ResearchYear 2015 | Volume 13 | Health | Natural Science | Technology | Social Science | Humanities | Business Penat n 3 229 189 Moving Knowledge Forward Research at Advances in Knowledge from the University Penn of Pennsylvania Year 2015 | Volume 13 | upenn.edu/researchdir Health | Natural Science | Technology | Social Science | Humanities | Business Vincent Price Dawn Bonnell Provost Vice Provost for Research Universities are incubators of innovation. From health to the Research at Penn is produced by the University of Pennsylvania’s humanities, researchers are finding new ways to address the world’s Office of University Communications. toughest questions and biggest challenges. An innovative spirit is woven in the fabric of Penn’s vast research Contributing Writers and editors offiCe of the ViCe ProVost for researCh enterprise. It is part of the University’s storied past and is one of the Katherine Unger Baillie, Christina Cook, Heather A. Davis, Greg Johnson, Evan Lerner, 215-898-7236 cornerstones of the Penn Compact 2020, the vision for the future. Madeleine Stone, Maria Zankey upenn.edu/research Vice Provost: Dawn Bonnell In this brochure, you will read about some of the eminent research design across the University’s 12 schools from the past year. SwivelStudios, Inc. offiCe of goVernment and CommunitY affairs offiCe of uniVersitY CommuniCations A team of researchers is unraveling the mysteries of anesthesia, while 215-898-1388 another has uncovered a previously unknown pharaoh in Egypt. Scientists 215-898-8721 upenn.edu/ogca upenn.edu/pennnews Vice President: Jeffrey Cooper are finding new ways to ferry drugs across the blood-brain barrier, and others Vice President: Stephen MacCarthy are making strides toward creating highly efficient solar panels. Designers Associate Vice President: Phyllis Holtzman Manager of Internal Communications: are examining how to protect the Chesapeake Bay region from rising sea Heather A. Davis levels, and a legal scholar is examining whether U.S. companies are truly American-owned. Photo Technology / Solar Cells / page 18 Credits Felice Macera At Penn, research is aimed at expanding the frontiers of human achieve- Social Science / Prostate Cancer / page 25 ment and understanding with the ultimate goal of improving the world. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, To keep up with all the University’s research news, visit Penn’s [reproduction number LC-USW3-007843-E] research website: upenn.edu/researchdir. Social Science / Q&A / page 26 Peter Tobia ©2015 University of Pennsylvania Research Advances in Knowledge from the University Penn of Pennsylvania What’s Inside Year 2015 | Volume 13 | upenn.edu/researchdir Health | Natural Science | Technology | Social Science | Humanities | Business 4 20 22 Facebook helps form a rich linguistic analysis. Researchers uncover the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh. 16 26 A researcher uses plants to move drugs across the A higher education researcher highlights blood-brain barrier. the value of minority-serving institutions. 7 14 21 31 aiding adolescents new feature of Canine gel Prevents damage Pros and Cons Who have Ptsd eye is discovered from heart attacks of 401(k) Loans Prolonged exposure Dogs and humans have a part A team works to minimize For some, the practice therapy is more effective of the retina in common. the secondary effects that can be a sound financial than counseling. occur after a heart attack. decision. on the CoVer: A drawing of Lamberts Point, part of Norfolk, Va. Researchers are designing strategies to help build resilience in the face of rising sea levels. Untangling the Mysteries of Anesthesia Anyone who has undergone surgery— from a simple filling at the dentist to a major cardiac procedure—has experienced anesthesia of some kind. But despite its widespread use, how anesthesia works in the body remains a mystery. ANESTHESIOLOGY New research by a team at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine has shed light on how one common anesthetic, sevoflurane, performs in a sodium ion channel. The study, published in the HEALTH Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of an ongoing research project led by Roderic Eckenhoff, vice chair for research and a professor of anesthesiology at the School of Medicine, that seeks to unravel the mysteries of anesthesia. The multi-institutional team included researchers from Temple, Thomas Jefferson, and Drexel universities and the University of Pittsburgh, plus Associate Professors William Dailey and Ivan Dmochowski and Professor J. Kent Blasie, all from the Department of Chemistry in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences. This group found that sevoflurane binds to the sodium channel in three places, each having a different effect. One location is the channel pore and produces a simple pore-blocking mechanism, the second is in a gate that controls the opening and closing of the sodium channel, and the third is in another gate that controls sodium flow by changing the shape of the channel’s pore. “Even within these multiple sites, they’re not all working in the same direction to modulate the channel. They’re actually working against each other,” says Annika Barber, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neuroscience in the School of Medicine and lead author of the paper. “For a single ion channel, a single protein, it’s just one player in a host of proteins that toP: the three binding sites identified by modulates the effect of anesthesia, but even clustering analysis, including the extracellular within a single player, there’s more than one site (red), linker site (yellow), and cavity site (purple/green). interaction that matters in terms of regulating bottom: a top view of the isoflurane molecule. the way that channel behaves.” 