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Power of 3

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Katia Lamer during her experiment in Houston. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility

By Daniel Dunaief

Clouds and rain often cause people to cancel their plans and seek alternative activities.

The opposite was the case for Katia Lamer this summer. A scientist and Director of Operations of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing, Lamer was in Houston to participate in ESCAPE and TRACER studies to understand the impact of pollution on deep convective cloud formation. 

Katia Lamer during her experiment in Houston. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility

With uncharacteristically dry weather and fewer of the clouds she and others intended to study, she had some down time and created a plan to study the distribution of urban heat. “I am always looking for an opportunity to grow the Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing and try to make the best of every situation,” she said.

Indeed, Lamer and her team launched 32 small, helium-filled party balloons. She and Stony Brook University student Zachary Mages each released 16 balloons every 100 meters while walking a one mile transect from the suburbs to downtown Houston. A mobile observatory followed the balloons and gathered data in real time through a radio link. 

While helium-filled party balloons are not the best option, Lamer said the greater good lay in gathering the kind of data that will be helpful in measuring and monitoring climate change and explained that until some better balloon technology was available, this is what they had to use.

“Typically, we launch the giant radiosonde balloons, but you can’t launch them in a city,” she said because of the lack of space for these larger balloons to rise without hitting obstacles. The balloons also might pass through navigable airspace, disturbing flight traffic.

The smaller party balloons carried sensitive equipment that measured temperature and humidity and had a GPS sensor tucked into foam cups.

“If we can demonstrate that there is significant variability in the vertical distribution of temperature and humidity at those scales, then this would suggest that we should push to increase the resolution of our models to improve climate change projections,” she explained.

By following these balloons closely with a mobile observatory, Lamer and her team can avoid interference from other signals and signal blockage by buildings.

The system they used allowed them to select a cut-off height. Once the balloons reached that altitude, the string that connected the sensors to the balloon burns off and the sensors start free-falling while the balloon climbs until it pops.

The sensors collect continuous data on temperature, humidity and horizontal wind during the ascent and descent. Using the GPS, researchers can collect the sensors.

While researchers have studied urban heat using mesoscale models and satellite data, that analysis does not have the spatial resolution to understand community scale variability. Urban winds also remain understudied, particularly the winds above the surface, she explained.

Winds transport pollutants, harmful contaminants, and heat, which may be relieved on some streets and trapped on others.

Michael Jensen, principal investigator for the Tracking Aerosol Convection interaction Experiment, or TRACER and meteorologist at BNL, explained that Lamer is “focused on what’s going on in the urban centers.” Having a truck that can move around and collect data makes the kind of experiment Lamer is conducting possible. Jensen described what Lamer and her colleagues are doing as “unique.”

New York model 

Katia Lamer during her experiment in Houston. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility

Lamer had conducted similar experiments in New York to measure winds. The CMAS mobile observatory’s first experiment took place in Manhattan around the One Vanderbilt skyscraper, which is 1,400 feet high and is next to Grand Central Terminal. No balloons were launched as part of that first experiment.She launched the small radiosonde balloons for the first time this summer in Houston around the 990 foot tall Wells Fargo complex. 

Of the 32 balloons she and Mages launched, they collected data from 24. The group lost connection to some of the balloons, while interference and signal blockage disrupted the data flow from others.

Lamer plans to use the information to explore how green spaces such as parks and blue infrastructure including fountains have the potential to provide some comfort to people in the immediate area.

Such observations will provide additional insight beyond numerical models into how large an area a park can cool in the context of the configuration of a neighborhood.

This kind of urban work can have numerous applications.

Lamer suggested it could play a role in urban planning and in national security, as officials need to know the dispersement of pollutants and chemicals. Understanding wind patterns on a fine scale can help inform models that indicate areas that might be affected by an accidental release of chemicals or a deliberate attack against residents.

Bigger picture

Katia Lamer during her experiment in Houston. Photo by Steven Andrade/ BNL

Lamer is gathering data from cities to understand the scale of heterogeneity in properties such as heat and humidity, among others. If conditions are horizontally and vertically homogeneous, only a few permanent stations would be necessary to monitor the city. If conditions are much more varied, more measurement stations would be necessary.

One way to perform this assessment is to use mobile observatories that collect data. The ones Lamer has deployed use low-cost, research-grade instruments for street level and column wide observations.

Over the ensuing decades, Lamer expects that the specific conditions will likely change. Collecting and analyzing data now will enable scientists to develop a baseline awareness of typical urban conditions.

Scientific origins

A native of St.-Dominique, a small farmer’s village in Quebec Canada, Lamer was impressed by storms as she was growing up. She would often watch them outside her window, fascinated by what she was witnessing. After watching the Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton movie Twister, she wanted to invent her own version of the Dorothy instrument and start chasing storms.

When she spoke with her high school guidance counselor about her interest in tornadoes, which do not occur in Quebec, the counselor said she was the first person to express such a professional passion and had no idea how to advise her.

Lamer, who grew up speaking French, attended McGill University in Montreal, where she studied earth system science, aspects of geology and geography and a range of earth-related topics.

Instead of studying or tracking tornadoes, she has worked on cloud physics and cloud dynamics. Hearing about how clouds are the biggest wild card in climate change projections, she decided to embrace the challenge.

During her three years at BNL, Lamer, who lives with her husband and children in Stony Brook, has appreciated the chance to “push the envelope and be creative,” she said. “I really hope to stay in the field of urban meteorology.”

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The temperatures at the poles are heating up more rapidly than those at the equator. Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

On any given day, heat waves can bring record-breaking temperatures, while winter storms can include below average cold temperatures or snow.

Edmund Chang. Photo from SBU

Weather and climate experts don’t generally make too much of a single day or even a few days amid an otherwise normal trend. But, then, enough of these exceptional days over the course of years can skew models of the climate, which refers to average temperature and atmospheric conditions for a region.

If the climate is steady, “we should see approximately the same number of hot and cold records being broken,” said Edmund Chang, Professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. “Over the past few decades, we have seen many more hot records being broken than cold records, indicating the climate is getting hotter.”

Recent heat

Indeed, just last week, before a heatwave hit the northeastern United States, the United Kingdom reported the hottest day on record, with the temperature at Heathrow Airport reaching above 104 degrees.

Erinna Bowman, who grew up in Stony Brook and has lived in London since 2009, said the temperature felt “like a desert,” with hot, dry heat radiating up in the urban setting. Most homes in London don’t have air conditioning, although public spaces like supermarkets and retail stores do.

