A sacrificed spider monkey is shedding new light on an ancient Mesoamerican relationship.

The remains of a 1,700-year-old monkey found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan outside modern-day Mexico City suggest the primate was a diplomatic gift from the Maya. The find is the earliest evidence of a primate held in captivity in the Americas, researchers report November 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unearthed in 2018 at the base of a pyramid in Teotihuacan, the monkey’s skeleton lay beside the corpses of other animals — including an eagle and several rattlesnakes — in an area of the city where visiting Maya elites may have resided.

Evidence of animal sacrifices, including of predators like jaguars, have been found in the city before. But “up to that point, we did not have any instances of sacrificed primates in Teotihuacan,” says Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of California, Riverside.

Chemical analysis of the spider monkey’s bones and teeth showed that the female had likely been captured in a humid environment at a young age sometime in the third century. The monkey then lived in captivity for a few years before meeting her end between the years 250 and 300.

The highlands around Mexico City are a long way from the natural habitat of spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroy), which require wet tropical forests to thrive. This fact, along with the presence of Maya murals and vessels, suggests to Sugiyama and her colleagues that the spider monkey was a gift from elite Mayas to the people of Teotihuacan.

The find is an example of diplomatic relations between two cultures that sometimes had violent interactions. Maya hieroglyphs indicated that military forces from Teotihuacan invaded the Maya city of Tikal in 378, marking the start of a roughly 70-year period in which Teotihuacan meddled in Maya politics (SN: 10/22/21).

The “striking” discovery of the monkey shows that relationship between these two cultures far predates the invasion, says David Stuart, an archaeologist and epigraphist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study.

“The war of 378 had a long history leading up to it,” he says. “The monkey is a really compelling illustration of this long relationship.”

Josep Cornella doesn’t deal in absolutes. While chemists typically draw rigid lines between organic and inorganic chemistry, Cornella, a researcher at Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, believes in just the opposite.

“You have to be open to cross boundaries,” he says, “and learn from it.” The fringes are “where the rich new things are.”

Cornella is an organic chemist by industry standards; he synthesizes molecules that contain carbon. But he’s put together a team from a wide range of backgrounds: inorganic chemists, physical organic chemists, computational chemists. Together, the team brainstorms novel approaches to designing new catalysts, so that chemical reactions essential to pharmaceuticals and agriculture can be made more efficient and friendly for the environment. Along the way, Cornella has unlocked mysteries that stumped chemists for years.

“He has told us about catalysts … that we didn’t have before, and which were just pipe dreams,” says Hosea Nelson, a chemist at Caltech who has not worked with Cornella.
Bold idea
When Cornella heard a speaker at a 2014 conference say that bismuth was nontoxic, he was sure it was a mistake. Bismuth is a heavy metal that sits between toxic lead and polonium on the periodic table. But it is indeed relatively nontoxic — it’s even used in the over-the-counter nausea medicine Pepto-Bismol.

Still, bismuth remains poorly understood. That’s one reason it attracted him. “It was a rather forgotten element of the periodic table,” Cornella says. But, “it’s there for a reason.”

Cornella started wondering if an element like bismuth could be trained for use as a catalyst. For the last century, scientists have been using transition metals, like palladium and iron, as the main catalysts in industrial synthesis. “Could we actually train [bismuth] to do what these guys do so well?” he asked. It was a conceptual question that “was completely naïve, or maybe stupid.”

Far from stupid: His team successfully used bismuth as a catalyst to make a carbon-fluorine bond. And bismuth didn’t just mimic a transition metal’s role — it worked better. Only a small amount of bismuth was required, much less than the amount of transition metal needed to complete the same task.

“A lot of people, including myself and other [researchers] around the world, have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make bismuth reactions catalytic,” Nelson says. “He’s the guy who cracked that nut.”

Standout research
While the bismuth research is “weird” and “exciting,” Cornella says, it remains a proof of concept. Bismuth, though cheap, is not as abundant as he had hoped, so it’s not a very sustainable option for industry.

But other Cornella team findings are already being used in the real world. In 2019, the group figured out how to make an alternative to Ni(COD)2, a finicky catalyst commonly used by chemists in the lab. If it’s not kept at freezing temperatures and protected from oxygen by a layer of inert gases, the nickel complex falls apart.

The alternative complex, developed by Lukas Nattmann, a Ph.D. student in Cornella’s lab at the time, stays stable in oxygen at room temperature. It’s a game changer: It saves energy and materials, and it’s universal. “You can basically take all those reactions that were developed for 60 years of Ni(COD)2 and basically replace all of them with our catalyst, and it works just fine,” Cornella says.
Cornella’s lab is also developing new reagents, substances that transform one material into another. The researchers are looking to transform atoms in functional groups — specific groupings of atoms that behave in specific ways regardless of the molecules they are found in — into other atoms in a single step. Doing these reactions in one step could cut preparation time from two weeks to a day, which would be very useful in the pharmaceutical industry

Taking risks
It’s the success that gets attention, but failure is “our daily basis,” Cornella says. “It’s a lot of failure.” As a student, when he couldn’t get a reaction to work, he’d set up a simple reaction called a TBS protection — the kind of reaction that’s impossible to get wrong — to remind himself that he wasn’t “completely useless.”

