bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ghrelin is neuroprotective in Parkinson’s disease: molecular mechanisms of metabolic neuroprotection
Authors: Bayliss Jacqueline A. , Andrews Zane B.
Published: March 2013

Ghrelin is a circulating orexigenic signal that rises with prolonged fasting and falls postprandially. Ghrelin regulates energy homeostasis by stimulating appetite and body weight; however, it also has many nonmetabolic functions including enhanced learning and memory, anxiolytic effects as well as being neuroprotective. In Parkinson’s disease, ghrelin enhances dopaminergic survival via reduced microglial and caspase activation and improved mitochondrial function. As mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to Parkinson’s disease, any agent that enhances mitochondrial function could be a potential therapeutic target. We propose that ghrelin provides neuroprotective effects via AMPK (5′ adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase) activation and enhanced mitophagy (removal of damaged mitochondria) to ultimately enhance mitochondrial bioenergetics. AMPK activation shifts energy balance from a negative to a neutral state and has a role in regulating mitochondrial biogenesis and reducing reactive oxygen species production. Mitophagy is important in Parkinson’s disease because damaged mitochondria produce reactive oxygen species resulting in damage to intracellular proteins, lipids and DNA predisposing them to neurodegeneration. Many genetic mutations linked to Parkinson’s disease are due to abnormal mitochondrial function and mitophagy, for example LRRK2, PINK1 and Parkin. An interaction between ghrelin and these classic Parkinson’s disease markers has not been observed, however by enhancing mitochondrial function, ghrelin or AMPK is a potential therapeutic target for slowing the progression of Parkinson’s disease symptoms, both motor and nonmotor.
Mast cells contribute to double-stranded RNA-induced augmentation of airway eosinophilia in a murine model of asthma
Authors: Kan-o Keiko , Matsunaga Yuko , Fukuyama Satoru , Moriwaki Atsushi , Hirai-Kitajima Hiroko , Yokomizo Takehiko , Aritake Kosuke , Urade Yoshihiro , Nakanishi Yoichi , Inoue Hiromasa , Matsumoto Koichiro
Published: March 2013

Background

Clinical studies showed the contribution of viral infection to the development of asthma. Although mast cells have multiple roles in the pathogenesis of allergic asthma, their role of in the virus-associated pathogenesis of asthma remains unknown. Most respiratory viruses generate double-stranded (ds) RNA during their replication. dsRNA provokes innate immune responses. We recently showed that an administration of polyinocinic polycytidilic acid (poly IC), a mimetic of viral dsRNA, during allergen sensitization augments airway eosinophilia and hyperresponsiveness in mice via enhanced production of IL-13.

Methods

The effect of poly IC on allergen-induced airway eosinophilia was investigated for mast cell-conserved Kit+/+ mice and -deficient KitW/KitW-v mice. The outcome of mast cell reconstitution was further investigated.

Results

Airway eosinophilia and IL-13 production were augmented by poly IC in Kit+/+ mice but not in KitW/KitW-v mice. When KitW/KitW-v mice were reconstituted with bone marrow-derived mast cells (BMMCs), the augmentation was restored. The augmentation was not induced in the mice systemically deficient for TIR domain-containing adaptor-inducing IFN-β (TRIF) or interferon regulatory factor (IRF)-3, both mediate dsRNA-triggered innate immune responses. The augmentation was, however, restored in KitW/KitW-v mice reconstituted with TRIF-deficient or IRF-3-deficient BMMCs. Although leukotriene B4 and prostaglandin D2 are major lipid mediators released from activated mast cells, no their contribution was shown to the dsRNA-induced augmentation of airway eosinophilia.

