Journalists

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.

A study published in the journal Cell shares the case of the "New York patient", a woman with leukaemia and HIV who identifies as "mixed race" and has been free of the virus since 2017. She would be the first woman to be cured of the virus after a bone marrow transplant and there are now four such cases, along with patients in Düsseldorf, Berlin and London. The method involves transplanting HIV-resistant stem cells, this time from umbilical cord blood.

A study in mice has found that high doses of the sweetener sucralose can reduce the immune response and, under certain laboratory conditions, alter its action against infections or tumours. The results are published in the journal Nature.

A review of studies of more than 700,000 women has estimated that those who follow a Mediterranean diet faithfully have about a 25% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and death. This effect is greater than had been found in other studies, many of which included a majority of men and did not differentiate results by sex. According to the authors, the study underscores the need for this type of targeted analysis. The results are published in the journal Heart.

Previous research has shown that coffee drinking is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, but most are short-term, observational studies - they describe associations without being able to determine cause and effect. Research published in BMJ Medicine uses another method (Mendelian randomisation) to study potential causal relationships between caffeine levels in plasma and cardiovascular health, using genetic variants in nearly 10,000 people who participated in long-term studies. Higher genetically-predicted caffeine concentrations in plasma were associated with lower body-mass index and fat mass and a lower risk of type 2 diabetes. In addition, the research shows that 43% of the protective effect of caffeine on the risk of type 2 diabetes was influenced by a reduction in body mass index.

A study has analysed around 10,000 teeth from 139 archaeological sites in Europe dating from around 1200 AD in the Middle Ages. The differences between the teeth of men and women make it possible to establish who had better living conditions and received more attention in each place. Comparing the data with the contemporary situation, they conclude that greater gender discrimination in the past correlates with greater inequality today. According to the authors, this persistence is most likely due to intergenerational transmission, as it is interrupted when there is a large population replacement. The results are published in the journal PNAS.

Researchers have presented the first connectome - a diagram of neural connections - of the whole brain of an insect, a vinegar fly larva (Drosophila melanogaster). The work, which the authors say will inspire new studies of neural circuits and machine learning architectures, is published today in Science.

About 58.5% of a baby's microbiota come from various parts of its mother's body, according to a study of the transmission of microbes between mother and child in the first month of life. The research, published in Cell Host & Microbe, is based on samples collected from 120 mother-baby pairs, with material from their nose/throat, saliva, skin, milk, vagina and faeces. It compares babies born by caesarean section and vaginally, and confirms that the reduced transfer of faecal microbes in caesarean births can be partially compensated by other transmission routes, such as breastfeeding.

This year's theme for 8M is "For an inclusive digital world: innovation and technology for gender equality". If we want to innovate for everyone, there must be women doing research in mathematics, an essential discipline in the fields of technology, finance and health. However, the future of mathematical research in Spain has a male profile and this is worrying: advances and major decisions will be made excluding half of the population.

People who had a lower respiratory tract infection—such as bronchitis or pneumonia—before the age of two have twice the risk of premature death from respiratory disease in adulthood, according to a study published in The Lancet. The research is based on long-term data from over 3,500 people born from 1946 onwards in England, Scotland and Wales. According to the study, one in five premature deaths in this representative sample could be due to respiratory infections. The team adjusted their estimate by taking into account factors such as socioeconomic status in childhood and smoking in adulthood.