“I’m accustomed to the summer getting quite hot, so I was able to cope,” said Bowman. Indeed, London is usually considerably cooler during the summer, with average temperatures around 73 degrees.

Michael Jensen. Photo from BNL

News coverage of the two extraordinarily hot days in London “was very much framed in the context of a changing climate,” Bowman said. The discussion of a hotter temperature doesn’t typically use the words “climate change,” but, instead, describes the phenomenon as “global heating.”

For climate researchers in the area, the weather this summer has also presented unusual challenges.

Brookhaven National Laboratory meteorologist Michael Jensen spent four years planning for an extensive study of convective clouds in Houston, in a study called Tracking Aerosol Convection Interactions, or Tracer.

“Our expectation is that we would be overwhelmed” with data from storms produced in the city, he said. “That’s not what we’re experiencing.”

The weather, which has been “extremely hot and extremely dry,” has been more typical of late August or early September. “This makes us wonder what August is going to look like,” he said.

Jensen, however, is optimistic that his extensive preparation and numerous pieces of equipment to gather meteorological data will enable him to collect considerable information.

Warming at the poles

Broadly speaking, heat waves have extended for longer periods of time in part because the temperatures at the poles are heating up more rapidly than those at the equator. The temperature difference between the tropics and the poles causes a background flow from west to east that pushes storms along, Chang explained.

The North Pole, however, has been warming faster than the tropics. A paper by his research group showed that the lower temperature gradient led to a weakening of the storm track.

When summer Atlantic storms pass by, they provide relief from the heat and can induce more clouds that can lead to cooler temperatures. Weakening these storms can lead to fewer clouds and less cooler air to relieve the heat, Chang added.

Rising sea levels

Malcolm Bowman. Photo from SBU

Malcolm Bowman, who is Erinna Bowman’s father and is Distinguished Service Professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, believes the recent ice melting in Greenland, which has been about 10 degrees above normal, could lead to a rise in sea levels of about one inch this summer. “It will slowly return to near normal as the fresh water melt spreads slowly over all the world’s oceans,” he added.

Bowman, who has studied sea level rises and is working on mitigation plans for the New York area in the event of a future major storm, is concerned about the rest of the hurricane season after the level of warming in the oceans this summer. 

“Those hurricanes which follow a path over the ocean, especially following the Gulf Stream, will remain strong and may gather additional strength from the heat of the underlying water,” he explained in an email.

Bowman is the principal investigator on a project titled “Long Island South Shore Sea Gates Study.”

He is studying the potential benefit of six possible sea gates that would be located across inlets along Nassau and Suffolk County. He also suggests that south shore sand dunes would need to be built up to a height of 14 feet above normal high tide.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers has come up with a tentatively selected plan for New York Harbor that it will release some time in the fall. Bowman anticipates the study will be controversial as the struggle between green and grey infrastructure — using natural processes to manage the water as opposed to sending it somewhere else — heats up.

As for the current heat waves, Bowman believes they are a consistent and validating extension of climate change.

Model simulations

In his lab, Chang has been looking at model simulations and is trying to understand what physical processes are involved. He is comparing these simulations with observations to determine the effectiveness of these projections.

To be sure, one of the many challenges of understanding the weather and climate is that numerous factors can influence specific conditions.

“Chaos in the atmosphere could give rise to large variations in weather” and to occasional extremes, Chang said. 

Before coming to any conclusions about longer term patterns or changes in climate, Chang said he and other climate modelers examine collections of models of the atmosphere to assess how likely specific conditions may occur due to chaos even without climate change.

“We have to rule out” climate variability to understand and appreciate the mechanisms involved in any short term changes in the weather, he added.

Still, Chang said he and other researchers are certain that high levels of summer heat will be a part of future climate patterns. 

“We are confident that the increase in temperature will result in more episodes of heat waves,” he said.

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Stony Brook Breast Cancer Screening mobile truck. (8/24/18)

By Daniel Dunaief

Some groups of people on Long Island have a much higher incidence of a particular type of cancer than others.

On an age adjusted rate, African American men, for example, were almost twice as likely to develop prostate cancer from 2014 to 2018 as Caucasians. Out of 100,000 African American men, 216.6 had prostate cancer compared with 123.9 out of 100,000 white men, according to data from the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Linda Mermelstein. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine

Dr. Linda Mermelstein, Associate Director of Stony Brook Cancer Center’s Office for Community Outreach and Engagement, is working with her team to address those stark differences and to empower members of the community to protect their health and make informed decisions.

“A lot of our focus is on addressing disparities” in cancer care in various communities throughout Long Island, Dr. Mermelstein said. 

The Cancer Center Outreach and Engagement office has taken numerous steps to inform the public about research and care. The center has a Mobile Mammography Unit, which travels into communities to provide access to screening for breast cancer.

On June 5, at the Latina Sisters Support Inc. Spanish Fair in Brentwood, the Cancer Center’s Community Outreach and Engagement staff provided mobile mammography screening and cancer prevention and screening education.

At that event, the Suffolk County Department of Health Services provided human papillomavirus and Covid-19 vaccines and Stony Brook School of Health Professionals offered blood pressure screening.

An information chasm

Dr. Jedan Phillips. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine

Dr. Jedan Phillips, Medical Director for Stony Brook Health Outreach and Medical Education and Associate Professor of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine, explained that Covid-19 exposed the “chasm” between what the health care profession believed and the reality of what works and what doesn’t.

During the pandemic, Stony Brook University brought a vaccination pod to Uniondale in Nassau County, which is a predominantly African American community. “Because we had no relationship there, we might have wasted over 200 doses of the vaccine” as residents were reluctant to get vaccinated, he said. “Even though [Stony Brook] offered something that would help, people chose against it. It’s not about the vaccine. It’s something deeper.”

Dr. Phillips said East Elmhurst, Queens, where he grew up, was “ravaged by Covid. I know at least 10 people in my community who were regular figures in my life that died. I saw how vulnerable of a position we were in as a group and I felt I needed to get involved.”

Dr. Phillips, who has a family medical practice in East Patchogue, together with Dr. Yuri Jadotte, Assistant Professor and Associate Program Director for the Preventive Medicine Residency in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook, created three focus groups to survey the views and understanding of African American men on prostate cancer.

