This month’s “Insights & Outcomes” clears a path through the snow to reveal new discoveries in the management of functional seizures, the formation of particle jets, and sustainability-minded chemistry — plus an honor for a leading astrophysicist and a presentation of physics thesis work in Europe.
As always, you can find more science and medicine research news on Yale News’ Science & Technology and Health & Medicine pages.
Mapped mitochondria
Mitochondria are known as the power plants that keep cells running. In the brain, where neurons are powered by mitochondria, mapping the location of mitochondria can reveal how they support brain function. A new study from Yale, published in the journal Science, shows that mitochondria are organized inside neurons in patterns that reflect not just the neuron’s type but also which neurotransmitter it uses and how it connects to larger brain circuits.
For the study, a research team led by the lab of Yale’s Damon Clark used what is known as a connectome dataset — an ultra-detailed electron microscopy map of a large brain region that shows how neurons are wired together while also revealing each neuron’s internal anatomy. By applying a massive fruit fly dataset of about 25,000 neurons, the team was able to measure hundreds of thousands of mitochondria across neural networks throughout the fly brain.
They found that mitochondria aren’t randomly scattered inside neurons. Their placement, size, shape, and complexity differ depending on the neuron’s type and the neurotransmitter it uses. Later, researchers found that what held true in the fruit fly brain held up when researchers looked for the same patterns in a mouse data set.
Together, the findings suggest that mitochondria shape and location are tightly linked to circuit structure. They’re built precisely into the logic of neural circuits and offer a new window into understanding how brain circuits are organized, the researchers said.
“One thing that made this research possible was just the massive amount of structural data, which allowed us to connect mitochondrial organization to many different aspects of circuit structure in the brain,” said Clark, the study’s senior author and a member of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) who is a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and of physics and of neuroscience.
Astrophysicist Natarajan makes ‘Impact 100’ list
Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor and Chair of Astronomy and professor of physics in FAS, has been named to New India Abroad’s inaugural “Impact 100” list of influential Indian Americans.
The list includes such notables as World Bank President Ajay Banga, astronaut Sunita Williams, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, actress and producer Mindy Kaling, wellness advocate Deepak Chopra, and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.
The editors of New India Abroad — a digital publication that aims to inform the global Indian diaspora — noted that the honorees were “selected not for visibility alone, but for impact — the ability to influence systems, shift conversations, and open doors for others. … What unites them is a shared commitment to excellence, public service, and a sense of responsibility to the communities they touch.”
Last year, Natarajan received the prestigious Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, awarded by the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics, for her groundbreaking research. Her work focuses on the formation, feeding, and feedback from black holes and their relationship to their host galaxies in the earliest stages of the universe, and her groundbreaking theories are now being validated by a new generation of powerful space telescopes.
New guidelines govern ‘functional seizure’ management
Functional seizures — episodes that resemble epileptic seizures but are not caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain — have long been misunderstood and frequently mismanaged. But new treatment guidelines from the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) offer new recommendations on how these seizures should be diagnosed and treated.
The guidelines call for earlier diagnosis and clearer communication among clinicians managing functional seizure patients, and they establish psychological therapies, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, as the cornerstone of treatment.
The guidelines, published in the journal Neurology, are based on research from a group of experts including Yale’s Ben Tolchin, associate professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine and author of the guidelines.
“This is a big step forward,” said Tolchin, who is also a fellow of the AAN. “Functional seizures affect many patients, and neurologists and emergency medicine physicians encounter them quite frequently.”
Functional seizures haven’t always easy to identify. Their symptoms can vary widely. Some episodes involve the involuntary movements that are a hallmark of epileptic seizures, but functional seizure patients can retain awareness as well as the ability to speak, see, and hear.
The new management guidelines mark a shift in standard care, away from medications and toward coordinated neurological and psychological treatment. The research showed that patients receiving these treatments were more likely to become seizure-free, experience fewer episodes, and report better quality of life.
“We’re now in the process of seeking endorsements from other organizations,” Tolchin said. “It’s important to raise awareness among professional organizations, among clinicians, and the general public.” The American Epilepsy Society and the Functional Neurologic Disorder Society have already endorsed the guidelines.
A method for methanol
Chemists at Yale and the University of Michigan have developed a novel, scalable approach to converting methane into methanol under mild, light-driven conditions — with potential benefits for industry and the environment.
