Hi Reddit, My name is Dr. David Robertson and I am Teaching & Research Fellow at the School of Psychological Sciences & Health, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (UK). My research focuses on applied face recognition and the use of this biometric in policing and security contexts. I recently published a study (Robertson DJ, Kramer RSS, Burton AM (2017)) titled Fraudulent ID using face morphs: Experiments on human and automatic recognition in PLOS ONE. Across three experiments we assessed the extent to which human operators and a smartphone algorithm accepted face morphs as a genuine match to a target face. Face morphs do represent a route to identity fraud in humans and machine recognition systems, human detection of these images can be improved through awareness training. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @UOSPsychology York FaceVar Lab website here.

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi Reddit, My name is Rebekah L. Rogers and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics at UNC Charlotte. My research focuses on genome structure changes and new gene formation. I recently published a study titled “Excess of genomic defects in a woolly mammoth on Wrangel Island” with Montgomery Slatkin. We reanalyzed genome sequences for two woolly mammoths. One specimen came from Siberia at a time when mammoths were happy and healthy. The other comes from a small population that existed on Wrangel Island until 3700 years ago, another 600 years after all mainland mammoths had gone extinct. We found that bad mutations were accumulating in woolly mammoth genomes just before they went extinct. The accumulation of bad mutations is consistent with mathematical theories predicting that natural selection becomes inefficient in small populations. Under these circumstances, bad mutations could accumulate in genomes that normally would be weeded out by competition. The mammoth from Wrangel Island had 50% more of its genes broken compared with the mainland mammoth from much earlier. Several different types of bad mutations had accumulated— large deletions in the DNA, retrogenes (which reflect the action of selfish virus-like DNA sequences), and single letters that would cause genes to terminate early. Many of the broken genes are urinary proteins and the olfactory receptors that detect them — genes important for social signaling. We also discovered that the mammoth from the island had mutations that would give him a shiny satin coat. These results may be important for conservation. They suggest that other very small populations of endangered species might undergo the same type of mutational meltdown. In our mammoths, we found that it required many generations to see a signal as strong as what we observed in the Wrangel Island genome. The sooner we can intervene to bring endangered species back to normal levels, the better off their genomes will be. There are many factors that influence extinction. Climate change, habitat destruction, and hunting were all very important for the mammoths’ demise. Still, these bad mutations certainly did not help them as the struggled to adapt on the island. Listen to the 60 second Science podcast on our work. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET. Ask me Anything! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @evolscientist or elsewhere on reddit as rlrogers. Alright! 1pm ET! Ready to go! Ok, thanks for all the fun questions!! I had a great time! Now it’s back to the lab to collect fruit flies!

Hi Reddit, My name is Ole Andreassen and I am a Professor in Psychiatry at University of Oslo. I have also a clinical position where I see patients regularly in the outpatient clinic at Oslo University Hospital. My research focuses on severe mental illness and neurodegenerative diseases. We recently published an article titled Genetic assessment of age-associated Alzheimer’s disease risk: development and validation of a polygenic hazard score in PLOS Medicine. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of a new genetic score to predict Alzheimer’s disease age of onset. Our results show that genetic data can be combined with epidemiological information on dementia incidence rates from the US population to derive a score that can predict age-specific risk for Alzheimer’s disease. I’ll be answering questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!

Hi Reddit, My name is Erin Mordecai and I am an Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University. My research focuses on the complex ways in which global change (including climate, land use, species invasions, etc.) influences infectious disease. I am joined by coauthors Jamieson O’Marr and Chris LeBoa. Jameison is a junior undergraduate majoring in biology at Stanford University, whose research interests involve using ecological methods to study and predict the spread of infectious disease. Chris is an undergraduate human biology major at Stanford University concentrating in disease ecology. His research focuses on using preventative strategies to reduce infectious disease risk. We recently published a review paper titled “Environmental and Social Change Drive the Explosive Emergence of Zika Virus in the Americas” in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. This study was unusual in that it was written as a class project in my Stanford undergraduate seminar course, Bio 2N: Global Change and the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease. We set out to explore all the ways in which global change may have fueled the emergence and spread of Zika virus in the Americas in the last two years. We found evidence for many factors at play, including poor housing and infrastructure, suitable climate, abundant mosquitoes that are well adapted to live and breed near humans, lapsed mosquito control, and global travel. For example, we found that Zika cases shot up in a province in Ecuador following a massive earthquake that destroyed housing and infrastructure. We also found that deforestation and low GDP both correlated with the number of Zika-linked microcephaly cases in Brazil. Because of the high suitability for mosquito transmission throughout much of the Americas (including parts of the southern US), we need to be much more vigilant about vector control and rapid public health responses to new emerging diseases. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Don’t forget to follow Erin on Twitter @morde.

