Category Archives: Biology

Biology

Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to … – The New York Times

There is no free will, according to Robert Sapolsky, a biologist and neurologist at Stanford University and a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Dr. Sapolsky worked for decades as a field primatologist before turning to neuroscience, and he has spent his career investigating behavior across the animal kingdom and writing about it in books including Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst and Monkeyluv, and Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals.

In his latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refutes the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.

Its a provocative claim, he concedes, but he would be content if readers simply began to question the belief, which is embedded in our cultural conversation. Getting rid of free will completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy and where we get meaning from, Dr. Sapolsky said, and this makes the idea particularly hard to shake.

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as liberating for most people, for whom life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.

He spoke in a series of interviews about the challenges that free will presents and how he stays motivated without it. These conversations were edited and condensed for clarity.

To most people, free will means being in charge of our actions. Whats wrong with that outlook?

Its a completely useless definition. When most people think theyre discerning free will, what they mean is somebody intended to do what they did: Something has just happened; somebody pulled the trigger. They understood the consequences and knew that alternative behaviors were available.

But that doesnt remotely begin to touch it, because youve got to ask: Where did that intent come from? Thats what happened a minute before, in the years before, and everything in between.

For that sort of free will to exist, it would have to function on a biological level completely independently of the history of that organism. You would be able to identify the neurons that caused a particular behavior, and it wouldnt matter what any other neuron in the brain was doing, what the environment was, what the persons hormone levels were, what culture they were brought up in. Show me that those neurons would do the exact same thing with all these other things changed, and youve proven free will to me.

So, whether I wore a red or blue shirt today are you saying I didnt really choose that?

Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if youre sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of that has to do with genetics: Whats the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning did they have to particular smells? All of that affects the outcome.

What about something bigger, like choosing where to go to college?

You ask, Why did you pick this one? And the person says, Ive learned that I do better in smaller classes. Or, They have an amazing party scene. At any meaningful juncture, were making decisions based on our tastes and predilections and values and character. And you have to ask: Where did they come from?

Neuroscience is getting really good at two levels of stuff. One is understanding what a particular part of the brain does, based on techniques like neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The other is at the level of tiny, reductive stuff: This variant of this gene interacts with this enzyme differently. So, we kind of understand what happens in one neuron. But how do 30 billion of them collectively make this a human cortex instead of a primate cortex? How do you scale up from understanding little component parts and getting some sense of the big, emergent thing?

Say we figured that out. Have X happen 4,000 times per second in Y part of the brain, countered as an opposing, inhibitory thing 2,123 times a second when the hormone levels are doing such-and-such. How does this big thing called a behavior or a personality or a thought or a mistake pop out at the macro level? Were beginning to understand how you get from one level to the other, but its unbelievably difficult.

If were not responsible for our actions, can we take ownership of them?

Well, we can take ownership in a purely mechanical sense. My molecules knocked into the molecules making up that vase of flowers and knocked it over and broke it thats true. And we can keep ourselves going with myths of agency when it really doesnt make a difference. If you want to believe that you freely chose to floss your upper teeth before your bottom teeth today, thats a benign myth to operate with.

But youre saying that the myth isnt always benign?

Fundamentally injurious things about our universe run on the notion that people get stuff that they didnt earn or they didnt deserve, and a huge amount of humanitys misery is due to myths of free will.

Most of the time, I get by without having to pay any attention whatsoever to how I think things work. Recognize how hard it is to do otherwise. Save that recognition for when it matters: when youre on a jury; when youre a schoolteacher, assessing students. If you have myths about free will, keep it to how youre flossing your teeth.

I want to wean people off the knee-jerk reaction to the notion that without free will, we will run amok because we cant be held responsible for things. That we have no societal mechanisms for having dangerous people not be dangerous, or for having gifted people do the things society needs to function. Its not the case that in a deterministic world, nothing can change.

How should privileged people think about their accomplishments?

Every living organism is just a biological machine. But were the only ones that know that were biological machines; we are trying to make sense of the fact that we feel as if our feelings are real.

At some point, it doesnt make a difference whether your feelings are real or whether your feeling of feelings being real is the case. We still find things aversive enough as biological machines that its useful to call stuff like that pain or sadness or unhappiness. And even though its completely absurd to think that something good can happen to a machine, its good when the feeling of feeling pain is lessened.

Thats a level on which we have to function. Meaning feels real. Purpose feels real. Every now and then, our knowledge of the machine-ness should not get in the way of the fact that this is a weird machine that feels as if feelings are real.

