been seen for a type of heart disease before.

An even more striking feature is that many of these patients recovered completely, with no sign of cardiac damage. There were some deaths ­– about 5 per cent of all patients –­ but most patients left the hospital disease-free in a matter of days, despite being admitted with severe chest pain and acute heart failure. Many never had a problem again. To scientists and doctors, this was highly intriguing. People with severe heart failure would usually have a very poor outlook. If the cardiologists had not seen the strange shape of the heart and its bizarre contraction on the X-ray, they would have thought that the patients had imagined or misinterpreted their symptoms.

It’s sobering to think that women suffering from Takotsubo syndrome might have been dismissed as malingerers faking an illness before such imaging was possible. You can see how a middle-aged woman, distraught after an upsetting event, coming into hospital with severe chest pain, but then recovering quickly, might have been seen as having a ‘hysterical’ illness. This raises questions about other potential Takotsubo sufferers who have been dismissed as imagining their symptoms. Many people who have panic attacks feel as though they are having a heart attack but later feel fine. Maybe they were affected by the syndrome too?

This is a primarily male disease, at least for those younger than 50 years old.

However, Takotsubo syndrome is not the only ‘broken heart’ disease. The other one is commonly known as ‘sudden cardiac death’. Here the heart goes into a chaotic rhythm (or arrhythmia), known as ventricular fibrillation. The heart is said to look like a ‘bag of worms’ as its different parts wriggle and writhe instead of contracting together. Blood is not ejected from the heart, and the victim loses consciousness within a few minutes. Without the intervention of manual or electrical defibrillation, death is rapid. Sudden cardiac death has exactly the same set of triggers as Takotsubo syndrome, including bereavement, arguments, and other extreme physical or emotional stress. But there is one big difference: this is a primarily male disease, at least for those younger than 50 years old.

What both diseases have in common is adrenaline. During moments of stress, the body naturally enters a fight-or-flight state in which adrenaline stimulates the heart and diverts blood to the muscles. However, extreme stress can cause an extreme spike in adrenaline, putting the heart into overdrive and disrupting its rhythm.

In 2014, a remarkable incident highlighted the different responses of men and women to extreme stress. A family of ardent Chilean football supporters ­– a husband, wife, and their three children – were watching the dramatic battle between Chile and Brazil for a place in the next round of the FIFA 2014 World Championships. The match resulted in a tense penalty shootout, but the last and deciding kick hit the goalpost, ending Chile’s hopes. The family immediately erupted into a ferocious quarrel that raged until the 58-year-old father clutched his chest in severe pain. He had a cardiac arrest and was rushed to an emergency room, where he was found to be in ventricular fibrillation and was given two rounds of defibrillation. Sadly, he did not survive.

Shortly after he had the cardiac arrest, his 64-year-old wife began to feel chest pains. Soon, she was being treated in the very angiography laboratory where he had been only an hour earlier. When monitored by doctors, her heart showed the same electrical signals as her husband but did not go into ventricular fibrillation. Doctors could find no sign of a blockage. Instead, her heart was contracting strongly in one area but was almost immobile in another: this was clearly a case of Takotsubo syndrome. After being given some supportive treatment in the hospital, her heart gradually returned to normal, and she was discharged after making a full recovery.

The stressors here are important. Clearly, the football match was the first trigger, and the main one for the husband, with possible additional triggering from the argument. Watching football, and sports in general, has often been associated with cardiac events. One study reported that mortality due to heart attack and stroke increased when a local team played at home. The penalty shootout in football matches seems to be a particularly significant stress. When England lost to Argentina in a penalty shootout on 30 June 1998, myocardial infarction increased in England by 25 per cent – an increase that lasted for two days. However, in the case of the Chilean wife whose husband died in 2014, the stress of seeing her husband with a cardiac arrest was most likely another strong trigger, especially coming so soon after the penalty shootout and the ensuing argument. For her husband, the extreme stress of both the match and the argument had caused fatal arrhythmia. But, though the wife experienced similar emotions, they did not result in arrhythmia. Scientists now think that, paradoxically, any arrhythmias she might have experienced were likely avoided thanks to the Takotsubo syndrome itself.

