Bioengineering and Bioscience

Super-fast Insect Urination Powered by the Physics of Superpropulsion

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:58:13 +0000

Super-fast Insect Urination Powered by the Physics of Superpropulsion admin Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:58

Saad Bhamla was in his backyard when he saw something he had never seen before: an insect urinating. Though nearly impossible to see, the insect formed an almost perfectly round droplet on its tail and then launched it away so quickly that it seemed to disappear. The tiny insect relieved itself repeatedly for hours.

Watch the video and read the full story here.

Summary sentence

Tiny insects known as sharpshooters excrete by catapulting urine drops at incredible accelerations. Their excretion is the first example of superpropulsion discovered in a biological system.

Dateline

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

Contact

Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

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Atlanta, GA

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News room topics

Earth and Environment

Science and Technology

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Renewable Bioproducts

Mercury ID

666241

Source updated

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:25

Mycorrhizal Types Control Biodiversity Effects on Productivity

admin — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 22:56:55 +0000

Mycorrhizal Types Control Biodiversity Effects on Productivity admin Thu, 02/23/2023 - 17:56

This news release first appeared in the Chinese Academy of Sciences newsroom, and has been tailored for Georgia Tech readers.

Mycorrhizal symbiosis — a symbiotic relationship that can exist between fungi and plant roots — helps plants expand their root surface area, giving plants greater access to nutrients and water. Although the first and foremost role of mycorrhizal symbiosis is to facilitate plant nutrition, scientists have not been clear how mycorrhizal types mediate the nutrient acquisition and interactions of coexisting trees in forests.

To investigate this crucial relationship, Lingli Liu, a professor at the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) led an international, collaborative team, which included School of Biological Sciencesprofessor Lin Jiang. The team studied nutrient acquisition strategies of arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) trees in the Biodiversity–Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) experiment in a subtropical forest in China, where trees of the two mycorrhizal types were initially evenly planted in mixtures of two, four, eight, or 16 tree species.

The researchers found that as the diversity of species increased, the net primary production (NPP) of EcM trees rapidly decreased, but the NPP of AM trees progressively increased, leading to the sheer dominance (>90%) of AM trees in the highest diversity treatment.

The team's analyses further revealed that differences in mycorrhizal nutrient-acquisition strategies, both nutrient acquisition from soil and nutrient resorption within the plant, contribute to the competitive edge of AM trees over EcM ones.

In addition, analysis of soil microbial communities showed that EcM-tree monocultures have a high abundance of symbiotic fungi, whereas AM-tree monocultures were dominated by saprotrophic and pathogenic fungi.

According to the researchers, as tree richness increased, shifts in microbial communities, particularly a decrease in the relative abundance of Agaricomycetes (mainly EcM fungi), corresponded with a decrease in the NPP of EcM subcommunities, but had a relatively small impact on the NPP of AM subcommunities.

These findings suggest that more efficient nutrient-acquisition strategies, rather than microbial-mediated negative plant-soil feedback, drive the dominance of AM trees in high-diversity ecosystems.

This study, based on the world’s largest forest BEF experiment, provides novel data and an alternative mechanism for explaining why and how AM trees usually dominate in high-diversity subtropical forests.

These findings also have practical implications for species selection in tropical and subtropical reforestation—suggesting it is preferable to plant mixed AM trees, as they have a more efficient nutrient-acquisition strategy than EcM trees.

This study was published as an online cover article in Sciences Advances on Jan. 19 and was funded by the Strategic Priority Research Program of CAS and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Summary sentence

An international, collaborative team of researchers shed light on how fungi and plant roots work together to gather nutrients — and how the diversity of plant species may impact the process.

Summary

An international, collaborative team of researchers shed light on how fungi and plant roots work together to gather nutrients — and how the diversity of plant species may impact the process.

Dateline

Thu, 02/23/2023 - 12:00

jess@cos.gatech.edu

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Georgia Tech Editor: Audra Davidson
Communications Officer II
College of Sciences

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cos-microbial

Mycorrhizal

Lin Jiang

Science Advances

School of Biological Sciences

go-researchnews

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Earth and Environment

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Research

Life Sciences and Biology

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Mercury ID

666118

Source updated

Thu, 02/23/2023 - 17:37

Artificial Intelligence Improves Outcomes of Heart Valve Patients

admin — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:54:21 +0000

Artificial Intelligence Improves Outcomes of Heart Valve Patients admin Mon, 02/13/2023 - 14:54

The 68-year-old man was admitted to the Texas hospital with severe complications stemming from a previously implanted heart valve. Sales reps from two different heart valve manufactures told his surgical team they couldn’t help.

