- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The special activity, “Moth Night,” will take place from 8 to 11 p.m. at 1124 Academic Surge on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. Free and open to the public, it will include outdoor collecting; viewing of the Bohart Museum's vast collection of worldwide moth specimens; demonstrations on how to spread the wings of a moth; and information on how to differentiate a moth from a butterfly. Free hot chocolate will be served.
The event is in keeping with National Moth Week, July 18-26, an annual event coordinated by Friends of the East Brunswick (New Jersey) Environmental Commission. This year, National Moth Week will spotlight the Sphingidae family of moths found throughout the world commonly called hawk moths, sphinx moths and hornworms. Citizen scientists will be out in force to record and photograph what they see that week.
Tabatha Yang, public education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart, said that after the sun sets, a black light demonstration will be held. Visitors will collect moths from a white sheet, much as residents do around their porch lights.
Entomologist Jeff Smith of Rocklin, an associate and 27-year volunteer at the Bohart Museum, will show visitors how to spread the wings of moths. Smith curates the 400,000-specimen Lepidoptera collection at the Bohart Museum. Smith organizes and identifies the butterflies and moths, creates the drawers that display them, and the labels that identify them. In between, he shares his passion for insects and spiders at outreach programs. Smith has spread the wings of 200,000 butterflies and moths, or about 7000 a year, since 1988.
Naturalist Greg Kareofelas of Davis, a longtime associate at the Bohart Museum, will assist with the open house and the outdoor collecting. The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, is a world-renowned insect museum that houses a global collection of nearly 8 million specimens.
Moths continue to attract the attention of the entomological world and other curious persons. Scientists estimate that there may be more than 500,000 moth species in the world. “Their colors and patterns are either dazzling or so cryptic that they define camouflage,” according to National Moth Week spokespersons. “Shapes and sizes span the gamut from as small as a pinhead to as large as an adult's hand.” Most moths are nocturnal, but some fly during the day, as butterflies do.
The Bohart Museum traditionally celebrates Mother's Day with “Moth'ers Day,” holding an open house.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Embargo lifts at noon p.m. Pacific Time, July 6, 2015
DAVIS--In ground-breaking research estimated to affect millions of patients globally, scientists at the University of California, Davis have pinpointed a key mechanism that causes neuropathic pain--a complex, chronic and difficult-to-treat pain caused by nerve injuries from trauma or from such diseases as diabetes, shingles, multiple sclerosis and stroke.
A biological process, termed endoplasmic reticulum stress or ER stress, is the significant driver of neuropathic pain, said lead researchers Bora Inceoglu of the Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology/UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Ahmed Bettaieb of the Fawaz Haj lab, Department of Nutrition.
The ground-breaking discovery, published July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “should ignite the discovery of a new generation of therapeutics,” paving the way for more efficient and effective ways to alleviate neuropathic pain, the researchers said.
“This is a fundamental discovery that opens new ways to control chronic pain,” said corresponding author and senior researcher Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology who holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“We can now specifically search for agents to control ER stress and its downstream pathways,” said Hammock. “This search is already underway in a number of laboratories working on cancer and other diseases.”
In the study, “Ahmed demonstrated key molecular signatures associated with diabetes and diabetic pain indicative of ER stress,” said Fawaz Haj, a senior author and corresponding author. The Haj laboratory studies the molecular basis of metabolic diseases, mainly obesity and type 2 diabetes.
“Diabetic neuropathy is a common consequence of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes which affects 60 to 70 percent of the diabetic patients,” said Ahmed Bettaieb, who has just accepted a position as assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition, University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “Knowledge on the specific contribution of individual cellular signaling pathways in the pathobiology of diabetic neuropathy is required to identify optimal drug targets. Identifying ER stress as a potential molecular mechanism that underlies diabetic neuropathic pain will open novel routes for the search of new therapeutic strategies therapies and optimizing currently available pain control medications.”
Inceoglu showed that neuropathic pain could be initiated by diverse compounds that cause ER stress and reversed by agents that block it.
"We were trying to understand how a class of natural bioactive lipids in our body can have such powerful analgesic effects,” said Inceoglu. “Our previous collaboration with Drs. Haj and Bettaieb had already established that blocking the degradation of these natural molecules is strongly analgesic (reduces pain) in diabetic animals without any of the side effects of known drugs. Expanding on these observations, in diabetic rodents, we looked at nerves and in particular those that are away from the skin, deeply embedded in the body. ER stress was obvious in these areas such as the sciatic nerve trunk and the spinal cord. Once we realized that ER stress had taken over the nervous system, we asked if it had any immediate consequences that can be measured."
