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- Written by: Lake County News reports
NORTH COAST, Calif. – A major milestone was reached on Wednesday in the effort to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) along California’s coast.
In a 3-0 vote, the California Fish and Game Commission approved and adopted regulations for the North Coast MPAs, completing the network of MPAs in California’s open coastal waters, from Mexico to the Oregon state line.
The network of MPAs is the first in the United States to be designed from the ground up as a science-based network, rather than a patchwork of independent protected areas without specific goals and objectives.
“This is a great day for California’s ocean and coastal resources,” said Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird. “As promised, we have completed the nation’s first statewide open coast system of marine protected areas, strengthening California’s ongoing commitment to conserve marine life for future generations. Through the process, we also established the first ever special designation allowing tribes to continue ancestral fishing practices on the North Coast.”
Assemblyman Wes Chesbro (D-Arcata) spoke to the commission to urge its members to adopt Marine Life Protection Act proposals worked out by a coalition of local fishermen, environmentalists and area tribes known as the North Coast Regional Stakeholders Group.
“It’s unanimous: We on the North Coast all support protecting our ocean fishery resources and we highly value sustainable commercial, recreational and traditional harvests,” said Chesbro, who spoke at the commission’s meeting in Eureka.
The proposal ultimately was accepted as part of the MPA.
The public planning process for the North Coast region began in June 2009 and included numerous public workshops and more than 75 days of meetings that provided opportunities for formal and informal public input through a regional stakeholder group, a science advisory team, and a blue ribbon task force.
Public comments were also received throughout the regulatory and environmental review processes for the proposed North Coast MPAs.
“Our decision today was made possible by the hard work and dedication of hundreds of stakeholders up and down the California coast,” said Michael Sutton, vice president of the Fish and Game Commission who presided over the historic vote. “California can be proud not only of its new, comprehensive network of protection for the marine environment, but of the cutting-edge public process that made it happen.”
The North Coast regulations include a provision for federally recognized tribal members to continue harvesting and gathering fish, kelp and shellfish as they have for countless generations.
The provision will allow noncommercial take to continue, consistent with existing regulations, in MPAs other than State Marine Reserves, where there is a record of ancestral take by a specific tribe.
“We sincerely appreciate the state’s willingness to hear the concerns of the tribes and develop a plan that meets critical marine conservation and tribal cultural protection goals,” said Chairwoman Priscilla Hunter of the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, a consortium of 10 federally recognized North Coast tribes based in Mendocino and Lake counties. “The start of this process was very difficult and contentious, but thanks to Secretary Laird and Governor Brown, we have ended in a very positive place with a strong framework for future tribal consultation on important conservation and environmental issues.”
The North Coast region covers approximately 1,027 square miles of state waters from the California/Oregon state line south to Alder Creek near Point Arena in Mendocino County.
The plan, adopted by the commission with broad community support, includes 19 MPAs, a recreational management area, and seven special closures covering approximately 137 square miles of state waters or about 13 percent of the region.
California encompasses approximately 5,285 square miles of open coast state waters. The open coast portion of the statewide network of MPAs now includes 119 MPAs, five recreational management areas and 15 special closures covering approximately 16 percent of all open coast state waters.
Approximately half of California’s new or modified MPAs are multiple use areas, with the remaining in no-take areas.
The MPAs were developed to be consistent with California’s landmark Marine Life Protection Act, the first statutory mandate of its kind in the nation, requiring that California’s MPAs be redesigned based on the best available science, with identified goals and objectives, with the advice and input of stakeholders and experts to create a statewide network.
“This statewide system will benefit fish and fishermen in California for generations to come,” said Charlton H. Bonham, director of the Department of Fish and Game. “The science shows that by protecting sensitive ocean and coastal habitats, marine life flourishes and in turn, creates a healthier system overall.”
The North Coast MPAs adopted by the Commission today are expected to go into effect by early 2013.
