One natural substance scientists have looked to in creating synthetic materials is nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl. An exceptionally tough, stiff material produced by some mollusks and serving as their inner shell layer, it also comprises the outer layer of pearls, giving them their lustrous shine.

Most methods used to produce artificial nacre are complex and energy intensive.

Now, however, a University biologist has invented an inexpensive and environmentally friendly method for making artificial nacre using an innovative component: bacteria. The artificial nacre created by Anne S. Meyer, an associate professor of biology, and her colleagues is made of biologically produced materials and has the toughness of natural nacre, while also being stiff and, surprisingly, bendable.

The method used to create the novel material could lead to new applications in medicine, engineering—and even constructing buildings on the moon.

The impressive mechanical properties of natural nacre arise from its hierarchical, layered structure, which allows energy to disperse evenly across the material. In a paper published in the journal Small, Meyer and her colleagues outline their method of using two strains of bacteria to replicate these layers. When they examined the samples under an electron microscope, the structure created by the bacteria was layered similarly to nacre produced naturally by mollusks.

Although nacre-inspired materials have been created synthetically before, the methods used to make them typically involve expensive equipment, extreme temperatures, high-pressure conditions, and toxic chemicals, Meyer says. To produce nacre in Meyer’s lab, however, all researchers have to do is grow bacteria and let it sit in a warm place.

In order to make the artificial nacre, Meyer and her team create alternating thin layers of crystalized calcium carbonate—like cement—and sticky polymer. They first take a glass or plastic slide and place it in a beaker containing the bacteria Sporosarcina pasteurii, a calcium source, and urea (in the human body, urea is the waste product excreted by the kidneys during urination). This combination triggers the crystallization of calcium carbonate. To make the polymer layer, they place the slide into a solution of the bacteria Bacillus licheniformis, then let the beaker sit in an incubator.

One of the most beneficial characteristics of the nacre produced in Meyer’s lab is that it is biocompatible—made of materials the human body produces or that humans can eat naturally anyway. This makes the nacre ideal for medical applications like artificial bones and implants, Meyer says. “If you break your arm, for example, you might put in a metal pin that has to be removed with a second surgery after your bone heals. A pin made out of our material would be stiff and tough, but you wouldn’t have to remove it.”

And, while the material is tougher and stiffer than most plastics, it is very lightweight, a quality that is especially valuable for transportation vehicles like airplanes, boats, or rockets, where every extra pound means extra fuel. Because the production of bacterial nacre doesn’t require any complex instruments, and the nacre coating protects against chemical degradation and weathering, it holds promise for civil engineering applications like crack prevention, protective coatings for erosion control, or for conservation of cultural artifacts, and could be useful in the food industry, as a sustainable packaging material.

The nacre might also be an ideal material to build houses on the moon and other planets: the only necessary “ingredients” would be an astronaut and a small tube of bacteria, Meyer says. “The moon has a large amount of calcium in the moon dust, so the calcium’s already there. The astronaut brings the bacteria, and the astronaut makes the urea, which is the only other thing you need to start making calcium carbonate layers.”

Read more here.

From left to right, Furth Fund award recipients Martina Anto-Ocrah, Mauricio Ibanez-Mejia, and Jinjiao Wang.

Three early career faculty members have received University funding to help them pursue promising lines of research.

As a result:

• Mauricio Ibanez-Mejia, assistant professor of earth and environmental services, will hire a postdoc to keep his lab at the cutting edge of studies that could revolutionize the geochemical study of Earth’s evolution.
• Martina Anto-Ocrah, assistant professor of emergency medicine and obstetrics and gynecology, will be able to provide incentives for study participants to evaluate the challenges facing Global Emergency Medicine in under-resourced settings.
• Jinjiao Wang, assistant professor of nursing, will continue pilot studies of a personalized intervention to improve care for homebound geriatric patients who have heart failure and have been recently hospitalized.

The Furth Fund was established through the generosity of Valerie and Frank Furth.  The awards provide promising scientists with $12,500 to promote their research activities, which may include the purchase of new equipment or support for graduate students or postdocs.

For example, Ibanez-Mejia and his lab are pioneering new ways to accurately measure stable isotopes of two transition metals – zirconium and hafnium – at high-resolution, which could provide fundamental insights into the geochemical evolution of the Earth and other planetary bodies.

“Professor Ibanez-Mejia is ahead of other worldwide efforts, but it is a highly competitive field,” says John Tarduno, Kenan Professor of Geophysics and chair of earth and environmental sciences. The Furth award, combined with other funding, “will greatly increase the chances that a top (postdoctoral) candidate will be secured.”