Do we lose love, too, if we lose free will?

Yeah. Like: Wow! Why? Why did this person turn out to love me? Where did that come from? And how much of that has to do with how my parents raised me, or what sort of olfactory receptor genes I have in my nose and how much I like their scent? At some point you get to that existential crisis of, Oh God, thats whats underlying all this stuff! Thats where the machine-ness becomes something we should be willing to ignore.

But its not OK for you to decide, with the same denial of reality, that you truly deserve a better salary than the average human on this planet.

Do it for where its needed. I sure cant do it more than a tiny percent of the time. Like once every three and a half weeks or so. Its a confusing, recursive challenge to watch yourself watching yourself, and to decide that what youre feeling feels real.

Read more:

Robert Sapolsky Doesn't Believe in Free Will. (But Feel Free to ... - The New York Times

Biology

Natural Selection Surprises: Evolutionary Lessons From the Wild Lizards of Florida – SciTechDaily

New research provides fresh insights into evolutionary stasis by studying the survival patterns of lizards in their natural habitat. Contrary to traditional beliefs, the study found that natural selection, which maintains an average species feature, was infrequent. Instead, it revealed that traits advantageous for survival varied from year to year, yet overall, species appearance remained largely unchanged over time.

Long-term lizard observation challenges the conventional understanding of natural selection, suggesting species can remain consistent in appearance while still undergoing evolution.

Many species experience little to no change over long periods of time. Biologists often fall back on the same explanation for why this is true: that natural selection favors individuals with more moderate characteristics. Individuals with more extreme features longer limbs, for example have a disadvantage, while more moderate or average individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on their common features.

However, new research from Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology provides a more complete explanation of how evolution plays out among species that live side-by-side. By directly measuring the long-term survival of lizards in the wild, the scientists showed that co-existing species each occupy a distinct fitness peak that is best understood as part of a communitywide fitness surface or landscape.

The study, led by James Stroud at Georgia Tech and published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a new way of thinking about how species relate to each other over time and how the differences between them reinforce their distinctness.

Taking high-resolution photographs of lizard feet to measure the size of adhesive sub-digital toepads. Credit: Days Edge Prod

Jonathan Losos, the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor and a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, said: If species are adapted to their environment, and the environment doesnt change, then you wouldnt expect the species to change. However, when scientists have gone out and studied natural selection, they rarely find evidence of such stabilizing selection.

Given this disconnect, we set out to study natural selection on the organisms we know so well,Anolislizards, to measure selection over several years and try to understand whats going on, Losos said.

Stroud, who was working as a postdoctoral researcher in Losos lab at WashU at the time, identified a place where four different species of anoles were living together on a small island in a lake in theFairchild Tropical Botanical Gardennear Miami.

He caught thousands of individual lizards on the island, tagged them, and measured their body proportions. Stroud then re-caught all of the lizards on the island every six months for 2 years, a period of time representing two to three generations of lizards.

James Stroud uses a tiny lasso attached to a fishing pole to catch a lizard. Credit: Days Edge Prods

New lizards that showed up were island babies, obviously. If a lizard disappeared from his census rolls, it was safe for Stroud to assume it had died, because the surrounding lake, filled with predatory fish, didnt let them leave. By determining which lizards survived from one year to the next, the researchers could evaluate whether survival was related to the body traits they had been measuring, like leg length.

What is special about this study is that we simultaneously measured natural selection on four co-existing species, something that has rarely been accomplished, said Losos, who also serves as the director of theLiving Earth Collaborative. By coincidence, just as our paper was published, another group published a similar study on Darwins famous finches of the Galapagos Islands.

In the Florida lizards, Losos and Stroud found that the stabilizing form of natural selection that which maintains a species same, average features was extremely rare. In fact, natural selection varied massively through time. In some years, lizards with longer legs would survive better, and in other years, lizards with shorter legs fared better. At other times, there was no clear pattern at all.

The most fascinating result is that natural selection was extremely variable through time, Stroud said. We often saw that selection would completely flip in direction from one year to the next. When combined into a long-term pattern, however, all this variation effectively canceled itself out: species remained remarkably similar across the entire time period.

Scientists do not yet fully understand how evolution works on the community level. There are very few long-term studies like this one because of the great amount of work and time required.

Evolution can and does happen its this ongoing process, but it doesnt necessarily mean things are constantly changing in the long run, Stroud said. Now we know that even if animals appear to be staying the same, evolution is still happening.

For more on this research, see Paradox of Stasis Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology.

Reference: Fluctuating selection maintains distinct species phenotypes in an ecological community in the wild by James T. Stroud, Michael P. Moore, R. Brian Langerhans and Jonathan B. Losos, 9 October 2023,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2222071120

See more here:

Natural Selection Surprises: Evolutionary Lessons From the Wild Lizards of Florida - SciTechDaily

Biology

NASA ROSES-23 Amendment 54: E.9-E.11 Space Biology … – Astrobiology News

View of tomatoes growing in the eXposed Root On-Orbit Test System (XROOTS) facility. NASA ID: iss068e018681 iss068e018681 (Oct. 25, 2022) larger image

The Space Biology Program solicits and funds research that will increase NASAs understanding of how living systems respond to the unique environments that are encountered during space exploration, including the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment inside the International Space Station (ISS) and deep space conditions beyond LEO, including transit to and maintenance in Lunar and Martian environments.

More information about the Space Biology Program can be found at: https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physical/programs/space-biology.

ROSES-2023 Amendment 54 Announces that:

1) E.9 Space Biology: Plant Studies and E.10 Space Biology: Animal Studies are being deferred to ROSES-2024, to be released February 14, 2024. 2) E.11 Research Pathfinder for Beyond Low Earth Orbit Space Biology Investigations will not be solicited in ROSES-2023, nor does NASA anticipate soliciting it in ROSES-2024.

On or about October 12, 2023, this Amendment to the NASA Research Announcement Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) 2023 (NNH23ZDA001N) will be posted on the NASA research opportunity homepage at https://solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2023 and will appear on SARAs ROSES blog at: https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/grant-solicitations/roses-2023/

Questions concerning any of these space biology programs may be directed to Sharmila Bhattacharya at spacebiology@nasaprs.com.

Astrobiology

Excerpt from:

NASA ROSES-23 Amendment 54: E.9-E.11 Space Biology ... - Astrobiology News

Biology

Hybrid Transistors with Silk Protein Set the Stage for Integration of … – Tufts Now

Your phone may have more than 15 billion tiny transistors packed into its microprocessor chips. The transistors are made of silicon, metals like gold and copper, and insulators that together take an electric current and convert it to 1s and 0s to communicate information and store it. The transistor materials are inorganic, basically derived from rock and metal.

But what if you could make these fundamental electronic components part biological, able to respond directly to the environment and change like living tissue?

This is what a team at Tufts University Silklab did when they created transistors replacing the insulating material with biological silk. They reported their findings in Advanced Materials.

Silk fibrointhe structural protein of silk fiberscan be precisely deposited onto surfaces and easily modified with other chemical and biological molecules to change its properties. Silk functionalized in this manner can pick up and detect a wide range of components from the body or environment.

The teams first demonstration of a prototype device used the hybrid transistors with silk fibroin to make a highly sensitive and ultrafast breath sensor, detecting changes in humidity. Further modifications of the silk layer in the transistors could enable devices to detect some cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, as well as sleep apnea, or pick up carbon dioxide levels and other gases and molecules in the breath that might provide diagnostic information. Used with blood plasma, they could potentially provide information on levels of oxygenation and glucose, circulating antibodies, and more.

Prior to the development of the hybrid transistors, the Silklab, led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, the Frank C. Doble Professor of engineering, had already used fibroin to make bioactive inks for fabrics that can detect changes in the environment or on the body, sensing tattoos that can be placed under the skin or on the teeth to monitor health and diet, and sensors that can be printed on any surface to detect pathogens like the virus responsible for COVID-19.

A transistor is simply an electrical switch, with a metal electrical lead coming in and another going out. In between the leads is the semiconductor material, so-called because its not able to conduct electricity unless coaxed.

Another source of electrical input called a gate is separated from everything else by an insulator. The gate acts as the key to turn the transistor on and off. It triggers the on-state when a threshold voltage creates an electric field across the insulator, priming electron movement in the semiconductor and starting the flow of current through the leads.

In a biological hybrid transistor, a silk layer is used as the insulator, and when it absorbs moisture, it acts like a gel carrying whatever ions (electrically charged molecules) are contained within. The gate triggers the on-state by rearranging ions in the silk gel. By changing the ionic composition in the silk, the transistor operation changes, allowing it to be triggered by any gate value between zero and one.

You could imagine creating circuits that make use of information that is not represented by the discrete binary levels used in digital computing, but can process variable information as in analog computing, with the variation caused by changing whats inside the silk insulator, said Omenetto. This opens up the possibility of introducing biology into computing within modern microprocessors. Of course, the most powerful known biological computer is the brain, which processes information with variable levels of chemical and electrical signals.

