Research Highlights

Full article issued by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function have mapped the human connectome—a structure made up of billions of cells in the human brain—which communicate with each other in networks to carry out complex functions quickly and accurately. 

The researchers used diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map the connectome in a group of healthy volunteers. Using computational modelling, they then randomly ‘rewired’, or rearranged, the connections within these maps, and found that the regions that became disconnected from the network most quickly as a result of rewiring corresponded to the brain areas that degrade the fastest in people with schizophrenia.

The researchers say that the knowledge could help researchers to understand what causes some people to develop schizophrenia and to identify people at risk of developing this disorder.

Full article issued by The University of Western Australia.

A team of ARC supported researchers from The University of Western Australia (UWA) and two Canadian universities has applied a first-of-its-kind technique that measures the long-term life cycle of sulphur, helping to explain the preferential location of high-value mineral deposits at the edges of ancient continents.

The study charts the life cycle of sulphur over hundreds of millions of years, from its origins as a volcanic gas emitted into the primordial atmosphere and oceans, and all the way throughout its journey across the earth’s deep crust. Sulphur plays a critical role in a variety of fundamental earth processes as it regulates the global climate, is essential to the living cell, and as sulphate is the primary ion necessary to transport and concentrate precious metals such as gold and platinum.

Associate Professor Marco Fiorentini, an ARC Future Fellowship recipient from UWA’s School of Earth Sciences, said that the largest and richest deposits of precious metals in Australia and on Earth were generally associated with large concentrations of sulphur-rich minerals. Professor Fiorentini's research team has fostered a strategic alliance to engage with several industry partners, applying this technique to multiple areas to predict the localisation of precious metals on other continents.

Full article issued by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis.

A team of Australian and US scientists, including Future Fellowship recipient, Professor Margaret Barbour from The University of Sydney, has demonstrated how three-dimensional (3D) imaging can now reproduce the inner reality of the leaf, including the dynamic carbon and water exchange processes.

Professor John Evans, a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis, based at the Research School of Biology at The Australian National University, said that although leaves and plant cells are three dimensional, plant biologists use highly simplified 1D or 2D models, evading the difficult, confounding and beautiful 3D reality.

But the field of plant science is now in the process of being profoundly transformed by new imaging and modelling technologies that are allowing scientists to peer inside the leaf with a clarity and resolution inconceivable a generation ago. The researchers predict that using a collaborative approach, they will be able to answer, within the next decade, outstanding questions about how the 3D special arrangement of organelles, cells and tissues affects photosynthesis and transpiration.

Full release issued by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence at James Cook University have described a remarkable new species of fish that lived in the sea about 150 million years ago in the time of the dinosaurs. The new species of bony fish had teeth like a piranha, which the researchers suggest they used as piranhas do: to bite off chunks of flesh from other fish.

As further support for that notion, the researchers also found their victims, other fish that had apparently been nibbled on in the same limestone deposits in South Germany (the quarry of Ettling in the Solnhofen region), where this piranha-like fish was found.

The researchers call the new find a "staggering example of evolutionary versatility and opportunism." With one of the world's best known and studied fossil deposits continuing to throw up such surprises, they intend to keep up the search for even more fascinating finds.