Many African American men don’t get screened for prostate cancer, even though such screenings could lead to earlier treatment and better outcomes.

By listening to what inspires African American men throughout Long Island to take action, Dr. Phillips hopes to tailor information to that type of delivery.

“It’s important to listen and understand,” Dr. Phillips said. Understanding what motivates people and seeking to provide the formats in which they prefer to access information can help establish a community connection and demonstrate cultural compassion.

Part of Dr. Phillips’s focus on preventive medicine comes from his experience with his father, who died from complications related to diabetes. His father, who was an inspiration for him, “didn’t live life in a preventive way,” which made managing his health more difficult, Dr. Phillips said.

With the numerous programs offered by the Office for Community Outreach and Engagement, Dr. Mermelstein said the group has four primary goals.

Dr. Jedan Phillips provides medical care.

“We want to monitor and understand what is the cancer burden in our catchment area” which includes Nassau and Suffolk County, she said. “Much of our activities are identifying the issues in terms of cancer” and understanding any barriers towards cancer care, like education, screening, diagnosis and treatment.

Secondly, she wants to provide cancer prevention services, screening, education and community navigation. Third, the group has a bi-directional engagement, with researchers getting to know the community and community advocates and the community learning about the research process.

Finally, the group seeks to catalyze the research by focusing on disparities, providing research services to the entire community based on specific needs.

One of Dr. Mermelstein’s first actions after heading up this team in 2019 was to create a community advisory council for the Stony Brook Cancer Center.

Janine Logan, Vice President of Communications and Population Health with the Long Island Health Collaborative, serves on that advisory council.“What I’m most excited about is that the committee understands the importance of knowing what your community thinks and needs,” Logan said.

Logan is pleased with the work the Stony Brook Cancer Center has done to educate residents about the lifestyle behaviors that can contribute to cancer, such as smoking, inactivity, and nutrition.

“They’ve done a lot of work in reaching out and educating communities to help them understand that these simple, modifiable behaviors can reduce their risk” of developing cancer, Logan said.

The effort at the Cancer Center to educate the public about the danger’s of the sun dovetails with some of the work she has done at the Long Island Health Collaborative.

Indeed, the Cancer Center Community Outreach and Engagement hosted a “Block the sun, not the fun” gathering on May 7 at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove.

The Stony Brook Cancer Center is also working with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services Cancer Prevention and Health Promotion Coalition to provide information about sunscreen safety.

In addition to the disparity among African American men who develop prostate cancer, the outreach effort also addressed the difference among hispanic women who have a higher incidence of cervical cancer than the non-hispanic Caucasian population.

In Suffolk County, about 10.2 Hispanic and Latino women out of 100,000 Hispanic and Latino women develop cervical cancer, which is higher than the 5.9 per 100,000 for white, non-Hispanic women, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Human papillomarvirus is estimated to cause about 36,500 cases of cancer in men and women every year in the United States. The HPV vaccination, which works best before exposure to the virus, can prevent 33,700 of those cancers. Because the vaccine doesn’t prevent all cancers, women still need screening to protect themselves.

Previously employed for 22 years with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, Dr. Mermelstein, who has a medical degree and a master’s in public health, briefly retired, before taking this job at Stony Brook.

“I wanted to do something to help address cancer after I retired, and so I contacted Stony Brook Cancer Center and began in this position about four months after I retired,” she explained.

Those interested in reaching out to the Office for Community Outreach and Engagement can call 631-444-4263 or email [email protected].

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Paolo Boffetta. Photo by Jeanne Neville/Stony Brook Medicine

By Daniel Dunaief

Screening for cancer can help people take steps to head off the development of a disease that could threaten the quantity and quality of their lives.

During the start of the pandemic, people around the world stopped screening for cervical, breast and colorectal cancer, according to a recent study led by Paolo Boffetta, Associate Director for Population Sciences at Stony Brook University’s  Cancer Center.

The results of the study were recently published in the journal JAMA Oncology.

Compared to 2019, screenings for breast cancer dropped in the first few months after the start of the pandemic by 35.6 percent for breast cancer, 41.8 percent for colorectal cancer, and 54.1 percent for cervical cancer compared to the same period in 2019.

Paolo Boffetta. Photo by Jeanne Neville/Stony Brook Medicine

Boffetta chose these three cancers because they are the ones public health authorities recommend for the population at large. Screenings can improve patient outcomes. 

“For some/ most cancer, the earlier the better for detection,” explained Stony Brook Cancer Center Director Yusuf Hannun.

Boffetta, who is also Adjunct Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, suggested that the longer-term impact of a reduction in screenings in the early part of the pandemic won’t be clear to doctors or patients in the short term.

“It will take a little bit of time to have a full understanding of this,” said Boffetta. Depending on the specific type, cancers “that are detected by screenings would not otherwise appear for a few years.”

Boffetta suggested that the pandemic, apart from the illnesses and symptoms that threatened the health of people who were battling the virus itself, affected public health services. He believes several factors likely contributed to the decrease in screenings. Patients around the world were reluctant or restricted in their ability to leave their homes amid lockdowns.

Additionally, some cancer centers likely reduce the number of people they monitored to cut back on the density of patients in health care facilities, although Boffetta did not gather any data on the reduction in the number of screenings at health care centers.

The positive news amid this study, which surveyed cancer screening data in PubMed and other medical journals from 19 countries from January 2020 through December 2021, was that the number of patients screened returned to a more normal level within several months of the start of the pandemic.

“An important finding is that by the summer of 2020, the decrease in screenings for breast cancer and cervical cancer seem to have disappeared,” Boffetta said by phone from Italy, where he is a part-time professor at the University of Bologna. “For colorectal cancer [the decrease in screenings] lasted longer,” through the end of 2020.

Boffetta described the reduction in screenings and then a return to normal as a U-shaped curve, with an initial decline followed by a recovery. Doctors typically screen for colorectal cancers by using a colonoscopy. This technique requires several hours in the hospital. Patients may have been “more reluctant to go back to such a complex procedure, compared to the mammography or pap smear” which screen for breast and cervical cancers, respectively.

Boffetta is conducting a broad study of the cancer literature from early findings to clinical diagnosis to treatment. At this point, he has finished a paper on the frequency and types of clinical diagnoses amid the pandemic. He is collecting data for another study that will examine cancer treatment.

“We are interested in how the pandemic affected each of these stages,” he said.

