Physicians have long prescribed a B-vitamin called nicotinic acid to help keep good cholesterol levels high. Early studies suggest that niacin prevents the removal of good cholesterol — known as high-density lipoprotein or HDL — from the body, and in so doing, raises the concentration of the substance. But the new results from studies of human cells suggest that niacin plays an even greater role, not just preventing removal, but actually boosting production of good cholesterol in the liver and small intestine.

“We’ve known the value of nicotinic acid for years, but this shows there could be even more benefits than we thought,” said the study’s lead author Michael Haas, a research associate professor of medicine.

A person’s cholesterol reading is made up of two major parts: HDL and low-density lipoprotein, also called LDL or “bad” cholesterol. HDL is responsible for moving cholesterol out of various tissues and into the liver so it can be flushed from the body. Doctors recommend keeping good cholesterol levels high and bad cholesterol levels low.

The body uses nicotinic acid to convert carbohydrates into energy. It is found in many over-the-counter multivitamin formulations and is sometimes prescribed on its own to lower triglycerides and increase good cholesterol.

But until now, researchers weren’t quite sure whether niacin could actually increase good cholesterol levels.

To find definitive evidence, the UF researchers tested human liver and intestine cells in the first study of its kind. They found that nicotinic acid increased the activity of a gene that produces a protein called apolipoprotein A-1, which is the major component of good cholesterol in the blood. Not only that, the researchers were able to identify the specific region of the gene that was responsible for making new HDL.

The work was funded by a $20,000 grant from the Endocrine Fellows Association to former UF fellow Dr. Abdul-Razzak Alamir.

“We have hoped for a long time that we would develop a medicine to raise the good cholesterol. Unfortunately many people do not tolerate the side effect of the drug nicotinic acid,” said Dr. Stewart G. Albert, a professor of internal medicine at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “What Dr. Haas and his group have done is demonstrate how nicotinic acid can increase the body’s ability to make the good cholesterol. This may enable researchers to find other medications that will accomplish the same benefit with a lower rate of side effects.”

The other authors of the study are Dr. Arshag D. Mooradian, professor and chairman of the UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville department of medicine; Dr. Joe M. Chehade, a UF associate professor of internal medicine; Dr. Senan Sultan, a former UF fellow; and Dr. Norman C.W. Wong, a professor of medicine, biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Calgary.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Shark attacks in the U.S. declined in 2011, but worldwide fatalities reached a two-decade high, according to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File report released today.

While the U.S. and Florida saw a five-year downturn in the number of reported unprovoked attacks, the 12 fatalities — which all occurred outside the U.S. — may show tourists are venturing to more remote places, said ichthyologist George Burgess, director of the file housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus.

“We had a number of fatalities in essentially out-of the way places, where there’s not the same quantity and quality of medical attention readily available,” Burgess said. “They also don’t have histories of shark attacks in these regions, so there are not contingency plans in effect like there are in places such as Florida.”

Seventy-five attacks occurred worldwide, close to the decade average, but the number of fatalities doubled compared with 2010. Fatalities occurred in Australia (3), Reunion (2), the Seychelles (2) and South Africa (2), with one each in Costa Rica, Kenya and New Caledonia. The average global fatality rate for the last decade was just under 7 percent, and it rose to 16 percent last year. Excluding the U.S., which had 29 shark attacks but no deaths, the international fatality rate averaged 25 percent in 2011, Burgess said.

“We’ve had a decade-long decline in the number of attacks and a continued decline in the fatality rate in the U.S.,” Burgess said. “But last year’s slight increase in non-U.S. attacks resulted in a higher death rate. One in four people who were attacked outside the U.S. died.”

Florida led the U.S. with 11 of its 29 attacks. Other countries with multiple attacks include Australia (11), South Africa (5), Reunion (4), Indonesia (3) Mexico (3), Russia (3), Seychelles (2) and Brazil (2). While the higher number of fatalities worldwide came as a surprise, the drop in the number of U.S. attacks follows a 10-year decline, Burgess said.

“It’s more than coincidence that we’ve had this drop over this last decade,” Burgess said. “The fact is, that’s a downward trend, and there has to be a cause for that. People might argue there’s less sharks, but since the late 1990s, populations have begun a slow recovery. By contrast, the number of attacks in the United States and Florida suggests there’s been a reduced use of these waters.”

Florida’s attacks historically lead the U.S., and as a high aquatic recreation area, especially for surfers, Volusia County leads the state. In 2011, Volusia County again led the state with six attacks, but it was the lowest since 2004 (3).

“It’s a good news/bad news situation,” Burgess said. “From the U.S. perspective, things have never been better, our attack and fatality rates continue to decline. But if it’s a reflection of the downturn in the economy, it might suggest that other areas have made a real push to get into the tourism market.”

The next step to reducing the number of fatalities is creating emergency plans for these alternative areas in the future, said Burgess, who has been invited to work on developing a response plan in Reunion Island this spring.

“Ironically, in this very foreign environment that has animals and plants that can do us harm, we often don’t seem to exhibit any concern at all, we just jump in,” Burgess said.

