For female North American dance flies, size definitely matters.

A recent UTM study discovered that, for North American male dance flies, sexual attraction is highest when female mates display large inflatable abdominal sacs. 

The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by UTM postdoctoral fellow Rosalind Murray, UTM biology professor Darryl Gwynne, U of T biology lecturer Jill Wheeler, and University of Stirling biologist Luc Bussiere.

To attract male dance flies for fertilization, the researchers found that female flies display signs of sexual ornamentation. The female flies use valuable energy reservoirs to expand their abdominal sacs, which is appealing to their male counterparts. 

In cases where female dance flies have smaller abdominal sacs, they attract males flies through larger leg scales.  

When discussing the reasoning behind her study, Murray said she “wanted to do an experiment to see if these ornaments were actually attracting the males and if they were working in the same way we typically see male ornaments — so, bigger is better.”

Why are the female flies using large amounts of energy to attract their male counterparts? 

According to Murray, the male flies provide them with a “food gift,” because the female flies have lost their ability to hunt, “so the males go hunting and they bring, usually another fly or insect. They kill it and they present it to the female in exchange for mating.”

The research took place over a 10-day period on an island in Credit River last June. North American dance flies are peculiar creatures that only appear for one hour at dawn and another hour at dusk.

As such, to complete the field research, Murray would wake up before sunrise to study the flies for an hour when they came out.  

During the day, Murray would analyze the data collected from the morning, and then she would venture out again at 8:30 pm to study the flies until sundown.

To test her theory, Murray created models that imitate female shapes and examined the impact of the two ornament types.

The research is particularly significant because it demonstrates a stark shift in our understanding of the animal kingdom. 

Typically, research has suggested that male animals use their energy to attract female counterparts. Much of Charles Darwin’s research, for example, focused on this phenomenon of sexual selection between mates.

However, Murray and Gwynne’s research turns this idea on its head.

“There are certain ways across animal kingdoms that males and females behave… It’s rare that you do find the vice versa, whereas in these flies, the subject of the paper, females are displaying very male-like traits,” Gwynne said. “They have reversed roles.”

Within the field of evolutionary biology, Murray’s study is the first that demonstrates this kind of female sexual ornamentation. “It’s such a bizarre system,” Murray said. 

“We’re looking at similar questions among many species of dance flies, thinking about how different species have evolved these ornaments.” 

— With files from Srivindhya Kolluru

It was recently announced that U of T will implement 49 new recommendations from the Equity and Diversity in Research and Innovation Working Group to foster more equity in every stage of research and academia — from ensuring diversity in committees that provide awards and funding to requiring further training in unconscious biases.

This is certainly exciting, especially since the announcement comes with concrete steps to fulfill its vision, which makes this promise feel substantive rather than empty. Assuming that these measures are put into place and followed, real progress is on the horizon.

Sadly, this change is urgently needed in academia. Study after study has shown that the field not only consists of overwhelming numbers of white and male academics, but it is also reluctant to change itself.

For example, in a 2012 study, professors in biology, chemistry, and physics departments at six universities across the US were given identical applications for a lab manager position, with some applicants using female names and others using male names. The male applicants were rated as more “hireable” and competent, and offered a larger starting salary.

In 2016, the Dean of U of T’s Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Trevor Young, revealed some sobering statistics about the racial and socioeconomic makeup of medical students and faculty: Black, Filipino, Latinx, and Indigenous students were “woefully under-represented,” and, in 2013, 75 per cent of the faculty were white.

To even produce these statistics is surprisingly difficult. In 2017, CBC reported that despite the claims of many Canadian universities as pro-diversity, very few actually have any data about the racial demographics of their students. This allows universities to plead ignorance about any kind of discrimination on their part, and allows them to continue a charade of racial blindness.

Many may fight back against these measures as being ‘discriminatory’ toward white men in favour of minorities and underprivileged folks, or suggest that the best solution would simply be to approach hiring, funding, and the like with blindness toward gender and racial considerations. To the former point, it is worth noting that none of the recommendations even suggest or imply discrimination toward white men.

To the latter point, I would say that this is impossible thanks to unconscious biases, which means that even those with the best of intentions still discriminate. In the 2012 study, it is highly unlikely that the faculty involved all held genuine contempt for women, but it is far more likely that they had absorbed societal ideas about men and women in science, and reflected them in hiring practices.

To go beyond the simple fact that more people of diverse backgrounds should have opportunities in academia and research, it should be noted that the type of research that would be conducted with more people who are not white men could be badly needed, or done with a genuine cultural sensitivity that may not be present otherwise.

A person with a particular racial background may have an interest in a research topic that affects them more than it does the dominant race. Someone who is part of an underprivileged community, especially one that has a history of mistreatment in research, may be able to connect with their own community and understand how to conduct research with them better.

Research in every field, from medicine to anthropology, has a tainted history of ignoring the needs and wishes of the communities they encounter, which can lead to dark consequences. Look no further than eugenics as a field, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, or the US Army working closely with anthropologists to finetune their strategy in Afghanistan.

Paula Rochon, Vice-President of Research at Women’s College Hospital, was part of the working group and reported last yearthat, because women were underused as research subjects in a study on dementia, it is unknown how certain dementia medications affect women, despite the fact that most elderly people with dementia are women. More female researchers, in that case, would have been more likely to push for more female subjects.

And we can extrapolate that to a larger scale. If most researchers are white men, with funding being granted by other white men, and the findings are presented to white men with nobody else in the room, the research would suffer by only focusing on certain issues and their effects on certain people.

No matter your personal identity, I hope that advocating for equity and diversity in academia and research is something we can all celebrate. These steps get more people from diverse backgrounds to be a part of every step of the process. This means more opportunities for more people, better research, and positive outcomes for everyone.

Adina Heisler is a fourth-year Women and Gender Studies and English student at University College.

A single bone fragment can reveal thousands of years of human history.

In a study published in Nature, a team of researchers, including U of T Professor Bence Viola, identified a hybrid between two extinct lineages of hominids — Neanderthals and Denisovans — in a bone fragment.

Neanderthals lived on earth about 40,000 years ago, and, along with modern humans, they evolved from Homo erectus. Denisovans diverged from Neanderthals, but little is known about them other than bits of information recovered from bone fragments of their extremities, found in a Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

This is why, when researchers found a bone fragment in the Denisova Cave in 2012, they didn’t give much thought to the finding; it looked like all the others, an ordinary and tiny piece of what was thought to be part of a bear or lion.

After all, when a site is being excavated, many items are found, including pieces from animals and insects.

“There are 100,000 bone fragments found at a time and this particular one had a length of only 2.5 centimetres long, roughly the size of a toe bone,” said Viola.

A few years following the discovery, the fragments were analyzed for collagen. Finding a long bone fragment gave researchers an advantage for conducting DNA extraction techniques because of its morphology; it preserves better and allows for further manipulation.

“The bone was also discovered to have an acid coating which suggested it was digested by hyenas,” added Viola. The fact that DNA evidence survived this process makes this discovery even more extraordinary.

The bone was determined to belong to a female around age 13. This teenager died 90,000 years ago and was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father.

Viola couldn’t believe it.

Based on previous studies, it was assumed that Neanderthals and Denisovans occasionally interacted, but interbreeding between the two hominins was thought to be rare.

This breakthrough informs researchers that interbreeding could have contributed to the gene flow, or transfer of genetic information, and it is now evident in the bone fragment.

The fragment is also evidence that the two species were in the same region at the same time.

Interbreeding is a result of various factors, such as an attempt to colonize certain areas. The discovery could help shape our understanding of hominin interactions and forms the basis to determine further benefits to interbreeding.

As such, this finding allows researchers to try and understand the lives of our closest ancient human relatives.

YAP and TAZ are proteins that have long been recognized for their role in regulating transcription — a process in which the information in DNA is copied into RNA — and are particularly relevant in cancer development.

A recent study in Nature Communications led by Mandeep K. Gill in U of T’s Department of Biochemistry identified NUAK2 as a gene that could control YAP/TAZ activity.

In normally functioning cells, YAP and TAZ are responsible for forming and regenerating tissues. In tumours, however, these proteins are able to initiate and metastasize, or spread, cancer cells to other parts of the body, as well as initiate the tumours.

“The relatively recent discovery (roughly 10 years) of the so called  ‘Hippo pathway’ which normally acts to limit excess cell growth and the demonstration that it is turned off in most cancers has provided a new target for the development of therapeutics,” explained Liliana Attisano, a principal investigator of the study also from the Department of Biochemistry, in an email to The Varsity.

The Hippo pathway is a process that controls tissue and organ development in mammals, especially in their size, by regulating cell growth and death, and controls the transcriptional activity of YAP and TAZ proteins.

The pathway can be activated by various factors, after which it engages its core cassette — a subunit made of enzymes known as kinases, which are involved in the movement of phosphate groups, or phosphorylation.

When a cascade of phosphorylation — the addition of a phosphate group — occurs in the cassette, YAP and TAZ are marked with phosphate groups and are targeted for degradation.

When the Hippo pathway is inactive, however, YAP and TAZ accumulate in the nucleus and latch on to the DNA-binding proteins in there, which can lead to cancer cell proliferation. 

Attisano and her team discovered NUAK2 was found to encode a protein that results in even more YAP and TAZ getting into the cell’s nucleus to further promote abnormal cell growth.

The researchers started by conducting studies in breast cancer cells and were able to identify  the kinase NUAK2 as a positive regulator of YAP and TAZ activity.

According to the study, “NUAK2 functions in a kinase-dependent manner to promote nuclear YAP/TAZ localization and activity” and promotes YAP and TAZ activity in a positive feedback loop.

A decrease in NUAK2 is therefore found to reduce transcriptional activity and the quantity of YAP and TAZ in the nucleus. As well, kinase-deficient NUAK2 was found to restore YAP and TAZ localization in the nucleus, which deemed NUAK2 an activator of YAP and TAZ activity.

“We found a way to restore the activity of the pathway (by removing or blocking NUAK2 activity),” wrote Attisano.

A lack of NAUK2 in cells showed a reduced cell growth and robust tumour growth in mice.

Tests were conducted on bladder cancer cells to determine the implications for human tumour progression. Larger increases of NUAK2 were found in high-grade samples that came from patients who had experienced a relapse.

These findings could be applied to cancer treatments as blocking the expression of or inhibiting NUAK2, YAP, and TAZ appears to restore Hippo pathway activity and cell growth, thus limiting tumour progression.

“There is still a long road ahead,” wrote Attisano. “But the next step would be [to] develop specific and potent compounds that can be tested in mouse and human organoid models with the long-term goal of… identifying a drug that can be used in patients.”

The European Union recently proposed Plan S, which aims to make all government-funded research open access (OA) and was accepted by 11 prominent funding agencies across Europe.

This initiative would deter researchers from publishing in traditional-style journals, such as Nature and Science, and attempts to circumvent issues perpetuated by paywalls so that information is more readily available to the public.

Open access refers to any scholarly research that is free, easily accessible, and often available online.

A brief history

The OA movement has been around since physicists and computer scientists began archiving data online, as early as the 1970s.

This way of using the internet to store and organize data gained immense popularity among librarians worldwide.

As the internet gained momentum, subscription costs for traditional journals started to rise and, consequently, neither public nor academic institutions could afford to access much of the research that was available. This resulted in a problem now known as ‘serials crisis.’

As a result, publishers were forced to drastically lower prices and provide grants to under-financed institutions and less economically stable countries.

Since then, the movement for OA publications has continued to grow, and has garnered both support and disdain globally. 

Types

OA publishing is widely classified into three main types: Gold OA, Green OA, and Hybrid OA.

Gold OA articles are immediately available online after publishing, but researchers must foot the costs of processing the article, including editing and peer review.

Doing so eliminates subscriptions and subsequent paywalls, but article processing charges (APCs) could present a large financial barrier to already underfunded research projects.

Green OAs have no APCs and are published in traditional journals, but are ‘self-archived’ in repositories, where they become available after an embargo period set by the publisher. The repository can be institutional or external and is often subject-based, which allows the general public to navigate a vast body of research more easily.

Hybrid OAs are the most prevalent and are offered by publishers that function as traditional journals.

Hybrid OAs are seen as a transitionary model that allows the copyright to stay with the author, giving them the right to publish the final version of the article without an embargo period.

Open access in Canada

Within Canada, there are three major federal granting agencies: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The three have come together and adopted a tri-agency OA policy that aims to expand the audience for the research they fund.

Canada has set an international precedent with this action and is working toward creating a more accessible scientific community.

Open access at U of T

The University of Toronto has adopted a similar policy and has readily available resources to help researchers make their findings OA. The initiatives introduced include TSpace, Open Access Week, Digital Special Collections, and Journal Production Services. University of Toronto Press also has four OA journals and continues to expand its collection.

Beyond Canada

As with any new movement in science, there are many detractors from the OA movement. In an industry worth more than $25 billion, publishing companies see OA as cutting a hole in their pockets.

The reputation of journals and the ‘publish or peril’ mentality have contributed to a robust industry, and many researchers view publishing in prestigious journals as the only way to further their careers.

The reputation that journals, such as Nature, carry in the scientific community make their demise seem unlikely.

Regardless of type, OA has garnered immense support worldwide. For government-funded research, it is a way of giving taxpayers a return on their investment. The movement could help combat misinformation, provide data for mining and commercial purposes, and help shape public policy.

The increased exposure associated with publicly available research also helps scientists in underfunded institutions gain access to new information. This results in a higher citation rate, which  is a key measure of an article’s value.

Despite protests, the OA movement is revolutionizing how research is shared to the public and among fellow researchers.

It was Frederick Banting’s co-discovery of how to extract insulin in the early 1920s at U of T that continues to save millions of lives across the globe, providing hope to patients suffering from diabetes who, in previous years, had none.

For Dr. Sue Tsai and Dr. Dan Winer at the University Health Network (UHN), insulin is the gift that keeps on giving.

“In [our] field a lot of people are looking at how obesity causes inflammation,” said Tsai. “But no one really knows it affects the immune system when it comes to infectious diseases, or cancer, because so many things are altered [and] your hormones are all dysregulated.”

Insulin’s role in diabetes is well-researched, but little is known about the role it has in regulating T cell function and what leads T cells to stop responding to insulin.

Tsai wanted to determine what factors cause obese individuals to have a reduced response to vaccinations, develop more infections, and be more likely to develop cancer.

They narrowed their target to insulin, because individuals become resistant to it when they become obese.

Tsai, a postdoctoral fellow at UHN, and Winer, an Assistant Professor in U of T’s Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, have uncovered an insulin signalling pathway that elicits a response from infection-fighting T cells when they are activated.

Insulin, a pancreatic hormone, promotes glucose uptake via downstream signalling pathways. These pathways involve the binding of the insulin hormone to an insulin receptor (INSR).

Immune cells, such as B cells and T cells, that protect the body against infection also possess this receptor. Tsai and Winer hypothesized that the binding of this receptor would stimulate T cell activation and proliferation, leading to a strong and immediate immune response.

In their study, Tsai and her colleagues compared T cell function in mice without the INSR to those with the receptor.

“We found that T cells [without INSR] become less functional, and when we give the mice influenza [H1N1], they do worse,” explained Tsai. “They lose more weight and then they have a weaker immune response against the influenza.”

INSR played an integral role in maximizing the potential function of the T cells in mice by increasing their nutrient uptake and in turn generating energy through ATP production during inflammation and infection.

The researchers’ findings provide some reasoning as to why vaccines in obese individuals may not be as effective. Many obese individuals are insulin-resistant and, as shown in this study, could therefore have a weaker T cell response.

T cells are integral to the efficacy of a vaccine, as they recruit infection-fighting antibodies and aid in immunological memory.

Tsai hopes to continue exploring the link between insulin and immunity, and is currently investigating insulin signalling in B cells. She believes the findings of these studies could have wide-ranging applications.

“The most obvious thing is influenza vaccines. How can we develop a vaccine, and what additional signals can we add to the vaccine to get them to work better in individuals who are insulin resistant?” said Tsai.

“Also, tumour immunotherapies. Do obese people respond to these therapies differently than non-obese people and does insulin resistance play a role in that?”

In the future, the insulin signaling pathway could also be used to study and find ways to ‘boost’ the immune system and develop vaccines that would work more effectively in obese individuals.

Tsai’s findings were published in Cell Metabolism last month, almost a century after the discovery of insulin.

The ability to discriminate between different quantities is not a skill unique to humans. Different animals, including fish, may possess the ability to count.

UTM Professor Robert Gerlai of the Department of Psychology contributed to a study that examines whether and, if so, how Pterophyllum scalare, otherwise known as angelfish, discriminate quantities while foraging.

Scientific literature on quantity discrimination in a foraging context has predominantly focused on mammals and birds. Several of these studies have shown that when animals are tested in laboratory conditions, they are sensitive to quantitative differences and often choose larger sets of food items over smaller sets.

Previous studies have shown that fish have the ability to distinguish between quantities of conspecifics, or members of their species. Angelfish are a social species, so there is an evolutionary benefit to being able to distinguish between sizes of groups. Choosing the larger group of fish, or shoal, offers better protection and reduces the risk of predation.

There is a literature gap in quantity discrimination experiments in fish with food as the discriminant. Fish, especially those that live in shoals, are often negatively affected when tested in complete isolation in a laboratory setting. In addition to the frightening test environment, other complications like uneven odour cues have prevented scientists from focusing on quantity discrimination in foraging contexts in fish.

Gerlai and his colleagues devised a novel methodology that allowed for angelfish to be tested individually while in a shoal, and therefore mitigated stress on the fish. Their new procedure also reduced other variables. For example, by presenting the stimuli outside of the aquarium, chemical and olfactory cues were excluded. This novel setup opens the way for developing more methods to accurately test numerical abilities in fish.