The technical challenge in creating hybrid biological transistors was to achieve silk processing at the nanoscale, down to 10nm or less than 1/10,000th the diameter of a human hair. Having achieved that, we can now make hybrid transistors with the same fabrication processes that are used for commercial chip manufacturing, said Beom Joon Kim, postdoctoral researcher at the School of Engineering. This means you can make a billion of these with capabilities available today.

Having billions of transistor nodes with connections reconfigured by biological processes in the silk could lead to microprocessors that could act like the neural networks used in AI. Looking ahead, one could imagine having integrated circuits that train themselves, respond to environmental signals, and record memory directly in the transistors rather than sending it to separate storage, said Omenetto.

Devices detecting and responding to more complex biological states, as well as large-scale analog and neuromorphic computing are yet to be created. Omenetto is optimistic about future opportunities. This opens up a new way of thinking about the interface between electronics and biology, with many important fundamental discoveries and applications ahead.

Here is the original post:

Hybrid Transistors with Silk Protein Set the Stage for Integration of ... - Tufts Now

Biology

Long-Term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology – Georgia Tech

Charles Darwin said that evolution was constantly happening, causing animals to adapt for survival. But many of his contemporaries disagreed. If evolution is always causing things to change, they asked, then how is it that two fossils from the same species, found in the same location, can look identical despite being 50 million years apart in age?

Everything changed in the past 40 years, when an explosion of evolutionary studies proved that evolution can and does occur rapidly even from one generation to the next. Evolutionary biologists were thrilled, but the findings reinforced the same paradox: If evolution can happen so fast, then why do most species on Earth continue to appear the same for many millions of years?

This is known as the paradox of stasis, and James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, set out to investigate it. He conducted a long-term study in a community of lizards, measuring how evolution unfolds in the wild across multiple species. In doing so, he may have found the answer to one of evolutions greatest challenges.

His research was published as the cover story in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read the full feature in the GT Research newsroom.

Read the original post:

Long-Term Lizard Study Challenges the Rules of Evolutionary Biology - Georgia Tech

Biology

Space Biology And The Out-Of-This-World Exploration Of Plant Stress – Texas A&M University Today

Texas A&M AgriLife plant scientist Nithya Rajan is studying plant stress levels for future space use in a NASA-funded project.

Sam Craft/Texas A&M AgriLife Marketing & Communications

A Texas A&M AgriLife plant scientist is joining the space race, of a sort, by helping to understand how plants can survive in space to support human space exploration.

As aTexas A&M AgriLife Researchcrop physiologist/agroecologist and professorin theTexas A&M College of Agriculture and Life SciencesDepartment of Soil and Crop Sciences, Dr. Nithya Rajan is used to working with hundreds of acres of plants grown on this planet.

But one of her latest projects will have her tending to the stress levels of individual plants, not in the field, but in the growth chamber, testing sensors for deployment in a spaceflight or lunar or martial habitats.

Rajan is connecting with University of Texas at Tyler assistant professor of electrical engineering Shawana Tabassum, Ph.D., who is leading the NASA-funded project,Leaf Sensor Network for In Situ and Multiparametric Analysis of Crop Stressors.

With all the advancements being made in space travel, Rajan said as a plant scientist, it is exciting to be a part of this project.

If we have to grow plants in a space station, on space flights or on Mars, we need to understand how plants behave in that environment, Rajan said. Resources in space will be very limited because it can take eight months to get to Mars, for example. So, every plant in a space environment will be essential to human explorers. We need to know if a plant is stressed and how to immediately intervene to correct that.

Tabassum is designing unique, one-of-a-kind wireless, multivariable leaf sensors to check hormone levels in plants to detect stress.

This fall, Rajan is taking those sensors and determining how they are picking up the stress levels of plants using short-duration cowpeas as the test crop in growth chamber studies.

We are thinking by attaching these sensors, we can detect plant stress, she said. And then, as a physiologist, I can try to relate that stress with the plant performance. I can see how that stress is impacting photosynthesis, for example.

While unable to replicate all growing conditions in space here on Earth, such as zero gravity, Rajans studies will mimic conditions like temperature and light. She will conduct experiments in a lightweight media as a stand-in for weightlessness.

Just like most space flights, this grant is exploratory in nature. If the two researchers can predict crop performance in spacelike conditions, they hope the next step will be more funding for future experiments, possibly aboard the International Space Station.