Said Inceoglu: "It was an exciting moment when we could block pain in diabetic rodents using known inhibitors of ER stress. Later inducing ER stress in healthy rodents resulted in neuropathic pain-like behaviors which could be eliminated with ER stress blockers, but not so well with known drugs that are prescribed to patients suffering from neuropathic pain, with or without diabetes."
"Unfortunately, neuropathic pain remains an unmet medical need and available drugs are either not so effective or have serious side effects that limit their use in many patients,” Inceoglu said. “The bottom line is that we do not fully understand neuropathic pain and our work sheds new light onto one out of many diverse biological processes that mediate neuropathic pain. With this knowledge, one can test if ER stress blocking drugs can control pain in the clinic, and in parallel, ask fundamental questions in the lab, such as how multiple types of pain grouped under the name ‘neuropathic' differ from each other and respond to new ER stress blockers."
John Imig, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who was not involved in the study, said: “This scientific study provides convincing evidence for a novel concept as to what causes neuropathic pain. Cellular endoplasmic reticulum stress, ER stress, has been implicated in diabetes and findings in this scientific study now implicate ER stress in neuropathic pain."
“This group of investigators previously found that drugs that target ER stress reduce symptoms of diabetes,” Imig pointed out. “Interestingly, this scientific study provides exciting data clearly demonstrating that molecular chaperones and soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors reduce ER stress and neuropathic pain in a synergistic manner. This provides a new opportunity for developing innovative single molecule or combination therapeutics for neuropathic pain.”
In earlier work, the UC Davis team showed that by stabilizing analgesic and anti-inflammatory natural molecules in the body, they could block ER stress and improve a variety of disease states. In this report, the researchers blocked ER stress using a powerful transition state inhibitor of the soluble epoxide hydrolase enzyme made by co-author/researcher Kin Sing Stephen Lee of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology/UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“The compound reduces dramatically the pain associated with diabetic neuropathy and illustrates that one can reduce neuropathic pain by increasing natural chemical mediators already in the body,” said Hammock. He and his laboratory discovered and study potent enzyme inhibitors that dramatically reduce inflammation, inflammatory pain and neuropathic pain.
The research “Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress in the Peripheral Nervous System Is a Significant Driver of Neuropathic Pain,” is the work of a six-member research team: Inceoglu, Bettaieb, Lee, Haj, Hammock and Carlos Trindade da Silva of the Department of Entomology and Nematology/UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“Despite intensive effort and resulting gains in understanding the mechanisms underlying neuropathic pain, limited success in therapeutic approaches have been attained,” the authors wrote in their abstract. “A recently identified, non-channel, nonneurotransmitter therapeutic target for pain is the enzyme soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH).”
“The sEH degrades natural analgesic lipid mediators, epoxy fatty acids (EpFAs), therefore its inhibition stabilizes these bioactive mediators,” they explained. “Here we demonstrate the effects of EpFAs on diabetes-induced neuropathic pain and define a previously unknown mechanism of pain, regulated by endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. The activation of ER stress is first quantified in the peripheral nervous system of type 1 diabetic rats. We demonstrate that both pain and markers of ER stress are reversed by a chemical chaperone.”
“Next we identify the EpFAs as upstream modulation of ER stress pathways. Chemical inducers of ER stress invariable lead to pain behavior that is reversed by a chemical chaperone and an inhibitor of sEH. The rapid occurrence of pain behavior with inducers, equally rapid reversed by blockers and natural incidence of ER stress in diabetic peripheral nervous system (PNS) argue for a major role of the ER stress pathways in regulating the excitability of the nociceptive system. Understanding the role of ER stress in generation and maintenance of pain opens routes to exploit this system for therapeutic purposes.
The research was supported in part by a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) grant and a NIEHS Superfund Basic Research Program grant, awarded to principal investigator Bruce Hammock; and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants awarded to Fawaz Haj. In addition, Hammock, Inceoglu and Bettaieb received grants from NIH and/or the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease.