Surfers were the most affected group, accounting for about 60 percent of unprovoked attacks, largely due to the provocative nature of the activity. Swimmers experienced 35 percent of attacks, followed by divers, with about 5 percent.

“When you’re inside the water, there’s much less chance of sharks making a mistake because both parties can see each other,” Burgess said. “Surfing involves a lot of swimming, kicking and splashing.”

Despite the number of deaths being higher than other years, people should remember how much of a threat humans are to sharks, Burgess said. With worldwide over-fishing, especially to meet demands for flesh and fins used in shark fin soup, an expensive Asian delicacy, humans pose a greater threat to elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) than sharks do to humans.

“We’re killing 30 to 70 million sharks per year in fisheries — who’s killing who?” Burgess said. “The reality is that the sea is actually a pretty benign environment, or else we’d be measuring injuries in the thousands or millions per year.”

The 2011 Worldwide Shark Attack Summary may be viewed online at www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/isaf/isaf.htm.

The university and its partners also will receive another $3.5 million in matching non-federal funds. Most of these will be from the state departments of transportation represented in the consortium. However, matching funds may also be obtained by transit agencies, local agencies and private firms.

The new consortium, named Southeast Transportation Research, Innovation and Education Center, or STRIDE, will advance transportation research and education in the southeastern U.S. and nationally. The team from UF joined other universities in the region to create a consortium. They are: Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Florida International University, University of Alabama Birmingham and Auburn University.

The research done by the consortium can help alleviate congestion, increase safety, and optimize the use of the transportation system. Working closely with public agencies will assure that research results can be implemented quickly. For example, improved algorithms for signal control can help reduce the travel time along an arterial street.

STRIDE’s theme focuses on three key areas: safety, livable communities and economic competitiveness. These areas were chosen because of their importance to the southeastern U.S. and the nation, according to the consortium principal investigator, Lily Elefteriadou, director of UF’s Transportation Research Center, part of the College of Engineering’s department of civil and coastal engineering.

The consortium will develop a strong interdisciplinary network of researchers and educators who will collaborate across the region, work closely with state departments of transportation, and the U.S. Department of Transportation. Further, it will “enhance collaboration between universities working on transportation research problems” and produce “an increase of the number of grads going into transportation, which is a major goal for the U.S. DOT,” Elefteriadou said.

For the future of transportation, it means there will be increased collaboration at the university level, state departments of transportation and other public agencies, she said.

“There will be an increased awareness of the research going on at the universities regarding transportation and the increasing abilities of research results to improve the transportation network in the region,” she said.

The $3.5 million is from the U.S. Department of Transportation and its Research and Innovative Technology Administration, known as RITA.

“The dogma is that this type of disease is incurable and that if there’s a metastatic tumor in one organ, then others must be present throughout the body,” said investigator Dr. Paul Okunieff, director of the UF Shands Cancer Center and chairman of the UF College of Medicine’s department of radiation oncology. “It’s considered an all-or-none phenomenon, but the fact is this view is probably not correct. We need to think about metastasis like we think about the primary tumor: determine how much it has spread, then decide whether it’s treatable based on existing technology.”

Nearly 1.6 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer last year, and nearly 600,000 died from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute. Experts estimate that up to 90 percent of those deaths were from metastases.

The researchers studied 121 patients who had five or fewer tumors that spread from areas such as the breast, colon or lung, to up to three additional organs. Tumors were treated with a one- to two-week radiation course strong enough to kill them and prevent their recurrence while sparing healthy tissue. In about 20 percent of the patients, who were enrolled from 2001 to 2006, long-term follow up revealed that the treated tumors did not return, nor did new ones pop up elsewhere. Very few regrowths occurred among patients who made it to three years.

Breast cancer patients fared even better, with one-third of patients being free of tumor regrowth after three years. Six years after treatment, almost half of breast cancer patients in the study were still alive — five times the survival rate for people with forms of metastatic cancer other than breast cancer. In addition, for more than one-third of breast cancer patients, the cancer did not become widespread after six years, whereas only one-eighth of people with other forms of metastatic cancer did not see their cancer spread. In general, survival was greatest among patients whose secondary tumors were relatively small and responded well to chemotherapy or hormone treatment given before radiation.

“Our results suggest that patients with metastases that are limited in number and extent should be considered for potentially curative radiotherapy, said investigator Dr. Michael Milano, an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Rochester. “Further studies are needed to ascertain which patients are most likely to benefit, either through prolonged survival or, perhaps, a cure. We need a better understanding of the biology of cancer, and what makes one person’s cancer behave so differently from another’s.”

Some patients in the study had recurrence of a small number of tumors, and retreatment with targeted radiation controlled their disease.

The researchers call for further investigation into the most appropriate types of treatment for cancer that has spread to limited areas, and the types of cancers most likely to respond.

“Given the promising results of precisely targeted radiation in controlling the spread of disease, easing pain and even unexpectedly extending patient survival — as we’ve seen in our own clinical experience and in the published literature — we must pursue research that advances our understanding of the mechanisms at work,” said Dr. Raymond B. Wynn, executive director for stereotactic radiosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Cancer Center, and a clinical professor of radiation oncology at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “Fortunately, we are more than halfway there.”

