The Secret Life of Scum

A UI researcher has discovered proof of what many of us have always suspected: the bacteria growing on old food in the back of our refrigerator talk to each other, plotting strategy to grow and spread.

Using chemical signals only now being decoded, the bacteria growing in complex communities called "biofilms"--"scum" to the layperson--relay critical information that allows the community to thrive and invade other areas.

Writing in the cover story for the May 21, 1998, issue of the journal Science, Peter Greenberg, professor of microbiology, points out that the real importance of this discovery involves the many forms of bacteria growing inside the human body, not the refrigerator.

"Some 65 percent of all human infections serious enough to involve a hospital stay are caused by biofilms," Greenberg says. The infections are frequently life-threatening, largely because they are resistant to antibiotics. Although the exact reasons for this resistance are still under investigation, most revolve around the recent discovery that biofilms are actually highly evolved communities, with different cells performing different tasks.

The key to fighting these communities, Greenberg says, may lie in disrupting their ability to communicate. Researchers hope the entire system will break down if one part of the biofilm can't get its message through to another area.

 

Iowa Receives Gift of Intellectual Property

The UI Research Foundation received an appraised value of $35 million in biotechnology patents, a gift of intellectual property that is the first of its kind at The University of Iowa. The benefactor, DuPont Corp., felt that the expertise of the UI's Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing makes the facility uniquely suited to complete work on the patents. The patents for various biological processes all require additional research and development to make them commercially viable. The projects include a low-waste production method for a widely used herbicide as well as a process that yields a nutritional chemical used as a food additive.

 

Four Professors Receive NEH Fellowships

Last December, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $30,000 each to Kathleen Diffley, associate professor of English; Henry Horwitz, professor of history; Leslie Schwalm, associate professor of history; and Katherine Tachau, professor of history.

Only three other universities in the country had four or more winners in this NEH competition. Both Harvard and Indiana universities had four awardees and the University of Michigan had six award winners.

These awards are among $8.7 million in grants and fellowships from the NEH to 173 individual scholars and 10 colleges and universities nationwide. In the last several years, competition for funding from the national endowments has grown fiercer than ever as Congress has reduced the budgets for both the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Nurses Speak the Same Language

A goal of developing a major, unified language for nursing outcomes is closer to realization thanks to a $2.4-million grant to the UI Center for Nursing Outcomes Classification project. Nursing outcomes are changes in patients' health status that result from nursing care. Trends toward computerization of patients' records and managed care demand that patient information be accessible to different health care providers in a consistent format using standardized terms. The grant is from the NIH's National Institute of Nursing Research and will facilitate field-testing of the project's standardized terms in hospitals, nursing homes, and home-care settings.

 

Testing Jet Engine Flameout and Emissions

A University of Iowa College of Engineering project, called ELF (Enclosed Laminar Flames), flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 to investigate ways to make jet engines burn cleaner and more reliably. In January 1999, the project, headed by L.D. Chen, interim director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) at Iowa, received a $339,000 grant from NASA's Microgravity Research Division. Initial studies of jet engine flameout and emission of nitrogen oxides and soot can best be performed in the near-weightless environment of space. With renewed NASA funding, the research team will be able to analyze past results and plan further research, including additional tests aboard a future space shuttle mission.

 

Cancer Research Awards

Two UI researchers have received monetary awards from the National Cancer Institute. George J. Weiner, director of the Cancer Center, received $740,000 to investigate how a cancer patient's own immune system might be induced to attack cancer cells. In addition, Frederick Quelle, assistant professor of pharmacology, received a five-year grant of more than $950,000 to study how and why some damaged cells bypass safety checkpoints in the body meant to prevent tumors from developing.