Hannun suggested that Boffetta’s work expertise help address important health care questions related to the pandemic and other threats to public health, adding, “Epidemiology is essential for understanding the pandemic and many chronic diseases, especially cancer with exposure issues.

A lab update

Boffetta joined Stony Brook University in April of 2020, soon after the start of the pandemic.

Also a Professor in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Boffetta will return to the United States in a few weeks from Italy.

Boffetta has added Research Coordinator Germana Giupponi and postdoctoral fellow Malak Khalifeh to his research efforts at Stony Brook. 

Germana Giupponi

A native of Italy, Giupponi, who started working with Boffetta in July of 2020 and provides administrative support and coordination with Boffetta’s collaborators, earned her master’s degree from the University of Milan.

Khalifeh joined Boffetta’s lab in March, is originally from Lebanon and conducted her PhD research in France at the University of Bordeaux. She is studying the link between the exposure people have to various chemicals in drinking water and bladder cancer. The bladder is especially susceptible to toxins from the environment.

Boffetta, meanwhile, has started teaching some graduate level classes at Stony Brook on cancer epidemiology for master’s and PhD students. He will teach one class this fall.

He is also continuing his studies with survivors of the World Trade Center attacks.

He has been comparing the survival of these first responders to the overall population in New York, comparing how the risk of cancer changed over the course of the 21 years since the attacks.

Boffetta has been working with Ben Luft, Director of the Stony Brook WTC Wellness Program at the Renaissance School of Medicine. Luft has provided clinical and research support for WTC responders.

Boffetta continues to have academic affiliations with other academic institutions, including Harvard University and Vanderbilt University.

Boffetta and his wife Antonella Greco, who have been living in New York City, plan to move to the Stony Brook area. Their three daughters live in Brooklyn, Italy and Argentina. Now that pandemic restrictions have lifted, Boffetta has been able to return to the opera and museums and has done some skiing and hiking.

As for this study, Boffetta suggested that the findings about screenings were consistent with what he might have expected during the beginning of the pandemic.Delaying screenings could mean that some people discover cancers at a more advanced state by the time they diagnose them, he said.

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Markus Seeliger, third from left, with members of his lab, from left, Terrence Jiang. Aziz Rangwala, Ian Outhwaite, Victoria Mingione,YiTing Paung, and Hannah Philipose. Photo from Markus Seeliger

By Daniel Dunaief

When a dart hits the center of a target, the contestant often gets excited and adds points to a score. But what if that well-placed dart slipped off the board before someone could count the points, rendering such an accurate throw ineffective?

With some cases of cancer treatments, that’s what may be happening, particularly when a disease develops a mutation that causes a relapse. Indeed, people who have chronic myeloid leukemia typically receive a treatment called Imatinib, or Gleevac.

The drug works, hitting a target called a kinase, which this white blood cell cancer needs to cause its cells to continue to divide uncontrollably. Patients, however, develop a mutation called N368S, which reduces the effectiveness of the drug.

While mutations typically make it more difficult for a drug to bind to its target, that’s not what’s happening with this specific mutation. Like the dart hitting the center of a board, the drug continues to reach its target.

Instead, in a model of drug resistance several scientists have developed, the mutation causes the drug to decouple.

Pratyush Tiwary with this year’s US top 20 students who are going to the international chemistry olympiad. Photo from Toward

A team of experimental and computational researchers including Markus Seeliger, Associate Professor of Pharmacological Sciences at Stony Brook University, and Pratyush Tiwary, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, published two research papers explaining a process that may also affect the way mutations enable resistance to other drugs.

Seeliger described how different disease-associated mutations bind to Gleevac in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Working with scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, Seeliger used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or NMR. The researchers showed how the drug bound to its target and then released.

Understanding the way diseases like cancer develop such resistance could affect drug discovery, giving pharmaceutical companies another way to prepare for changes diseases make that reduce the effectiveness of treatments.

A ‘hot paper’

Tiwary published research in which Seeliger was a coauthor in late April in the journal Angewandte Chemie that the publication labeled a “hot paper” for its implications in the field. Tiwary developed a way to simulate the kinetic processes that enable the mutated kinases to release the drug.

Tiwary created an artificial intelligence model that extended the time he analyzed the drug-protein interaction from milliseconds all the way out to thousands of seconds.

“Even within the simulation world, if you can quantitatively predict a binding affinity, that’s amazing,” Seeliger said. “It’s extremely hard to calculate kinetics, and he got that right.”

Tiwary, who started talking with Seeliger about five years ago and has been actively collaborating for about three years, uses experimental data to inform the dynamics that affect his simulations.

Seeliger “had done the experiments of the dissociation rates beforehand, but did not have a way to explain why they were what they were,” Tiwary explained in an email. “Our simulations gave him insights into why this was the case and … insight into how to think about drugs that might dissociate further.”

Drug discovery

Tiwary hopes the work enables researchers to look at structural and kinetic intermediates in reactions, which could provide clues about drug design and delivery. While he worked with a single mutation, he said he could conduct such an analysis on alterations that affect drug interactions in other diseases.

He wrote that the computations, while expensive, were not prohibitive. He used the equivalent of 16 independent 64 CPUs for one to two weeks. He suggested that computing advances could cut this down by a factor of 10, which would enable the exploration of different mutations.

“The methods are now so easy to automate that we could run many, many simulations in parallel,” Tiwary explained. Machine learning makes the automation possible.

Given what he’s learned, Tiwary hopes to contribute to future drug begin that addresses mutation or resistance to treatment in other cancers. He also plans to continue to work with Seeliger to address other questions.

Next steps

Seeliger said he plans to extend this work beyond the realm of this specific type of cancer.

He will explore “how common these kinetic mutations are in other systems, other diseases and other kinases,” Seeliger said.

He would also like to understand whether other proteins in the cell help with the release of drugs or, alternatively, prevent the release of drugs from their target. The cell could have “other accessory proteins that help kick out the drug from the receptor,” Seeliger said.

The concept of drug resistance time comes from infectious disease, where microbes develop numerous mutations.

Seeliger, who is originally from Hanover, Germany, said he enjoys seeing details in any scene, even outside work, that others might not notice. 

He described how he was driving with postdoctoral fellows in Colorado when he spotted a moose. While the group stopped to take a picture, he noticed that the moose had an ear tag, which is something others didn’t immediately notice.

As for the research collaboration, Seeliger is pleased with the findings and the potential of the ongoing collaboration between experimental and computational biologists.

“The computational paper, aside from using interesting new methodology, describes why things are happening the way they are on a molecular level,” he said.

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Members of the CanCan team, from left,Oliver Maddocks, David Lewis, Johan Vande Voorde, Bette Caan, Marcus Goncalves, Eileen White, Mariam Jamal-Hanjani, Tobias Janowitz, Karen Mustian, Janelle Ayres andToni Hui

By Daniel Dunaief

If a team Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Tobias Janowitz co-leads succeeds, researchers will know more about the end stage of numerous types of cancer that involves the loss of tissue and muscle mass.

Tobias Janowitz

Recently, lead scientists Janowitz; Eileen White, Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer; and Dr. Marcus DaSilva Goncalves, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine received $25 million in funding as a part of a Cancer Grand Challenge, which is a combined trans-Atlantic funding effort between Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the United States.

The cachexia group was one of four teams to receive funding among 11 finalists.

Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, described cachexia as “one of the most difficult clinical problems with late stage cancer.”

Stillman added that the collaboration is promising because it brings together a group of “remarkable” scientists, including White, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Stillman’s lab. “It has great potential for making a difference in the lives of patients.”

Stillman believes Janowitz is an ideal co leader for this challenging project because he has an MD and a PhD and is clinically certified as an oncologist.

CanCan team

For his part, Janowitz is looking forward to the opportunity to team up with other ambitious research efforts to create a virtual institute.

Eileen White

“It’s incredibly exciting to get the chance to do something you think is higher risk with a large group of people who have come together around this problem,” said Janowitz. “We often talked about how it would be nice to bring team members from other disciplines into this area.”

Indeed, the cachexia team, which White named CanCan for Cancer Cachexia Action Network believes cachexia is a tumor-driven metabolic imbalance. The group is pursuing different areas of research, including metabolism, neuroendocrinology, clinical research, and immunology, among others, to define clinical subtypes with the hopes of creating individualized therapies.

While the effort brings together a range of scientists with different expertise and technological skills, researchers don’t expect an immediate therapeutic solution within that time frame. Rather, they anticipate that their experiments and clinical data will help inform future approaches that could enhance efforts to prevent and treat a wasting disease that causes severe declines in a patient’s quality of life.

“What we would deem as a success is, if in five years time, we have maybe one to three strong lead hypotheses that comes out of our shared work on how we can either prevent or treat cachexia as it emerges,” Janowitz said.

The complexity of cachexia

Dr. Marcus DaSilva Goncalves

As a complex process that involves an understanding of numerous interconnected dynamics, cachexia has been a challenging field for researchers and a difficult one for funding agencies looking for discrete problems with definable results and solutions.

Cachexia research had “never reached this critical mass that people were seeing where we can say, ‘Okay, there’s enough work going on to really unravel this,’” Janowitz said.

The CanCan team has several scientific themes. Janowitz will be involved with metabolic dysregulation. He would like to understand the behavioral changes around appetite and food intake.

Additionally, the group will explore the interaction of normal cells and cancer cells by looking at the tumor micro environment. This research will explore how cancer cells can reprogram healthy host cells.

“We’ve got a really exciting axis of research” within the network, Janowitz said.

Searching for signaling molecules

Janowitz said Norbert Perrimon, James Stillman Professor of Developmental Biology at Harvard Medical School is one of the leading experts in fly genetics and fly biology. Perrimon has created a model of cachexia in the fruit fly. While that sounds far from patients, Perrimon can use single molecule resolution of the entire organism to get an insight and understanding of candidate molecules.

“We are hoping to search for new signaling molecules that might get involved” in cachexia, Janowitz said. Once the research finds new candidates, he and others can validate whether they also work in mouse models of cancer and cancer cachexia.

With numerous clinical groups, Janowitz hopes to contribute to the design and execution of experimental medicine studies.

The Cancer Grand Challenge will distribute the funds based on what members need. Janowitz described the allocation of funds as “roughly equitable.” He will use that funding to support a postdoctoral researcher, a PhD student and a technician, who can help with specific projects he’s merging in his lab to combine with the team effort.

The funds will also support his salary so he can supervise the work in his lab and help with the coordination of this effort.

The funding agencies have an additional budget to organize conferences and meetings, where researchers can discuss ideas in person and can ensure that any clinical and laboratory work is standardized and reproducible in different facilities.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory will host the first full gathering of the cachexia team in November.

Challenging beginnings

When he was a doctor in the United Kingdom, Janowitz was fascinated and confounded by cachexia. In the early years of his training, he saw patients who had a small tumor burden, but were so sick that they died. Those experiences made “such a strong imprint” that he wanted to help unravel this process as a junior oncologist, he said.

Getting funding was challenging because cachexia was complex and didn’t involve a finely defined project that linked a receptor protein to a cell type that led to a diseased condition.

Janowitz, among others in this field, felt passionate enough about this area to continue to search for information about cachexia. After he restructured his research into a narrower focus, he secured more funding.

An unsolved mystery

With enough researchers continuing along this path, Janowitz said the group developed an awareness that this is “one of the big, unsolved mysteries of cancer progression.”

Janowitz appreciates the opportunity to work with a team that has accomplished researchers who work in fields that are related or synergistic, but aren’t necessarily considered part of the cachexia field.

The significant funding comes with expectations.

“The grant is both a great joy, but also, essentially, a mandate of duty,” he said. “Now, you have to utilize this grant to make significant contributions to understand and hopefully treat this debilitating condition.”

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A view of Shinnecock Bay. Photo by Christopher Paparo/Fish Guy Photos
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A view of Shinnecock Bay. Photo by Christopher Paparo/Fish Guy Photos
Maria Grima holding an invasive European green crab from Shinnecock Bay. Photo by Leeanne Dion
A squid from Shinnecock Bay. Photo by Sara Cernadas-Martin
Konstantine Rounto
Konstantine Rountos with students.
Konstantine Rountos with St. Joseph's University students before going out on a trawl. Photo from Rountos
Brown tide before the restoration on Shinnecock Bay started in 2012. Photo from Chris Gobler
Clearnose skate from Shinnecock Bay. Photo by Sara Cernadas-Martin
Maria Grima. Photo by Sara Cernadas-Martin
Ellen Pikitch with sea horses from Shinnecock Bay. Photo from SBU
A summer flounder. Photo by Christopher Paparo/Fish Guy Photos

By Daniel Dunaief

The Galapagos Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Little Cayman and … Shinnecock Bay? Yes, that’s correct, the 40 square kilometer bay located on the southern end of Long Island recently joined a distinguished list of celebrated marine locations identified by Mission Blue, a non-profit international organization led by famed marine biologist Sylvia Earle.