Conclusions

We conclude that mast cells contribute to dsRNA-induced augmentation of allergic airway inflammation without requiring direct activation of mast cells with dsRNA or involvement of leukotriene B4 or prostaglandin D2.
The ArabidopsisAt1g30680 gene encodes a homologue to the phage T7 gp4 protein that has both DNA primase and DNA helicase activities
Authors: Diray-Arce Joann , Liu Bin , Cupp John D , Hunt Travis , Nielsen Brent L
Published: March 2013

Background

The Arabidopsis thaliana genome encodes a homologue of the full-length bacteriophage T7 gp4 protein, which is also homologous to the eukaryotic Twinkle protein. While the phage protein has both DNA primase and DNA helicase activities, in animal cells Twinkle is localized to mitochondria and has only DNA helicase activity due to sequence changes in the DNA primase domain. However, Arabidopsis and other plant Twinkle homologues retain sequence homology for both functional domains of the phage protein. The Arabidopsis Twinkle homologue has been shown by others to be dual targeted to mitochondria and chloroplasts.

Results

To determine the functional activity of the Arabidopsis protein we obtained the gene for the full-length Arabidopsis protein and expressed it in bacteria. The purified protein was shown to have both DNA primase and DNA helicase activities. Western blot and qRT-PCR analysis indicated that the Arabidopsis gene is expressed most abundantly in young leaves and shoot apex tissue, as expected if this protein plays a role in organelle DNA replication. This expression is closely correlated with the expression of organelle-localized DNA polymerase in the same tissues. Homologues from other plant species show close similarity by phylogenetic analysis.

Conclusions

The results presented here indicate that the Arabidopsis phage T7 gp4/Twinkle homologue has both DNA primase and DNA helicase activities and may provide these functions for organelle DNA replication.
The personal and national costs of lost labour force participation due to arthritis: an economic study
Authors: Schofield Deborah J , Shrestha Rupendra N , Percival Richard , Passey Megan E , Callander Emily J , Kelly Simon J
Published: March 2013

Background

The costs of arthritis to the individuals and the state are considerable.

Methods

Cross-sectional analysis of the base population of Health&WealthMOD, a microsimulation model of 45 to 64 year old Australians built on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers and STINMOD, an income and savings microsimulation model.

Results

Individuals aged 45 to 64 years who had retired early due to arthritis had a median value of AU$260 in total weekly income whereas those who were employed full time were likely to average more than five times this. The large national aggregate impact of early retirement due to arthritis includes AU$9.4 billion in lost GDP, attributable to arthritis through its impact on labour force participation.

When looking at the ongoing impact of being out of the labour force those who retired from the labour force early due to arthritis were estimated to have a median value of total savings by the time they are 65 of as little as $300 (for males aged 45–54). This is far lower than the median value of savings for those males aged 45–54 who remained in the labour force full time, who would have an estimated $339 100 of savings at age 65.

Conclusions

The costs of arthritis to the individuals and the state are considerable. The impacts on the state include loss of productivity from reduced workforce participation, lost income taxation revenue, and increased government support payments – in addition to direct health care costs. Individuals bear the economic costs of lost income and the reduction of their savings over the long term.
Differential expression of beta-catenin and dickkopf-1 in the third trimester placentas from normal and preeclamptic pregnancies: a comparative study
Authors: Zhang Zhan , Li He , Zhang Linlin , Jia Liting , Wang Peng
Published: March 2013

Background

Beta-catenin is a key nuclear effector of Wnt signaling which could be antagonized by dickkopf-1(DKK1). Beta-catenin and DKK1 are involved in a variety of biological processes; however, their expression in the placenta with severe preeclampsia (PE) has not been elucidated. This study was aimed to detect the localization and compare the expression of beta-catenin and DKK1 in normal and preeclamptic placenta.

Methods

Sixty pregnant women who underwent cesarean section were enrolled in this study, including 30 healthy pregnant women in the control group and 30 preeclamptic women in the severe PE group. Real-time polymerase chain reaction (real-time-PCR) and western blot were employed to detect the beta-catenin and DKK1 mRNA and protein expression levels, respectively, and their locations were evaluated by immunohistochemistry (IHC).

