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KU lab leads research on little-studied coronavirus structure, developing antiviral treatment
LAWRENCE — Back in early 2020, University of Kansas virologist Anthony Fehr was part of a relatively small community of researchers in the world studying coronaviruses. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and his niche research area exploded on a global scale. His lab at KU is in the process of creating the first antiviral therapeutic drug targeting the macrodomain — an enzyme essential in causing disease because it counters the host’s innate immune response — amid the rapid influx of attention the group of viruses is receiving.
KU studies: Media literacy can reduce stereotypes; mass communication research samples lack diversity
LAWRENCE — A pair of recent studies from the University of Kansas shows that a media literacy intervention can help reduce stereotypes people hold about Black Americans and that a majority of journalism and mass communications studies from the early 21st century have lacked diversity, as research participants tended to be young, educated, white and female.
Author Leah Penniman to speak in collaborative series on climate justice
LAWRENCE – The collaborative virtual series inspired by contributors to the book “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” returns to the University of Kansas in spring 2022. The first event features farmer, food sovereignty activist and author Leah Penniman at noon Feb. 17 in conversation with local food policy activist and grower Cody Haynes.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Rylie Koester, Office of Research, 785-864-0375, [email protected], @ResearchAtKU
KU lab leads research on little-studied coronavirus structure, developing antiviral treatment
LAWRENCE — Back in early 2020, University of Kansas virologist Anthony Fehr was part of a relatively small community of researchers in the world studying coronaviruses. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and his niche research area exploded on a global scale. Fehr appeared on television shows and in newspaper articles as a leading expert to help the public understand the novel coronavirus and its disease.
“It was weird being in the spotlight,” said Fehr, who is more accustomed to spending time in the laboratory. “All of a sudden, everybody cared about this, and you have bright lights shining on you.”
Fehr began studying coronaviruses as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iowa, where he focused on a little-studied structure called the macrodomain. Now a decade later, his lab at KU is in the process of creating the first antiviral therapeutic drug targeting the macrodomain amid the rapid influx of attention the group of viruses is receiving.
“While we understand a little bit more than we did 10 years ago, there’s still a lot of work to do,” said Fehr, assistant professor of molecular biosciences and investigator with the Higuchi Biosciences Center.
The macrodomain is an enzyme essential in causing disease because it counters the host’s innate immune response. This makes it a new and unique target for drug discovery because it focuses on immune response, whereas current therapeutics inhibit viral replication.
The lab’s studies have shown that without the macrodomain protein, coronaviruses — including SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV — replicate poorly and don’t cause disease in animal models of infection.
In April 2020, Fehr characterized and published the first description of the SARS-CoV-2 macrodomain, which helped the scientific community better understand the virus and how it functions.
“There’s a lot that we don’t understand about this interaction between the virus and the host,” said Fehr, who came to KU in 2018 as an investigator in the Chemical Biology of Infectious Disease Center of Biomedical Research Excellence. “I’m driven to uncover new aspects of that every day.”
The National Institutes of Health recently renewed support for CBID with a five-year, $11.35 million grant to continue biological research for drug therapies. With the prevalence of coronaviruses and the likelihood of others to emerge, a wide range of therapeutics can help combat current viruses and prevent future outbreaks.
“Getting a bigger picture of how the virus works in general will help us develop better strategies to target it,” Fehr said. In May, the lab performed an initial study of 38,000 compounds in collaboration with KU’s Infectious Disease Assay Development core laboratory, directed by Anu Roy. Results showed six potential candidates that Fehr’s lab continues to study and develop.
“It was very exciting to be able to identify inhibitor candidates for SARS-CoV-2,” Roy said. “Using our novel assay, we hope to obtain funding to support larger screening campaigns to identify more compounds targeting the macrodomain. These compounds have the potential to function as first-class antivirals.”
Fehr is submitting a National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01) to continue developing inhibitors for the macrodomain. He and his collaborators are also writing a manuscript describing their efforts to understand and target the macrodomain.
Many researchers have flocked to the field to advance understanding of coronaviruses. More than 88,400 articles that included the term “coronavirus” were published in 2021, compared to 906 in 2019, based on a search of the PubMed database for biomedical literature. Despite the increased competition for funding and discovery, Fehr welcomes the wealth of information being generated in the quest to combat the viruses.
“In all aspects of this battle, we’re not going to be finished in the next few years,” he said. “We’ve set up our research program to be long-lasting, and we’re going to have things to work on for the next decade or more on this topic.”
In addition to his research at KU, Fehr is a project leader at the Center for Development of Macrodomain Inhibitors for Coronavirus and Alphavirus Treatment at Johns Hopkins University. The center aims to research and develop antiviral treatments targeting the macrodomain in coronaviruses and alphaviruses.