For more information on the Marine Life Protection Act, visit www.dfg.ca.gov/mlpa/ .
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- Written by: Sarah Yang
One of the top suspects behind killer vascular diseases is the victim of mistaken identity, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, who used genetic tracing to help hunt down the real culprit.
The guilty party is not the smooth muscle cells within blood vessel walls, which for decades was thought to combine with cholesterol and fat that can clog arteries. Blocked vessels can eventually lead to heart attacks and strokes, which account for one in three deaths in the United States.
Instead, a previously unknown type of stem cell — a multipotent vascular stem cell — is to blame, and it should now be the focus in the search for new treatments, the scientists report in a new study appearing June 6 in the journal Nature Communications.
"For the first time, we are showing evidence that vascular diseases are actually a kind of stem cell disease," said principal investigator Song Li, professor of bioengineering and a researcher at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. "This work should revolutionize therapies for vascular diseases because we now know that stem cells rather than smooth muscle cells are the correct therapeutic target."
The finding that a stem cell population contributes to artery-hardening diseases, such as atherosclerosis, provides a promising new direction for future research, the study authors said.
"This is groundbreaking and provocative work, as it challenges existing dogma," said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease at UC San Francisco, who provided some of the mouse vascular tissues used by the researchers. "Targeting the vascular stem cells rather than the existing smooth muscle in the vessel wall might be much more effective in treating vascular disease."
It is generally accepted that the buildup of artery-blocking plaque stems from the body's immune response to vessel damage caused by low-density lipoproteins, the bad cholesterol many people try to eliminate from their diets.
Such damage attracts legions of white blood cells and can spur the formation of fibrous scar tissue that accumulates within the vessel, narrowing the blood flow.
The scar tissue, known as neointima, has certain characteristics of smooth muscle, the dominant type of tissue in the blood vessel wall.
Because mature smooth muscle cells no longer multiply and grow, it was theorized that in the course of the inflammatory response, they revert, or de-differentiate, into an earlier state where they can proliferate and form matrices that contribute to plaque buildup.
However, no experiments published have directly demonstrated this de-differentiation process, so Li and his research team remained skeptical. They turned to transgenic mice with a gene that caused their mature smooth muscle cells to glow green under a microscope.
In analyzing the cells from cross sections of the blood vessels, they found that more than 90 percent of the cells in the blood vessels were mature smooth muscle cells. They then isolated and cultured the cells taken from the middle layer of the mouse blood vessels.
After one month of cell expansion, the researchers saw a threefold increase in the size of the cell nucleus and the spreading area, along with an increase in stress fibers.
Notably, none of the new, proliferating cells glowed green, which meant that their lineage could not be traced back to the mature smooth muscle cells originally isolated from the blood vessels.
"Not only was there a lack of green markers in the cell cultures, but we noticed that another type of cell isolated from the blood vessels exhibited progenitor traits for different types of tissue, not just smooth muscle cells," said Zhenyu Tang, co-lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering.
The other co-lead author of the study, Aijun Wang, was a post-doctoral researcher in Li's lab.
"The different phenotypes gave us the clue that stem cells were involved," said Wang, who is now an assistant professor and the co-director of the Surgical Bioengineering Laboratory at the UC Davis Medical Center. "We did further tests and detected proteins and transcriptional factors that are only found in stem cells. No one knew that these cells existed in the blood vessel walls because no one looked for them before."
Further experiments determined that the newly discovered vascular stem cells were multipotent, or capable of differentiating into various specialized cell types, including smooth muscle, nerve, cartilage, bone and fat cells. This would explain why previous studies misidentified the cells involved in vessel clogs as de-differentiated smooth muscle cells after vascular injury.
"In the later stages of vascular disease, the soft vessels become hardened and more brittle," said Li. "Previously, there was controversy about how soft tissue would become hard. The ability of stem cells to form bone or cartilage could explain this calcification of the blood vessels."