The surgeons reached out to a startup — co-founded by a Georgia Tech researcher — to see if its technology could help them save his life.

The company, DASI Simulations, uses artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision in its technology for personalized and more accurate heart valve replacement modeling. The result, the company says, a reduction in errors and better patient outcomes as in the case of the Texas patient.

The company’s modeling gave the Texas medical team four safe device options, as well as ways to solve the original problem and the patient was discharged 24 hours later.

“The physicians sent this case to our headquarters. And basically, we were able to send them these 3D images, where the physicians can exactly see what will happen. Not only that, but they were also able to go in boldly and dilate the previous valve and perform the procedure of implanting a second trans-catheter heart valve within the first,” said Lakshmi Prasad Dasi, co-founder, chief technology officer, and renowned scholar in heart valve engineering and cardiovascular biomechanics.

Doctors saved the man’s life, but in 2023, cardiovascular disease — the world’s leading cause of death — will claim the lives of more than 22,000 Georgians, some 700,000 people across the U.S., and 19 million around the globe. Even more daunting, that global death toll is expected to surpass 23 million by 2030.

The company is looking to improve those outcomes by utilizing AI to focus on the leading cause of cardiovascular afflictions: valvular heart disease, which occurs when any of the heart’s four valves are damaged, compromising the blood flow.

“When the surgeons run these patients through our system, the physician team can clear many of the complications that they’re worried about. And they’ll be able to go in and treat with a personalized plan,” said Dasi, who is associate chair for undergraduate studies and Rozelle Vanda Wesley Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Launched in 2019, the company, which is currently in a bridge round and anticipates a Series A capital raise in the fall of 2023, has already secured investment funding of about $4 million, including a non-dilutive $600,000 grant. DASI Simulations has 40 client hospitals in the U.S. and is working with Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, which works with faculty and students on their research commercialization, to secure capital investments.

The hospitals leveraging Dasi Simulations’ technology are using it exclusively on a group of high-risk patients. Surgeons don’t want to operate on these patients due to the complexities that come with an advanced state of disease. Without surgical intervention, these patients will die within six months to two years. Dasi Simulations technology can help surgeons navigate these high-risk surgeries with advanced AI based simulations.

“The problem is that currently, when doctors are planning the treatment of patients, such as valve replacement, their process is extremely limited in its flexibility and adaptability to specific patient anatomical features.”

All patients undergo CT scans of their hearts followed by time consuming measurements, said Dasi, who is also a faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. The physician imager today uses a computer mouse and takes measurements of a patient’s heart from those 2D scans to determine what size replacement valve would be needed.

It's a time-consuming and inexact process made even more complicated now because heart valve sales representatives — not the surgeons — do the bulk of those scan measurements at the majority of the 800 hospitals in the U.S. that perform structural heart procedures, Dasi said.

“So, sales reps are doing the measurements, as part of their sales service to the hospitals,” he said. “Overall, there's increased human error of between 15% to 20% variability, and a lot of time is lost when multiple people make discordant measurements.”

Because of that scenario, the resulting decisions made about what to do with any given patient’s case can be compromised.

“The decisions that the heart team makes are compromised not only because measurements may be inaccurate but also because they're unable to predict risks that the patient may have with a particular device selection. Consequently, there is hardly any personalization of the procedure to the patient,” Dasi said. “Oftentimes, when these surgeons perform a surgical procedure, five years down the line, they realize that ‘we shouldn't have done the surgery the way we did.’ Now, you're stuck in this difficult scenario because a different device choice back then could have made today’s surgery less risky.”

It’s a scenario that translates into complications that occur at high rates and increased costs to hospitals that aren’t reimbursable if they occur within 30 days of the patient’s discharge.

Reducing risk through bias elimination

DASI Simulations technology, which is based on research conducted at Georgia Tech, Ohio State University, Emory University, and Piedmont Hospital, uses AI to create 3D models for accurate measurements based on the CT scans. It’s a process that takes a computer seconds, compared with the 30 minutes it might take a doctor or sales rep.

The company says because the 3D modeling and AI measurements are accurate, it removes the possibility of manual errors. Also, because sales reps are not performing the modeling as is current practice to drive sales, there is no potential for bias toward using any one heart valve replacement device.

The company’s technology also includes 3D predictive modeling, which gives medical teams a better understanding of potential outcomes and the likelihood of complications. Under the current approach, doctors make the decisions about what kind of stents or valves based on the 2D scans, but they can’t necessarily predict the complications that may arise.

With DASI Simulations’ predictive technology, surgical teams don’t have to guess what the likely complications might be with a given valve and can make better decisions for the patient, Dasi said.

“The real benefit here is that now they have science in their hands, and they can make data driven scientific decisions as opposed to clinical intuition-based guesswork.”

Summary sentence

DASI Simulations, uses AI and computer vision in its technology for personalized and more accurate heart valve replacement modeling.

Dateline

Mon, 02/13/2023 - 12:00

peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu

Contact

Péralte C. Paul
404.316.1210
peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

go-researchnews

Lakshmi Prasad Dasi

DASI Simulations

Heart Disease

heart valves

News room topics

Health and Medicine

Science and Technology

Categories

Research

Biotechnology, Health, Bioengineering, Genetics

Life Sciences and Biology

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Mercury ID

665740

Source updated

Mon, 02/13/2023 - 12:30

The Plants Seeking Refuge Across Our Dynamically Changing Planet

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 22:51:42 +0000

The Plants Seeking Refuge Across Our Dynamically Changing Planet admin Mon, 02/06/2023 - 17:51

Plants, like animals and people, seek refuge from climate change. And when they move, they take entire ecosystems with them. To understand why and how plants have trekked across landscapes throughout time, researchers at the forefront of conservation are calling for a new framework. The key to protecting biodiversity in the future may be through understanding the past.

Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, spearheaded a special feature on the topic of biodiversity in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences along with colleagues in Texas, Norway, and Argentina. In the special feature, “The Past as a Lens for Biodiversity Conservation on a Dynamically Changing Planet,” McGuire and her collaborators highlight the outstanding questions that must be addressed for successful future conservation efforts. The feature brings together conservation research that illuminates the complex and constantly evolving dynamics brought on by climate change and the ever-shifting ways humans use land. These factors, McGuire said, interact over time to create dynamic changes and illustrate the need to incorporate temporal perspectives into conservation strategies by looking deep into the past.

One example of this work highlighted in the journal is McGuire’s research about plants in North America, which investigates how and why they’ve moved across geography over time, where they’re heading, and why it’s important.

“Plants are shifting their geographic ranges, and this is happening whether we realize it or not,” McGuire said. “As seeds fall or are transported to distant places, the likelihood that the plant’s seed is going to be able to survive and grow is changing as climates are changing. Studying plants’ niche dynamics over thousands of years can help us understand how species adapt to climate change and can teach us how to protect and maintain biodiversity in the face of rapid climate change to come.”

Climate Fidelity: A New Metric for Understanding Vulnerability

The first step is to understand which type of plants exhibit what McGuire terms “climate fidelity,” and which do not. If a plant has climate fidelity, it means that the plant stays loyal to its preferred climatic niche, often migrating across geographies over thousands of years to keep up with its ideal habitat. Plants that don’t exhibit climate fidelity tend to adapt locally in the face of climate change. Being loyal to one’s climate, it turns out, doesn’t necessarily mean being loyal to a particular place.

To investigate the case of trees, McGuire and former Georgia Tech postdoctoral scholar Yue Wang (associate professor in the School of Ecology at Sun Yat-sen University in China) studied pollen data from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, which contains pollen fossil data from sediment cores across North America. Each sediment core is sampled, layer by layer, producing a series of pollen data from different times throughout history. The data also contains breakdowns of the relative abundance of different types of plants represented by the pollen types – pine versus oak versus grass, for example – painting a picture of what types of plants were present in that location and when.

McGuire and Wang looked at data from 13,240 fossil pollen samples taken from 337 locations across the entirety of North America. For each of the 16 major plant taxa in North America, they divided the pollen data into six distinct chunks or “bins” of time of 4,000 years, starting from 18,000 years ago up to the present day. Wang used the data to identify all climate sites containing fossil pollen for any individual type of tree – such as oak, for example – for each period. Then, Wang looked at how each tree’s climate changed from one period to the next. Wang did this by comparing the locations of pollen types between adjacent time periods, which enabled the team to identify how and why each type of tree’s climate changed over time.

“This process allowed us to see the climate fidelity of these different plant taxa, showing that certain plants maintain very consistent climatic niches, even when climate is changing rapidly,” Wang said.

For example, their findings showed that when North American glaciers were retreating 18,000 years ago, spruce and alder trees moved northward to maintain the cool temperatures of their habitats.

Crucially, McGuire and Wang found that most plant species in North America have exhibited long-term climate fidelity over the past 18,000 years. They also found that plants that migrated farther did a better job of tracking climate during periods of change.

But some plants fared better than others. For example, the small seeds of willow trees can fly over long distances – enabling them to track their preferred climates very effectively. But the large seeds of ash trees, for example, can only be dispersed short distances from parent trees, hindering their ability to track climate. Habitat disruptions from humans could make it even more difficult for ash trees to be able to take hold in new regions. If there are no adjacent habitats for ash trees, their seeds are under pressure to move even farther – a particular challenge for ash, which slows their migration movements even more.

Protecting the Fabric of Life

On the bright side, by identifying which plants have historically been most sensitive to changing climates, McGuire and Wang’s research can help conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy prioritize land where biodiversity is most vulnerable to climate change.

As a final step, McGuire and Wang identified “climate fidelity hotspots,” regions that have historically exhibited strong climate fidelity whose plants will most urgently need to move as their climates change. They compared these hotspots to climate-resilient regions identified by The Nature Conservancy that could serve as refuge areas for those plants. While plants in these resilient regions can initially adapt to impending climate change by shifting their distributions locally, the plants will likely face major challenges when a region’s climate change capacity is exceeded due to lack of connectivity and habitat disruptions from humans. Refining these priorities helps stakeholders identify efficient strategies for allowing the fabric of life to thrive.

“I think that understanding climate fidelity, while a new and different idea, will be very important going forward, especially when thinking about how to prioritize protecting different plants in the face of climate change,” McGuire said. “It is important to be able to see that some plants and animals are more vulnerable to climate change, and this information can help build stronger strategies for protecting the biodiversity on the planet.”

Citation: Yue Wang, Silvia Pineda-Munoz, and Jenny L. McGuire, "Plants maintain climate fidelity in the face of dynamic climate change." PNAS (2023).

DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201946119

Summary sentence

Researchers investigate how trees have moved across geography over time, where they’re heading, and why it’s important.

Summary

Dateline

Mon, 02/06/2023 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

Contact

Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

cos-climate

go-researchnews

School of Biological Sciences

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Green Buzz

News room topics

Earth and Environment

Science and Technology

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Systems

Mercury ID

665493

Source updated

Mon, 02/06/2023 - 16:10

The Nobel Whisperer: M.G. Finn on Click Chemistry and Collaboration

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 19:47:41 +0000

The Nobel Whisperer: M.G. Finn on Click Chemistry and Collaboration admin Wed, 01/25/2023 - 14:47

On Dec. 10, 2022, Georgia Tech chemist M.G. Finn found himself in the Stockholm Concert Hall wearing a tuxedo. It was a big night — the 126th anniversary of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel's death — but the mood was anything but somber.

Read the story here.

Summary sentence

A story of human connection at the heart of Nobel-winning science

Summary

Dateline

Wed, 01/25/2023 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

Contact

Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer

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Atlanta, GA

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Keywords

cos-microbial

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Nobel Prize

Nobel

M.G. Finn

News room topics

Campus and Community

Health and Medicine

Science and Technology

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Mercury ID

665119

Source updated

Wed, 01/25/2023 - 13:38

Georgia Tech Professor and Team Create Tool to Reduce Burn Risk During Surgeries

admin — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 22:26:42 +0000

Georgia Tech Professor and Team Create Tool to Reduce Burn Risk During Surgeries admin Sat, 12/17/2022 - 17:26

Any surgical procedure comes with a degree of risk for patients. But there’s also stress for the surgical team who must adhere to strict protocols and procedures to ensure positive safe patient surgical outcomes.

Among the worries: accidentally burning a patient or operating room staff or setting fire to the surgical table draping. Although rare, burns can happen from the heat generated by fiber optic light cables that illuminate endoscopes and camera cables surgeons use during operations to see what’s happening internally.

James Rains, a professor in Georgia Tech’s Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, has developed a device to minimize that risk.

Rains is co-founder and CEO of Jackson Medical, an Atlanta-based medical device company that launched in 2016. Its flagship product, GloShield, is a flexible, ceramic fitted heat shield that covers the end of the light cable, which can get as hot as 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Whenever you want to look inside the body, you need to illuminate it. You need to provide a light source inside the body via a scope,” Rains said. The risk is present in the surgical field when equipment is assembled and disassembled, leading to a detached and exposed light cable.

Current protocols call for someone on the surgical team to hold the cable or keep it from the patient’s skin or material can catch fire. But those protocols aren’t always strictly followed as Rains and his team found when observing bladder and abdominal surgeries in metro Atlanta.

The Jackson Medical team’s observations and understanding of those risks was further underscored through interviews with more than 1,000 clinicians and practitioners across the country.

The GloShield device is designed with a flexible neck connected to a cap that fits snugly over the end of the light cable. The polymer used to create the devices remains cool to the touch. The cap flips up to allow the cable to reconnect to the scope when necessary.

