Healthy Davis Together: Creating a Model for Community Control of COVID-19.

While many higher-education institutions dramatically altered their operations and helped mitigate COVID-19 transmission on campuses, these efforts were rarely fully extended to surrounding communities. A community pandemic-response program was launched in a college town that deployed epidemiological infection-control measures and health behavior change interventions. An increase in self-reported preventive health behaviors and a lower relative case positivity proportion were observed. The program identified scalable approaches that may generalize to other college towns and community types. Building public health infrastructure with such programs may be pivotal in promoting health in the postpandemic era. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(8):1142-1146. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306880).

Are Drosophila a useful model for understanding the toxicity of inhaled oxidative pollutants: a review.

Oxidative atmospheric pollutants represent a significant stress and cause injury to both vertebrate and invertebrate species. In both, the biosurfaces of their respiratory apparatus are directly exposed to oxidizing pollutant-induced stresses. Respiratory-tract surfaces contain integrated antioxidant systems that appear to provide a primary defense against environmental insults caused by inhaled atmospheric reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS), whether gaseous or particulate. When the biosurface antioxidant defenses are overwhelmed, oxidative and nitrosative stress to the acellular and cellular components of the exposed biosurfaces can ensue via direct chemical reactions that lead to the induction of inflammatory, adaptive, injurious, and reparative processes. The study of model invertebrates (e.g., Drosophila) has a long history of yielding valuable insights into both fundamental biology and pathobiology. Mutants and/or transgenic insects, with specific alterations in key components of innate and/or adaptive antioxidant defense systems and immune genes, offer opportunities to dissect the complex systems that maintain respiratory tract surface defenses against environmental oxidants and the ensuing host responses. In this article, we use a comparative absfont approach to consider interactions of atmospheric oxidant pollutants with selected biosystems. We focused primarily on ozone (O(3)) as the pollutant, vertebrate and invertebrate respiratory tracts as the exposed biosystems, and nonenzymatic micronutrient antioxidants as significant contributors to overall antioxidant defense strategies. We present parallels among these diverse organisms with regard to their protective strategies against environmental atmospheric oxidants, with particular focus given to using the invertebrate Drosophila as a potentially useful model for vertebrate respiratory-tract responses to inhaled oxidants specifically and pollutants in general. We conclude that the insect respiratory system has considerable promise toward understanding novel aspects of vertebrate respiratory tract responses to inhaled oxidative environmental challenges.

A large-scale screen for mutagen-sensitive loci in Drosophila.

In a screen for new DNA repair mutants, we tested 6275 Drosophila strains bearing homozygous mutagenized autosomes (obtained from C. Zuker) for hypersensitivity to methyl methanesulfonate (MMS) and nitrogen mustard (HN2). Testing of 2585 second-chromosome lines resulted in the recovery of 18 mutants, 8 of which were alleles of known genes. The remaining 10 second-chromosome mutants were solely sensitive to MMS and define 8 new mutagen-sensitive genes (mus212-mus219). Testing of 3690 third chromosomes led to the identification of 60 third-chromosome mutants, 44 of which were alleles of known genes. The remaining 16 mutants define 14 new mutagen-sensitive genes (mus314-mus327). We have initiated efforts to identify these genes at the molecular level and report here the first two identified. The HN2-sensitive mus322 mutant defines the Drosophila ortholog of the yeast snm1 gene, and the MMS- and HN2-sensitive mus301 mutant defines the Drosophila ortholog of the human HEL308 gene. We have also identified a second-chromosome mutant, mus215(ZIII-2059), that uniformly reduces the frequency of meiotic recombination to <3% of that observed in wild type and thus defines a function required for both DNA repair and meiotic recombination. At least one allele of each new gene identified in this study is available at the Bloomington Stock Center.