Time flies! It seems like yesterday that I wrote my first editorial for the launch of the TS digest last year, describing it as the literary equivalent of a fine dining tasting menu. Our goal behind curating this interactive, bite-sized digital magazine was to provide you, our readers, with refreshing content—short articles, brief podcast episodes, videos, infographics—for when you need a quick science break from your busy day.

It has been overwhelmingly exciting to see our readers warmly welcome the TS Digest into their devices with an insatiable appetite for short-form articles. Along the way, we introduced new columns: Epic Fail, where researchers share their lab disaster stories; Just Curious, where we find an expert to answer a common biology question; and Science Snapshot, where we cover the story behind a scientific image. While you enjoyed our stories on diverse topics, from endogenous psychedelics to designer peptoids that pop viral membranes, you especially loved these novel content formats.

My favorite aspect of the TS Digest is that it offers us an opportunity to interact with our readers. Every month, with the launch of a new issue, I excitedly await reader feedback; a special thanks to the hundreds of readers who shared their thoughts on editorials, submitted their embarrassing Epic Fail stories, or asked poignant Just Curious column questions in the past year. Being in lock step with our readers has allowed us to keep the TS Digest alive, customizing every issue to satisfy your cravings. 

As we celebrate one year of TS Digest, I once again look to you all to guide us on how to best serve you. Are there certain topics you would like to see more of? Do you have ideas about new content types that we should cover? Would you enjoy more than one TS Digest issue per month? We look forward to your input to keep the TS Digest community going strong.

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With a track record of invention and translating technology into practical solutions, Walker Inman continues to drive innovation in the life sciences field. Inman is currently the cofounder and CEO of Lucid Scientific Inc., a company that develops cellular analysis tools.

In this Science Philosophy in a Flash podcast episode brought to you by Lucid Scientific, The Scientist spoke with Inman about the challenges of measuring oxygen concentration in cell culture and how his real-time oxygen monitoring technology, Resipher, overcomes these problems.

Learn more about Lucid Scientific and Resipher.

Walker Inman Cofounder and CEO Lucid Scientific Inc.

How do you monitor your cells when growing them in culture?

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Humans mastered the art of cheese fermentation over thousands of years. Although researchers knew that some bacterial species were key to cheesemaking, they knew little about the microbial community interactions that occurred as milk turns into cheese.¹ 

After conducting a year-long experiment, researchers led by Ahmad Zeidan, a bioengineer at Chr. Hansen (now Novonesis), cracked how these microbial interactions affect cheese flavor formation.² Their findings, reported in Nature Communications, could help cheesemakers finetune cheddar characteristics. 

The team chose cheddar cheese as a model system because its composition of 25 to 30 bacterial strains provided an intermediate level of microbial complexity to work with, Zeidan explained. They then assessed the effects of specific bacterial strains on cheese flavor by removing either a single strain or a group of strains from the starter culture. 

The presence of Streptococcus thermophilus was essential for the growth of the Lactococcus bacterial population. Metatranscriptomic and metabolic modeling of controlled milk fermentation experiments revealed that S. thermophilus acts as a key amino acid donor to the Lactococcus community, alleviating nitrogen limitations that may occur during cheese ripening.

Metatranscriptome analyses also revealed that one Lactococcus cremoris strain made cheddar taste good by limiting the formation of compounds that, when in excess, lead to off flavors.³ When the team took a closer look at the Lactococcus community, they found that competition between L. cremoris and another Lactococcus strain drove the formation of these compounds.

“This work advances the field [by] figuring out what needs to be done to make cheese taste the way we want it to taste,” said Maria Marco, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “It [also] shows the complexity of microbial environments. We're not just talking about different species, but different strains of the same species interacting with each other.”  

While the placenta only lasts about nine months, dysfunction of this temporary organ can have long-term consequences for the health of the mother and baby.¹ “If the fetus doesn't get everything it needs, the baby's born, but it just doesn't have the resilience that it would otherwise have,” said Rohan Lewis, a placental physiologist at the University of Southampton. Despite this organ’s importance, the mechanisms that contribute to the proper function of its cells are not well understood.

         

Cells of the placenta separate maternal blood (top left) from the fetal blood (bottom right).

Rohan Lewis

To help close this knowledge gap, Lewis, along with placenta researcher Michelle Desforges at the University of Manchester, and bioinformatician Michele Darrow at the Rosalind Franklin Institute, launched a citizen science initiative to characterize the crucial internal machinery of placental cells.

In the present study, they will analyze cells in the outermost layer of the placenta, which mediates the exchange of maternal nutrients and fetal waste products by using samples donated by women with healthy pregnancies and women who experienced complications like preeclampsia.

“These cells are metabolically really active,” said Lewis. “And cells that are metabolically active need a lot of mitochondria.” The researchers want to determine how the numbers, sizes, and structures of the mitochondria might link to the abilities of the cells, and by extension, the placenta as a whole, to function properly.

By using scanning electron microscopy, the researchers constructed three-dimensional images of the placental cells and the mitochondria they contained. Now, said Lewis, “We've got this gap where the technology for imaging is leaps ahead, but our capacity to analyze that data is still way behind.”

The team turned to the collective power of citizen scientists to overcome this challenge. Participants in the Placenta Profiles project will identify and tag mitochondria in this enormous bank of microscopy images, enabling researchers to assess mitochondrial dynamics and train machine learning models to perform this identification task in the future.

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