Researchers with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences measured antioxidant content in a Florida-produced blueberry wine and compared it to published reports of antioxidant content in white and red wines made from grapes. Antioxidants are compounds that may offer cells protection from damaging molecules called free radicals.

The researchers found the Florida wine, produced from southern highbush blueberries, had more antioxidants than all of the reported white wine values and all but 20 percent of the reported values for red wines, which are considered high in antioxidants.

Wade Yang, a food science and human nutrition assistant professor with IFAS, led the research.

“For people seeking the potential health benefits of a glass of wine, blueberry wine is a comparable, and, in many instances, better alternative to grape wines,” Yang said.

Blueberry production in Florida was valued at more than $70 million in 2009 and is unique because the state’s warm climate allows it to provide some of the first fresh blueberries on U.S. store shelves in the spring.

Wine production offers blueberry producers a market for extra berries they might not be able to sell due to slight imperfections or late ripening, said Jeff Williamson, an IFAS professor in horticultural sciences and fruit crop specialist.

“Growers are always looking for value-added products and ways to utilize all of their crop rather than just the part that might in this case, ripen at the right time and be of the right standards for fresh fruit,” Williamson said.

Florida’s blueberry wine industry is relatively small, Williamson said.

Yang’s team tested the antioxidant activity of the blueberry wine using a method known as oxygen radical absorbance capacity.

This was the first study that looked at antioxidants in wine from southern highbush blueberries, a variety commonly grown in Florida. Previous studies have examined the antioxidant content of wine from northern varieties, and found the values comparable to southern blueberry wine.

Dark fruit, such as blueberries, often indicates the presence of antioxidants. Many of these antioxidants are transferred from the juice, fruit and skins of the blueberries when they are fermented into wine.

A local blueberry wine producing company contributed $5,000 to help fund the study. The research is published in this month’s issue of Sustainable Agriculture Research.

Four of the five categories measured by the survey reveal increased optimism. For instance, the overall perception among survey takers that they are better off financially than they were a year ago rose four points to 60, the highest figure since March 2008 when the U.S. economy began to falter. Expectations that their personal finances will improve by this time next year also rose eight points to 86.

In addition, confidence in the nation’s economy over the next year went up dramatically by 14 points to 74. Trust in the U.S. economy over the next five years was upbeat, too, moving 10 points to 83. These figures parallel results of a University of Michigan study that show consumer confidence across the nation shot up from 69.9 in December to 75 in January.

Only when it came to deciding if the present is a good time to buy big-ticket items such as an automobile or a refrigerator, did confidence among respondents sag, falling four points to 81.

“Consumer confidence in Florida is now back to the level it was in January 2011,” said Chris McCarty, director of UF’s Survey Research Center in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “We are beginning the year with the same pattern as last year where there were relatively steady increases in confidence from the end of the summer with a surge to 77 in January 2011. This was followed by seven months of decline with the low of 61 in August 2011 when Congress debated the debt ceiling.”

The UF survey shows these increases ranged across income and age groups, except for lower income respondents whose perceptions of current personal finances declined slightly. Results also indicate little difference in confidence among political parties, which indicate that the rising consumer confidence is most likely linked to perceptions of the economy rather than concern about the upcoming November elections, McCarty said.

Employment gains, especially in trade, transportation and utilities, may help explain the boost in confidence. However, McCarty said, the drop in unemployment may also reflect a decline in the labor force, along with adjustments the Bureau of Labor Statistics used to remove seasonal fluctuations in its unemployment calculations.

“The employment report for January will help identify if this is indeed a trend,” he said.

Encouraging news about housing prices and stock market investments, which are the major asset sources for most households, also may be helping to buoy Floridians’ spirits, McCarty said. For instance, the median price of a single-family home increased in December to $134,300, a $4,000 gain from the previous month. In addition, the stock market is near a post-recession high.

“Concrete plans to modify Social Security and Medicare have been shelved, at least temporarily, which is a relief to many seniors,” McCarty said.

Finally, although gas prices have increased nearly 20 cents a gallon over the past month, inflation overall remains low. In addition, interest rates are at near record lows and the Federal Reserve has announced plans to keep them low for the next two years.

“While many aspects of the economy are better this year, it remains to be seen whether this level of confidence will be sustained,” McCarty said. “The biggest threat to the U.S. economy, and therefore Florida, is the recession in Europe which would affect Floridians primarily as decreased demand for Florida tourism, decreased demand for houses from foreign investors, and the stock market portfolios of workers and retirees whose investments would include companies with exposure to much of Europe. However, barring a very negative outcome to the turmoil over European debt, this pattern of confidence, if sustained, bodes well for Florida.”

The index used by UF researchers is benchmarked to 1966, which means a value of 100 represents the same level of confidence for that year. The lowest index possible is a 2; the highest is 150.

The UF survey was conducted between Jan. 2 and Jan. 25, and reflects the responses of 420 individuals statewide.

But the ants’ social behaviors — such as hauling their dead off to what entomologists call “bone yards” in isolated spots away from the nests — have prevented commercial development of this method. The fungus can’t spread if infected ants are continually separated from healthy ones.

A new University of Florida study shows, however, that there may be a way to make insect-killing fungi a more potent weapon against fire ants and other pests. Scientists with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences modified the fungus so that it produces a peptide that helps regulate the fire ants’ nervous system.

The modified fungus was five to eight times as effective in killing fire ants, but had no increased effect on an unrelated insect, the greater wax moth. The researchers were surprised to learn that the modified fungus had another benefit — it disrupted the ants’ undertaker-like behavior.

The study was published this month by the online journal PLoS One.

“Potentially, it’s important because if you can disrupt this behavior, you may be able to increase the efficacy of the fungus in the nest, because they won’t take the dead out and you can spread the infection throughout the nest better. In theory, you could use the same amount of fungus and it would be more effective,” said Nemat Keyhani, a UF associate professor of microbiology and cell science and the study’s lead author.

Keyhani also led a research team in a similar study of mosquitoes, publishing the findings in this month’s issue of Nature Biotechnology.

In that study, the scientists tested Beauveria bassiana against mosquitoes, modifying the fungus so that it produced another peptide, called TMOF (trypsin-modulating oostatic factor).

This hormone, discovered by a UF/IFAS entomologist, is produced by mosquitoes. It stops the insects from producing a crucial digestive enzyme called trypsin. Though TMOF is important for the normal digestive process, too much of it causes mosquitoes to starve, unable to take nutrients from food.

Keyhani said the goal of both studies was to show that a host molecule, such as a peptide or hormone that an insect uses for a normal physiological process, can be used against it, disrupting that process and making it more susceptible to microbial infections.

In the mosquito study, combining the fungus with TMOF reduced the survival time of the mosquitoes by 25 percent, reduced females’ trypsin activity by 50 percent, and resulted in female mosquitoes laying 40 percent fewer eggs.

“So we’ve now proven the concept in two different ways — one against mosquitoes and one against fire ants,” Keyhani said.

Roberto Pereira, an IFAS research associate scientist in urban entomology and a member of the fire ant research team, said the findings are promising, but more study will be needed to determine commercial viability.

“We would probably want to enhance mortality quite a bit more than we did,” he said. “But even a small change in efficacy of the pathogen in causing disease or its ability to spread can cause it to go from a weak pathogen to one that overwhelms the host population.”

The ability to show that the modified fungus can target a specific insect population is also important, he said.

Besides Keyhani and Pereira, the fire ant research team included Yanhua Fan of Southwest University in Chongqing, China; Engin Kilic, a postdoctoral student in microbiology and cell science at UF and George Casella, a UF distinguished professor in IFAS statistics.

In addition to Keyhani and Fan, the mosquito research team included former UF entomology professor Dov Borovsky and UF graduate student Chloe Hawkings and UF postdoctoral fellow Almudena Ortiz-Urquiza.

The discovery nearly doubles the number of verified Kepler planets so far. It also triples the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits – or passes in front of — its host star. Such systems are particularly valuable for the clues they provide about how planets form.

Eric B. Ford, associate professor of the astronomy department at the University of Florida, is part of the Kepler Mission science team. Ford’s research group at UF, including graduate student Robert Morehead and postdoctoral associate Althea Moorhead, has contributed to several previous Kepler discoveries. Ford is lead author of the paper describing Kepler-23 and Kepler-24, two of the 11 systems announced today.

In this research, Ford and his team not only describe the two new planetary systems but also develop a new technique that, in Ford’s words “dramatically accelerates planet discovery and will enable astronomers to confirm planets transiting fainter and more distant stars.”

The Kepler Mission uses a 1-meter space telescope to stare constantly at a patch of the Milky Way, registering the small decreases in the light from stars caused when a planet crosses in front of it. With this tool, astronomers are able to constantly monitor more than 160,000 stars at a time.

Until now, confirming that small decreases in a star’s brightness was caused by a planet required additional observations and time-consuming analysis. The new technique takes advantage of the gravitational effects that different planets in a system have on each other’s orbits. By precisely timing the deviations from the expected orbital times caused by this effect, the team was able to detect the gravitational tug exerted by the planets on each other, and confirm 10 of the newly announced planetary systems.

Five of the new planetary systems contain a pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer planet. Another five systems contain a pair of planets where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet orbits its star.

“These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher,” said Jason Steffen, the Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Fermilab Center for Astroparticle Physics and lead author of a paper confirming four of the systems.

The new planets orbit close to their host stars, their size ranging from 1.7 times the radius of Earth to about the size of Jupiter. Fifteen of them are smaller than Neptune and further observations will be required to determine which of them are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The confirmed planets orbit their host star once every 6 to 143 days, so all of them are closer to their host star than Venus is to the sun.

The new discoveries will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Searching for exoplanets using real Kepler data is open to everyone by visiting planethunters.org. For more information about the Kepler mission visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

Now they can live longer thanks to a new minimally invasive treatment that involves inserting an artificial valve that takes over the work of the diseased valve. The University of Florida is among a limited number of facilities around the country initially approved to offer the procedure.

“It’s exciting — this technology opens an option for patients who otherwise do not have a repair option,” said cardiologist Dr. Anthony A. Bavry, an assistant professor in the UF College of Medicine’s department of medicine. “Previously we had to treat these patients with medications, and unfortunately many did not do well. This is a big change.”

The new valve replacement technique, called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in November 2011. Medical practices approved to perform the procedure had to demonstrate high levels of expertise and collaboration in cardiology and surgery, as well as high-quality facilities for conducting the procedure and collecting data for patient care and monitoring.

Bavry and Dr. R. David Anderson, director of interventional cardiology at UF, will team with thoracic and cardiovascular surgeons Dr. Thomas M. Beaver, and Dr. Charles T. Klodell, to do the procedure at UF&Shands, the University of Florida Academic Health Center. Working in such multidisciplinary teams streamlines and speeds patient evaluation and decisions about the best course of action.

“You have both a surgeon and a cardiologist seeing a patient, reviewing the data and making the best decision about how to treat,” Bavry said.

Among the elderly, severe aortic stenosis is the most common abnormality of the heart valves. But up to one-third of such patients are considered ineligible for surgery. They are instead given medicines to control heart rate and blood pressure, and their heart volume is monitored in order to head off congestive heart failure. Medical treatments ease symptoms but do not prolong life.

In the new TAVR procedure, the artificial valve — framed by a stent and wrapped around a balloon — is transported up to the aortic valve via a large catheter in the leg. The new valve is then anchored into position inside the diseased valve by inflation of the balloon. Placement of the stent is monitored with X-ray and ultrasound imaging.

Patients’ survival chances improve with the new technique. In clinical trials involving 700 patients, treatment with the new procedure cut the death rate nearly in half after one year of having the implanted device, compared with medical therapy alone.

“This is one of the best things that has happened in the last 10 years in interventional cardiology,” said Dr. Samir Kapadia, an interventional cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who is one of the leaders in clinical trials of the new technique. “Procedurally, it’s like a miracle — patients are sick, you do the critical part of the valve replacement in 15 to 30 seconds and all of a sudden the heart starts working more efficiently. It has changed the way we do things and has provided treatment options for lots of people who did not have an option before.”

The procedure has also been compared with traditional open surgery in patients who were operable but had a high risk of dying if they did have surgery. After a year, patient outcomes were comparable to those of surgery patients. Additional studies are being carried out to see how the procedure works among patients who are at lower risk of death if they have surgery.

The UF team has begun evaluating patients to see who might be good candidates for the procedure. Tests include chest CT scans, cardiac catheterization and EKGs. They are also reaching out to physicians whose patients might benefit.

Research continues on new ways to insert the valve, as well as on new types of valves, including one that can be repositioned after it has been placed inside the body.

The study is the first complete assessment of greening’s economic impact on Florida, said Jack Payne, UF senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources. He called the study an important step in the fight against greening, because it quantifies damages and could show legislators and funding agencies why the invasive disease is one of the state’s biggest challenges.

“This study shows plainly just how imperative it is that we find a cure for citrus greening,” Payne said. “We have dedicated a huge amount of IFAS resources toward that end, and we are very appreciative of the significant support our research is receiving from the citrus industry. Growers are the people most obviously impacted, but the study demonstrates that many other Floridians are hurt as well—when fewer oranges are harvested, there are fewer dollars circulating in our state’s economy.”

First detected in Florida in 2005, greening causes citrus trees to drop fruit prematurely and eventually kills the trees. The disease is caused by a bacterium, and was first described in 1919 in China. The bacterium is transmitted by an invasive insect, the Asian citrus psyllid.

The study compares actual harvests of oranges used to make juice with projected harvests that would have taken place if greening had never struck Florida groves; it covers the growing seasons from 2006-2007 through 2010-2011. During those five years, the disease caused substantial crop losses, said citrus economist Tom Spreen, a professor with the UF/IFAS food and resource economics department.

The state’s juice-orange harvest for the period was 734 million boxes, and would have been an estimated 951 million boxes without greening, Spreen said. To develop economic impact figures, Spreen and colleague Alan Hodges, an extension scientist with the department, analyzed both scenarios using statistical models and data on the citrus industry and Florida’s economy.

To estimate lost revenues and jobs, the economists took into account direct losses to growers, indirect losses to industries affiliated with citrus production and the resulting cuts in spending by employee households and government.

When focusing strictly on juice-orange production during that five-year period, Florida growers lost $1.36 billion in revenues, and 2,125 permanent jobs were lost.

Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest citrus grower organization, funded the study. The study did not address production of other citrus varieties, such as grapefruit, or oranges sold fresh to consumers, Spreen said.

Florida is the nation’s largest citrus producer and the world’s second-largest orange juice producer, after Brazil. Florida’s citrus industry generates about $8.9 billion a year, mainly from orange juice production.

The study is available at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe903.

Several complex and costly steps remain before the gene therapy technique can be used in humans, but once at that stage, it has great potential to change lives.

“Imagine that you can’t see or can just barely see, and that could be changed to function at some levels so that you could read, navigate, maybe even drive — it would change your life considerably,” said study co-author William W. Hauswirth, the Rybaczki-Bullard professor of ophthalmology in the UF College of Medicine and a professor and eminent scholar in department of molecular genetics and microbiology and the UF Genetics Institute. “Providing the gene that’s missing is one of the ultimate ways of treating disease and restoring significant visual function.”

The researchers tackled a condition called X-linked retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic defect that is passed from mothers to sons. Girls carry the trait, but do not have the kind of vision loss seen among boys. About 100,000 people in the U.S. have a form of retinitis pigmentosa, which is characterized by initial loss of peripheral vision and night vision, which eventually progresses to tunnel vision, then blindness. In some cases, loss of sight coincides with the appearance of dark-colored areas on the usually orange-colored retina.

The UF researchers previously had success pioneering the use of gene therapy in clinical trials to reverse a form of blindness known as Leber’s congenital amaurosis. About 5 percent of people who have retinitis pigmentosa have this form, which affects the eye’s inner lining.

“That was a great advance, which showed that gene therapy is safe and lasts for years in humans, but this new study has the potential for a bigger impact, because it is treating a form of the disease that affects many more people,” said John G. Flannery, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley who is an expert in the design of viruses for delivering replacement genes. Flannery was not involved in the current study.

The X-linked form of retinitis pigmentosa addressed in the new study is the most common, and is caused by degeneration of light-sensitive cells in the eyes known as photoreceptor cells. It starts early in life, so though affected children are often born seeing, they gradually lose their vision.

“These children often go blind in the second decade of life, which is a very crucial period,” said co-author Alfred S. Lewin, a professor in the UF College of Medicine department of molecular genetics and microbiology and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. “This is a compelling reason to try to develop a therapy, because this disease hinders people’s ability to fully experience their world.”

Both Lewin and Hauswirth are members of UF’s Powell Gene Therapy Center.

The UF researchers and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania performed the technically challenging task of cloning a working copy of the affected gene into a virus that served as a delivery vehicle to transport it to the appropriate part of the eye. They also cloned a genetic “switch” that would turn on the gene once it was in place, so it could start producing a protein needed for the damaged eye cells to function.

After laboratory tests proved successful, the researchers expanded their NIH-funded studies and were able to cure animals in which X-linked retinitis pigmentosa occurs naturally. The injected genes made their way only to the spot where they were needed, and not to any other places in the body. The study gave a good approximation of how the gene therapy might work in humans.

“The results are encouraging and the rescue of the damaged photoreceptor cells is quite convincing,” said Flannery, who is on the scientific advisory board of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which provided some funding for the study. “Since this type of study is often the step before applying a treatment to human patients, showing that it works is critical.”

The researchers plan to repeat their studies on a larger scale over a longer term, and make a version of the virus that proves to be safe in humans. Once that is achieved, a pharmaceutical grade of the virus would have to be produced and tested before moving into clinical trials in humans. The researchers will be able to use much of the technology they have already developed and used successfully to restore vision.

Researchers analyzed genes of a naturally occurring hybrid species, Tragopogon miscellus, and the study, published online today in Current Biology, suggests genome evolution in hybrid plants may follow a set of “rules” that determine which parental genes are lost. The research may be used to create higher and more stable yields in other hybrid polyploid plants, including agricultural crops such as wheat, corn, coffee and apples.

“The repeatability of gene loss in populations of separate origin is a really exciting result,” said co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “Scientists have often wondered if there are ‘rules’ that govern patterns of evolution, and data for Tragopogon polyploids suggest that such rules may actually operate at the genetic level.”

Scientists analyzed about 70 of the hybrid plants commonly known as goatsbeard, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was accompanied by polyploidy, or whole genome duplication. Following a polyploidy event, the hybrid offspring contains twice the number of chromosomes, totaling 24.

Researchers compared the patterns of gene loss in the hybrid to patterns of gene loss in other species from the same family that experienced an ancient polyploidy event about 40 million years ago, and found similar results. The data support an evolutionary hypothesis that genes whose products interact closely with other gene products are more likely to be maintained in duplicate after polyploid formation, meaning some aspects of genome evolution are predictable and repeatable in independent lines.

“We were surprised at the speed at which patterns seemed to form in which genes show loss versus retention,” said lead author Richard Buggs of Queen Mary University of London, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum.

Soltis said one possible mechanism of gene loss may be linked with changes in chromosome structure, an occurrence documented in a study published Jan. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By further researching the connection between specific gene losses and chromosomal changes, researchers hope to better understand how these patterns affect fertility and physical characteristics of hybrid plants.

“Hybridization and chromosome doubling have played a major role in the evolution of flowering plants, and Tragopogon miscellus gives us an amazing window into this process,” said study co-author Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor in UF’s biology department.

The polyploid’s two parent species, Tragopogon dubius and Tragopogon pratensis, were introduced to the U.S. in the 1920s. Because their flowers only bloom for a few hours in the morning, Tragopogon plants are often referred to as “John-go-to-bed-at-noon.” It looks like a daisy except for being yellow in color.