Anto-Ocrah is working with collaborators at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, the Women and Children Health Advocacy Group (WaCHAG), and representatives of the Ghana Health Ministry to explore ways to allocate emergency medicine resources in the West African country of Ghana.

“Martina’s unique interests in Global Emergency Medicine, particularly in under-resourced settings, coupled with her passion and dedication to research, make her an exceptional addition to our faculty,” says Michael Kamali, chair of emergency medicine.

Wang is developing a personalized intervention to help make sure homebound geriatric patients take their medications and adhere to other treatments after hospitalization – specifically patients who suffer from heart failure in combination with depression, physical frailty or cognitive impairment. Heart failure causes the most hospitalizations in older Americans, yet patients who are homebound have limited access to facility-based care, which often leads to readmissions and even early mortality. The Furth award will help fund a pilot study.

“Dr. Wang has established herself as an extraordinary scientist who has made and is making critical research breakthroughs of enormous significance at such an early stage of her career for our nation’s health care for the increasing number of older adults,” says Kathy Rideout, University vice president and dean of the School of Nursing.

Jayne C. Lammers, associate professor in teaching and curriculum at the Warner School, is the recipient of a prestigious Fulbright Scholar award for 2019-20. Drawing on her expertise with literacies research and qualitative methods, Lammers will conduct research on the digital literacy practices of adolescents in Indonesia starting in the fall.

The Fulbright award will take Lammers to State University of Semarang/Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES) for five months to explore students’ interest-driven digital literacies and online practices. She will use her research findings to help inform Indonesian teachers and teacher educators about the technology use of their students.

Lammers will travel to Indonesia in August to begin her research, which will include a qualitative study among students from three public middle schools and four public high schools located near UNNES. As part of her Fulbright research experience, Lammers will continue an ongoing collaboration she has developed with Warner alumna Puji Astuti ‘16W (PhD), an Indonesian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) researcher and faculty member at UNNES. Together, they will collect data through surveys, interviews, and youth-directed guided tours of the online spaces they frequent to understand students’ digital literacy practices in their everyday lives.

Most of the research to understand digital literacy, Lammers says, has been derived from studies conducted in Western countries, such as the United States, Europe, and Australia. She hopes her work in Indonesia will help to expand knowledge with participation from a broader range of cultural contexts.

“My goal is to take what we learn about Indonesian youth’s use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to help teachers and teacher educators make classroom-based literacy instruction more relevant to young people in Indonesia,” says Lammers. “I believe with the opportunity to bring Indonesian perspectives into the Western scholarly conversation and understanding of digital literacies, we will honor the way that Indonesian’s youth engage in our connected global community.”

While in Indonesia, Lammers will also organize and offer academic writing workshops and mentorships at the host institution to help create a more collaborative, supportive editorial environment for faculty in the English department. She will adapt a model of writing camps, an informal gathering of scholars to work on professional writing projects, that she has helped to create and facilitate in Rochester. She will also be giving lectures at local universities and will deliver the keynote address at the 8th UNNES International Conference on English Language Teaching, Literature, and Translation.

Read more here.

Stewart Weaver, a professor of history, has been selected as a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow to continue his work on “Climate Witness: Voices from Ladakh”—an effort to preserve the rich culture and history of the locale and its people before it’s too late.

The Carnegie Fellowship, among the most prestigious awards in the social sciences and humanities, provides up to $200,000 to support research toward “the publication of a book or major study that offers a fresh perspective on a pressing challenge of our time,” according to the Carnegie Corporation’s website. Weaver’s was one of 32 successful nominations out of nearly 300.

Mountain environments are particularly susceptible to climate change, placing Ladakh—a mountain region in the far north of India—on the front lines of global warming. In 2010, a violent cloudburst dumped 14 inches of rain on Ladakh, which normally gets just three inches of rain in a year. In the principal town of Leh 255 people were killed, over 800 were injured, and thousands left homeless. Five years later, flooding recurred on a wider scale, destroying buildings, roads, fields, and orchards all over Ladakh and provoking a wide-ranging discussion among locals about changing weather patterns and the causes of climate catastrophe.

“Looking closely at Ladakh,” Weaver says, “allows us to draw larger conclusions about the challenges of climate change at high altitude, and the ways in which mountain communities are both struggling with and successfully adapting to them.”

An ongoing research collaboration between the University of Rochester, the Himalayan Cultural Heritage Foundation, and the Central Institute for Buddhist Studies in Leh, the Climate Witness project has taken several Rochester students to the region, along with Weaver and his wife and project partner Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, an associate professor of history and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Rochester, and anthropologist Nancy Chin, an associate professor of public health sciences who has been conducting field research in Ladakh for many years. Over the course of two summers, the team has collected and recorded a wide array of Ladakhi testimonies about the struggle and resilience in this high trans-Himalayan land.

