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ST. LOUIS, MO, November 18, 2021 Just as there often exists an urban-rural divide in political and environmental landscapes, urban and rural education systems share the common issue of being under-resourced, especially for science education. As climate change looms over rural agricultural communities, urban heat islands could serve as critical partners for anticipating the future of economically important crops. Kristine Callis Duehl, PhD, the Sally and Derick Driemeyer Director of Education Research and Outreach at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and her collaborators at the Jackie Joyner Kersee Foundation and University of Illinois Extension were awarded a three year, $685,000 grant from United States Department of Agriculture to create a synergistic partnership between urban and rural communities in Southern IL to establish a cross-regional curriculum that introduces bioengineering and plant monitoring technology to middle school aged youth in summer programs.

Young people at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation in East St. Louis, IL and at the Illinois Extension program in Waterloo, IL will monitor corn growth in both regions by using in-demand technology including drones and a microclimate field monitoring system developed by Danforth Center scientist Nadia Shakoor, PhD. By growing and comparing sweet corn, GMO commodity corn, and non-GMO commodity corn, students will see first-hand how bioengineering improves plant health and crop yield. By conducting joint fieldwork and presenting their ideas at a mini-conference, urban and rural youth will establish a collaboration that generates culturally mindful activities as well as authentic data that can help shed light on the impact of climate change on corn harvests. This collaboration will allow rural students to experience FarmBot robotics at work in smaller, urban plots and allow urban students to experience the use of drones used in precision agriculture on larger, rural farms. Ultimately, through this informal authentic research experience, participants will help develop a culturally informed curriculum that can be launched nationwide to establish a network of urban-rural authentic research hubs for non-formal summer programs.

Young people participating in the project will gain an understanding of gene editing and hands-on experience using robotics to plant corn, as well as experience using drone and microclimate monitoring systems to assess corn growth and the microclimate, said Callis-Duehl. It will also provide technological training, and exposure to data analysis to prepare them for the future, as big data analysis has become increasingly critical in agricultural science.

Youth will also gain leadership experience by providing feedback on curriculum so that it evolves and by teaching the youth the partner program how to use the agricultural technology unique to their research area (urban or rural).

Co-Project Directors include Lisa Walsh, Danforth Plant Science Center, Mark Fryer, Jackie Joyner Kersee Foundation and Amy Cope, University of Illinois Extension.

About the Donald Danforth Plant Science CenterFounded in 1998, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a not-for-profit research institute with a mission to improve the human condition through plant science. Research, education, and outreach aim to have impact at the nexus of food security and the environment and position the St. Louis region as a world center for plant science. The Centers work is funded through competitive grants from many sources, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow us on Twitter at @DanforthCenter.

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Collaboration aims to shrink the urban-rural divide and address the impact of climate change through student research network - EurekAlert

Superspreading events have distinguished the COVID-19 pandemic from the early outbreak of the disease. Now, research from Harvard University, Tulane University, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital finds that a critical factor in these and other transmission events is the propensity of certain individuals to exhale large numbers of small respiratory droplets. The researchers found that age, obesity and COVID-19 infection all correlate with a propensity to breathe out more respiratory droplets.

Understanding the source and variance of respiratory droplet generation may lead to effective approaches to reducing COVID-19 infection and transmission.

The study was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Respiratory droplet generation in the airways varies between people depending on their phenotype, said David Edwards, Associate in Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and co-author of the study. While our results show that the young and healthy tend to generate far fewer droplets than the older and less healthy, they also show, in combination with the results from nonhuman primates, that any of us, when infected by COVID-19, may be at risk of producing a large number of respiratory droplets. This is an important finding in that the majority of these droplets are smaller than a single micron, meaning they can carry infection deep into our lungs and propagate infection very far in poorly circulated indoor settings.

Using data from an observational study of 194 healthy people, ages 19 to 66, and an experimental study of nonhuman primates with COVID-19, researchers found that exhaled aerosol particles vary greatly between subjects. Those who were older with higher body mass indexes (BMI) and increasing degree of COVID-19 infection had three times the number of exhaled respiratory droplets as others in the study group.

The researchers found that 18 percent of human subjects accounted for 80 percent of the exhaled particles of the group, reflecting a distribution of exhaled aerosol particles analogous to a classical 20:80 super-spreader distribution of airborne infection. The findings suggest that quantitative assessment and control of exhaled aerosol may be critical to slowing the airborne spread of COVID-19 in the absence of an effective and widely disseminated vaccine.

Our nonhuman primate studies suggest that within a few days of infection by SARS-CoV-2 aerosol, exhaled aerosol increases with the rise of viral replication in the airways, reaching a peak within about a week from first infection and then diminishing in magnitude as the infection is cleared to return to baseline within two weeks post infection, said co-author Chad Roy, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane School of Medicine and a core scientist at the Tulane National Primate Research Center at Tulane University. We observed these same phenomena with TB-infected nonhuman primates. It seems likely that viral and bacterial infection of the airway weaken airway mucus in similar ways and promote airborne movement of infection with risks to ourselves and those around us.

The authors argue that management of COVID-19 through the restoration of airway lining mucus barrier function, and, monitoring of exhaled aerosol numbers might be important strategies in the control of transmission and infection of COVID-19, and other respiratory infectious diseases, including TB and influenza.

The research was co-authored by Dennis Ausiello, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Jonathan Salzman and Tom Devlin, of Sensory Cloud; Robert Langer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Brandon J. Beddingfield, Alyssa C. Fears, Lara A. Doyle-Meyers, Rachel K. Redmann, Stephanie Z. Killeen and Nicholas J. Maness, of Tulane National Primate Research Center .

It was supported in part by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (Grant # HHSN272201700033I), the National Institutes of Health (Grant # OD01110) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

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Exhaled respiratory droplets increase with the onset of COVID-19 infection and with aging and obesity | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering...