Hi Reddit, My name is Caspar Hallmann and I am PhD candidate at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My research focuses on population dynamics of birds and plants in relation to landscape and climate changes. My name is Eelke Jongejans and I am Assistant Professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My research focuses on spatial population dynamics: I’m interested in the demographic and driving processes that can explain why certain populations increase in number, while others dwindle. We recently published a study titled More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas in PLOS ONE. The aims were to see whether the total weight of insects flying in German nature areas has changed over time, and whether a change can be understood by considering climate change, land use change and local changes in plant species composition. The insect biomass data were painstakingly collected by our German co-authors of the Entomological Society Krefeld, using highly standardized traps from 1989 till 2016. Approximately every 11 days they placed a new bottle with ethanol, resulting in 1503 samples collected in 63 different sites. About half of the sites were visited in more than 1 year, resulting in 96 site-year combinations. To analyze this complex dataset we modeled daily biomass as a function of explanatory variable like habitat cluster, weather variables, plant species richness, proportion of land covered by agricultural fields in a 200m radius. While these variables explained a considerable amount of variation between the collected samples, they could not explain the overall 76% decline in insect biomass that we found over the 27 years. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Unsure what to ask? Read an interview with Caspar Hallmann on PLOS Research News.

Hi reddit, My name is Michael Inzlicht and I am a professor at The University of Toronto. My research focuses on the topic of self-control and the related concepts of cognitive control and executive function. I recently published a study titled, “A pre-registered naturalistic observation of within domain mental fatigue and domain-general depletion of self-control” in PLOS ONE. In this paper, we monitored over 16,000 students as they engaged in voluntary learning on an online program to examine the impact of time-of-day and within-task fatigue on participation and performance. Contrary to models of self-control that suggest that self-control is domain general and runs out, we did not find that task engagement decreased at the end of the day. These findings join others (e.g., http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147770) that cast doubt on the notion that self-control is based on some finite resource that diminishes with use. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @minzlicht!

Hi Reddit, My name is Marinho Lopes and I am a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. And I’m Leandro Junges and I am a Research Fellow at the EPSRC centre for predictive modelling in healthcare at the University of Exeter. Our research focuses on the mechanisms of seizure emergence and on mathematical models to quantitatively predict whose brains regions are most responsible for seizure generation. Our group recently published a paper titled “An optimal strategy for epilepsy surgery: Disruption of the rich-club?” in PLOS Computational Biology. We used statistical methods to determine how different regions were connected from the electrical recordings of the brain. We then applied advanced mathematical modelling to study which regions of the brain contribute most greatly to generating seizures and whether their removal would result in the brain being seizure-free. The idea being that if brain surgeons targeted these regions the outcome of surgery would be enhanced. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET– Ask Us Anything! Don’t forget to follow our group on Twitter @CBMA_UoE.

Hi Reddit, My name is Selena Bartlett and I am a Professor of Neuroscience and Group Leader at the Translational Research Institute, Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on developing innovative approaches to prevention and treatment of addictions. We focus on trying to develop strategies to help people overcome addiction to sugar that drives obesity and alcohol for alcoholism. And my name is Arnauld Belmer and I am postdoctoral researcher at the Queensland University of QUT. My research focuses on identifying the brain circuitry underlying the development of dependence and addiction, including to sugar or alcohol. My (Selena’s) laboratory focuses on dissecting the molecular signaling and neural circuitry pathways that have been changed by long-term overconsumption of sugar and/or alcohol. At the lab, we focus on two important areas associated with addiction, the amygdala that processes fear, stress and reward and the prefrontal cortex, that is important for impulse control and decision making. My lab has shown, that overconsumption of sucrose changes the neuronal circuitry in both the amygdala (which this paper is about) and the prefrontal cortex. The shocking finding for my lab, was that sugar changes the brain in exactly the same way that long-term consumption of alcohol does. Today, we will discuss the changes happening in the amygdala from overconsumption of sucrose. We hypothesize that these maladaptive changes in the BLA lead to changes in signalling activity in the amygdala, that is the basolateral amygdala becomes more sensitive to stress and fear signaling over the long-term. The consequence is that the reward/motivation circuits become down-regulated, this leads to people using high calorie rewards, such as sucrose, to reduce activity in the over-reactive amygdala. We recently published a paper titled Binge-like sucrose consumption reduces the dendritic length and complexity of principal neurons in the adolescent rat basolateral amygdala in PLOS ONE, showing that chronic binge-like sucrose consumption elicits maladaptive changes in the morphology of neurons in the amygdala. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything!