Hi Reddit! We are Eric Jonas (a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Konrad Kording (Professor at Northwestern and RIC). Our research focuses on trying to understand how the neurons in the brain compute and give rise to behavior. A lot of what we do is come up with mathematical techniques to understand neural data and work on new methods to acquire this data. We recently published a paper titled “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” that tried to address if the analysis methods we frequently use in neuroscience are likely to provide the level of “understanding” we seek. One of the biggest challenges facing neuroscience is that we don’t actually know ahead of time how neural systems work, so validating analysis techniques can be a catch-22. We attempted to use these techniques on a microprocessor – a system we understand really well – to see if we could make sense of how it works. This ended up being quite difficult, and we suggest ways that we might move forward as a community to make sure our analysis methods really do what we hope they will. Our study has also been written up in the popular press. Read the articles in Arstechnica and The Economist) to learn more. We will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Us Anything! Follow Eric on Twitter @stochastician Konrad at @kordinglab.

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi reddit, my name is Daniel Irimia and I am an Associate Professor in the Surgery Department at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a Senior Investigator at Shriners Burns Hospital in Boston. My research focuses on designing novel technologies for measuring the activities of white blood cells from patients, towards better ways to predict, diagnose, monitor, and treat inflammation, infections, and sepsis. In 2016, I received the “Pioneers of Miniaturization” prize from the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society, for pioneering work on microfluidic technologies for measuring human neutrophil activities and applications to human diseases. I am the organizer of the recent Dicty World Race, an unorthodox approach aimed at encouraging biologists to employ emerging microfluidic technologies to make high precision measurements of cell migration for biological and medical research applications. The results and learning from this experiment were recently published as an article titled “A Worldwide Competition to Compare the Speed and Chemotactic Accuracy of Neutrophil-Like Cells” in PLOS ONE. The race enabled a large-scale comparison of motility and chemotaxis in the engineered cell lines, allowing exploration of a diverse set of strategies for enhancing chemotactic performance. We found that there are tradeoffs between cell speed and chemotactic accuracy in maze-like environments and that the winning cells were not the fastest cell type, but excelled in finding the shortest paths through the maze. These findings could eventually help us develop better therapies against infections and chronic inflammation. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @D__Irimia. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!

Hi Reddit, My name is Anirban Banerjee and I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biosciences & Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, INDIA. I am a microbiologist and my research primarily focuses on the identification of various methods adopted by pathogens to breach different barriers in our body, such as the blood-brain barrier or feto-maternal barrier etc. We hope to learn from the smart tactics employed by these tiny creatures and apply them to deliver drugs across these barriers which are hard to penetrate. We recently published an article titled “Membrane Vesicles of Group B Streptococcus Disrupt Feto-Maternal Barrier Leading to Preterm Birth” in PLOS Pathogens. It is a well established fact that colonization of vagina and cervix of pregnant women with Group B Streptococcus (GBS), an opportunistic pathogen, significantly increases the probability of preterm birth. However, in fairly large number of cases the bacteria has not been detected in the feto-maternal interface and/or amniotic fluid. This led us to wonder how GBS sitting in the vagina can orchestrate events at the feto-maternal barrier. We were of the opinion that since rupture of amniotic membrane which is a prerequisite for preterm birth involves a complex series of events; this can only be augmented by a host of bacterial factors and not just simply one. Our findings suggest GBS produces membrane bound vesicles (MVs) that are loaded with multiple toxic proteins and enzymes of the bacteria. These MVs are capable of traveling up through the reproductive tract and lead to a series of deleterious effects resulting in extensive damage of the feto-maternal barrier (amniotic membrane) and subsequently preterm birth. This work was primarily done by four doctoral students in my lab (Manalee Surve, Anajali Anil, Kshama Kamath and Smita Bhutda) in collaboration with Dr. Deepak Modi, from National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health (NIRRH), Mumbai, INDIA. I will be answering your questions at 1pm ET – Ask Me Anything!

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.