We want to see how plants are performing in the growth chamber, and we want to relate that to the sensors and test how the signals relate to plant performance, Rajan said. Hopefully, in the future, we may be able to test these sensors in space. If they are performing well, perhaps we can deploy them in space and utilize them.

See more here:

Space Biology And The Out-Of-This-World Exploration Of Plant Stress - Texas A&M University Today

Biology

Caldwell Welcomes New Faculty Caldwell University – Caldwell University

Caldwell University welcomed several new faculty members this fall semester.

Ellina Chernobilsky, Ph.D., acting vice president for Academic Affairs, said the University is delighted to welcome such accomplished faculty. I believe that the new faculty will contribute to the success of our students not only as classroom faculty but also by being great role models outside of the class.

Maria Agapito, Ph.D. has joined the School of Natural Sciences. She was previously chair of the Biology Program at Bard High School Early College in Newark. At Bard, she was one of 35 science teachers in the country to receive a grant from the Society of Science & the Public to pursue research. Agapito worked in the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Department at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School where she conducted research in developmental biology, neurology and ethanol toxicology, using C. elegans as an animal model system.She served for several years at Kean University as adjunct professor in the School of Natural Sciences.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a minor in chemistry and a Master of Science in Biology with a concentration in molecular biology from Montclair State University. She completed her doctoral training in neuroscience at Rutgers and was accepted to the National Institute of Health IRACDA/INSPIRE postdoctoral program.

Agapito has published peer-reviewed articles in professional journals, presented at national conferences and obtained prestigious fellowships. She is the president of the New Jersey Academy of Science and serves as a convener for the North Jersey Life Sciences Industry Partnership. Her long-term goal is to change the face of America by enhancing curiosity, educating and mentoring students to enter STEM-related fields to create a diverse population of role models for the generations to come.

Daniel Cruz, Ph.D. rejoins the School of Psychology and Counseling, having previously served on the faculty at Caldwell. Cruz is an assessment psychologist and neuroscience researcher, is licensed to practice psychology in New Jersey and is board-certified in counseling psychology with a concentration in psychological and neuropsychological assessment and consultation.

Cruz is past president of the Latino Mental Health Association of New Jersey and an officer of the board of trustees for the New Jersey Neuropsychological Society. He completed an APA-accredited child and adolescent psychology internship at Rutgers University-University Behavioral Health Care and postdoctoral training in outpatient mental health, severe and persistent mental illness, and psychological, educational and neuropsychological testing and intervention. His research focuses on developmental disorders, including developmental trauma, complex PTSD, autism and ADHD. Cruz is the founder of the Neuroscience Institute for Trauma. He holds a Master of Science degree from Rutgers and a Ph.D. from Seton Hall University.

Steven Kreutzer, Ph.D. joins the School of Business and Computer Science, bringing much higher education and corporate business experience.

He previously served at Bloomfield College where he was professor of computer science and chair of the Division of Business. He was active in shared governance as chair of several committees including technology, tenure and advancement and enrollment management. Kreutzer was faculty council chair and faculty chair and served as the faculty representative on the Academic Affairs Board Committee for many years.

Early in his career Kreutzer worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories where he wrote software used by tens of thousands of people and did work advancing the effectiveness of large-scale software development organizations. He performed assessments of large-scale development teams and did technology due diligence for potential acquisition targets. Kreutzer worked as a management consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and at AIG where he held senior management positions and led a team that developed, maintained and supported a large-scale data warehouse. He led an internal management consulting organization, focusing on operations and strategy.

Melissa Sepe, M.A., N. joins the Caldwell School of Nursing and Public Health as an assistant professor, having previously served as an adjunct. Her clinical experience includes critical care, outpatient care and community health for pediatric and adult populations. She brings leadership experience, having served as an adult nurse practitioner responsible for the care of cardiac patients in the office setting, as an advanced practice nurse overseeing clinical operations and education for an emergency department nursing staff and as head nurse at a local private school during the COVID-19 pandemic. While in the Overlook Hospital Emergency Department, Sepe was the nurse leader for the acute myocardial infarction team when the department received the Mission Impossible Award in recognition of outstanding patient care. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Villanova University and a Master of Arts in Nursing from NYU.

Read more here:

Caldwell Welcomes New Faculty Caldwell University - Caldwell University

Biology

How vitamins have shaped human biology and evolution – Advanced Science News

Eat your fruit and vegetables! These foods are packed with essential nutrients, including vitamins, the health benefits of which have been drummed into us since childhood.

