Urban community gardeners' knowledge and perceptions of soil contaminant risks

Although urban community gardening can offer health, social, environmental, and economic benefits, these benefits must be weighed against the potential health risks stemming from exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals and organic chemicals that may be present in urban soils. Individuals who garden at or eat food grown in contaminated urban garden sites may be at risk of exposure to such contaminants. Gardeners may be unaware of these risks and how to manage them. We used a mixed quantitative/qualitative research approach to characterize urban community gardeners' knowledge and perceptions of risks related to soil contaminant exposure. We conducted surveys with 70 gardeners from 15 community gardens in Baltimore, Maryland, and semi-structured interviews with 18 key informants knowledgeable about community gardening and soil contamination in Baltimore. We identified a range of factors, challenges, and needs related to Baltimore community gardeners' perceptions of risk related to soil contamination, including low levels of concern and inconsistent levels of knowledge about heavy metal and organic chemical contaminants, barriers to investigating a garden site's history and conducting soil tests, limited knowledge of best practices for reducing exposure, and a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent and manage soil contamination. Key informants discussed various strategies for developing and disseminating educational materials to gardeners. For some challenges, such as barriers to conducting site history and soil tests, some informants recommended city-wide interventions that bypass the need for gardener knowledge altogether

Genome-Wide Analysis of GLD-1–Mediated mRNA Regulation Suggests a Role in mRNA Storage

Translational repression is often accompanied by mRNA degradation. In contrast, many mRNAs in germ cells and neurons are “stored" in the cytoplasm in a repressed but stable form. Unlike repression, the stabilization of these mRNAs is surprisingly little understood. A key player in Caenorhabditis elegans germ cell development is the STAR domain protein GLD-1. By genome-wide analysis of mRNA regulation in the germ line, we observed that GLD-1 has a widespread role in repressing translation but, importantly, also in stabilizing a sub-population of its mRNA targets. Additionally, these mRNAs appear to be stabilized by the DDX6-like RNA helicase CGH-1, which is a conserved component of germ granules and processing bodies. Because many GLD-1 and CGH-1 stabilized mRNAs encode factors important for the oocyte-to-embryo transition (OET), our findings suggest that the regulation by GLD-1 and CGH-1 serves two purposes. Firstly, GLD-1–dependent repression prevents precocious translation of OET–promoting mRNAs. Secondly, GLD-1– and CGH-1–dependent stabilization ensures that these mRNAs are sufficiently abundant for robust translation when activated during OET. In the absence of this protective mechanism, the accumulation of OET–promoting mRNAs, and consequently the oocyte-to-embryo transition, might be compromised