News from the Media

Flowers are common gathering places where pollinators such as bees and butterflies can pick up fungal, bacterial or viral infections that might be as benign as the sniffles or as debilitating as influenza. But “almost nothing is known regarding how pathogens of pollinators are transmitted at flowers,” postdoctoral researcher Scott McArt and Professor Lynn Adler at UMass Amherst microbiology, write. “As major hubs of plant-animal interactions throughout the world, flowers are ideal venues for the transmission of microbes among plants and animals.” In a recent review in Ecology Letters with colleagues at Yale and the University of Texas at Austin, McArt and Adler survey the literature and identify promising areas for future research on how floral traits influence pathogen transmission.

UMass Amherst food scientist Hang Xiao recently received a four-year, $491,220 grant to study the biochemical fate of nanoemulsion-based food delivery systems in the gastrointestinal tract, hoping to re-shape them and enhance the absorption of beneficial food components encapsulated in delivery systems. Food biochemists like Xiao believe that if taken up in appropriate amounts and forms, certain food components known as nutraceuticals might benefit human health by providing anti-inflammatory or anti-cancer effects. Nutraceuticals include flavonoids and carotenoids in fruits and vegetables, for example.

UMass Amherst officials are planning to build a solar panel array that would generate 2.4 megawatts of electricity in conjunction with ConEdison Development. The facility would be built on 10 acres the university owns in Hadley. Stephen Herbert, associate dean of agricultural research and outreach at the UMass Amherst Center for Agriculture, is leading the project. It must secure conservation permits in order to proceed.

A team of entomologists, including John M. Clark, UMass Amherst veterinary and animal sciences, has found out why the human head louse and the body louse, the same species, differ in their ability to transmit disease to their hosts. They say head lice are smaller and may contain more beneficial bacteria than body lice, which are larger. The larger lice apparently are more likely to get sick from the bacteria and pass it on to a host.

Joseph Elkinton, UMass Amherst environmental conservationalist, is leading efforts to find out if winter moths, destructive insects that have defoliated trees in eastern and southeastern Massachusetts, are moving into this region. He says there are more of them being observed, but so far they haven’t been seen in numbers high enough to cause concern. An online survey of the insects is available to track the insects.

A research team including fish ecologist Andy Danylchuk, environmental conservation, has documented rarely seen pre-spawning behavior in bonefish, which should aid future conservation efforts. Bonefish, sometimes called the gray ghost, are among the most elusive and highly prized quarry of recreational anglers in the Florida Keys, the Bahamas and similar tropical habitats around the world.

Carolyn DeMoranville, director of the UMass Cranberry Station in East Wareham, is featured in a story in The Boston Globe magazine. She says she spends most of her time thinking about ways to make the cranberry industry more sustainable and considering what may happen if the climate becomes warmer.

UMass Amherst entomologist Joseph Elkinton and graduate student Monica Davis are featured in a front-page story in The Boston Globe about the oak crypt gall wasp, an insect menace that is killing black oaks in southeastern Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod and Rhode Island. Elkinton says little is known about the wasps, but he says they pose a severe threat.

A story on the crypt gall wasp, an insect menace that is damaging trees on Cape Cod, notes that Joseph Elkinton, environmental conservation, and his graduate students, are searching for ways to deliver insecticide that will kill the insects.