Results

Our results indicated that beta-catenin and DKK1 were expressed predominantly in the syncytiotrophoblast and the extravillous trophoblast (EVT). The beta-catenin mRNA and protein expressions were significantly decreased, whereas the DKK1 significantly increased in preeclamptic placental tissues compared to normal placental controls.

Conclusions

In conclusion, decreased beta-catenin expression, as well as DKK1 over-expression might be associated with the process of the pathogenesis of PE. Further studies would elucidate their exact roles in the pathogenesis of PE.
Objectively measured light-intensity lifestyle activity and sedentary time are independently associated with metabolic syndrome: a cross-sectional study of Japanese adults
Authors: Kim Junghoon , Tanabe Kai , Yokoyama Noriko , Zempo Hirofumi , Kuno Shinya
Published: March 2013

Background

Reducing sedentary time and increasing lifestyle activities, including light-intensity activity, may be an option to help prevent metabolic syndrome (MetS). The purpose of the present study was to examine whether objectively measured light-intensity lifestyle activity and sedentary time is associated with MetS, independent of moderate–vigorous intensity physical activity (MVPA).

Methods

The participants in this cross-sectional study were 483 middle-aged Japanese adults, aged 30–64 years. The participants were divided into those with or without MetS according to the Japanese criteria for MetS. A triaxial accelerometer was used to measure light-intensity lifestyle activity [1.6–2.9 metabolic equivalents (METs)] and sedentary time (≤1.5 METs). Logistic regression was used to predict MetS from the levels of light-intensity lifestyle activity and sedentary time with age, sex, smoking, calorie intake, accelerometer wear time, and MVPA as covariates.

Results

The odds ratios (OR) for MetS in the highest and middle tertiles of light-intensity lifestyle activity were 0.44 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.24 to 0.81] and 0.51 (95% CI: 0.29 to 0.89) relative to the lowest tertile, after adjustment for age, sex, smoking, calorie intake, accelerometer wear time and MVPA (P
trend = 0.012). Sedentary time was also associated with the risk of MetS (P
trend = 0.018). Among participants in the highest tertile of sedentary time, the risk of MetS was 2.27-times greater than that in the lowest tertile (95% CI: 1.25 to 4.11). The risk of MetS was not significantly increased in subjects in the middle tertile of sedentary time.

Conclusions

We found that light-intensity lifestyle activity and sedentary time were significantly associated with the risk of MetS, independent of MVPA. The results of our study suggest that public health messages and guidelines should be refined to include increases in light-intensity lifestyle activity and/or decreases in sedentary time, alongside promoting MVPA, to prevent MetS.
Comparative proteomic analysis of a new adaptive Pichia Stipitis strain to furfural, a lignocellulosic inhibitory compound
Authors: Hao Xue-Cai , Yang Xiu-Shan , Wan Ping , Tian Shen
Published: March 2013

The development of inhibitor-tolerant ethanologenic yeast is one of the most significant challenges facing bio-ethanol production. Adaptation of Pichia stipitis to inhibitors is one of the most efficient ways for dealing with inhibitor problems. The molecular mechanisms involved in the tolerance and adaptation of P. stipitis are, however, still unclear. In the present study, we developed a yeast strain from P. stipitis Y7 that has improved tolerance against inhibitors. We performed comparative proteomic investigations with sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. These investigations gave insights into the tolerance of yeast strains to biomass conversion inhibitors at the protein level. Many proteins involved in glycolysis, the pentose phosphate pathway, and the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle were found to be differentially expressed due to the presence of furfural. Quantitative real-time reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) and metabolite analysis were utilized to provide orthogonal evidence for the results obtained. Our results provide a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in the response of P. stipitis to furfural. These findings will benefit the design and development of inhibitor-tolerant yeast.
Co-culturing a novel Bacillus strain with Clostridium tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755 to produce butyric acid from sucrose
Authors: Dwidar Mohammed , Kim Seil , Jeon Byoung Seung , Um Youngsoon , Mitchell Robert J , Sang Byoung-In
Published: March 2013

Background

Currently, the most promising microorganism used for the bio-production of butyric acid is Clostridium tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755T; however, it is unable to use sucrose as a sole carbon source. Consequently, a newly isolated strain, Bacillu s sp. SGP1, that was found to produce a levansucrase enzyme, which hydrolyzes sucrose into fructose and glucose, was used in a co-culture with this strain, permitting C. tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755T to ferment sucrose to butyric acid.