“Surgeries are complex, and there are so many decisions that need to be made and so many tasks that need to be addressed by the surgical team,” said Kamil Makhnejia, another co-founder and who serves as the company’s chief operating officer. “There’s charting and taking care of the patient to ensure there’s proper equipment and specimen handoffs among team members during the entirety of the surgical procedure.”

It takes less than six seconds for the heat generated by a light cable to melt through a surgical drape or burn a patient, Makhnejia said, explaining that the device has been used in more than 100,000 surgeries to date.

“It’s not a matter of if something is going to happen, but when,” Rains said, adding that even though the risks remain low, medical professionals want solutions that reduce as many of those risks as possible and establish peace of mind. “During a surgical procedure, while you’re trying to juggle so many different things — we want to provide a layer of safety so that clinicians can keep their focus on patient outcome.”

That is the right approach said Dr. Howard Herman, an Atlanta surgeon in otorhinolaryngology, a surgical subspeciality of the head and neck, who has used GloShield in his operations.

“There are a lot of risks in surgery, and you try to minimize those risks,” said Herman, who has been a practicing surgeon for 29 years. “The beauty of this solution is that it mitigates the risk. To me, it should become part of the standard of care.”

The Jackson Medical team developed and refined the GloShield prototype at the Global Center for Medical Innovation, a Georgia Tech affiliate, which helps startups in the medical device space through all stages of their lifecycle, ranging from prototype to commercialization.

Jackson Medical is also a portfolio company of the Center for MedTech Excellence. A program of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, the center supports and addresses the unique needs of early-stage medical device technologies.

“We often use the words disruption and innovation quite liberally, yet companies are far from both,” said Nakia Melecio, the Center for MedTech Excellence’s director. “When I think of the team at Jackson Medical, their technology is not only disruptive, but also a novel solution for most, if not all, surgeons to protect patients from burn injuries with a commonly used surgical tool.”

Summary sentence

Jackson Medical's GloShield device finds success in American hospitals

Summary

Jackson Medical's GloShield device finds success in American hospitals

Dateline

Sat, 12/17/2022 - 12:00

peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu

Contact

Péralte C. Paul
peralte.paul@comm.gathe.edu
404.316.1210

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

Jackson Medical

Global Center for Medical Innovation

GloShield

surgery

News room topics

Business and Economic Development

Health and Medicine

Categories

Research

Biotechnology, Health, Bioengineering, Genetics

Business

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Mercury ID

663963

Source updated

Sat, 12/17/2022 - 17:23

Faculty Honored as National Academy of Inventors Fellows

admin — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:23:48 +0000

Faculty Honored as National Academy of Inventors Fellows admin Fri, 12/09/2022 - 11:23

Three faculty from Georgia Tech have been chosen as 2022 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows, the highest professional distinction for academic inventors.

The new class of fellows includes Adegboyega "Yomi" Oyelere of the College of Sciences, along with Madhavan Swaminathan and Zhong Lin Wang of the College of Engineering.

They are among approximately 150 honorees from research universities and governmental and non-profit institutions around the world. They were chosen by the NAI for demonstrating “a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.”

Oyelere is a professor in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry. His research spans bioorganic chemistry, biochemistry, and drug design with interrelated work across RNA-small molecule interaction, targeted histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibition, and design and synthesis of novel bioconjugates for molecular delivery applications.

Oyelere's lab has worked to develop a therapeutic strategy for cancer treatment to inhibit enzymes called histone deacetylases, which play an important role in the regulation of gene expression. He has also worked on the design of histone deacetylase inhibitors that can be taken up by the hormones expressed on the surface of hormone-positive breast cancer cells to stop the cells from dividing. In 2018, he received Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Undergraduate Mentor Senior Faculty Award.

Swaminathan is the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging & Electromagnetics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and has a joint appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). He directs the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center at Georgia Tech. He is an internationally recognized researcher in electronics packaging, an area that is expected to fuel the semiconductor industry over the next decade.

Swaminathan holds 31 patents and is the founder and co-founder of two start-up companies (E-System Design and Jacket Micro Devices).

Wang is the Regents’ Professor and Hightower Chair Emeritus in MSE. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators established the principle and technological roadmap for harvesting mechanical energy from environment and biological systems for powering mobile sensors.

Wang’s work also pioneered the field of self-powered sensors, and he coined piezotronics and piezo-phototronics for the third-generation semiconductors. Wang holds 70 U.S. and foreign patents.

Georgia Tech now has 16 NAI Fellows. The new cohort will be inducted at the NAI Fellows Induction Ceremony in July.

Summary sentence

Three faculty from Georgia Tech have been chosen as 2022 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows, the highest professional distinction for academic inventors.