Researchers analyzed genes from five natural populations of T. miscellus, as well as polyploid plants re-created in UF greenhouses. The DNA was extracted from the leaf tissue.

“Although Tragopogon miscellus is perfectly positioned to allow examination of genome evolution after hybridization, it is not a traditional research model organism and virtually none of the tools and resources that allow these types of studies had been developed for it,” said co-author Brad Barbazuk, a UF associate professor in biology and member of the UF Genetics Institute. “The availability of cost-effective, high-throughput genomics technologies has enabled us to examine this important phenomenon in this young species.”

The two-year study was funded by UF and the National Science Foundation. Study co-authors include Srikar Chamala of the UF Genetics Institute, Wei Wu and Pat Schnable of Iowa State University and Jennifer Tate of Massey University in New Zealand.

“Polyploidy, the duplication of whole genomes, is a huge and really important process in plant genetics and plant evolution, and what the Soltises have is a beautiful system for studying these early stages of polyploid formation in nature,” said Jeffrey Doyle, a plant biology professor at Cornell University. “If you know something about the rules by which genomes evolve, you may be able to predict what’s going to happen when you try to genetically engineer something.”

Now, researchers from the University of Florida and elsewhere have identified a new drug that can serve as a “bridge” during that time when patients have to stop taking blood thinners, minimizing both the risk of a heart attack and the risk of excessive bleeding during surgery. The findings appeared Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“This could be a way to satisfy an unmet need and solve a huge clinical problem for millions of patients,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Dominick Angiolillo, an associate professor of medicine and medical director of the UF Cardiovascular Research Program at the UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville.

Patients who have stents — small mesh tubes that help open up the arteries — must take aspirin or other blood-thinning medication for at least one year after implantation of the devices. But a problem arises if a patient requires open heart surgery during that year.

The patient must stop taking blood thinners five to seven days before surgery to avoid severe bleeding during surgery. But stopping the medication increases heart attack risk. The need for a short-term “bridge” between traditional medication and heart surgery came to national attention when former President Bill Clinton had a mild heart attack in 2004 and needed bypass surgery. Clinton had to wait six days for surgery because he had been taking aspirin and clopidogrel, commercially sold as Plavix.

Angiolillo and colleagues conducted a two-year international clinical trial to determine whether an experimental intravenous blood-thinning drug called cangrelor can keep patients in good health during the presurgery period in which they stop taking traditional oral medication. The trial was funded by The Medicines Company, which manufactures cangrelor.

The researchers determined the appropriate dosage of the drug then administered it to half of the 210 patients in the study. The other half were given a placebo, which did not contain the drug. Neither patients nor physicians knew to which group a patient was assigned until surgery was needed.

The researchers found that cangrelor can effectively thin the blood to keep heart attack risk low without increasing the risk of major bleeding during surgery. Some cases of minor, non-life threatening bleeding occurred among patients on cangrelor. Because the blood-thinning effects of cangrelor are not as long lasting as for traditional medications such as aspirin and clopidogrel, the risk of heavy bleeding is reduced.

“This is a very important scientific first step that really helps us understand what to do with people who are awaiting surgical procedures and are on medications that raise their bleeding risk,” said Dr. Deepak L. Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who is not affiliated with the current study but has also conducted research on cangrelor.

Further studies are needed before cangrelor can be used in widespread clinical practice.

The Lime Swallowtail, or Citrus Swallowtail, is a well-known agricultural pest from southern Asia discovered in the Caribbean in 2006, and researchers say its potential impact on the U.S. citrus industry is cause for serious concern.

“Everything that’s in the Caribbean eventually gets to Florida – Florida is an invasive magnet,” said UF lepidopterist Delano Lewis, lead author of the study published in the current issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. “That’s why we’re trying to make the first strike to see how to stop it.”

Experiments conducted on the UF campus at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity and the College of Medicine show when methionine is sprayed on leaves it is 100 percent effective in killing larvae related to the Lime Swallowtail caterpillars within two to three days. If not controlled, the caterpillars can completely defoliate young wild lime plants.

Because the Lime Swallowtail, Princeps (Papilio) demoleus, is invasive and cannot be legally brought into the U.S., researchers experimented using a genetically related surrogate with a similar life history and appetite for citrus, the Giant Swallowtail, Heraclides (Papilio) cresphontes. Because these pest caterpillars have the same body structure and biology, researchers are confident methionine will also control the Lime Swallowtail, Lewis said.

“Its effectiveness is based on the biochemistry of the insect gut, so although this work was done on a surrogate, the methionine will block the ion channel in the same way,” Lewis said.

Methionine is needed in the human diet for many reasons, including protein-building and metabolism. It is environmentally safe and harmless to citrus plants, mammals and birds.

“It’s a very curious phenomenon to have this nutrient amino acid that humans can’t live without, yet at the concentrations we put on the leaves, it is toxic to crop-destructive caterpillars,” said study co-author Bruce Stevens, professor of physiology and functional genomics in the UF College of Medicine. “It’s a completely different class of pesticides that has not been seen before – most are toxic to not only the pest, but to people and animals, too.”