Fehr’s lab has also collaborated with other KU researchers at the university’s Structural Biology Center, its Chemical Biology Core and its Protein Structure & X-Ray Crystallography Laboratory. Fehr credits his ability to pursue more impactful research to KU’s Center of Biomedical Research Excellence program. KU has two NIH-designated COBRE centers.
“Having these core facilities has really enhanced my research and our capabilities in the lab to do these types of experiments and hopefully have a bigger impact on society than I might have just doing basic research,” Fehr said. “The idea of developing this inhibitor for this enzyme was not something I would have done probably at most other places. And, so now I’m like, ‘We have the opportunity, let’s get it done.’”
“Dr. Fehr’s pursuit of novel small molecule inhibitors of the macrodomain was enabled by KU COBRE centers and core laboratories, a testament to their importance to the research mission of KU,” said Erik Lundquist, professor of molecular biosciences and associate vice chancellor for research. “His work on the coronavirus macrodomain could not be more timely and important for controlling SARS-CoV-2 and other potentially infectious coronaviruses in the future.”
Indeed, Fehr has an eye on the advances of tomorrow while reveling in the thrill of today’s discoveries.
“I want our lab to continue to bring in new students and drive the next era of scientists,” Fehr said. “At the end of the day, I’m also just really interested in this enzyme and this whole process of uncovering new biology every few weeks or months. Scientists live at the edge of what’s known and what’s not known. Anytime you push into the ‘not known’ part, you make that known. I find that really fascinating and really fun.”
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
KU studies: Media literacy can reduce stereotypes; mass communication research samples lack diversity
LAWRENCE — The media that people consume inform a large part of their everyday life, including how they view others. A pair of recent studies from the University of Kansas shows that a media literacy intervention can help reduce stereotypes people hold about Black Americans and that a majority of journalism and mass communications studies have lacked diversity with overly homogenous samples.
Media literacy and racial stereotypes
Joseph Erba, associate professor of strategic communication at KU, conducted a study examining the effects of a media literacy intervention on racial stereotypes. He found that when readers read a news story about sports, drugs or welfare — topics that disproportionately stereotype the Black community — those who took part in a media literacy intervention held fewer stereotypes than readers who did not. Erba and Yvonnes Chen, associate professor of strategic communication at KU, had previously conducted research on a media literacy intervention with students.
“We saw that those interventions were successful in lowering stereotypes in students, especially about African Americans and Latina/os,” Erba said. “But they were face-to-face, one group at a time. We wanted to look at an intervention that could be done online with a larger sample.”
Erba conducted an online experiment with more than 700 white Americans who read a news story on a fictional news website about sports, drugs or welfare. Participants were given one of the three stories at random, and half were given further context to read — the online media literacy intervention — and half were not. All then answered questions about their attitudes toward Black subjects in explicit and implicit terms by agreeing or disagreeing with statements from the Pro Black Attitude Scale and the Symbolic Racism Scale, two previously validated research instruments.
The findings showed those who received the intervention held fewer stereotypes than their counterparts. Those who read the sports story showed the greatest difference in stereotypes, followed by the story on drugs, while those who read stories on welfare showed no difference. The intervention included further context for readers in all three areas. One example for the sports story included information on educational inequalities in the United States and how many Black Americans had to hope for an athletic scholarship to be able to continue their education after high school. The crime intervention included information about how members of the Black community are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses, even though they do not consume or sell drugs at higher rates than white Americans, and the welfare story included information about the difference in welfare benefits and income inequality between Black and white Americans.
The unequal reductions in stereotypes between topics could be due to the level of stereotype associated with each in audiences’ minds, but the fact that the intervention did show reductions is encouraging, said Erba, who presented his findings to the International Communication Association in 2021. He also noted that those who received the intervention were asked their opinions on reading the news with the additional context included, and they reported enjoying reading the news more than those who were not provided the context.
“Journalists tend to see themselves as objective observers and don’t want to appear biased. So we wanted to see if having this additional context affected how people viewed the news source,” Erba said. “Not only did the intervention work, but there was no difference in the level of trust, and participants enjoyed the news even more when they got it. That’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned.”
Erba continues to test the online media literacy intervention with college students to see if a different sample produces different results. In a time of racial tensions, unrest and increased calls for social justice, a media literacy intervention that can reduce stereotypes holds promise, especially when research has shown the Black community is overrepresented in news coverage as perpetrators of crime, underrepresented as victims of crime and in other negative lights, he said.
“What we have very little information about is how we can intervene to mitigate those effects,” Erba said. “Media literacy is a very rich field. We have research on media’s effects on behavioral measures like smoking and drinking, but very little on race.”
Who are the masses in mass media research?
Another KU study found that mass media research of the last decade-plus has depended on samples lacking diversity, which can call into question how much researchers truly know about mass media’s effects on the population.