Results

B. sp. SGP1 alone did not show any butyric acid production and the main metabolite produced was lactic acid. This allowed C. tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755T to utilize the monosaccharides resulting from the activity of levansucrase together with the lactic acid produced by B. sp. SGP1 to generate butyric acid, which was the main fermentative product within the co-culture. Furthermore, the final acetic acid concentration in the co-culture was significantly lower when compared with pure C. tyrobutyricum ATCC 25755T cultures grown on glucose. In fed-batch fermentations, the optimum conditions for the production of butyric acid were around pH 5.50 and a temperature of 37°C. Under these conditions, the final butyrate concentration was 34.2±1.8 g/L with yields of 0.35±0.03 g butyrate/g sucrose and maximum productivity of 0.3±0.04 g/L/h.

Conclusions

Using this co-culture, sucrose can be utilized as a carbon source for butyric acid production at a relatively high yield. In addition, this co-culture offers also the benefit of a greater selectivity, with butyric acid constituting 92.8% of the acids when the fermentation was terminated.
Skills or culture? An analysis of the decision to work by immigrant women in Italy
Authors: Accetturo Antonio , Infante Luigi
Published: March 2013

Activity and employment rates for immigrant women in many industrialised countries display a great variability across national groups. The aim of this paper is to assess whether this fact is due to a voluntary decision (i.e. large reservation wages by immigrants) or to an involuntary process (i.e. low labor market evaluation of their skills). This is done by estimating the reservation wage for each individual in a sample of immigrant women in Italy. Our results show that low activity and employment rates for certain national groups are not associated with high reservation wages. This implies that low participation should not be interpreted as a voluntary decision.

JEL codes

J22, J61, J15
Queering Natal
Authors: Tallie T. J.
Published: March 2013

The media coverage of President Jacob Zuma and the “problem” of his foreign and potentially threatening polygamy reveals the long-extant gendered and raced fault lines of the presumably postcolonial relationship between Britain and South Africa. The discourses in the British press that marked Zuma as a “buffoon,” “barbaric,” and less civilized than his “distinctly monogamous” hosts can be traced to nineteenth-century settler colonial regimes and their violent attempts at reordering the lands and peoples they sought to occupy and replace. The arrival of British settlers in the nineteenth-century colony of Natal brought them into conflict with the Zulu peoples they sought to supplant and exploit. A reading of emigrant letters, missionary pamphlets, and newspaper correspondence reveals that the persistence of the practice of isithembu (polygamy) and ilobolo (the ritual exchange of cattle upon marriage) among Zulus in the face of British attempts to control their social and political formations challenged the very heart of the settler project. As British settlers sought to create and define a “modern” sexuality predicated on a heteronormative family unit, polygamy became the flashpoint in a biopolitical battle between colonists and indigenous peoples in Natal. For settlers, polygamy failed at being properly heteronormative, instead indicating an overweening hyper-heterosexuality in Zulu men. As a result, to white observers, polygamy presented a dangerous and disruptive challenge to the gendered, raced, and sexual order they wished to construct — in short, it became queer. The destabilizing queer potential of indigenous polygamy to the settler project reveals the assumptions about sexuality, civilization, and conjugality that underwrite colonial aspiration and postimperial anxieties.
Is the Rectum a Mirror? Queer Palindromes in John Greyson's Fig Trees and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know
Authors: Clare Stephanie
Published: March 2013