Summary

Three faculty from Georgia Tech have been chosen as 2022 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows, the highest professional distinction for academic inventors: Adegboyega "Yomi" Oyelere of the College of Sciences, along with Madhavan Swaminathan and Zhong Lin Wang of the College of Engineering.

Dateline

Thu, 12/08/2022 - 12:00

jess@cos.gatech.edu

Contact

Jason Maderer

Jess Hunt-Ralston

Keywords

cos-community

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

School of Materials Science and Engineering

go-imat

go-ien

News room topics

Campus and Community

Categories

Institute and Campus

Research

Core research areas

Bioengineering and Bioscience

Electronics and Nanotechnology

People and Technology

Systems

Mercury ID

663752

Source updated

Fri, 12/09/2022 - 11:03

Tiny Limbs and Long Bodies: Coordinating Lizard Locomotion

bwaye3 — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 14:50:18 +0000

Tiny Limbs and Long Bodies: Coordinating Lizard Locomotion bwaye3 Tue, 07/19/2022 - 10:50

Snakes and lizards have distinct body movement patterns. Lizards bend from side to side as they retract their legs to walk or run. Snakes, on the other hand, slither and undulate, like a wave that travels down the body. However, there are species of lizards that have long, snakelike bodies, and limbs so tiny even scientists have wondered about their purpose. Understanding how these hybrid-looking lizards move could provide insight into why an evolutionary transition from lizardlike to snakelike motion occurred.

Using biological experiments, robot models, and a geometric theory of locomotion from the 1980s, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology investigated how and why intermediate lizard species, with their elongated bodies and short limbs, might use their bodies to move. Led by living systems physics professor Daniel Goldman, the research team studied body-limb coordination in a diverse sample of lizard bodies. Their multidisciplinary approach uncovered the existence of a previously unknown spectrum of body movements in lizards, revealing a continuum of locomotion dynamics between lizardlike and snakelike movements. Their findings, published in the June issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, deepen the understanding of evolution’s implications for locomotion, and have additional applications for advanced robotics designs.

“We were interested in why and how these intermediate lizards use their bodies and limbs to move around in different terrestrial environments,” Goldman said. “This is a fundamental question in locomotion biology and can inspire more capable wiggling robots.”

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Baxi Chong, a Ph.D. student in Goldman’s lab and first author of the paper, became interested in the short-limbed, elongated lizard species Brachymeles at a presentation by Philip Bergmann, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Clark University, in which Bergmann discussed the evolution of the species. Chong, a theoretician, had a tool in mind that he believed could help explain how the rare lizard moved, so he reached out to Bergmann to collaborate. Bergmann sent footage of the lizards in the wild to Goldman’s lab for analysis.

Eva Erickson, a recent graduate from Georgia Tech and Goldman’s lab, then applied new artificial intelligence techniques to analyze the lizards’ body movement in Bergmann’s videos as well as other lizard species. Known as neural network tracking, the software uses AI to identify features of images — such as legs and bodies — and track those features and their movements.

It has typically been thought that organisms either wiggle like snakes, bend like lizards, or use no body bending at all. When analyzing the footage, however, the researchers saw a wide variety of snakelike waves (traveling waves) and lizardlike movements (standing waves) represented across a diversity of lizard species.

“Markerless animal pose estimation software has been greatly improving, allowing much greater insight into the kinematics of organisms,” said Erickson, who will enter a Ph.D. program at Brown University in Fall 2022. “Through tracking videos with the program DeepLabCut, we found that these species perform a diverse array of wave patterns as they locomote.”

The next question was how to make sense of the diversity of wave patterns. According to Chong, while there are endless ways to think about the waves and what they mean, the information is so complex that it is nearly impossible for humans to understand without using laborious and time-consuming equations.

Instead, Chong used a mathematical technique developed by particle physicists and control theorists in the last decades. While the theory, now referred to in the locomotion field as geometric mechanics, was initially introduced to study idealized locomotion — to understand how three connected points might swim in water — Chong adapted the theory to include the concept of legs.

Using geometric mechanics, Chong produced diagrams that visualized the body-limb coordination data, replacing complicated calculations with much simpler diagrammatic analysis. They were able to both see and show the advantage of snakelike waves in short-limbed elongate lizard locomotion and predict that the advantage arises as the primary thrust generation shifts from the limbs to the body.

“The advantage of geometric mechanics is that we don't have to explore every possibility of locomotion to determine which one is the best,” Chong said.

Findings from the neural network tracking and geometric mechanics enabled the group to form a theory: that the style of lizard movement — whether they move using standing waves to run or a traveling wave to slither — is closely related to degree of limb size and body elongation.

Testing the Theory With Real and Robotic Lizards

The researchers tested the theory in two ways. First, they changed the environment, putting sand-dwelling lizards in what they would never come across naturally: sand with air blowing up through it. They observed that short-bodied lizards with strong legs were forced to wiggle their way out, in a movement known as “terrestrial swimming.” Essentially, they were able to trick lizards into using snakelike locomotion to move, further supporting the existence of a spectrum of locomotion patterns.

The team then built a robot model to investigate the advantages of lizardlike and snakelike body movements in the intermediate lizard species. Known as a robophysical model, the robot functions as a physicist’s model of a living system that can also be used to vary parameters such as limb length and how the lizard’s body drags on the ground. With such capabilities, they can test the predictions of their theoretical model while also gaining understanding of the biological system.

The team then built a robot model to investigate the advantages of lizardlike and snakelike body movements in the intermediate lizard species. Known as a robophysical model, the robot functions as a physicist’s model of a living system. With the robot, they can test the predictions of their theoretical model while also gaining insights into the intermediate lizard’s biology and locomotion.

“We built the robophysical model to be reconfigurable — we can vary limb length and change how the lizard robot propels itself with the addition and removal of a belly plate,” said Tianyu Wang, a robotics Ph.D. student and member of Goldman’s lab. “We then used the robot to run similar experiments in sand while tracking its motions and performance.”

The researchers found that, when more body weight was distributed on the belly rather than the limbs, snakelike body movement had the clear advantage in getting lizards where they need to be — even for those lizards with the strongest legs.

Overall, the team observed that the degree of body elongation and limb reduction in lizards is directly related to how body and limb movements are coordinated, indicating a closely intertwined continuum between body shapes and locomotion style. The researchers even found the tiny limbs to be of significant use to the lizards, not only with propulsion, but also with lifting their bellies off the ground.

Insights

The researchers’ findings enabled them to conclude that evolution was not just acting to lengthen bodies or shorten limbs, but both — and in a highly coordinated and functional way.

“Our work really helps explain why these intermediate species are able to compete with other species and persist in their own right for millions of years,” Bergmann said. “They aren’t evolving to be snakelike but are completely functional species with their own ecological roles.”

Also, roboticists can apply concepts discovered in the researchers’ work. For example, using the findings from Goldman’s lab, roboticists have created snake-, lizard-, and amphibian-inspired robots that could one day be used in search and rescue operations.

“With the robophysical models, we can develop principles that can also inform the next generation of robots that might have to crawl around in rubble or move around in extraterrestrial environments like the surface of moons or planets,” Goldman said.

Finally, an important aspect of the study was its multidisciplinary approach. By taking videos from an evolutionary biologist, applying AI tracking software and geometric mechanics to understand movement, and building a robophysical model to test their hypothesis, each student brought individual expertise to bear on the research question.

“I have to say, this really was an awesome student-led project,” Goldman said.

Citation: Baxi Chong, Tianyu Wang, Eva Ericksoa, Philip J. Bergmann, and Daniel I. Goldman, “Coordinating tiny limbs and long bodies: Geometric mechanicsof lizard terrestrial swimming,” PNAS, June 2022.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2118456119

Funding: NSF–Simons Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology (Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative Grant 594594), NSF Grant IOS-1353703, President’s Undergraduate Research Awards at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Army Research Office Grant W911NF-11-1-0514.

Writer: Catherine Barzler

Video: Steven Norris and Evan Atkinson

Photos: Philip Bergmann and Steven Norris

Media Contact: Catherine Barzler | catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

###

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Summary sentence

Using biological experiments, robot models, and a geometric theory of locomotion, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology investigated how and why intermediate lizard species, with their elongated bodies and short limbs, might use their bodies

Dateline

Fri, 07/15/2022 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

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Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

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Robotics

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Source updated

Fri, 07/15/2022 - 11:30

Tiny Limbs and Long Bodies: Coordinating Lizard Locomotion

bwaye3 — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 14:50:18 +0000

Tiny Limbs and Long Bodies: Coordinating Lizard Locomotion bwaye3 Tue, 07/19/2022 - 10:50

A Multidisciplinary Approach

“The advantage of geometric mechanics is that we don't have to explore every possibility of locomotion to determine which one is the best,” Chong said.

Testing the Theory With Real and Robotic Lizards

The team then built a robot model to investigate the advantages of lizardlike and snakelike body movements in the intermediate lizard species. Known as a robophysical model, the robot functions as a physicist’s model of a living system. With the robot, they can test the predictions of their theoretical model while also gaining insights into the intermediate lizard’s biology and locomotion.