When quantity discrimination in a foraging context is tested in animals, often a binary choice test is given. This is a test in which two options are given to the animal and the choice the animal makes is observed. In the context of fish, a picture of a single item of food is shown on one side of the tank. On the opposite side of the tank, a picture of multiple items of food is shown. The side in which the fish spends the longest amount of time can be taken as the choice that animal has made.

There are two predominant theories that are said to explain how animals have the ability to count. The first is called the object file system, which allows animals to differentiate based on the number of elements, such as food items, in different groups — it is therefore thought to be more precise. The object file system of discrimination is said to be limited to small number of food items, with a maximum of four elements.

The second theory, known as the approximate number discrimination system, is used when larger sets of elements are presented. The approximate number discrimination system depends on ratios, not the absolute numerical differences between the number of elements compared.

In this study, Gerlai and his colleagues found a significant increase in accuracy in choosing the larger number of food items as the numerical ratio between the contrasting sets of food items increased. Overall, their results point to evidence that activation of the approximate number system was being used to discriminate.

Fish may not be solving complex math problems any time soon, but studying decision-making in this species when a binary choice test is given in a foraging context may help understand more complex behaviours.

Scientists are still left with several questions about the extent to which quantity discrimination in a foraging context is learned and if it is a result of evolutionary fine-tuning of neural circuitry.

Oskar Shura and Pawandeep Sandhu, recent graduates from the Department of Biology at UTM, investigated animal risk-taking behaviour in the common earthworm, Lumbricus terrestris.

“Having the background information in a simple invertebrate such as an earthworm could really provide us with information on how, or why, other organisms take risks, and how external factors (such as starvation) could influence these choices,” explained Shura in an email.

Their study, published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was carried out from September 2016 to April 2017 as part of BIO318, a year long research course at UTM that explores animal behaviour.

Shura and Sandhu worked under the mentorship of Cylita Guy, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and Rosalind L. Murray, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology. Cylita helped Shura and Sandhu shape the manuscript, while Murray provided her expertise for statistical analyses and supplementary data.

To explore the starvation-related trade-off with safety in Lumbricus terrestris, the authors manipulated the earthworm’s tendency to move away from light, a phenomenon known as negative phototaxis.

Earthworms prefer to live in predominantly moist and dark habitats, yet they are foragers that feed at the surface of the soil. This reaction to light is thought to be a defensive tactic against predators that may be active during dawn or daytime, or as a strategy to avoid dry soil, which may lead to desiccation and suffocation.

The association between starvation and risk was tested by defining movement toward light as risky behaviour.

The worms were divided into three groups: a non-starved group kept in high-nutrient compost and a starved group kept in low-nutrient potting soil for seven days prior to the experiment, as well as a group in a half-starved condition that was transferred from being in high-nutrient soil for four days to low-nutrient soil for three days prior to the experiment.

Worms from the groups at the three different stages of starvation were then individually placed in an arena where they could choose between a dark, low-nutrient environment or a bright, LED-lit, high-nutrient environment.

While there were no significant observed differences of choice and latency between the half-starved and starved worms, considering their general aversion to light, the starved and half-starved groups chose the nutrient-rich but lit environment at more than double the proportionality than the worms that were not starved.

Starved earthworms were more willing to ignore the bright environmental cue to danger when facing hunger as the alternative. They also made decisions more quickly; the starved groups took about half the time of non-starved worms when deciding between the two conditions.

The study highlighted “a cost-benefit trade-off between growth and survival,” when a hungry worm might choose to ignore the danger signs posed by a bright environment to benefit from the potential windfall gain of nutrition. There is a key balance between safety and hunger and its influence on the decision-making process in the worm.

The similarity to human behaviour is easy to see.

“You might be more likely to eat at a really sketchy food joint that you might get food poisoning from if it’s close rather than travel a really far distance to go to better food,” explained Guy.

Considering that species such as these earthworms are relatively understudied, the authors suggest that identifying behavioural similarity and differences between diverse evolutionary groups could benefit our understanding of biology and ecology.

According to Shura, studies that examine the behaviour or life history of the common earthworm  Lumbricus terrestris, an invasive species, could be used to manage their population numbers in the future.

Shura and Sandhu presented their findings at the Canadian Society for Ecology & Evolution Meeting 2018 at the University of Guelph in July.

“To have our research critically evaluated by such experienced individuals like Cylita, Ros [Murray], our professors, and the editors, was truly such an honour,” said Shura.