Today he runs a lab that champions taking risks. He encourages students to learn from one another about areas they know nothing about. For instance, a pure organic chemist could come into Cornella’s lab and leave with a good understanding of organometallic chemistry after spending long days working alongside a colleague who is an expert in that area.

To Cornella, this sharing of knowledge is crucial. “If you tackle a problem from just one unique perspective,” he says, “maybe you’re missing some stuff.”

While Cornella might not like absolutes, Phil Baran, who advised Cornella during his postdoctoral work at Scripps Research in San Diego, sees Cornella as fitting into one of two distinct categories: “There are chemists who do chemistry in order to eat, like it’s a job. And there are chemists who eat in order to do chemistry,” Baran says. Cornella fits into the latter group. “It’s his oxygen.”

Growing up in Brazil, Marcos Simões-Costa often visited his grandparents’ farm in the Amazon. That immersion in nature — squawking toucans and all — sparked his fascination with science and evolution. But a video of a developing embryo, shown in his middle school science class, cemented his desire to become a developmental biologist.

“It’s such a beautiful process,” he says. “I was always into drawing and art, and it was very visual — the shapes of the embryo changing, the fact that you start with one cell and the complexity is increasing. I just got lost in that video.”

Today, Simões-Costa, of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, is honoring his younger self by demystifying how the embryo develops. He studies the embryos and stem cells of birds and mice to learn how networks of genes and the elements that control them influence the identity of cells. The work could lead to new treatments for various diseases, including cancer.

“The embryo is our best teacher,” he says.
Standout research
Simões-Costa focuses on the embryo’s neural crest cells, a population of stem cells that form in the developing central nervous system. The cells migrate to other parts of the embryo and give rise to many different cell types, from the bone cells of the face to muscle cells to brain and nerve cells.

Scientists have wondered for years why, despite being so similar, neural crest cells in the cranial region of the embryo can form bone and cartilage, while those in the trunk region can’t form either. While a postdoc at Caltech, Simões-Costa studied the cascade of molecules that govern how genes are expressed in each cell type. With his adviser, developmental biologist Marianne Bronner, he identified transcription factors — proteins that can turn genes on and off — that were present only in cranial cells. Transplanting the genes for those proteins into trunk cells endowed the cells with the ability to create cartilage and bone.

Now in his own lab, he continues to piece together just how this vast regulatory network influences the specialization of cells. His team reconstructed how neural crest cells’ full set of genetic instructions, or the genome, folds into a compact, 3-D shape. The researchers identified short DNA sequences, called enhancers, that are located in faraway regions of the genome, but end up close to key genes when the genome folds. These enhancers work with transcription factors and other regulatory elements to control gene activity.

Simões-Costa is also using neural crest cells to elucidate a strange behavior shared by cancer cells and some embryonic cells. These cells produce energy anaerobically, without oxygen, even when oxygen is present. Called the Warburg effect, this metabolic process has been studied extensively in cancer cells, but its function remained unclear.

Colored tracks representing cell movements..
Through experiments manipulating the metabolism of neural crest cells, Simões-Costa’s team found that the Warburg effect is necessary for the cells to move around during early development. The mechanism, which should stay turned off in nonembryonic cells, somehow “gets reactivated in adult cells in the context of cancer, leading those cells to become more migratory and more invasive,” Simões-Costa says.

“He’s one of the few people who’s really looked at [this process in neural crest cells] at a molecular level and done a deep dive into the mechanisms underlying it,” says Bronner.

Cleverly combining classical embryological methods with the latest genomic technologies to address fundamental questions in developmental biology is what makes Simões-Costa special, says Kelly Liu, a developmental biologist at Cornell University. He wants to understand not only what individual genes do, but how they work at a systems level, she says.

What’s next
How does the genetic blueprint tell cells where they are in the embryo, and what they should be doing? How do cancer cells hijack the Warburg effect, and could understanding of that process lead to new treatments? These are some of the questions Simões-Costa wants to tackle next.

“It’s been 20 years since the Human Genome Project came to a conclusion,” he says, referring to the massive effort to read the human genetic instruction book. “But there’s still so much mystery in the genetic code.”

Those mysteries, plus a deep passion for lab work, fuel Simões-Costa’s research. “Being at the bench is when I’m the happiest,” he says. He likens the delicate craft of performing precise surgeries on tissues and cells to meditation. “It does not get old.”