Mission Blue named Shinnecock Bay a Hope Spot, one of 132 such locations in the world that it considers critical to the health of the ocean.

Shinnecock Bay has the distinction of being the only Hope Spot in New York State, the only one near a major city and one of three on the Eastern Seaboard.

“The idea that you could have a Hope Spot so close to a major metropolitan area is pretty significant,” said Ellen Pikitch, Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and Director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science.

The designation by Mission Blue not only puts Shinnecock Bay in elite environmental company, but it also completes a comeback story driven by scientists, their students, numerous volunteers, and other supportive groups.

“The point of Mission Blue designating this place a Hope Spot isn’t only to bring more people and attention to Shinnecock Bay,” said Pikitch, but is also to “send the message of hope that we can turn things around.”

Pikitch, Christopher Gobler, Endowed Chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and Bradley Peterson, Associate Professor at Somas, led the efforts at the bay.

The scientists created clam sanctuaries in the Western Shinnecock Bay with strict no take rules for people, which helped jump start the restoration. The clams helped meet natural filtration goals.

The researchers also helped restore eelgrass, also called seagrass, which is a more effective natural way to sequester carbon per square inch than the rainforest.

Between 1930 and the start of the project in 2012, New York State had lost about 90 percent of its eelgrass. A task force projected that eelgrass would be extinct in the Empire State by 2030. The bay now has about 100 more acres of eelgrass than it had in 2012.

These efforts have created a “huge leap in the number of forage fish” including bay anchovies and menhaden, said Pikitch, who studies forage fish. “The bay is in a much healthier place now that it was when we started,” she added.

Tough beginnings

Indeed, in 2012, parts or all of the bay had to close because of brown or red tides. The tides sometimes “looked like coffee spilled across the entire bay,” Pikitch said.

The steps the researchers took to improve water quality took some time. “Harmful algal blooms didn’t disappear right away,” Pikitch said. “As the study progressed, the amount of time brown tides occurred got shorter and shorter. Ultimately we stopped seeing brown tides several years ago.”

Red tides, which can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning that could be fatal to people, had also been a problem in Shinnecock Bay. Nearly half the bay was closed to shellfishing in 2011, 2014, and 2015. In 2017 and 2028, about 1/4 of the bay was closed due to red tides. Since 2019, however, red tides haven’t threatened the bay.

On the water

Throughout the restoration process, scientists in training and volunteers contributed to various efforts. Konstantine Rountos, Associate Professor of Biology at St. Joseph’s University in New York, earned his Master’s and PhD and conducted his post doctoral research at Stony Brook University. He also served as the lead research scientist for the Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program trawl survey from 2012 to 2016. 

Rountos called the designation “remarkable and extremely exciting.” When he started working on the bay in 2005 as a Master’s candidate, he saw stressors such as eelgrass declines.

“Not only was the ecosystem showing signs of collapse (decreased seagrass, decreased hard clams, increased harmful algal blooms), but the Bay was supporting fewer and fewer baymen,” he said. The Long Island “cultural identity of ‘living off the bay’ was in serious danger.”

Rountos believes people often overlook the significant ecological importance of this area, driving past these environmental and ecological treasures without appreciating their importance. 

Amid his many Bay memories, he recalls catching a seven-foot long roughtail stingray. “It was very surprising to pull that up by hand in our trawl net,” he said.

A veteran of the bay since 2016, Maria Grima spent time on Shinnecok as an undergraduate at Stony Brook and more recently for her Master’s training, which she hopes to complete this August.

Grima has been studying the invasive European green crab that shreds eelgrass and consumes shellfish such as clams, oysters and mussels. In a preliminary analysis, the population of this crab has declined. Grima noted that it’s difficult to prove cause and effect for the reduction in the number of these crabs.

Rather than pursue a potential career in medicine, which was her initial focus when she arrived at Stony Brook, Grima decided to focus on “fixing the environmental issues that cause human health problems.”

She is “really proud that Shinnecock Bay” achieved the Hope Spot designation. 

One of her favorite Bay memories involves seeing an ocean sunfish, which is a distinctive and large fish that propels itself through water with its dorsal and ventral fins and is the world’s largest bony fish. Seeing the biodiversity on a bay that has had historically poor water quality “gives you hope when you’re on the boat,” Grima said.

When friends and volunteers have joined her on the Bay, she has delighted in watching them interact with seahorses, which “wrap their little tail around your finger.”

Looking toward the future

While Pikitch is pleased with the designation, she said the work of maintaining it continues.

“We can’t rest on our laurels,” she said. “Continued construction on Long Island’s East End and the growing threat of climate change may require additional restoration work. We need to keep a close eye on what is happening in Shinnecock Bay and be ready to take action if necessary.”

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In left photo, Zhiyang Zhai, on the right, with John Shanklin and Jantana Keereetaweep; in right photo, Zhiyang Zhai with Hui Liu. Photos courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

In a highly competitive national award process, the Department of Energy provides $2.5 million to promising researchers through Early Career Research Funding.

Recently, the DOE announced that Zhiyang Zhai, an associate biologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, was one of 83 scientists from around the country to receive this funding.

“Supporting talented researchers early in their career is key to fostering scientific creativity and ingenuity within the national research community,” DOE Office of Science Director Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, said in a statement.

Zhai, who has worked at BNL for 11 years, is studying a signaling protein called Target Of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase, which is important in the plant and animal kingdom.

He hopes to develop a basic understanding of the way this kinase reacts to different conditions, such as the presence of carbon, to trigger reactions in a plant, including producing oils through photosynthesis or making seeds.

Zhiyang Zhai. Photo from BNL

“Ancient systems like this evolve in different lineages (like plants and animals) to work differently and [Zhai] wants to find out the details of how it works in plants,” John Shanklin, chair of BNL’s Biology Department, explained in an email. 

Zhai is trying to define which upstream signals interact with TOR and what the effects of those interactions are on TOR to learn how the kinase works.

He is hoping to get a clear idea of how different nodes interact and how signaling through carbon, nutrients and sunlight affects TOR kinase levels and its configuration.

Researchers may eventually use the knowledge of upstream regulators to reprogram responses by introducing enzymes that would cause the synthesis, or degradation, of upstream regulatory metabolites, Shanklin suggested.

