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Darren Mann likes nothing better than getting his hands dirty. He’s at his happiest in the field with magnifying glass and notebook, delving into a fresh pile of poo. He is an insect expert and a specialist in dung beetles, some of nature’s best recyclers. ‘They’re an amazing group of insects,’ he tells us. ‘My life revolves around my girlfriend and insects. I work 10 to 12 hours a day and half the weekend, and when I’m not working I’m out collecting.’

Darren is Assistant Curator for Entomology at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History [OUMNH]. He has just returned from Borneo where he and Dr Eleanor Slade of the Department of Zoology and Oxford’s WildCRU are involved in an innovative project to study the effects of logging on the various benefits provided by rainforests. Under the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems project [SAFE], whose sponsors include Borneo’s Sabah Forestry Department and the UK’s Royal Society, fragments of forest are being left in an area to be felled for palm oil. Dung beetles will be an indicator of the profusion of larger species in the rainforest areas that remain.

‘Dung beetles are quite sensitive to habitat change and because they feed on dung they can be used as a surrogate for mammal abundance,’ Darren explains. ‘They’re now one of the most popular groups used in ecological studies. We have the pre-logging data from Borneo and hope to go back to record any changes. It’s such a cool project and a wonderful opportunity to track change over time.’

There are more than 5,000 species of dung beetles inhabiting every continent bar Antarctica. Most belong to the sub-family Scarabaeinae and within that group, can be distinguished by their differing breeding behaviours: dwellers live in dung; rollers roll dung balls elsewhere; and tunnelers bury dung in situ. Females lay their eggs in the dung, which becomes food for emerging larvae. Some females must cling to dung balls as they are wheeled away from the main dung pile.

Dung beetles perform many useful roles, returning goodness to soil, dispersing seeds excreted by mammals and saving farmers huge sums by clearing fields of livestock manure. They were successfully imported into Australia between 1969 and 1984 because native beetles couldn’t cope with the volumes of dung produced by introduced cattle.

Beetles are caught by setting small traps baited with faeces. They are removed for identification which can mean finding new species. Darren is credited with discovering several insect species new to science and has a dung beetle, Copris manni, named after him. He has published many papers and collected specimens in several countries including Costa Rica, Pakistan, Turkey and Namibia.

When he came to the Museum of Natural History in 1997 to interview for the post of collections’ technician he was so convinced he’d be overlooked for the job that he treated his first visit as a chance to marvel at some of the site’s five million preserved insects. His passion won over the interview panel and he has won several promotions since. Darren is now responsible for insect collections some of which are centuries old. Currently he is providing specialist help to the charity Buglife, which is trying to establish the locations of Britain’s four remaining oil beetles. He is also updating the UK guide that first inspired him as a schoolboy in 1986, Dung Beetles and Chafers by L Jessop. ‘Reading it was like an epiphany, one of those life-changing moments. I’ve been hooked on dung beetles ever since.’

Darren says he was ‘a really, really bad student’ at school because so little interested him. ‘I didn’t see the point in going because they weren’t teaching me about insects.’ He forgot to attend an A level exam because he was too busy collecting. ‘I found a Rhynchites cavifrons, a really beautiful weevil,’ he recalls. He subsequently missed lectures, and turned down the chance of degree studies at Plymouth Poly, but years later still won a place on a postgraduate diploma in insect taxonomy at the University of Wales.

Darren’s favourite beetle is tattooed on his chest. It is Coprophanaeus lancifer, the giant Amazonian carrion scarab beetle. The exoskeleton of a specimen looks down from a shelf above Darren’s desk. ‘I was asked at my Oxford interview whether I’d have the same passion for entomology in 10 years time. I do. I can stare at a beetle in a microscope for four hours and not get bored but I’ve never read a novel from start to finish; I’d much rather sit in a field and watch a bee pollinate a flower.

‘I have to do natural history wherever I am. I don’t understand how people can’t do natural history or go out for a walk and not try to identify what they see.’ Mounted police officers in Richmond Park did understand and once pulled up alongside Darren as he was busy ‘dung beetling away’.

He remembers the incident well: ‘I explained what I was doing and they burst out laughing. When I’m out collecting, some people look at me in disgust but most just think I’m a bit of a weirdo. I’m perfectly at ease sticking my hands in a pile of dung and I’ve never been ill. I think I’m pretty well inoculated against anything that’s in there.’ 

The two thousand, seven hundred and eighty-fourth baby has been vaccinated today in South Africa as part of a clinical trial of a new vaccine against tuberculosis. The new TB vaccine is the most advanced in development anywhere in the world.

That’s the last baby in the trial, and marks completion of trial enrolment almost two years to the day after the study was first announced.

‘We are extremely proud of this achievement and are eager to see the study results, which are expected to be available in 2012,’ says Dr Helen McShane, who developed the vaccine at the Jenner Institute, Oxford University. ‘This milestone brings us a step closer to potentially having a new TB vaccine, from which millions of people around the world would benefit.’

It’s certainly quite a milestone, and marks a great deal of work to vaccinate all these babies under 1 year old in an area where there is one of the highest rates of TB in the world.

But why precisely 2,784 babies, not 2,500 or 3,000?

Helen explains that it is entirely down to the calculations used to plan the trial. These sums showed that 2784 babies should give enough statistical weight to be able to see a significant improvement in preventing TB over the 90-year-old (but still standard) BCG jab.

The new vaccine is designed to be given to infants after they have received the BCG vaccine, boosting the immune response further. All the babies in the trial have received the BCG vaccine, with half then getting the trial vaccine and half a placebo. ‘If successful, the next steps would be to plan a phase III trial and licensure of the vaccine,’ Helen says.

The current trial was a phase IIb trial, and is the first to be able to really determine whether the vaccine gives infants any protection against TB. A larger phase III trial would pin down exactly the size of any benefit and guide how the vaccine could be rolled out.

The trial in Worcester, about 100km from Cape Town, is being conducted by the University of Cape Town’s South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative (SATVI), in partnership with Aeras, the Wellcome Trust, and the Oxford-Emergent Tuberculosis Consortium Ltd (a joint venture between the University of Oxford and Emergent Biosolutions Inc formed to develop the vaccine).

‘We are pleased to report that the trial has run smoothly to date,’ says Dr Hassan Mahomed, who has led the trial at SATVI.

This July an expedition will set out for the central highlands of Indonesian Borneo to sample the biodiversity of uncharted areas, track ape populations and find out how remote communities interact with their environment.

Among the 20-strong BRINCC Expedition team of conservation biologists will be Susan Cheyne of Oxford University’s WildCRU, one of the leaders of the OuTrop Project.

The team will follow the route of the Murung River, a major tributary of the Barito River, surveying the sort of wildlife – apes, birds, insects, reptiles and amphibians – essential to the health of a tropical forest ecosystem. The researchers are particularly keen to find out more about nocturnal species.

Susan is one of the team with a special interest in the area’s hybrid gibbons: a hybrid of the Bornean agile gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis) and Müller's Bornean gibbon (Hylobates muelleri) about which little is known. These apes currently have no status on IUCN, Susan explains, despite being a naturally occurring, viable and thriving population.

‘We don’t know whether orang-utans are also present,’ Susan told us. ‘This will be the first comprehensive ape survey in this area and will be combined with collecting data on the other primates throughout the course of the expedition.’

As with the OuTrop Project, involving local people in the work will be a vital part of the new mission. At several villages along the Murung the team will train people from the indigenous Dayak community how to use GPS to help accurately identify and map areas they use. It is hoped that the maps will help in both conservation and any future debates about land rights.

Susan adds: ‘The BRINCC expedition team has extensive experience working in conservation activities in Indonesia and we hope to take this knowledge and know-how into the uncharted centre of Borneo, an area which has received relatively little conservation attention compared to lowland forests.’

For more information and details of how to support the research visit the BRINCC Expedition Blog.

Dr Susan Cheyne is a member of WildCRU, part of Oxford University's Department of Zoology.

Research published last week in the journal PNAS may have identified a promising new target for developing drugs against one of the most common types of lung cancer.

Oxford University researchers have helped a team at biotech company Genentech in South San Francisco look at the role of a protein called PAK1 in the growth of tumours.

PAK1 is a protein involved in a biochemical cascade used by cells in the body to control things like cell growth, division, and survival. Other proteins in this pathway have been implicated in cancer – when these controls go wrong, they can lead to uncontrolled cancerous growth.

Dr Adrian Jubb and colleagues at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford were able to develop a test to look at levels of PAK1 in lung tissue samples from a tissue bank in Oxford. They showed that PAK1 was found at higher levels in one type of lung cancer, specifically the squamous type of non-small-cell lung cancer.

Building on these observations, the Genentech team were then able to show that knocking out the PAK1 protein stopped the growth of cells from these human lung cancers in the lab. Similarly, inhibiting PAK1 could impair growth of these tumours in mice.

Importantly, results also showed that combining an attack on PAK1 with other targeted therapies that Genentech is developing might kill off the cancer cells.

This suggests that such combination drug therapies might be a promising new avenue in searching for new treatments for non-small-cell lung cancer.

Certainly, lung cancer (of all types) is one of the most difficult cancers to treat, and has one of the lowest survival rates of any type of cancer. Fewer than 10 per cent of lung cancer patients survive the disease beyond five years after diagnosis. It is often diagnosed at a late stage and it tends to occur in older people who may also have other medical conditions.

Non-small-cell lung cancer accounts for around 85 per cent of all lung cancer cases, with around 30,000 people are diagnosed with this form of the disease each year in the UK.

Non-small-cell lung cancers can be further divided into three types: squamous cell carcinomas, adenocarcinomas, and large cell carcinomas.

Squamous cancers are the most common type of lung cancer, and are often due to smoking. It is squamous cancers that have been identified as having raised levels of PAK1 in this study.

Beyond doing what’s already possible with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, options for drug treatments of non-small-cell lung cancer are limited.

‘Non-small-cell lung cancer is an unmet clinical need,’ says Adrian Jubb. ‘We simply need more effective treatments.

‘We have demonstrated that targeting PAK1 has antitumour activity. And we now have a platform for assessing whether PAK1 is also worth pursuing for other squamous cancers, such as head and neck cancers, or other tumours including melanoma and pancreatic cancer.’

The Oxford work was supported by Cancer Research UK, the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre and the Pathological Society of Great Britain.

Birds willing to move around and take risks are better at finding the best places to live, researchers have found. Those with ‘fast-exploring’ personalities – birds tending to be hyperactive – are far more likely to end up in areas providing enough food, shelter and reproductive opportunities, a new study shows.

The research, led by scientists at Oxford University, has also found that smaller immigrant birds – those flying into, and staying, in a better habitat – are likely to have faster personalities than those born in the better habitat.  

‘If you’re quite big, your personality probably doesn’t matter because you’re likely to be able to secure a territory anyway, or a mate with a territory,’ said Dr John Quinn of Oxford University's Department of Zoology. ‘But if you’re quite small you have to have a big personality to join a new population.’

Researchers from the Edward Grey Institute in the Department of Zoology have been studying great tits  – a common garden and woodland bird – for more than 50 years and Wytham Woods near Oxford, an oak woodland that is comparatively rare near Oxford, is one of the best local habitats for the species.

‘Great tits can probably see the woods from several kilometres away and we think the immigrants were born in towns or hedgerows where the habitat quality is not so good,’ Dr Quinn says. His study showed that immigrant birds flying into Wytham were likely to have fast personality types.

The research by Dr Quinn and colleagues was published this week in the BES's Journal of Animal Ecology. The birds were housed overnight in a field station near to Wytham and in the morning placed in a room with artificial trees ‘so that we could determine their behaviour in these unusual circumstances,’ Dr Quinn explains.

Great tits are generally calm, and readily adapt to captivity, but there were clear differences between fast and slow personalities. ‘The slow types just sat on the trees and did very little while the hyperactive types moved around constantly.

‘This behaviour is consistent throughout an individual bird’s life and even predicts whether birds are assertive, aggressive or promiscuous in the wild.’

The scientists also assessed whether the fast-exploring trait was passed onto offspring. ‘Overall in Wytham, exploration behaviour is heritable – it is spurred partly by “nature” - but the difference between immigrants and residents seems primarily to be driven by environmental conditions, or “nurture”. Although this trait stays with an individual for life, we found that the offspring of immigrant birds behaved in the same way as the residents.’

The ability of birds, and other animals, to relocate to better sites is often important for gene flow, Dr Quinn adds. ‘Immigration generally increases the genetic variation and makes populations more resilient to environmental change and inbreeding’. But while immigrants to Wytham may bring in new genes for some kinds of traits, this does not appear to be the case for genes normally associated with personality.

‘We generally think fast-exploring birds are risk takers that prioritise finding food. But with that comes a greater chance of predation and perhaps a risk of injury from fighting. If you watched great tits at your garden feeder there’s a good chance you’d pick out the fast and slow personality types. In Wytham, fast birds tend to dominate the feeders.’

Fast personality traits are commonly seen in other animals ranging from spiders to squid and  from fish to pond skaters. ‘These wild-animal personalities are also biologically similar to those you see in pets. Some dogs for example have quite agreeable personalities, or temperaments, while others are quite aggressive,’ Dr Quinn says. ‘But while the variation you see in pets is caused by artificial selection, the patterns we see in wild birds seem to be caused by natural selection.’  

Dr John Quinn is based at Oxford University's Department of Zoology.