Rutgers News Center

Genetics receives $7.8 million for autism research

The Simons Foundation, through its Autism Research Initiative, has signed a two-year contract with the Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository to establish a collection of DNA samples for autism studies. The samples will be collected from 2,000 families that have a single autistic child.

The Simons Simplex Collection will supply the groundwork for a different approach to autism genetics. Most scientists agree that there is a genetic basis for autism, with an assortment of environmental factors possibly conspiring with the altered genes to produce the many forms of the disorder. Many believe that genetic analyses will point the way for future research and potential therapies.

To find individuals with sporadic mutations, the project will seek out families with only one affected child. In a family where several children display autism, there is probably a defect in a gene that is inherited in the usual sense, and not by genetic alterations not found in the DNA tissue of parents.

State of Our Unions 2007 report released

The National Marriage Project at Rutgers, directed by David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, released its annual report “The State of Our Unions 2007.”

The report highlighted the following key findings:

• Americans have become less likely to marry, and the U.S. marriage rate continues to decline.
• The divorce rate is twice that of the 1960s, but has decreased slightly since the 1980s.
• The number of unmarried couples has increased dramatically over four decades.
• The presence of children in America has declined significantly, and contributes to the weakening of the institution of marriage.

The National Marriage Project website

Researchers come together under umbrella of climate change

The first step in an initiative to pool research expertise is under way: a website, climatechange.rutgers.edu, serving as a clearinghouse for information on climate change and its impact on New Jersey.

The website provides a user-friendly roadmap for visitors to navigate the departments, centers, and institutes where faculty are addressing environmental and climate change. Different groups focus on research topics ranging from the past, present, and future behavior of global and regional climate to assessing the impacts of climate change on individuals and communities. It also features downloadable slides and presentations created by Rutgers scientists.

Edible films may protect food from spoilage, contamination

Two items high on the list of public concerns are the need for greater food safety and a growing demand for natural or organic food products. Understanding this, chemists and food scientists at Rutgers joined forces to develop natural approaches to the prevention of food contamination and spoilage.
The researchers employed natural antimicrobial agents derived from sources such as cloves, oregano, thyme and paprika to create novel biodegradable polymers or plastics to potentially block the formation of bacterial biofilms on food surfaces and packaging.

With the growing consumer interest in natural foods, shoppers may be more attracted to products containing natural antimicrobial ingredients rather than the synthetic chemical additives currently in use to protect against contamination and spoilage.

Nursing faculty member studies how to reduce medication errors

Rutgers College of Nursing faculty member Linda Flynn is conducting a study to explore the effects of nurse staffing, work environment, and safety technology on the frequency of nonintercepted medication errors in 17 New Jersey hospitals.

“Medication errors can originate from a variety of sources such as the physician who writes the order, the pharmacist that provides the medication, or the nurse who administers the medication,” said Flynn, an assistant professor of nursing in Newark. Funded by a two-year grant, $308,254 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the study will begin this fall with approximately 100 selected registered nurses practicing in New Jersey. Hospital pharmacists will also be surveyed.

Contest to stamp out carbon emissions on New Brunswick Campus

The Rutgers University Energy Institute will offer four awards of up to $2,500 to students who develop the best plans to reduce or eliminate carbon output of the New Brunswick Campus by 2030.

The current carbon footprint on the campus is 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. That doesn’t take into account vehicles that traverse the multi-municipality campus. 

Individual or teams of enrolled undergraduate students in any program on the New Brunswick Campus are eligible. Proposals should be submitted on or before March 31, 2008, to the Rutgers Energy Institute, 71 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 or to yana@marine.rutgers.edu. Visit the Rutgers Energy Institute website for more information.

SCILS professor examines what went right in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

Despite images of submerged cities, flattened towns, and demoralized people, many of the businesses and organizations in New Orleans are recovering after Hurricane Katrina. Associate Professor Marya Doerfel found that traditional competitors came to cooperate with each other, and businesses sacrificed short-term interests to preserve mutual long-term interests.

“The companies and the organizations that I worked with did not wait around until someone else helped,” said Doerfel, of the Department of Communication at the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. She learned how businesses and professional organizations from around the country and the world pitched in to provide the kind of help that government or faith-based organizations were unsuited to provide.

The study was funded by a small exploratory research grant from the National Science Foundation. Doerfel conducted 86 interviews between December 2005 and May 2007. Half the interviews were conducted in person in New Orleans.

More than $6 million for stem cell research

Rutgers scientists and their collaborators have been awarded $6.4 million by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology to investigate human embryonic stem cell therapies for central nerve system disorders.

Approximate $3 million goes to a program involving the Rutgers Stem Cell Research Center, the W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers, and Reprogenetics LLC, an international genetics lab with facilities in New Jersey. More than $2 million went to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Rutgers, enabling scientists to focus on gene delivery and bioengineering of embryonic stem cells.

In June, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority approved $9.1 million for design and pre-development costs of the proposed Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey. The institute will occupy five floors of a 16-story tower to be built jointly by Rutgers, UMDNJ, and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

National award for research into children’s mental health and substance abuse

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, granted a prestigious Career Development Award to Naomi Marmorstein, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers–Camden. The $649,503 award will further Marmorstein’s intensive research on how children’s anxiety and depression may be associated with substance abuse throughout adulthood.

“We have known for a long time that some people who have depression or anxiety drink alcohol or use drugs to cope with those unpleasant feelings; this is called the ‘self-medication’ model of substance abuse. However, there is also some evidence that heavy substance use may predict internalizing disorders, rather than the other way around,” Marmorstein said. “It is time to apply the advances we have made in research methodologies in order to better understand these associations.”

Caffeine and exercise can team up to prevent skin cancer

A Rutgers study has found that low to moderate amounts of caffeine along with exercise can be good for your health. A research team from the Susan Lehman Cullman Laboratory for Cancer Research at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy showed that a combination of exercise and some caffeine protected against the destructive effects of the sun’s UVB radiation, known to induce skin cancer.

Several mechanisms at the biochemical level might be responsible for the protective effects of caffeine and exercise, but researchers acknowledged that what is happening synergistically is still somewhat of a mystery. “We need to dig deeper into how the combination of caffeine and exercise is exerting its influence at the cellular and molecular levels, identifying the underlying mechanisms,” said Allan Conney, director of the Cullman Laboratory and an author of the research paper, published in the July 31 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.