This could be a way to “tune” the sensor kinase activity to increase the synthesis of storage compounds like oil and starch.

In the bigger picture, this type of research could have implications and applications in basic science that could enhance the production of renewable resources that are part of a net-zero carbon fuel strategy.

The DOE sponsors “basic science programs to discover how plants and other organisms convert and store carbon that will enable a transition towards a net zero carbon economy to reduce the use of fossil fuels,” Shanklin said.

In applying for the award, Zhai paid “tremendous attention” to what the DOE’s mission is in this area, Shanklin said. Zhai picked out a project that, if successful, will directly contribute to some of the goals of the DOE.

Through an understanding of the way TOR kinase works, Zhai hopes to provide more details about metabolism.

Structure and function

Jen Sheen, Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, conducted pioneering work on how TOR kinase regulates cell growth in plants in 2013. Since then, TOR has attracted attention from an increasing number of biologists and has become “a hot and rapidly-developing research direction in plant biology,” Zhai explained.

He hopes to study the structure of TOR using BNL’s Laboratory of Biomolecular Structure at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II.

Zhai, who hopes to purify the plant version of TOR, plans to study how upstream signaling molecules interact with and modify the structure of the enzyme.

He will also use the cryo-electron microscope to get a structure. He is looking at molecular changes in TOR in the presence or absence of molecules or compounds that biochemically bind to it.

Through this funded research, Zhai hopes to explain how signals such as carbon supply, nutrients and sunlight regulates cell growth.

Once he’s conducted his studies on TOR, Zhai plans to make mutants of TOR and test them experimentally to see if a new version, which Zhai described as “TOR 2.0,” has the anticipated effects.

Zhai is building on his experience with another regulatory kinase, called SnRK1, which is involved in energy signaling.

“His expertise in defining SnRK1’s mechanism ideally positions him to perform this work,” Shanklin said.

At this point, Zhai is focused on basic science. Other researchers will apply what he learns to the development of plants for commercial use.

A seminal moment and a call home

Zhai described the award as “very significant” for him. He plans to continue with his passionate research to explore the unknown.

He will use the funds to hire new postdoctoral researchers to build up his research team. He also hopes this award gives him increased visibility and an opportunity to add collaborators at BNL and elsewhere.

The funding will support part of Zhai’s salary as well as that of his staff. He will also purchase some new lab instruments and tap into the award to attend conferences and publish papers.

When he learned he had won the award, Zhai called his mother Ruiming, who lives in his native China. “She is so proud of me and immediately spread the good news to my other relatives in China,” Zhai recalled.

When Shanklin spoke with Zhai after the two had learned of the award, he said he had “never seen Zhai look happier.”Shanklin suggested that this is a “seminal moment” in a career that he expects will have other such milestones in the future.

A resident of Mt. Sinai, Zhai lives with his wife Hui Liu, who is a Research Associate in Shanklin’s group specializing in plant transformation, fatty acids and lipidomics analysis.The couple has two sons, nine-year-old Terence and three-year-old Steven.

As for his work, Zhai hopes it has broader implications.

“The knowledge of TOR signaling will provide us [with] tools to achieve hyperaccumulation of lipids in plant vegetative tissues, which is a promising source for renewable energy,” he said.

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By Daniel Dunaief

Kelp, and other seaweed, may prove to be an oyster’s best friend. And, no, this isn’t a script for a new episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.

A thick, heavy leafy seaweed, kelp provides an environmentally friendly solution to several problems. Amid higher levels of carbon dioxide, the air has become warmer and oceans, including coastal regions, are more acidic. That’s because carbon dioxide mixes with water, producing negative hydrogen ions that lower the pH of the water.

Enter kelp.

A rapidly growing seaweed, kelp, which is endemic to the area, uses that carbon dioxide in the same way trees do, as a part of photosynthesis. By removing carbon dioxide, kelp raises the pH, which is helpful for the area’s shellfish.

The above graph shows pH scale measurements with and without kelp. The graph shows continuous pH (NBS scale) bubbling, and the addition of 4 x 104 cells mL-1 Isochrysis galbana added daily to simulate daily feedings of bivalves.  Image provided by Chris Gobler

That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in Frontiers in Marine Science by Stony Brook University Professor Christopher Gobler, Endowed Chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mike Doall, Associate Director of Shellfish Restoration and Aquaculture at Stony Brook University.

In a series of five laboratory experiments and a field study, Gobler and Doall showed that kelp lowered acidification, enabling better growth for shellfish like oysters. “There was better oyster growth inside the kelp than 50 meters away” Doall said, in what he and Gobler describe as the “halo” effect.

Gobler was especially pleased with the implications of the field experiment.“While showing that  [result] in the lab was exciting, being able to improve the growth of oysters on an oyster farm experiencing coastal acidification proves this approach can have very broad implications,” Gobler said in a statement.

Doall estimates that kelp farmers can grow 72,000 pounds per acre of kelp in just six months, during the prime growing season from December through May.

Doall, whose primary role in the study was to grow the kelp and set up the field experiment, said he grew kelp at the Great Gun oyster farm in Moriches Bay that were up to 12 feet long. Over the last four years, he has grown kelp in 16 locations around Long Island, from the East River to Fishers Island.

This year, the team conducted kelp studies in nine locations. The best growth occurred in the East River and in Moriches Bay, Doall said. He harvested about 2,000 pounds each from those two sites this year and is primarily using the kelp in a host of fertilizer studies.

Gobler explained that using seaweed like kelp could enhance aquaculture.

“The intensification of ocean acidification now threatens bivalve aquaculture and has necessitated a solution,” Gobler said in a statement. “We believe our work is foundational to a solution.”

Above, Mike Doall during a recent kelp harvest in Moriches Bay. Photo by Cameron Provost

One of the challenges of using kelp to improve the local conditions for shellfish is that it grows during the winter through May, while the growing season for shellfish occurs during the summer.

“That is why we are now working on summer seaweeds,” Gobler explained in an email.

Gobler and Doall are looking for similar potential localized benefits from Ulva, a green sea lettuce, and Gracilaria, which is a red, branchy seaweed.

“Most water quality issues occur during summer, so it’s important to grow seaweed year round,” Doall said.

The Stony Brook scientists, who have worked together since the early 1990s when they were graduate students, are also exploring varieties of kelp that might be more heat tolerant and will try to use some of those on Long Island.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is leading a project to hybridize these heartier strains of kelp, Doall said. GreenWave, which supports regenerative ocean farming, is also participating in that effort.