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Hello Reddit, My name is Jackson Champer and I am postdoc at Cornell. My research focuses on gene drives, which are genes designed to spread rapidly through populations. A successful gene drive in mosquitoes could help fight vector borne diseases such as malaria and dengue. Together with my coauthors, I recently published a study titled “Novel CRISPR/Cas9 gene drive constructs reveal insights into mechanisms of resistance allele formation and drive efficiency in genetically diverse populations” in PLOS Genetics. We found that resistance alleles, which prevent the spread of the gene drive, can form in both the germline and in the embryo stages in fruit flies. We utilized the nanos promoter for better gene drive performance, and we also found that gene drive could produce greater or smaller numbers of resistance alleles, depending on the genetic background of the insect. Since our PLOS Genetics article was submitted, we have taken the first steps towards reducing resistance allele formation. A preprint of our new results is available on bioRxiv I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask me Anything! I also post occasional research updates and links to gene drive papers on Twitter, follow me @Jackson_Champer.

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EDIT: David Lombardi will not be joining today’s chat. Hi Reddit, My name is Dorothee Fischer and I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My research focuses on how to design shift schedules that minimize risks for health and safety using the fact that people sleep and function optimally at very different times of day (they’re different chronotypes). My coauthor, David Lombardi, will be joining me for today’s chat. We recently published a study paper titled “Chronotypes in the US - influence of age and sex” in PLOS ONE. In this study, we found that there are large differences in chronotype among individuals at any age (from 15 to over 80) and that chronotype differs systematically by age such that on average adolescents aged 17-19 are the latest chronotypes in society making it hard for many high school students to accommodate early school start times. If you want to know more, Ask Us Anything at 1pm ET!

Hi Reddit, My name is Sarka Lisonkova and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. My research focuses on risk factors and determinants of severe maternal morbidity. I recently published a study titled ‘Maternal age and severe maternal morbidity: a population-based retrospective cohort study’ in PLOS Medicine. This study shows that older mothers – aged 40 years or more – have increasingly higher rates of potentially life-threatening conditions including acute cardiac events, shock, acute renal failure, amniotic fluid embolism, and serious complications of obstetric interventions. Even though these serious complications are rare, our results provide important information for counseling to women who contemplate delaying childbirth until their forties. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @sarkalis.

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Hi Reddit, My name is Hui Wu, a Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. My research focuses on microbial molecular mechanisms that contribute to oral infectious diseases, such as dental caries and periodontal disease. Specifically, I am interested in protein glycosylation pathways and using novel small molecules to inhibit bacterial biofilms. And I’m Jessica Scoffield, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. My research examines competitive interactions between commensals (“friendly bacteria”) and pathogens that occur in polymicrobial infections. I am particularly interested in discovering unique antimicrobial mechanisms used by commensal bacteria to inhibit pathogenic bacteria. We recently published a study titled A commensal streptococcus hijacks a Pseudomonas aeruginosa exopolysaccharide to promote biofilm formation, in PLOS Pathogens. The purpose of the study was to characterize the two-species biofilm of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a pathogen) and Streptococcus parasanguinis (a commensal), which are two bacteria that are present in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. Our study revealed that S. parasanguinis can utilize products made by P. aeruginosa to promote its own biofilm, while simultaneously restricting the incorporation of P. aeruginosa into the biofilm. Our findings suggest that commensals, such as S. parasanguinis, may be able to inhibit the persistence of P. aeruginosa. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything!