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​The coastal waters of the Red Sea have enough resources to support bacterial growth, but predation by protistan grazers limits the population, according to new research from KAUST. Since bacteria are vital players in the marine food web, determining the factors that affect their growth and abundance is critical to understanding marine ecosystems and how they will respond to climate change.

Researchers at KAUST’s Red Sea Research Center measured the abundance and growth rates of heterotrophic bacteria in water samples collected from the Red Sea coast over 16 months. They also recorded a range of environmental parameters in order to assess their effect on bacterial growth dynamics.

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Image: Luis Silva (front) and his supervisor, Xosé Anxelu G. Morán, analyze samples to determine their bacterial content.
© 2019 KAUST

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​A new kind of congenital disorder caused by a group of mutations in a gene previously linked only to a rare progressive brain disease has been discovered by an international team co-led by Saudi investigators.

The disorder—congenital hypotonia, epilepsy, developmental delay, digit abnormalities, or CHEDDA—is characterized by intellectual disability, reduced muscle tone and facial abnormalities. It results from defects in ATN1, a gene also implicated in a neurodegenerative condition called dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy (DRPLA). However, the disease-causing mutations responsible for each illness occur in different regions of the gene, and the clinical symptoms of DRPLA and CHEDDA are observably distinct.

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Image: The KAUST research team (l-r): Stefan Arold, Łukasz Jaremko, Mariusz Jaremko, Heba Ahmed, Jasmine Merzaban, Fajr Aleisa and Seungbeom Hong.
Reproduced with permission from reference 1 © 2019 journal

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​Mangrove forests on the coasts of Saudi Arabia act as litter traps, accumulating plastic debris from the marine environment, according to new research from KAUST. The study offers an explanation for the fate of missing marine plastic litter and highlights the threat it poses to coastal ecosystems.

“Of all the plastic discarded in the marine environment globally, only 1 percent is found floating in surface waters. That means that 99 percent of the plastic is elsewhere, but yet we don’t know where exactly,” says Cecilia Martin of KAUST’s Red Sea Research Center. In previous work, Martin and others in Carlos Duarte's research group, found relatively low levels of plastic litter in the Red Sea.  Next, to identify the location of this missing litter, the team used an unmanned aerial vehicle to scour the beaches.

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Image: More than 90 percent of the litter found in the survey was identified as plastic: the most common types of litter included bottles, bags, lengths of rope and food wrappings.
© 2019 KAUST

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​The nanoscale water channels that nature has evolved to rapidly shuttle water molecules into and out of cells could inspire new materials to clean up chemical and pharmaceutical production. KAUST researchers have tailored the structure of graphene-oxide layers to mimic the hourglass shape of these biological channels, creating ultrathin membranes to rapidly separate chemical mixtures.

"In making pharmaceuticals and other chemicals, separating mixtures of organic molecules is an essential and tedious task," says Shaofei Wang, postdoctoral researcher in Suzana Nuñes lab at KAUST. One option to make these chemical separations faster and more efficient is through selectively permeable membranes, which feature tailored nanoscale channels that separate molecules by size.

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Image: Solutions of organic dye molecules could be easily separated by the dual-spaced membrane.
© 2019 KAUST; Anastasia Khrenova.

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​To conserve and manage fresh water, particularly in arid regions such as Saudi Arabia, it is important to understand how the water is used each day. KAUST scientists are using data gathered by shoebox-sized satellites, or CubeSats, to learn more about daily agricultural water use.

An estimated 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s freshwater supplies are used in crop irrigation, but much of this comes from unsustainable aquifers. However, keeping track of water fluxes is incredibly difficult and there are no estimates tracking agricultural consumption by area over time.

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Image: A spatial map of water use for the researched farm area, as generated using CubeSat data and an adapted evapotranspiration model.
Reproduced from reference under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license @ 2018

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​A controlled, laboratory approach, along with computer simulations, has helped KAUST researchers to show that bacterial communities can homogenously disperse within aquatic ecosystems even with slow flowing water and the persistence of their preferred, localized conditions.

“Bacterial communities are a fundamental part of water-based ecosystems, such as oceans, lakes and rivers,” explains microbial ecologist Stilianos Fodelianakis. “They represent most of an ecosystem’s biomass, and drive carbon and nutrient cycles. If we can understand how these communities change, we might be able to predict changes in the whole ecosystem in light of climate change.”

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Image: Multiple strains of bacteria exist within an ecosystem: shown here are three bacterial members of the synthetic community viewed under a scanning electron microscope.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons license 4.0 from reference 1 © 2019 KAUST