In Review: Research Roundup

Searching for Life in All the Wrong Places?

Scientists have detected thousands of exoplanets and possible exomoons but have yet to definitively spot a moon orbiting a planet outside the solar system.

Why does it matter? Earth’s moon, by stabilizing the planet’s spin axis and controlling the length of the day and ocean tides, plays a critical role in the biological cycles of Earth’s life-forms.

Perhaps an orbiting moon is a beneficial precondition for life elsewhere in the universe?

While most planets in the solar system have moons, Earth’s moon is distinct in that it is larger than a quarter of Earth’s radius.

Miki Nakajima, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, and colleagues from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona ran computer simulations of moon formations using hypothetical Earth-like, rocky planets and icy planets of varying masses.

The results, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest some important parameters for researchers seeking life beyond the solar system.

“The exoplanet search has typically been focused on planets larger than six Earth masses,” Nakajima says. But simu“lations showed rocky planets larger than six times the mass of Earth and icy planets with a mass greater than Earth’s fail to produce the conditions for the formation of a sizable moon.

Thus, in the search for life outside the solar system, Nakajima suggests researchers turn their gaze to smaller planets. Those are “better candidates to host fractionally large moons,” she says.

—Lindsey Valich

Homing in on a Shared Network of Cancer Genes

Discrete genetic mutations have been implicated in a small fraction of cancer types. But those mutations rely on a downstream network of non-mutated genes to actually cause cancer.

In a new study, Medical Center researchers report progress in targeting non-mutated genes—and their intricate interactions—that are essential to making cells cancerous.

Hartmut (Hucky) Land, deputy director of the Wilmot Cancer Institute and the Robert and Dorothy Markin Professor of Biomedical Genetics; Helene McMurray, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; and Matthew McCall, a Wilmot Cancer Institute investigator and an associate professor of biostatistics and computational biology, have previously identified a diverse set of non-mutated genes that are crucial to cancer. To see how those genes interact, McCall developed a new network modeling method called TopNet.

The number of possible gene network models considered by TopNet was many times greater than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.

After weeding out models that didn’t closely fit the observed data and further focusing on gene interactions that appeared in at least 80 percent of the models, the team was left with a manageable set of 24 high-confidence gene interactions. Subsequent experiments demonstrated that the interactions often play an important role in malignancy.

“Dr. McCall’s elegant and mind-boggling methodology is essentially helping us disentangle a hairball of genetic networks,” says Land. The team’s ultimate goal is to find broadly effective cancer therapies.

—Susanne Pallo ’15M (PhD)

Democracy’s Logic of Deterrence

If political observers accept the premise that politicians and political parties generally want to stay in power, then why would they ever forgo dirty tricks to win elections?

According to a team of political scientists, the answer boils down to a fear of revenge. But, they warn, the conditions that have secured that fear may be eroding.

In a paper in the American Journal of Political Science, Rochester political scientists Gretchen Helmke and Jack Paine, along with their former colleague Mary Kroeger, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, report that informal norms of mutual restraint and formal constitutional rules are intertwined into a “logic of deterrence.”

But if legal bounds become sufficiently asymmetric, they argue, the foundations for restraint crumble. Asymmetries emerge when some groups are more vulnerable than others to legally permissible electoral distortions and when groups that are more vulnerable vote overwhelmingly for one party over the other.

“Gerrymandering and vote suppression are two key areas of contemporary American electoral politics that really threaten our fundamental principles of democratic representation,” says Paine, an associate professor of political science whose research focuses on authoritarian politics. “Another troubling development,” he adds, “is that these asymmetries are now affecting another sacred democratic principle—conceding electoral loss.”

—Sandra Knispel

Leadership Turnover and Struggling Schools

When it comes to K–12 education, there’s a lot of evidence-based research designed to improve student outcomes. But for a variety of reasons, much of that research may not make it into the hands of the teachers and school leaders who might put it into practice.

Kara Finnigan, a professor at the Warner School of Education, and her coauthor at the University of California, San Diego, set out to identify conditions that facilitate or hinder the diffusion of research among individuals across schools and school systems.

Using longitudinal social network, survey, and interview data, they identified “brokers”—in practice, often area superintendents—who acted as the most important source for connecting people in the network around research ideas, and as bridges between principals and central office instructional leaders.

In a chapter in Networks, Knowledge Brokers, and the Public Policymaking Process (Palgrave McMillan, 2021), Finnigan and her coauthor, Alan Daly, demonstrate that turnover among area superintendents hinders the use of research evidence across a district and has the greatest negative impact on principals from lower-performing schools who become disconnected from research ideas due to the instability of the leadership structure.

“This, in turn, has the potential to have a ripple effect, impacting outcomes for youth, particularly in low-performing schools and school systems that are already in turmoil,” says Finnigan.

Christina Leal, a PhD candidate at the Warner School, also contributed to the research.

—Theresa Danylak