Stevens first discovered the pesticide properties of methionine while cloning genes that regulate amino acid metabolism in 1998. Working with co-author James Cuda of UF’s department of entomology and nematology, Stevens later found this amino acid to be effective against yellow fever mosquito larvae, tomato hornworm and Colorado potato beetle.

Methionine disrupts an ion channel that controls nutrient absorption in larvae with an alkaline intestine, such as in caterpillars of the Citrus Swallowtail. In 2004 and 2007, Stevens obtained two patents for the use of methionine as a pesticide, through the UF Office of Technology Licensing.

“The methionine is sprayed on the leaves, and when the caterpillars begin to eat the leaves, they ingest the compound – it’s not in the plant itself,” Lewis said. “Once they take those first few bites, they don’t feed again and remain stationary until they die.”

Methionine is low-cost and serves as fertilizer if it reaches the ground because it’s a biodegradable nitrogen source, Stevens said. The amino acid is mass produced and has been used as a nutritional supplement in outdoor livestock feed since the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently approved the use of methionine for organic poultry production.

“This is a neat idea and I’m hoping that more work will be done on this in the future because there’s a lot of potential there,” said John Ruberson, a professor in the entomology department at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the study. “The one challenge I can see from a grower’s perspective is that it tends to work kind of slowly. Typically, it takes two to three days to kill the insect, but they do show that [insect] feeding is reduced, which is a good thing.”

Patent rights for the use of methionine to control turf and ornamental pests have been licensed to Phoenix Environmental Care LLC, which is developing a pest control product.

While researchers are unsure how the Lime Swallowtail reached the Caribbean, its proximity poses a potential threat to Central and South American citrus industries, as well.

“We suspect someone could have brought them to release the adult butterflies in weddings, or perhaps they arrived with imported citrus stock,” Lewis said. “Regardless, it’s in the Caribbean and it’s a very strong flyer.”

The newly confirmed planets, called Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b, will be announced in Wednesday’s online edition of the journal Nature, said Eric B. Ford, UF associate professor of astronomy. William F. Welsh, associate professor at San Diego State University, is the lead author on the paper.

Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b both orbit a “binary star.” They are actually a pair of gravitationally bound stars that orbit each other. While the existence of such bodies, called “circumbinary planets,” had long been predicted, they remained just a theory until the team discovered Kepler-16b in September 2011. They dubbed Kepler-16b “Tatooine” because of its resemblance to the two-sun world depicted in the “Star Wars” film series.

“We have long believed these kinds of planets to be possible, but they have been very difficult to detect for various technical reasons,” Ford said. “With the discoveries of Kepler-16b, 34b and 35b, the Kepler mission has shown that the galaxy abounds with millions of planets orbiting two stars.”

The planets were discovered by measuring the star light decrease as the planets pass in front of, or transit, either of the two stars. Kepler also measures the star light decrease when one of the stars passes in front of the other. The mutual gravitational tugs of the stars and planets cause the times of the transits to deviate from a regular schedule, allowing astronomers to confirm the planet and measure its mass.

Both planets are low-density gas giants, comparable in size to Jupiter, but much less massive. Compared to Jupiter, Kepler-34 is about 24 percent smaller in size, but has 78 percent less mass. It can complete a full orbit in 288 terrestrial days. Kepler-35 is about 26 percent smaller, has 88 percent less mass, and completes its orbit around the stars much faster – just 131 days.

The astronomers believe the planets are made primarily of hydrogen and too hot to sustain life.

“Circumbinary planets can have much more complex climates, since the distance between the planet and each star change significantly during each orbital period, the length of an alien planet’s year,” Ford said. “For Kepler-35b, the amount of incoming star light changes by over 50 percent within a single Earth year. For Kepler-34b, each Earth-year brings ‘summers’ with 2.3 times as much star light as winters. Over the course of a year, the change in the amount of sunlight heating the Earth varies by only 6 percent.”

NASA’s Kepler mission, which began in March 2009, uses a 1-meter space telescope trained on one small portion of the Milky Way for several years. Astronomers analyze data from the telescope for periodic dimming that indicates a planet crossing in front of its host star. The mission’s goal is to find the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of their host stars – where a planet might have liquid water on its surface.

Most Sun-like stars in the galaxy are not alone, like the Earth’s sun, but have a “dance partner,” forming a binary system or binary star. Kepler has already identified about 2,165 eclipsing binaries, of the more than 160,000 stars being observed.

NASA originally planned to stop receiving data from the Kepler spacecraft in November 2012.

“Astronomers are practically begging NASA to extend the Kepler mission until 2016, so it can characterize the masses and orbits of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone. Kepler is revolutionizing so many fields, not just planetary science,” Ford said. “It would be a shame not to maximize the scientific return of this great observatory. Hopefully common sense will prevail and the mission will continue.”

The public can contribute to searching for planets using real Kepler data by visiting planethunters.org, which works with the latest versión of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. For additional information, downloadable slides, and full resolution versions of artwork after the embargo lifts, please see http://sdsu.edu/kepler. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.