Transforming methane — a component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change — into liquid fuels and industrial feedstocks has long been viewed as a grand challenge for researchers. Unfortunately, most approaches to such conversions are not commercially viable, either due to high costs, a low conversion rate, or both.
In the new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe a new approach that may prove more effective.
The researchers developed a system for selectively exposing methane and water — on a surface of photoactive Zinc oxide — to light. The new system involves a cycling of wet and dry conditions, resulting in a robust conversion of methane into methanol.
“The main issue to resolve was preventing overoxidation, that leads to uneconomic or even harmful products such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide,” said Jan Paul Menzel, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yale lab of Victor Batista, and co-first author of the study. “The beauty of this work is controlling the selectivity of methane oxidation by a step wise, dual state process by cycling through dry and wet conditions, using microdoplets of water to control the reaction environment.”
Batista is the John Gamble Kirkwood Professor of Chemistry in FAS, a member of the Energy Sciences Institute and the Yale Quantum Institute, and director of the Center for Quantum Dynamics on Modular Quantum Devices.
Yale co-authors of the study are Batista and Zhuoran Long, a postdoctoral associate in Batista’s lab. The study’s corresponding authors are Songtao Tang and Zetian Mi of the University of Michigan.
A visit to the ALICE detector
Sierra Cantway, a physics student in the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and a student at Yale’s Wright Lab, recently presented her thesis work at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Sierra Cantway at CERN.
Cantway, a member of CERN’s A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), also supported detector operations during the visit. She contributes to the data-taking operations of the ALICE detector through her work on its ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMCAL), a subdetector designed to measure energetic photons, light neutral mesons, electrons, and jets that are produced through high-energy collisions of particles in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.
While at CERN, Cantway prepared the EMCal for a highly anticipated Pb–Pb run, where the LHC is used to collide lead (Pb) ions traveling near the speed of light to create a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is an exotic, high-energy-density state of matter thought to have existed in the universe’s first nanoseconds.
“It was amazing to see the ALICE detector in person for the first time as part of that access,” Cantway said. “I could finally see with my own eyes the EMCal detector that I had been working on remotely throughout my Ph.D. I kept thinking, ‘Look, there’s that section of the detector I worked on the other day!’”
Cantway is advised by Helen Caines, the Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics in FAS.
The evolution of jets
Andrew Tamis, a physics student in GSAS and member of Wright Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Group, recently had a set of results from his thesis published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Specifically, his paper characterizes the evolution of jets — particle streams caused by the high-speed collisions of heavy ions.
Jet undergoing a parton shower of quarks (straight lines) and gluons (curvy lines), hadronization, and hadronic scatterings/decays.
Tamis is at the forefront of a new trend in research that looks at jets in terms of their evolution through time. Detectors can only pick up the jet at the end of its lifespan, so Tamis used a measurement for his analysis — called an Energy-Energy Correlator (EEC) — to determine how energy is distributed throughout a jet’s lifetime. Similarly, cosmologists use energy correlators of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — to learn about particles present at the beginning of the universe.
“We show that when certain particles become confined into hadrons [a type of subatomic composite particle], it happens at a similar scale,” Tamis said. “We can define that as energy times distance. Normally, this confinement happens at smaller distances the more energetic the particle is. As these jets fragment, the splittings go on and happen at shorter and shorter distances. We can then relate and say if we are looking at this confinement into hadrons happening at shorter distances, it happened at later times.”
The new study includes data from the Solenoidal Tracker at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab. Co-authors of the study are RHIG associate research scientist Isaac Mooney and Yale Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics Helen Caines.
Additional RHIC researchers from Yale who are part of the STAR collaboration include D. Allan Bromley Professor Emeritus of Physics John Harris, assistant professor Laura Havener, and graduate students Ryan Hamilton, Iris Ponce Pinto, and Emily Pottebaum.
Karen Guzman, Victoria Misenti, and Jim Shelton contributed to this report.
Research Redux:
In developing an immunity to allergens, a little ‘dirty’ goes a long way
Early do-not-attempt resuscitation orders aren’t driving disparities in cardiac arrest survival
Sweetening the deal for sustainability — while removing carbon dioxide
Why leaving things unfinished messes with your mind
A clearer look at critical materials, thanks to refrigerator magnets