This essay considers a form of relation that is neither sameness nor difference but correspondence. It does so by analyzing the palindromes in two films, John Greyson's Fig Trees and Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know. Within a palindrome, letters here and there are neither the same nor different. Instead, they correspond in a particular arrangement. I argue that palindromes' spatiality resonates with the spatiality of anal eroticism as described by Sigmund Freud; I show how the films use palindromes to figure particular relations between people and places; and I conclude that such relations seem difficult, and sometimes undesirable, to sustain. Ultimately, in thinking through relations of correspondence, the essay examines identity's impossible suspense.
“ … Your Ancestors Come”: Tracing an Abundant Present in Adelina Anthony's La Hocicona Series
Authors: Rowe Aimee Carrillo
Published: March 2013

This essay examines the queer Xicana performer Adelina Anthony's triptych performance, La Hocicona Series, to trace the theoretically capacious convergences among queer time, indigenous spirituality, and performance. Anthony's characters move with an affective and spiritual force that brings audiences into fleeting contact with ancestors and goddesses, as sacred ceremony interanimates political critique, queer desire, abject subjects, and indigenous visioning. Her performances generate what I call an abundant present that binds disparate temporal registers: a pre-Conquest past, when ancestors lived and Mexica spirituality was prevalent, interanimates contemporary queer Xicana life to generate present moments in which prior rhythms and life forms come to life. Orgasmic pleasure ruptures the time-space of the theater, bringing the past to life in the present and tracing the promise of queer multiracial futures.
Reframing Aids, Retooling Scholarship
Authors: Epstein Steven
Published: March 2013

Three excellent recent books attest to how much remains to be understood about the AIDS epidemic, and even about its most well-studied years, the 1980s and 1990s. While varying by discipline and approach, these books converge around a common set of preoccupations: the potency of historical legacies, the vigor as well as the fragility of counterpublics, the tensions between individualizing and collectivizing responses to disaster, and the social management of despair. Yet despite their virtues, these books also raise questions about the limitations of accounts that isolate HIV/AIDS as a distinct scholarly topic.
Culture’s Calling: Mobile Phones, Gender, and the Making of an African Migrant Village in Lisbon
Authors: Johnson Michelle C.
Published: March 2013

In this article, I explore how immigrants from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau living in Portugal use mobile phones in their daily lives in Lisbon. Whereas one might assume that mobile phones and other new information technologies facilitate transnational communication between Africa and Portugal, the ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in Lisbon from 1999 to 2003 revealed a different scenario. Instead, mobile phones as imagined and used by the Guinean immigrants I met in Lisbon revealed less about transnationalism and globalization than they did about constructing community and identity in a new locale. As Guinean immigrants in Portugal reconfigured their relationship to their former colonizers and struggled to make their way in a new, multicultural Europe, they used their mobile phones to engage local networks, shape local identities, and transform Lisbon’s sprawl into an African migrant village. Here, I highlight the gendered dimensions of this process and contend that Guinean men’s and women’s varied uses of mobile phones in Lisbon underscore contrasting experiences of migration, mobility, and belonging.
The Private Performance of Salat Prayers: Repetition, Time, and Meaning
Authors: Haeri Niloofar
Published: March 2013

This article is an ethnography of the private performance of the five daily prayers of Islam among a group of middle class, educated women in Tehran. It goes beyond the public and formal spheres to explore religious experience in everyday life. What happens in a ritual when performed alone, without a public? I argue against the prevalent notion that repetition renders the formulas of rituals meaningless. Instead, over time, there is a proliferation of meanings emerging as a result of the undermining of the formality of the text by repetition. The ways in which creativity is exercised are analyzed in answer to the question of what makes one prayer session more satisfying than another—what is an efficacious salat? I argue that the length of time the prayers have been performed, the age of the reciter, and the literate practices of reading and debate are crucial in understanding how this ritual is brought to life by its practitioners.
“Things that Involve Sex are Just Different”: US Anti-Trafficking Law and Policy on the Books, in Their Minds, and in Action
Authors: Peters Alicia W.
Published: March 2013

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, passed by the US Congress in 2000, criminalizes the forced or deceptive movement of people into exploitative conditions of labor and provides services to victims. The law makes a symbolic distinction (although it holds no legal meaning) between “sex” and “non-sex” trafficking, (i.e., movement into forced prostitution and movement into other forced labor sectors), thereby marking “sex trafficking” as a special category. This article explores how the law is translated into action through symbolically-mediated processes that incorporate assumptions and narratives about sex, gender, and victimization, as well as how the symbolic privileging of “sex trafficking” results in uneven treatment of victims.
Neoliberalism and the New Agora: Exploring Survival, Emergence, and Political Subjectivity Among Pluralized Subaltern Communities in Athens, Greece
Authors: Alexandrakis Othon
Published: March 2013

In the wake of the Greek economic crisis, pluralized groups of subalterns are coming together across Athens to take advantage of new, post-bailout, below-the-radar work opportunities. This article follows one such group consisting of an undocumented migrant from Mauritania and a small group of Roma (Gypsies), as they established an undocumented transportation business. It probes the complex relationship between subjective identity formation and the emergence of new modes of collective political agency in neoliberal contexts. By adapting work-related techniques of survival, members of the transport group and their broader networks are creating public spaces of multivalent political intensity.
New Literacy Practices of a Kiregi Mother from a(n) (Im)migrant South Korean Family in Canada
Authors: Kim Ji Eun , Deschambault Ryan
Published: March 2013

The purpose of this study was to explore one South Korean (hereafter Korean) mother’s literacy practices after she had migrated to Canada for the purpose of overseeing her children’s education. Using a case study method, we focused on language, media, domains, and purposes of literacy practices in Korea and Canada. Data were obtained through two semi-structured interviews, two home visit observations, a questionnaire, and collection of literacy artifacts. The documented changes in the mother’s literacy practices, along with the theoretical and methodological approaches used to document them, offer promising areas and approaches for future research about the out-of-school literacy practices of (im)migrant students.
Real-World Literacy Activity in Pre-school
Authors: Anderson Jim , Purcell-Gates Victoria , Lenters Kimberly , McTavish Marianne
Published: March 2013

In this article, we share real-world literacy activities that we designed and implemented in two early literacy classes for preschoolers from two inner-city neighborhoods that were part of an intergenerational family literacy program, Literacy for Life (LFL). The program was informed by research that shows that young children in high literate homes develop important emergent literacy knowledge by engaging in meaningful and functional activities in their homes and communities that are mediated by print. We defined real-world literacy activity as reading, writing, or listening to real-life texts for real-life purposes. The children made significant gains in literacy knowledge when compared to the norm group. We share examples of how we integrated real-world literacy activities into daily classroom management/organizational routines, whole class and small group instruction, celebrations and special events and how we took advantage of teachable moments to make explicit the purposes and functions of print and texts in developmentally appropriate ways.
Re-considering the Range of Reciprocity in Community-Based Research and Service Learning: You Don’t Have to be an Activist to Give Back
Authors: Remley Dirk
Published: March 2013

This essay presents perspectives on the range of potential reciprocity in literacy research and service learning, focusing attention on opportunities for individualized and institutional reciprocation, as observed by Takayoshi and Powell. Researchers and students involved in community-based research or service programs have several opportunities to give back to their research participants and service organizations. The more they are aware of these opportunities or can make these entities aware of these benefits and act upon them, the more productive such research and service can be to the field of literacy studies as well as to those who participate.
Informed, Passionate, and Disorderly: Uncivil Rhetoric in a New Gilded Age
Authors: Welch Nancy
Published: March 2013