Related Links
PNAS Article
Diabetes Can Be Prevented, Reversed
UC Davis Pain Research May Pave the Way to Understanding and Controlling Chronic Pain
Bruce Hammock Elected to National Academy of Inventors
Contacts:
Bruce Hammock, corresponding author
bdhammock@ucdavis.edu
(530) 752-7519 office
(530) 752-8465 message
Fawaz Haj, corresponding author
fghaj@ucdavis.edu
(530) 752-3214
Bora Inceoglu, abinceoglu@ucdavis.edu
Ahmed Bettaieb, abettaieb@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event, free and open to the public, takes place from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the half-acre bee garden, located on Bee Biology Road, next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the central campus.
Among the native ants at the haven are
- Dorymyrmex insanus (workers small, ~3 mm long, black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Dorymyrmex bicolor (workers small, ~3 mm long, bicolored, dull orange and black; conspicuous crater-shaped nests in bare soil)
- Prenolepis imparis (also known as the “winter ant” or “winter honey ant”; workers small (3-4 mm long), brown, with shiny gaster; inconspicuous nests in soil)
- Formica moki (sometimes called “field ants”; workers medium-sized (6 mm long), with a dark head, orange-brown mesosoma (thorax) and silvery-gray gaster; nest in soil)
Images of these species can be found on the AntWeb (www.antweb.org).
The haven is home to many insects other than bees, noted Christine Casey, director of the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, which is owned and operated by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. It was planted in the fall of 2009.
Approximately six other species of native ants reside in the vicinity of the garden, including Formica aerata, Pogonomyrmex subdentatus, and Solenopsis xyloni. The introduced Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) occurs around the Bee Biology building, but it appears not to have colonized the bee garden.
Attendees will learn how to observe and identify California native ants, and learn about the differences between bees and ants.
The program is part of a brown bag lunch series. For more information see the flier and access the haven web site.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--When it comes to protecting our pollinators, we can all pitch in to help, says native bee ecologist Margaret “Rei” Scampavia of the University of California, Davis.
Scampavia, who is studying how farming practices affect bee nesting for her doctorate in entomology, recently won the top graduate student poster award at the first-ever UC Davis Bee Symposium, and provided the popular “Pollinator Pavilion” at the UC Davis Picnic Day.
Scampavia, who studies with major professors Neal Williams and Ed Lewis of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and anticipates receiving her Ph.D. in 2016, lists three ways to “save the pollinators."
1. Provide food: Plant a variety of trees, shrubs and annual flower with blooms that differ in size, shape, color and flowering time. Planting native milkweeds also can help support monarch butterfly populations. Hummingbird and butterfly feeders can also provide additional food sources, but make sure to clean and disinfect your feeders regularly, as they can accumulate toxic fungi.
2. Provide homes: Bees can be limited by food or nesting opportunities. Native bees are usually not aggressive and unlikely to sting. A patch of bare soil can provide valuable nest sites for soil-nesting bees, particularly if the soil is loose and slightly damp. A dead stump or log, or shrubs with hollow stems, such as raspberry or elderberry, can also provide nests for cavity-nesting bees. “You can also make or order a ‘bee condo,' or a block of wood with holes of varying diameter,” she says. “Line these holes with paper tubes to make them easy to clean between years. Some bee species line their nests with rose, wisteria or fuzzy plants such as lamb's ear leaves, so growing these plants can help these bees, too.”
3. Provide pesticide shelters. As much as possible, try to reduce pesticide use in your garden, or use less toxic pesticides, such as soap sand oils. If you spray, do so when pollinators are not active--after dusk to before dawn. Try to avoid spraying flowers directly. Create a pesticide-free source of water and mud for bees and butterflies, such as a dripping faucet or a bird bath.
“There are about 300 species of bumble bees worldwide and all are in the Bombus genus,” Scampavia points out. “Many of these species are in decline. Threats to bumble bees in the United States include disease introduced by commercial colonies, habitat loss and pesticide use.”
Bumble bee colonies live for one year, she said. A queen often starts her nest in an abandoned rodent burrow.
“Some species have been domesticated for greenhouse pollination as bumble bees are good pollinators of tomatoes and peppers,” she says. They vibrate their flight muscles to share loose the pollen.
There's also a major focus on monarch butterflies during National Pollinator Week. Scampavia describes monarchs as “truly amazing.”
Monarchs, Danaus plexippus, are the only butterflies that have a two-way multi-generation migration each year, she points out.
“Using the earth's magnetism, the sun, and air currents, they travel up to 100 miles a day. Some fly 3000 miles to overwinter. The western monarchs generally overwinter on the California Coast, while the eastern monarchs travel to the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico.”