2 | UPEnn.EDU/RESEARCHDIR | 2015 In order to examine how sevoflurane changes and manipulates the functions of the channel, Barber worked with the Institute for Computational Molecular Science at Temple to use molecular dynamic simulation—a 3-D computational modeling method—to force the anesthetic to stay in some areas of the channel protein and exit others. The team then worked with Manuel Covarrubias at Thomas Jefferson to integrate the 3-D behavior with electrical activity of the channel. If researchers are able to see how different channels are affected by anesthetics, to attribute a functional effect to a specific site, they could Nefarious Partnership theoretically begin to optimize the design of the / MICROBIOLOGY / drug for that particular site. This could lead to Responsible for drugs with fewer side effects. EALTH “If we understand the desirable properties of H Toddlers’ Tooth Woes the existing drugs, even though that might be a difficult project, I would say there’s every reason to believe we could make something better,” says Parents are admonished not to put their children to bed with a bottle, lest they rot Max Kelz, associate professor of anesthesiology their tiny teeth. Indeed, “bottle rot” is the familiar term for an aggressive and painful and critical care at Penn Medicine, who studies form of tooth decay that affects young children. In some cases, surgery is the only the relationship between anesthesia and uncon- viable treatment. sciousness. “It’s still fascinating that [anesthetics] Though researchers have known that sugar was to blame for this decay, called early exist in the first place, that they work as well as childhood caries, a team led by Penn’s Hyun (Michel) Koo, a professor in the School they do as often as they do. They can be thought of Dental Medicine’s Department of Orthodontics, wanted to better understand the of as tools to probe mechanism. some really funda- Koo has spent 15 years studying how microbes construct the biofilms known, in the mental questions in mouth, as dental plaque. Recently, he and other scientists had observed that in early biology.” childhood caries, these biofilms contained not only Streptococcus mutans—the bacterium Eckenhoff says implicated in most cases of tooth decay—but also a fungus, Candida albicans. doctors have become “We were puzzled,” says Koo. “Candida usually does not associate with S. mutans, nor remarkably skilled at does it colonize teeth very effectively.” administering anes- In research published in the journal Infection and Immunity, Koo and colleagues found thetics—despite the that S. mutans uses an enzyme to produce extracellular polysaccharides and that this mysteries that remain. enzyme also attaches to Candida, allowing the fungus to produce these glue-like “Patients shouldn’t polymers in the presence of sugar. The fungus uses this “glue” to bind to teeth and fear anesthesia,” he S. mutans, two abilities it otherwise lacks. Under these circumstances, the fungus boosts says. “But by the plaque formation. same token, they The enhanced biofilms also contained pockets of acidity next to the surface of teeth, shouldn’t take it for which can dissolve enamel and cause cavities. The study, which was supported by the granted. … We need national Science Foundation and the national Institute of Dental and Craniofacial a lot more work to understand how they work Research, found that the presence of S. mutans and C. albicans together doubled the and what else they might be doing, and how to number of cavities and boosted their severity severalfold in rats. avoid those other things.” n “Our data will certainly open the way to test agents to prevent this disease and, even more intriguing,” Koo says, “The possibility of preventing children from acquiring this painful and costly infection.” n 2015 | UPEnn.EDU/RESEARCHDIR | 3 EUROBIOLOGY N HEALTH there’s no such thing as ‘Catching up on sleep’ unfortunately for night owls, the phrase “catching up on sleep” may be a misnomer. new research from the Perelman School of Medicine published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that chronic sleep loss may lead to irreversible physical damage to and loss of brain cells. “We’ve known that when humans are sleep-deprived, their performance deteriorates,” says Sigrid Veasey, professor of medicine and member of Uthe Center for Sleep and Circadian neurobiology at Penn Medicine.