Little known about the now celebrated 1912 Bread and Roses strike is that prominent Progressive-era reformers condemned the strikers as “uncivil” and “violent.” An examination of Bread and Roses’ controversies reveals how a ruling class enlists middle-class sentiments to oppose social-justice arguments and defend a civil order—not for the good of democracy but against it. The strikers’ inspiring actions to push against civil boundaries and create democratic space can challenge today’s teachers of public writing to question the construction of civility as an acontextual virtue and consider the class-struggle uses of unruly rhetoric for our new Gilded Age.
Gambian-American College Writers Flip the Script on Aid-to-Africa Discourse
Authors: Long Elenore , Fye Nyillan , Jarvis John
Published: March 2013

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aidto-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.
Shakespeare and the Cultural Capital Tension: Advancing Literacy in Rural Arkansas
Authors: Jolliffe David A.
Published: March 2013

A multi-faceted Shakespeare festival in a small town in rural east central Arkansas, part of a larger Community Literacy Advocacy Project, represents a concerted effort to alter the discourse of decline in this economically troubled region, but it also raises some challenging issues about how such projects distribute social and cultural capital among their participants.
What’s Writing Got to Do with It?: Citizen Wisdom, Civil Rights Activism, and 21 st Century Community Literacy
Authors: Kells Michelle Hall
Published: March 2013

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic inclusion. I argue that writing can be both a healing process and an occasion for exercising agency in a world of contingency and uncertainty. To illustrate, I describe several key events shaping the evolution of the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement in New Mexico. Taking a case study approach, I begin this chapter by examining the civic discourses of one prominent New Mexico leader in the post-World War II civil rights movement: Vicente Ximenes. As a leader, Ximenes confronted critical civil rights issues about culture and belonging for over fifty years beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a historical moment worth revisiting. First, I set the stage for this examination about writing, citizenship, and civic literacy by analyzing two critical rhetorical moments in the life of this post World War II civil rights activist. Secondly, I connect the Ximenes legacy to a growing movement at the University of New Mexico and the ways that we are making critical responses to current issues facing our local communities in New Mexico. By triangulating social acts of literacy, currently and historically, this article offers organizing principles for Composition teachers and advocates of community literacy serving vulnerable communities in their various spheres of practice.
Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21 st Century
Authors: Carter Shannon , Mutnick Deborah
Published: March 2013

A general overview of the Writing Democracy project, including its origin story and key objectives. Draws parallels between the historical context that gave rise to the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project and today, examining the potential for a reprise of the FWP in community literacy and public rhetoric and introducing articles collected in this special issue as responses to the key challenges such a reprisal might raise.
“Our Habit Saves You”: Peircean Subjectivity in “The Beast in the Jungle”
Authors: Phipps Gregory
Published: March 2013

This article uses Charles Peirce’s theory of subjectivity to examine “The Beast in the Jungle.” Peirce argues that an individual’s beliefs manifest themselves through external, Pragmatic consequences. These consequences often foster doubts which undermine the individual’s beliefs, forcing re-evaluations. Peirce’s theory helps reveal that John Marcher’s professed terror and anticipation is an esoteric and self-important belief that gains a limited Pragmatic affirmation through May Bartram. While May’s love for Marcher is able to keep away intrusive doubts, Marcher’s lack of love for May and the attendant Pragmatic consequences of this failure ultimately launch the beast.
“As an artist and as a bachelor”: The Sexual Dynamics of “The Liar”
Authors: Collister Peter
Published: March 2013

This essay examines the performances both public and subjective of two male protagonists in this story whose title anticipates dissimulation and whose plot ostensibly deals with portraiture and one man’s wish to expose the other’s facility in lying. Their nominal romantic object is a woman, but her presence becomes merely token within this triangulated relationship. The representation of assumed norms of social, sexual, or cultural behaviors to which males must subscribe is undermined by the deviant tendencies of James’s discourse within scenes where the artist is licensed to gaze upon his subject, culminating in moments of homoerotic intensity.
The Beast to Come: Henry James and the Writing of Queer Messianism
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: March 2013