Other tests in the study showed that the multipotent stem cells were dormant under normal physiological conditions. When the blood vessel walls were damaged, the stem cells rather than the mature smooth muscle cells became activated and started to multiply.
The researchers analyzed human carotid arteries to confirm that the same type of multipotent vascular stem cells are found in human blood vessels.
"If your target is wrong, then your treatment can't be very effective," said Dr. Shu Chien, director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego, and Li's former adviser. "These new findings give us the right target and should speed up the discovery of novel treatments for vascular diseases."
Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine helped support this research.
Sarah Yang writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Incumbents at the federal and state levels came out on top in their primary efforts to represent Lake County in the U.S. Congress and California Assembly.
According to vote tallies posted on the California Secretary of State’s Web site early Wednesday morning, Congressman John Garamendi (D-Fairfield) and Congressman Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) led their races for reelection to the Third and Fifth Congressional Districts, respectively.
At 2:30 a.m. Wednesday Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s office reported that 383 of 521 precincts – or 73.5 percent – had been counted in the Fifth Congressional District race, which includes the southern portion of Lake County, as well as Napa, Solano, Sonoma and Contra Costa counties.
At that point Thompson led with 70,945 votes, or 72.4 percent, followed by Republicans Stewart John Cilley, with 10,834 votes or 11.1 percent, and Randy Loftin with 16,177 votes or 16.5 percent.
Garamendi also won his primary race by a strong margin, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office.
Because of redistricting Garamendi is now seeking the Third Congressional District seat, which represents the northern portion of Lake County as well as Colusa, Glenn, Sacramento, Solano, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties.
As of 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, all 452 precincts had been counted, and Garamendi had 52.8 percent of the vote, with 47,258 ballots cast for him.
He was followed by a field of Republican candidates led by Colusa County Supervisor Kim Vann, who received 22,336 votes or 25 percent of the vote; Rick Tubbs, 13,744 votes, 15.4 percent; Tony Carlos, 4,146 votes, 4.6 percent; and Eugene Ray, 1,936 votes, 2.2 percent.
The statewide results in both the congressional races mirrored those in Lake County, where Thompson and Garamendi led their respective fields.
Thompson and Garamendi must win in November to clinch reelection.
Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada (D-Davis), who is moving to the Fourth Assembly District due to redistricting, was leading her race with Republican challenger John Munn of Davis, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
As of 2:30 a.m. Wednesday 88.9 percent of the precincts – or 384 of 432 – had been counted in the Fourth District Assembly race, with Yamada receiving 38,421 votes, or 60 percent of the ballots cast, to Munn’s 25,610 ballots, or 40 percent.
In Lake County, Yamada led Munn by a more narrow margin, 53.7 percent or 4,757 votes to Munn’s 4,086 votes, or 46.1 percent of the vote.
Munn and Yamada also will continue the race through the November election, at which time the winner will take the Assembly seat.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The second annual “Power to the Youth” event will be held on Saturday, June 9, at Austin Park in Clearlake.
Families and children are invited to join in the fun from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
There will be a number of events occurring simultaneously throughout the day.
A dodgeball game will take place in the tennis courts, a Magic the Gathering tournament, flag football games, a basketball tournament, skate park competitions and video games.
For the young children, there will be a bouncy house, face painting, sand box area, coloring table, sidewalk chalk and more.
The event also will showcase a multitude of booths that offer local services, from political parties to educational institutions, health care, real estate, local sporting clubs and many more.
Live music also will be offered throughout the event by Righteous Vibration, Moral Discontent, Corey Snipes, K-Town and Elysium.
Bruno Sabatier, an event organizer, said the aim was to have fun, offer healthy competitions and musical entertainment, and educate residents on what the the community has to offer.
Power to the Youth is made possible through the partnership with Lake Community Pride Foundation, a local nonprofit group that aims to help the youth through programs such as the Safe House and the soon-to-be renovated Youth Center as well as supporting music and other fine arts in the Konocti Unified School District.