YSM Issue 97.1

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FEATURE Climate Engineering ART BY MOLLY HILL GROWING SMARTER SIMPLE SENSORS HELP CROPS GROW WITH LESS WATER BY BRANDON NGO Consider a scenario where you’re at a doctor’s office battling the flu. Your doctor diligently measures your blood pressure, listens to your lungs with a stethoscope, checks your reflexes, and examines your body temperature. These thorough examinations directly listen to your body and are essential for your doctor to evaluate your health condition. Now, imagine a similar approach to monitoring the health of plants using devices that directly track their health. How could this be possible? Currently, the most common technology in smart agriculture involves sensors that track environmental conditions to determine the health of the plants grown nearby. Researcher Uberto Garlando and professor Danilo Demarchi, both affiliated with the Italian university Politecnico di Torino, and members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Council are taking a more advanced approach to understanding the plants’ needs. “To understand the plant status and be able to detect stresses such as pest infections, we developed devices and electronic systems that are ‘plant-wearable’ that focused on proper status detection [by] simply ‘asking’ the plant [what it needs],” Garlando said. These sensors work by tracking electrical signals within the plant that vary when subjected to different environmental conditions like leaf temperature and water content stress. When the plants “wear” these sensors, the farmers can monitor the health of their plants based on the variance of these electrical signals. “The sensors extract a signaling frequency proportional to the electrical signals of the plants that can give us information about the plants’ health,” Demarchi said. To monitor plants at a lower cost, these sensors extract a signaling frequency that is less accurate than previous renditions of similar sensors. Despite the trade-off between cost and accuracy, the researchers concluded that the frequency they used was still meaningful enough for the farmers to understand the needs of their plants. “The best trade-off is when you can get information out of the minimum cost possible,” Garlando said. “Our final goal is to reduce the cost to a few cents for each device.” Empowered by information about the plants’ health from these cheaper sensors, farmers can avoid the overuse of resources necessary for growing plants. “With this technology, it’s possible to reduce, for example, the use of pesticides or chemicals in agriculture because instead of spreading the pesticide on all the crops, I know where specifically I need to use the pesticide,” Demarchi said. Reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture limits waste, protecting local ecosystems and bodies of water from chemical pollutants. These “plant-wearable” sensors also come at a time of accelerating climate change, with the amount of arable farmland drastically decreasing. Electrical engineers like Garlando and Demarchi have been working on developing low-cost, smart agri-food systems in the past decade to benefit farmers with higher agricultural yields under harsh conditions. Overall, Garlando and Demarchi believe that these “plantwearable” devices will fundamentally change the agricultural industry, making it more environmentally sustainable and efficient in the hopes of increasing global food security. The sensors also pave the way for the popularization of agricultural technology (AgriTech) engineering in universities. The Politecnico di Torino University recently released a new master’s degree program in AgriTech engineering. “The engineering AgriTech culture still has to grow,” Demarchi said. By working with agricultural companies, Demarchi hopes that engineers can bring their ideas to real-world use. He also aspires to motivate more researchers to work on problems faced by the agricultural industry in Italy and beyond. Looking at the future of the AgriTech industry, Garlando, Demarchi, and other engineers are hoping to improve their technology by further decreasing the costs of the sensors while maintaining enough accuracy to determine the needs of the plants. “Of course, we are proud of these sensors so far,” Demarchi said. “However, we are always going to continue to improve our devices and our sensors. We are working toward reducing the device size and power consumption in the future.” For now, we can only wonder whether the fruits and vegetables we have been eating have worn these “plant-wearable” sensors, developed to fight against climate change and enhance food security. ■ 26 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2024 www.yalescientific.org