Gobler explained that they also plan to start earlier, which will extend the growing season.

While the different growing seasons for kelp and oysters may make kelp only part of the solution for reducing ocean acidification for shellfish, the different growing seasons makes the seaweed a complementary companion crop for commercial shellfish diggers.

Summer laborers who work on oysters can transition to kelp harvesting in the fall and winter.

A resident of Rocky Point, Doall lives with his wife Nancy, who teaches at North Coleman Road Elementary School in the Middle Country School District.

The Doall’s 23-year old daughter Deanna, who is a graduate of the University of Tampa, is currently traveling in Guatemala, while their 20-year old daughter Annie is attending Florida Gulf Coast University.

Doall grew up in Massapequa Park. As a 12-year old, he pooled his lawn mowing money with a friend’s paper route funds to buy a small boat with a 1967 10-horsepower Evinrude engine. The pair went out on bays to fish and, periodically, to clam.

Doall, who loves gardening and being in the ocean, described the two of them as being “notorious” for needing tows back to the shore regularly when their engine died.

The former owner of an oyster farm, Doall also enjoys eating them. He particularly enjoys eating oysters in the winter and early spring, when they are plump. His favorite way to eat them is raw on the half shell, but he also appreciates his wife’s “killer Oysters Rockefeller,” as he described it.

As for kelp, the current supply in the area exceeds the demand. The excess kelp, which farmers harvest to prevent the release of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that the seaweed removed from the water, can be composted or used for fertilizer, explained Gobler.

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This map shows of the status of marine protected areas in the United States. Credit: Sullivan-Stack et al., Frontiers in Marine Science 2022

By Daniel Dunaief

Time is not on our side.

That’s one of the messages, among others, from a recent paper in Frontiers in Marine Conservation that explored Marine Protected Areas around the United States.

In a study involving scientists at universities across the country, the researchers concluded that the current uneven distribution of MPAs do not offer sufficient protection for marine environments.

Left, Ellen Pikitch holds gooseneck barnacles in The Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, an MPA in Washington State.

 

“The mainland of the United States is not well protected” with no region reaching the 10 percent target for 2020, said Ellen Pikitch, Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Sciences at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University and a co-author on the study. “The mid-Atlantic is one of the worst of the worst in that regard. We’re not well positioned and we have no time to waste.”

Indeed, the United States, through the administration of President Joe Biden (D), has committed to protecting 30 percent of the oceans by 2030. At this point, 26 percent of the oceans are in at least one kind of MPA. That, however, doesn’t reflect the uneven distribution of marine protection, Pikitch and the other authors suggested.

As much as 96 percent of the protection is in the Central Pacific Ocean, Pikitch explained. That compares with 1.9 percent of the mainland United States and 0.3 percent of the mid-Atlantic.

“We are denying the benefits of ocean protection to a huge portion of the U.S. population,” Pikitch said. “This needs to change if we want the full spectrum of marine life in U.S. ocean waters and to obtain the many benefits to human well-being that this would provide.”

The researchers in the study used a new science-based framework called “The MPA Guide,” which Pikitch helped create. This study represents the first application of this guide to the quantity and quality of marine protection around the United States.

The Guide, which was published in September in the journal Science, rates areas as fully, highly, lightly or minimally protected and is designed to bridge the gap between scientific research and government policies.

Jenna Sullivan-Stack, a research associate at Oregon State University and lead author on the paper, credits Pikitch with helping to create the guide.

Pikitch made “key contributions to this work, especially putting it in context relative to international work and also thinking about how it can be useful on a regional scale for the mid-Atlantic,” Sullivan-Stack explained in an email.

“These findings highlight an urgent need to improve the quality, quantity and representativeness of MPA protection across U.S. waters to bring benefits to human and marine communities,” Sullivan-Stack said in a statement.

Pikitch said MPAs enhance resilience to climate change, providing buffers along shorelines. Seagrasses, which Long Island has in its estuaries, are one of the “most powerful carbon sequesters” on the planet, she explained.

Pikitch suggested there was abundant evidence of the benefits of MPAs. This includes having fish that live longer, grow to a larger size and reproduce more. Some published, peer-reviewed papers also indicate the benefit for nearby waterways.

“I have seen the spillover effect in several MPAs I have studied,” Pikitch said.

To be sure, these benefits may not accrue in nearby waters. That depends on factors including if the area where fishing is allowed is downstream of the protected area and on the dispersal properties of the fished organism, among other things, Pikitch explained.

Lauren Wenzel, Director of NOAA’s Marine Protected Areas Center, said the government recognizes that the ocean is changing rapidly due to climate change and that MPAs are affected by warmer and more acidic water, intense storms and other impacts.

“We are now working to ensure that existing and new MPAs can help buffer climate impacts by protecting habitats that store carbon and by providing effective protection to areas important for climate resilience,” Wenzel said.

The researchers made several recommendations in the paper. They urged the creation of more, and more effective, MPAs, urging a reevaluation of areas with weak protection and an active management of these regions to generate desired results.

They also suggested establishment of new, networked MPAS with better representation of biodiversity, regions and habitats. The researchers urged policy makers to track areas that provide conservation benefits, such as military closed regions.

The paper calls for the reinstatement and empowerment of the MPA Federal Advisory Committee, which was canceled in 2019.

While the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has no plans to reinstate this committee, is it “considering ways to expand the dialogue and seek advice from outside the government on area-based management,” Wenzel said.

The paper also urges the country to revisit and update the National Ocean Policy and National Ocean Policy Committee, which were repealed in 2018 before plans were implemented.

Wenzel said that the United States recently joined the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, a multi-national effort to ensure the country commits to developing a national plan within five years to manage the ocean under national jurisdiction sustainably.

In terms of enforcing MPAs, the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries supports enforcement that fosters voluntary compliance through educating sanctuary users and promoting a sense of stewardship toward the living and cultural resources of the sanctuary, Wenzel added.

“The sanctuary system’s goal is to provide a law enforcement presence in order to deter and detect violations,” she said.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries works with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of the Interior.

In terms of the impact of the paper, Pikitch said she hopes the paper affects policies and ignites change.

“We need to ramp up the amount and quality of protection in U.S. ocean waters, particularly adjacent to the mainland U.S. and the mid-Atlantic region,” she said.

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