Insights

The researchers’ findings enabled them to conclude that evolution was not just acting to lengthen bodies or shorten limbs, but both — and in a highly coordinated and functional way.

“I have to say, this really was an awesome student-led project,” Goldman said.

Writer: Catherine Barzler

Video: Steven Norris and Evan Atkinson

Photos: Philip Bergmann and Steven Norris

Media Contact: Catherine Barzler | catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

###

Summary sentence

Using biological experiments, robot models, and a geometric theory of locomotion, researchers investigate how and why intermediate lizard species, with their elongated bodies and short limbs, might use their bodies to move.

Summary

Dateline

Fri, 07/15/2022 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

Contact

Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

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Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

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Research

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Source updated

Fri, 07/15/2022 - 17:31

Research Partnership Expands to Address Lymphatic Injury

bwaye3 — Fri, 17 Jun 2022 17:41:43 +0000

Research Partnership Expands to Address Lymphatic Injury bwaye3 Fri, 06/17/2022 - 13:41

Years after cancer surgery, many patients’ lymphatic systems start to fail. They can experience swelling and fluid retention, a condition known as lymphedema that has no cure. But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working to understand the lymph system through a partnership with the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI).

“We want to know: ‘Why does the lymphatic system fail?’” said Brandon Dixon, a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering. “What are some of the mechanisms that drive its failure? We want a basic understanding of the rules that govern lymphatic remodeling.”

To uncover this basic understanding, Dixon and his fellow mechanical engineering investigators Alexander Alexeev and Zhanna Nepiyushchikh are studying the lymph system in sheep. Sheep make ideal candidates as they have limbs that must transport fluid against gravity and these limbs have a consistent architecture of lymphatic vessels. Previously, the researchers had worked with mice and rats, but there are inherent limitations to this.

“Gravity is a key component of lymphedema, especially in the lower legs or arms, places where the fluid has to travel a long distance against gravity,” he said. “You just can't recapitulate that in a mouse or a rat, so we wanted a large animal model of lymphatic failure.”

Initially, the researchers partnered with the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine to study sheep. Their results won a $3 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for the next four years to build a computational model and framework to understand lymphatic growth and adaptation after injury.

Part of the grant was moving the research from Athens to Atlanta by partnering with GCMI.

“The challenge of the large animal work is it's very expensive, and we could not have done this project without both NIH support and in-kind contributions from GCMI which were made available through support from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research,” said Dixon, who is also a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “GCMI has really created a unique environment that's allowed us to do this work here.”

Studying the System

To conduct the research, the team surgically dissects a section of lymphatic vessel but leaves all the remaining vasculature intact to determine how the remaining lymphatic vessels compensate for this loss of lymphatic vessels over time. As a point of comparison the researchers use the other limb, which does not receive an injury to its lymphatics, as a control, and then employ in vivo near-infrared lymphatic imaging (indirect visual imaging that utilizes specialized tracers taken up by the lymphatic system) to determine how the vessels adapt over time.

From here, they develop computational models to understand how the structural changes in the lymphatic vessels alter their ability to pump fluid. Although it’s a biological system, the mechanics plays a very important role in the understanding of its function, according to Alexeev.

“In contrast to the circulatory system where we have a centralized pump, or the heart, that pumps the fluid and drives the flow, in lymphatics we have a distributed system of pumps that contract periodically, and there are also numerous elastic valves that open and close to create a unidirectional lymph flow,” he said.

The modeling of a lymphatic system presents an extra challenge because the researchers need to consider how the fluid flow interacts with elastic valves and contracting vessel walls. Yet an advantage of computational modeling is that it provides detailed insights into how the system should work and helps to rationalize the observations from the sheep studies.

“The problem we are addressing is the gap in understanding what triggers lymphatics to fail and why one patient develops lymphedema while another does not,” said Nepiyushchikh. “It is very exciting to work with a team where everybody brings a high level of expertise and experience towards understanding such a complex disease as lymphedema. It will be tremendous for the lymphedema field to be able to predict lymphatic failure and find the best preventative options, as well as narrow the treatment possibilities in already existing conditions.”

Summary sentence

Researchers at Georgia Tech are working to understand the lymph system through a partnership with the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI).

Dateline

Fri, 06/17/2022 - 12:00

tess.malone@gatech.edu

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Tess Malone

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go-ibb

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Bioengineering and Bioscience

Mercury ID

658977

Source updated

Fri, 06/17/2022 - 10:59

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Tiny Limbs and Long Bodies: Coordinating Lizard Locomotion

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