Biology FEATURE DITCHING OPIOIDS NEW COMPOUND MAY PROVIDE NON-OPIOID PAIN BY MEGAN KERNIS ART BY JIYA MODY www.yalescientific.org According to the CDC, overdoses involving opioids claimed the lives of 80,411 Americans in 2021. Amid this crisis, healthcare professionals increasingly rely on treatment strategies that limit the use of opioids for patients in need of pain relief. The CDC’s current recommendations on opioid use suggest alternative first-line therapies, low-dose prescriptions, and goal-oriented treatments. But to bring an end to opioid abuse without compromising on quality of care, it might be necessary to remove opioids from clinical use altogether. To provide a safe alternative, researchers are scrambling to create non-opioid pain relief medications. A team based out of the University of Texas at Dallas recently published research on a new compound that alleviates nerve pain by changing the way cells send signals to each other. The new compound works by targeting the sigma-2 receptor transmembrane protein 97 (σ 2 R), an endoplasmic reticulumresident protein. σ 2 R is widely expressed in cells in the central nervous system and is known to regulate cholesterol transportation. Additional properties of this protein have remained relatively unknown for a long time. Stephen Martin and Jim Sahn, chemistry professors at UT Dallas, came across ligands that bind to σ 2 R while synthesizing compounds for a study of the receptor conducted by the National Institutes of Health. Further experiments revealed that these ligands reduced pain hypersensitivity in a mouse model. “In the beginning, it was really curiositydriven,” Sahn said. “So [reducing hypersensitivity] was motivating in the early days.” With the prospect of pain relief on the table, Martin and Sahn sought to translate their discovery of these complex ligands (FEM-1689 and DKR) into a simpler form that resulted in the same outcome but was easier to produce. Interestingly, Martin said that the ligands were named after friends and family, including Martin’s wife (FEM- 1689) and a decorated UT Dallas football coach, Daryll K. Royal (DKR). Originally, Martin and Sahn had a fuzzy understanding of how the ligands worked. They knew that the ligands inhibited nerve pain, but they weren’t sure how. To investigate this phenomenon, Martin started talking to his colleagues, seeking out someone who could help them work out an answer. “Through networking […] we traversed the path from Alzheimer’s to traumatic brain injury,” Martin said. “I wanted a risk-taking biologist who would be willing to look at this.” The biologist he found was Theodore Price. Price and his colleague, Saad Yousuf, elucidated the mechanism behind the ligands’ action. Yousuf demonstrated that the receptor σ 2 R is responsible for regulating other proteins that have much broader implications down a long chain—a signaling pathway—leading to the cause of nerve pain. Price, eager to make use of Yousuf ’s discovery, coupled this signaling mechanism with his own tests in mouse models to develop a potential drug. One novelty of their research is that the scientists began experimenting with animals directly. Typically, drug developers work with cellular models before moving to animal models and eventually clinical trials. However, since Price and his colleagues already knew that the compound was bound to a specific receptor, σ 2 R, they were able to jump straight into animal testing. Beyond that, the drug’s efficacy and long-lasting properties were surprising to the researchers. “The thing that has impressed me from the start is how efficacious this is after a long period of time,” Price said. “It’s something that is unheard of,” Yousuf added. The team was quick to credit Martin for bringing them together and providing a strong foundation for the entire project. “[Martin] is really good at making friends,” Sahn said. Martin, meanwhile, emphasized the role of collaboration among scientists across disciplines. “What I learned is you get a name, you call them up, and you ask them if they’re interested,” Martin said. “If the answer is no, you ask them if they know somebody who might be, and you call them up until you find the right person.” The team received a grant through the initiative “Helping End Addiction Long- Term” (HEAL), which will help develop a drug using their foundational research. “In four years, hopefully, we’ll be close to submitting an IND [Investigational New Drug] to the FDA and being able to start the clinical trials soon after that,” Price said. With an established group and promising experimental findings, the possibility of a non-opioid pain relief drug is on the horizon. ■ March 2024 Yale Scientific Magazine 27
Page 1 and 2: Yale Scientific THE NATION’S OLDE
Page 3 and 4: CONTENTS More articles online at ww
Page 5 and 6: The Editor-in-Chief Speaks AT THE C
Page 7 and 8: Biology / Mathematical Ecology NEWS
Page 9 and 10: Paleontology FOCUS IDENTIFYING EZEK
Page 11 and 12: Social Technology FOCUS I AM ALAN T
Page 13 and 14: Genetics FOCUS hollow, tubular stru
Page 15 and 16: Immunology FOCUS may be able to tri
Page 17 and 18: Environmental Engineering FOCUS Oil
Page 19 and 20: Astrochemistry FOCUS Cosmic Time Ca
Page 21 and 22: Astrochemistry FOCUS very low-energ
Page 23 and 24: Ribonucleic acids (RNA) are among t
Page 25: WEATHERING Evolutionary Biology FEA
Page 29 and 30: Computational Biology FEATURE We ca
Page 31 and 32: Astronomy FEATURE succession of sup
Page 33 and 34: Paleontology FEATURE strontium can
Page 35 and 36: Profile SHORT EMILY BORING YC ’18
Page 37 and 38: WORD WIZARDS IN 'SCIENCE DICTION' E
Page 39 and 40: BY YUSUF RASHEED What do you think

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