We understand that vitamins play a crucial role in preventing disease and maintaining our overall health. But to what extent do they shape our physical characteristics and how have they contributed to our evolution as a species?

Mark Lucock, associate professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia is pushing for a new paradigm of thinking in this area and is revolutionizing the way we might think about vitamins beyond just health and well being.

[Vitamins] contribute to shaping and maintaining the human phenome, the fingerprint of an individuals unique biology defined by complex environmental and genetic factors over lifecycle and evolutionary timescales, Lucock explained in an email.

Spanning a lengthy career, Lucock says the concept of vitomics and adaptive vitome, a term he coined for this concept has evolved over several years, dating back to when he was studying folic acid and vitamin D.

He defines it as follows: Vitamin related actions that adapt an organisms metabolism/biology to a specific environmental condition(s) within, across and beyond the lifecycle.

This is different to the traditional and perhaps more one-dimensional view of vitamins, which focuses on their overall health benefits and ability to prevent deficiencies, such as rickets or scurvy.

According to Lucock, this more traditional view has little appreciation for the long-term evolutionary role vitamins play in adapting our biology to environmental conditions over time and their importance in our prenatal development.

Acknowledging these extended functions aids our understanding of evolution and highlights that vitamins are even more important than already known.

From embryo development to childhood, adulthood and old age, vitamins are central to metabolic function and vital for cellular processes that support life. They not only influence small molecules within cells but help direct the organization of these cells and their programming to perform specific functions during embryo development.

For example, in a complex interplay, environmental conditions as well as nutrients and vitamins, such as folic acid, influence the DNA in our genes, turning them on or off. These early controls can impact our health in later life and even predispose us to risk of disease.

However, balance is key because you can have too much of a good thing with excessive levels of certain vitamins, like vitamin A, being toxic and can lead to birth defects.

Turning genes on and off is an example of the short-term effects of vitamins for individual people, but it is their long-term effects on human evolution that Lucock proposes in this new way of thinking about them. A prime example is the proposed evolutionary role of vitamin D and folate in skin pigmentation.

Both vitamin D and folate are sensitive to sunlight, but in opposite ways. Sunlight helps produce vitamin D in the skin whereas ultraviolet (UV) rays break down folate. Because both these vitamins are needed for reproduction, biological mechanisms have evolved over time to protect them and ensure survival of our species.

Evolutionary belief is that our ancestors originated in hot equatorial regions of Africa with strong sun and UV rays, so pigmentation in the skin increased to protect folate, leading to a darker skin. However, when our ancestors moved north where there was less sun, less pigmentation was needed to protect folate. Simultaneous changes in culture, especially the development of farming, may have also influenced this change.

As hunter gatherers, our early diet was rich in vitamin D (particularly from fish and meat), but after the development of farming practices, grains became a significant dietary component, leading to a deficit in vitamin D , explained Lucock. Given the importance of vitamin D in maintaining reproductive efficiency, natural selection will have favored a loss in skin melanin to allow for improved vitamin D photosynthesis in our skin.

These examples illustrate the contribution of vitamins beyond just health, and begin to paint a bigger picture of their importance to humans as a species.

Recent advances in laboratory techniques have allowed the measurement of thousands of cellular small molecules related to DNA, proteins, and metabolism. To understand these vast and complex interactions within biological systems, scientists are adopting a systems biology approach that looks at the bigger picture by analyzing these interconnected molecules to understand how they fit together and how whole systems work.

With individual roles in cell function, embryo development, and evolution, Lucock argues it is time to put the pieces together, and adopt an integrated approach when researching the role of vitamins in human biology.

Society will benefit from such a paradigm, which examines the larger picture (a tapestry of all the smaller pieces), explained Lucock. Previous generations tended to be reductionists, looking at taking these pieces apart. I think it will be easier for the average person to embrace the bigger picture than consider the minutiae when looking how living systems interact within and across the lifecycle.

We are still learning about the role of vitamins in these areas and this new concept may facilitate new learning.

New discoveries involving vitamins in molecular, developmental and evolutionary biology requires a more integrated perspective that embraces a broader, more attuned role for vitamins in life processes, explains Lucock. It is hoped that adopting this integrated approach will facilitate new scientific discoveries, kick starting a new era for vitamins.

Reference: Lucock, M, D, Vitomics: A novel paradigm for examining the role of vitamins in human biology, Bioassays (2023). DOI: 10.1002/bies.202300127

Feature image credit: Unsplash

View original post here:

How vitamins have shaped human biology and evolution - Advanced Science News