Scientific experiments in my laboratory have shown that the changes to the heart in Takotsubo is a result of high levels of adrenaline, which would normally stimulate the heart (and potentially disturb its rhythm) but instead dampen its function. When I tried to prevent this switch from exciting to dampening in the laboratory models, the heart’s rhythm was immediately – and fatally – triggered. By dampening, or ‘shutting down’ the heart, Takotsubo syndrome is protecting it from something worse: sudden cardiac death.

So, why are males more susceptible to adrenaline-induced arrhythmia? Maybe a better question is why females are better protected from adrenaline? My hunch is that, without this protection, the extreme physical and emotional stress of labor and birth could overwhelm mothers with adrenaline. Perhaps this is why young females are protected from both sudden cardiac death and Takotsubo syndrome. Postmenopausal women seem to lose some of this protection but are still rescued from the worst consequences of an adrenaline surge. There are some deaths, but many are saved from fatal arrhythmia.

Heartbreak may be nothing new, but now it has a medical history. Experiencing the emotional pain of natural disasters, grief, trauma, arguments and even watching sports can potentially have very real physical consequences for our health and survival. We truly can be ‘heartbroken’. But the story of Takotsubo syndrome is not only the story of how heartbreak became more than a metaphor. It’s also a retelling of an old, familiar story in which the heart is fundamentally connected to our emotions, a story of how emotions hold sway over life and death. It’s one we’ve been telling since stories began.

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Sian Hardingis emeritus professor of cardiac pharmacology at Imperial College London. She is the author of The Exquisite Machine The New Science of the Heart (2022).

Courtesy: Psyche (Received through email on Dec 15, 2022) 

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By Iqra Hussain

Overthinking is basically a disease, which slowly and gradually rises to depression. Overthinking leads to the thoughts which are unnecessary and useless and find place in our mind while thinking too much for little things or getting worried for small things.

What will happen…how you will go?

Is it a sign of depression and overthinking – being worried about past, tensed for future, and crying in present?

This is all that we call as depression.

Thinking all the time builds pressure in your mind due to which you cannot concentrate in your real life, can’t enjoy the happiness, neither the sweetness of life. Your mind just goes around the things which you had kept in it.

Nowadays depression has become more common that we hear reports of suicidal attempts by youth.

Yes this life is difficult and there are problems…but why we are here to take these problems over our head and ruin our life….???

If there are problems, there might be solutions too. Everything in this world can be possible because the word impossible itself says “I M POSSIBLE”.

Then what’s the need to be worry of…

We just have to focus on the solutions to tackle with the problems.

Instead of overthinking about them, asking questions ‘what will happen… and become depressed, we should utilize our energy to sort out the puzzle and be relaxed. As life is like math… when you start solving problems it becomes easy and simple.

Self-help tips for depression and overthinking

Here are tips you can apply to be free from overthinking and depression.

The overthinking lies hidden beyond the words. So first stop this and just think in a normal and positive way.

• Stop thinking too much and enjoy the present moments.
• Don’t be depressed as it makes miserable the sweet moments of your life…
• Just chill and live the happy life…
• Don’t wait for the perfect moment to be happy; make that moment perfect for you and be happy.
• Whenever you feel depressed, leave that place, change the environment and do something interesting which relaxes you and gives you calmness.
• You can stop overthinking by engaging yourself in many indoor and outdoor activities to be so busy that there would be no time for overthinking to reach you.

You know what overthinking and depression takes away your happiness, joy and pleasures of life.

All things despairs away and you become weak physically and mentally.

That will at last lead you towards destruction. So be alert… and active, stop thinking useless, avoid negative thoughts, sad feelings and live your life happily in a fresh air with fresh and energetic mind.

When your mind is fresh and active it makes you active and fresh to sort out solutions and fight with all the problems of life.

So feel free, be happy and enjoy the journey of life happily.

Iqra Hussain

Iqra Hussain is a final year student of Pharm D at Peoples Medical University Shaheed Benazirabad (Nawabshah) Sindh.

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