The decline of the monarch population is alarming, she notes. “In the past 20 years, monarch populations have declined by 90 percent. They are threatened by the loss of their overwintering grounds, overuse of herbicides that kill milkweed, and climate change.”
Scampavia launched the first-ever Pollinator Pavilion at the UC Davis Picnic Day. It proved to be one of the most popular attractions not only in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology display at Briggs Hall but at the entire UC Davis Picnic Day celebration. She displayed live monarchs donated by Utterback Farms in Woodland; butterfly feeders and bee condos donated by ARBICO Organics, based in Arizona; a live bumble bee colony from UC Davis research; and specimens from the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis.
Her display showcased numerous live pollinators, including bees, butterflies and flies. She also drew in the crowds with informational posters on pollinators. The posters detailed how individuals can help support healthy pollinator populations.
Fellow entomology graduate student Danny Klittich set up the pavilion, which included an enclosure for the live pollinators. Visitors could walk inside the zipped enclosure and be one-on-one with the pollinators. Many took photos of the monarchs on their hands or arms. Younger visitors were encouraged to practice observing pollinators by filling out a data sheet counting the number of each type of pollinator they saw.
Scampavia recently won the top prize at the Bee Symposium with her poster, “Farming Practices Affect Nest Site Selection of Native Ground Nesting Bees.”
"Rei is multi-talented: she is able to both conduct high quality research and communicate information about pollinators in engaging and effective ways," said Katharina Ullmann who holds a doctorate in entomology from UC Davis (Neal Williams lab) and is now a crop pollination specialist for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. "Anyone who saw her award-winning poster at the Bee Symposium or who experience the pollinator pavilion at Picnic day knows that pollinators are lucky to have Rei working for them!"
Scampavia received her bachelor's degree in biology in 2008 from Mills College, Oakland. She began her doctoral studies at UC Davis in 2011. She earlier served as a biological science technician (plants) for the U.S. Forest Service, Groveland, Calif., and ; a research consultant for BMP Ecosciences in San Francisco.
Active in the Entomological Society of America (ESA), Scampavia was a member of the 2014 UC Davis Student Debate Team that won first place in the nationals. She also was a member of the 2013 UC Davis Linnaean Games Team that won second at the annual meeting of the Pacific Branch of ESA.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
He will receive an award of $16,000 to be used in support of his research activities. The Hellman Family Foundation established the UC Davis Hellman Fellows Program, which "supports and encourages the research of promising assistant professors who exhibit potential for great distinction in their research." Johnson's project title: "Genetic Mechanisms Underlying the Evolution of Novelty."
A luncheon honoring him and the other 11 UC DavisHellman Fellows is planned in late April or early May, said Lynn Daum of the UC Davis Vice Provost office, Academic Affairs. They will give a short presentation about their research.
Johnson is the second faculty member in the Department of Entomology and Nematology to receive the honor. Community ecologist Louie Yang received the distinction in 2012 as an assistant professor and is now an associate professor.
Johnson, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology faculty in 2011, received his doctorate in 2004 from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. in behavioral biology (thesis: “Organization of Work in the Honey Bee”). He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1998 from the UC San Diego, where he majored in ecology, behavior and evolution.
"Our lab studies the genetics, behavior, evolution, and health of honey bees. We use experimental and theoretical approaches to all the questions we explore," he writes on his website. "Current work in our lab focuses on the evolution and genetic basis of social behavior using comparative and functional genomics, task allocation using behavioral and theoretical approaches, and honey bee health using a combination of genetics, epidemiology, and physiological approaches."
The complete list of Hellman Fellows for 2015 from the UC Davis campus:
- Brian Johnson, assistant professor, Entomology and Nematology
- Shu Shen, assistant professor, Economics
- Nicholas Zwyns, assistant professor, Anthropology
- Jessica Bissett Prerea, assistant professor, Native American Studies
- Chunjie Zhang, assistant professor, German and Russian
- Cassandra Hart, assistant professor, Education
- Siwei Liu, assistant professor, Ecology
- Danielle Stolzenberg, assistant professor, Psychology
- Helen Koo, assistant professor, Design
- Margaret Ronda, assistant professor, English
- Kevin Gee, assistant professor, Education
- Brett Milligan, assistant professor, Landscape Architecture, Human Ecology