Stanford scientists discover a strategy to restore bleached coral

In the Doerr School of Sustainability, the Oceans Department’s Palumbi Lab found that bleached corals, when paired with healthy counterparts, could recover fully in record time. 

Bleached corals are corals that have turned ghostly white due to the expulsion of symbiotic algae living inside their tissues. The ejection of the beneficial algae is a distress signal caused by warming waters, according to the Doerr School of Sustainability. 

The discovery represents the first time scientists have observed bleached corals completely recover through physical contact with healthy clones. The team, led by Danny Collins, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Oceans Department, published their findings in “Science Advances” on Oct. 14. 

“Bleached corals are often considered a lost cause because recovery after a heatwave is very slow, if it happens at all,” Fiorenza Micheli, Collins’ faculty advisor and co-director of the Center of Ocean Solutions, told the Doerr School. “Once a coral has bleached, what can we do?” Collins said. 

The team used a powerful microscope that led to the discovery of microscopic channels in coral tissues. When bleached coral tissue is fused with healthy tissue, the algae is transferred between corals through this pathway, restoring the bleached coral’s health in weeks. “Once beneficial algae enter bleached corals, they don’t just spread out,” Palumbi told the Doerr School, “They flood in and start dividing at the fastest rates seen in corals.” The team observed that algae moved from healthy to bleached fragments in as quickly as three days.

“These new insights into how corals can naturally recover give us hope for the future,” Fiorenza said. “They open the door to what’s possible and may lead to the breakthrough we need to accelerate reef restoration.”

The restoration requires a genetically identical, healthy copy of every bleached coral and physical contact to jumpstart recovery. The research team aims to explore algae delivery methods and alternative solutions to coral restoration, including deeper insights into temperature’s role in the system.

Researchers engineer protein-derived material for environmental and medical applications

The Feig lab, run by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Vivian Feig, Ph.D. ’20, developed a flexible glycine-based piezoelectric material. Piezoelectric materials have the ability to generate electricity when physically manipulated. This newly developed material has potential applications in medical and environmental sensors.  

The new biomaterial is made of glycine, the simplest amino acid. Glycine is pervasively found in the body, the environment and has even been traced to outer space. “Glycine is really interesting because it’s so abundant,” Feig told Stanford Report. “We know how to process it, our bodies know how to break it down and it’s cheap and really accessible.”

The lab’s research expands consideration of glycine’s engineering potential in next-generation materials. Scientists had already acknowledged glycine’s potential, but noted its drawbacks: glycine disintegrates within seconds when in contact with water, and the crystalline state the glycine is more responsive to cannot generate electricity. 

The research team led by postdoctoral scholar Zhuomin Zhang successfully discovered a tactic to cultivate and fix glycine in its higher-performing form and protect it from degradation. 

“When we are making new materials, we think about the entire functional lifetime for a device, as well as practical constraints about how it will be deployed,” Feig told Stanford Report. 

The lab hopes to test their inventions under extreme temperature and pH conditions that closely simulate bodily environments.

AI-backed model of the immune system helps identify drugs to prevent premature labor

A Stanford Medicine research team constructed an AI-driven model of immune system changes in pregnancy, enabling scientists to test medications to avert premature birth. The team was led by Jakob Einhaus, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine.

Premature birth can lead to short-term and long-term health complications ranging from cardiovascular problems and learning impairments to neurological disabilities, according to the National Institutes of Health. Prematurity is the leading cause of death in children under age 5.

Scientists trained AI to use a comprehensive atlas of the immune system. This atlas is accurate to a cell-by-cell level, successfully generating “digital twins” of the immune systems of individual pregnant women for virtual drug testing.

The twin system, Simulated Immune Modeling of Clinical Outcomes (SIMCO), uses machine-learning techniques to integrate data on the body’s immune cell behavior during pregnancy. The system informs how individual immune cells will respond to various drugs.

The researchers, equipped with AI tools, identified two common drugs that may mitigate delivery complications: aspirin and lansoprazole, taken together. Low-dose aspirin has a modest ability to prevent premature births, and Lansoprazole is occasionally prescribed to treat acid reflux during pregnancy.

The findings published in Science Advances build on two decades of research on how the maternal immune system fluctuates during pregnancy.

“In the digital twin system, these two drugs in combination had a large effect on the delay of labor, 15 times higher than aspirin alone,” senior author Brice Gaudilliere, professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, told Stanford Medicine. “We’re on the brink of having a real impact for the treatment of preterm birth, a global health problem that affects 10% of pregnancies worldwide.” 

These findings bridge a decades-long gap between previous solutions and modern pharmacological interventions for premature births, Gaudilliere said.