Erba; Peter Bobkowski, associate professor of journalism & mass communications at KU; Brock Ternes of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and former KU graduate student; and Yuchen Liu and Tara Logan, former graduate students at KU, wrote a study in which they conducted a census of 1,278 mass communication studies, all of those published in six high-impact communications journals from 2000 to 2014. They found that when the studies did report on the demographics of their samples, they relied heavily on young, educated white women. The study was published in the Howard Journal of Communications.
In the 2000 U.S. Census, Latina/os were the largest minority for the first time. The U.S. population has diversified even more since then, yet many studies that form the basis of knowledge on media effects in America did not have samples that mirrored that diversity.
“We’re taking a step back and saying, ‘We have these results, but how did we get there?’ This study shows we may not know as much as we thought we know about media effects, because we’ve based them on a series of studies in which the sample may be too limited,” Erba said.
The American Psychological Association recommends that researchers record and include demographic information about their study samples including age, gender, race, income and education levels. Several of the studies included no information on demographics, and authors point out that demographic reporting did improve over the 15-year study period. Three-fourths of the studies reported gender, two-thirds reported age, two-fifths reported race/ethnicity, and one-third reported education. While the reporting improved, the authors point out that when the information was included, it showed the majority of study participants were young, with an average age of 30; 60% were women; the vast majority were white; and most had at least 13 years of education. Therefore, the average participant was not representative of the larger U.S. population.
Years of research have pointed out the importance of how a person’s identity, including age, gender, education, race, income and other factors, influence how they interact with mass media in areas such as health communications and news coverage. However, when samples are not diverse or too homogenous, it limits the implications of the studies for the broader population.
“I hope that this study adds to the conversation happening across the social sciences about how inclusive our disciplines are in their faculty ranks, research and publications,” Bobkowski said. “This study contributes one more data point in support of critically evaluating our collective work and committing to do better.”
The authors argue that not only does mass media scholarship perhaps not know as much as previously thought about media influence but that researchers should actively take steps to reverse the trend. First, they recommend recording study participants’ demographics and exploring potential differences between participants representing different demographic intersections. They also challenge researchers to be more conscious about sampling techniques by recruiting more diverse samples and remembering that people identify with social identities on different levels.
“One lesson from this study is the need to improve how mass communication approaches social identity. Measuring participants’ identities and identity salience adds only a few minutes to a study, and reporting these variables adds only a few sentences to a manuscript,” the authors wrote. “Exploring the role these variables may play vis-à-vis the media makes a study’s results more transparent for readers and may lead to new insights. Mass communication researchers should reflect on their participants’ identities and critically assess what their results reveal and, most importantly, do not reveal.”
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Contact: Emily Ryan, The Commons, 785-864-6293, [email protected], @TheCommonsKU
Author Leah Penniman to speak in collaborative series on climate justice
LAWRENCE – The collaborative virtual series inspired by contributors to the book “All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” returns to the University of Kansas in spring 2022. The first event features farmer, food sovereignty activist, author and soil steward Leah Penniman at noon Feb. 17 in conversation with local food policy activist and grower Cody Haynes.
This series spans the knowledge across and beyond disciplines and features the writers whose works comprise “All We Can Save,” edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson, to center individual and collective agency around the urgency of climate change. Recognizing that the effects of climate change are most immediately and disproportionately felt by minority and low-income communities, this series highlights activists, scholars, thinkers, creatives and doers whose life work generates and speaks to ideas for action, survival and nourishment.
“Students across campus are engaged in classes, discussions and action around climate change issues and are yearning for solutions,” said Ali Brox, assistant teaching professor in the Environmental Studies Program. “We are fortunate to have someone as inspiring as Leah Penniman join the ongoing conversations at KU as part of the ‘All We Can Save’ series.”
The editors of the book observe that climate change is often discussed in scientific terms but that the response to climate change must include diverse expertise. Highlighted among additional perspectives are global social movements and grassroots activism, cultural and creative practices, religious and spiritual engagement, and food production, among other realms.
Penniman’s work brings food production into conversation with these additional realms. “Her work with Soul Fire Farm puts theory into practice, demonstrating the power of good relationships with land to uproot racism and heal communities and ourselves,” said Megan Kaminski, associate professor of English. “Guided by Afro-Indigenous ancestral wisdom, Penniman’s land-based activism and writing builds sustainable, just and equitable futures rooted in food sovereignty and community self-determination. Her work informs and inspires research and action across disciplines and vocations.”
This series is led by The Commons, with support from the Environmental Studies Program; the Indigenous Studies Program; the KU departments of African & African-American Studies, English, Geography & Atmospheric Science, and Geology; the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity; the KU Sawyer Seminar; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the Global Awareness Program; the Health Humanities and Arts Research Collaborative; the University Honors Program and the Global Awareness Program.
All events are free and open to the public. Register on Zoom for the Feb. 17 event.
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