Their challenges are urgent. As Weaver writes, “The Himalaya is the Water Tower of Asia. The snow fields and glaciers on which 700 million people depend for their water are melting fast and calling the sustainability of life in the entire Himalayan watershed into very real question. Out-migration is imminent, and in Ladakh it has begun.”

Read more here.

The 8^th Annual Lecture on Biomedical and Health Science Ethics will be given by Daniel E. Acuna, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. 

Attendance at the lecture, from 2-3 p.m. Friday, May 10 in the Class of ’62 Auditorium (G-9425), is mandatory for Medical Center graduate students and postdoctoral appointees.

Acuna’s lecture is entitled: “How to Catch a Scientific Figure Falsifier: Analysis and statistical reporting of potential figure element reuse and splicing across millions of images.” This special lecture is part of ongoing instruction in responsible conduct of research (RCR) required of grad students and postdocs by the National Institutes of Health.

As part of ongoing efforts to satisfy this requirement, the University of Rochester sponsors periodic RCR lectures and workshops. In addition to completing the Ethics and Professional Integrity in Research Course (IND501/506), all graduate students and postdoctoral appointees are expected to participate in these lectures and workshops.

Refreshments will be available in Flaum Atrium following the lecture.

A request for applications, sponsored by the Medical Center and Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, will support new and innovative mentored pilot research relevant to the regulation of tobacco products by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). One goal of the pilot grants program is to foster careers in tobacco regulatory science-relevant research.

Projects will be required to identify a clear tobacco regulatory science goal aligned with one or more FDA CTP priorities. Priority areas are: toxicity, addiction, health effects, behavior, communications, marketing influences and impact analysis related to tobacco products and electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). Read the full RFA.

Submit applications by 5 p.m. Friday, May 31. Contact Scott Steele or Deborah Ossip  with questions.

Valeriia Sherina, statistics, “Statistical Methods for qPCR Data Near the Limit of Detection.”  11 a.m. May 10, 2019.  Helen Wood Hall | 1W-509. Advisor: Matthew McCall.

Nicolas Riquelme Carrasco, economics, “Essays on Mechanism Design and Multiple Privately Informed Principals.” 10 a.m. May 10, 2019. Harkness 113. Advisor: Paulo Barelli.

Emily Wu, microbiology & immunology, “Uncovering the Role of TNF-alpha in the Genesis of Inflammatory Interstitial Lung Disease in the TNF-Transgenic Mouse Model of Rheumatoid Arthritis.”  1 p.m. May 17, 2019. Ryan Case Method Room 1-9576 (Medical Center). Advisor: Edward Schwarz.

Today: Applications due for high-risk, high-reward pilot projects offered through the Lung Biology and Disease program. All faculty are eligible to apply, including research and tenure-track faculty.

May 10: “How to Catch a Scientific Figure Falsifier: Analysis and statistical reporting of potential figure element reuse and splicing across millions of images.” 8^th Annual Lecture on Biomedical and Health Science Ethics by Daniel E. Acuna, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Mandatory for Medical Center graduate students and postdoctoral appointees. 2-3 p.m. Class of ’62 Auditorium (G-9425). Refreshments will be available in Flaum Atrium following the lecture.

May 15: Deadline to apply for funding from the UR CTSI Center for Leading Innovation and Collaboration (CLIC) to write a Synergy Paper focusing on a new approach to translational science or a review of a pressing translational science topic. All application requirements are on the CLIC website.

May 23: The Rochester Advanced Materials Science Program (RAMP) Symposium, on the topic of “Biologically Engineered Materials.” 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Goergen Hall Sloan Auditorium. Featuring five keynote speakers, a poster session, and lightning talks.  Register for a poster presentation and lightning talks by e-mailing Gina Eagan. 

May 23: Deadline to apply for funding from the Center for Emerging and Innovative Sciences (CEIS) to support projects with NY companies that promote technology transfer to those companies. All proposals must be submitted by email as attachments using the forms on the CEIS web site at http://www.ceis.rochester.edu/funding/CIRP.html. Documentation of company commitment must accompany the proposal. Proposals must be received by Cathy Adams (cathy.adams@rochester.edu, 585-275-3999). Questions may be addressed to her as well.

May 31: 5 p.m. deadline to submit applications, sponsored the Medical Center and Roswell Park for pilot funding for research relevant to the regulation of tobacco products. Read the full RFA. Contact Scott Steele or Deborah Ossip with questions.

June 1: Un-meeting to foster new collaborations and ideas and explore innovative approaches to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning at all stages of the translational science spectrum. Hosted by the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI). 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saunders Research Building. Register by Monday, May 13.