This article argues that John Marcher and May Bartram’s companionship in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” imaginatively anticipates a relationally richer future in both its ambiguous intimacy and its orientation to a never-named “thing” that, contrary to the story’s dominant interpretations, corresponds neither to unrealized heterosexual love nor to repressed homosexual desire. May and Marcher sketch the contours of “a queer messianism” in which fidelity to the future is uncoupled from normative reproduction and in which melancholic attachments to youth animate oppositional identifications.
Queer Footing: Pedestrian Politics and the Problem of Queer Difference in The Princess Casamassima
Authors: Nichols Ben
Published: March 2013

This essay picks up the figure of the street-walker, not, as has been done, as an emblem for transformative modes of subjectivity, open to proliferating difference, but as the manifestation of stubborn sameness. Through this, it seeks to question the heteronormative ideologies underwriting a perceived privileging of difference in James studies and queer studies. James’s established importance to queer work makes him an important figure of sameness and this rhetorical force is used to engage and critique recent queer theory (principally Lee Edelman’s No Future ) by re-engaging the queerness attached by extant criticism to Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima .
The Anxiety of Audience: Economies of Readership in James’s Hawthorne
Authors: Fraser Gordon
Published: March 2013

The author critiques a widespread psychoanalytic interpretation of James’s Hawthorne (1879), proposing instead an economic model for interpreting the work. After demonstrating that a reading first proposed by Richard H. Brodhead—based on Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence —has become pervasive in James scholarship, the author shows how this model fails to recognize the highly conscious way James used Hawthorne as an address to British readers. The article shows that Hawthorne in fact represents an attempt to undermine British notions of U.S. authorship and produce space in which James could position himself as a cosmopolitan, transatlantic man of letters.
Henry James’s Syntax of Surprise
Authors: Stanley Kate
Published: March 2013

Shock has been a key term for critical approaches to modernist literature since Walter Benjamin defined modern experience as a “series of shocks and collisions.” This essay brings to light an alternate framework for modernism, which has nineteenth-century roots in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s formulation of life as “a series of surprises.” I focus on The Ambassadors to elaborate Henry James’s syntax of surprise, an idiosyncratic grammar of time and attention that distinguishes his late novels of consciousness from his initial novelistic economy of shock. As I contend, Jamesian surprise is central to a wider aesthetics of surprise, which recasts modernist representations of time and consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic.
Conscience and Consciousness in The Ambassadors : Epistemology, Focalization, and Narrative Ethics
Authors: Held Joshua
Published: March 2013

Through focalization and details like reflexive pronouns, verbs of perception, and counterfactuals, Henry James’s narrator in The Ambassadors reveals that Lambert Strether’s consciousness and conscience are not just perceived, but imagined, even created. This creation of Strether’s interior world foregrounds the solipsistic torque of focalization on narrative ethics, suggesting the narrator and focalizing character as the principal directors of the novel’s ethics, as of its perception. While Strether’s conscience can hardly make claims on other characters, much less on readers, focalization both proffers a model of ethical response and makes conscience the command center of a new ethical world.
Assembling Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions
Authors: Cardozo Karen , Subramaniam Banu
Published: March 2013

This essay de-centers the human for a more ecological perspective. Drawing on Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” the authors collaborate across the humanities and sciences to rethink Asian/America as a multispecies, naturecultural, and transnational phenomenon. After offering a theoretical foundation, the essay connects Asian/American Studies to issues in the biological sciences, and discusses how Said’s theory of Orientalism resonates in a multispecies paradigm – specifically, the nativism and xenophobia of “invasion biology” that vilifies foreign species with strident calls for their eradication. Case studies reveal that it is not an essential predilection to invasion, but the conditions of globalization that generate so-called invasions. The authors conclude that solutions must move from targeting species to a reconsideration of the larger forces that “invite” invasions and that assembling Asian/America generate interdisciplinary academic and political partnerships that can better solve the problems of the 21st century.
Ethnic Social Structures and Mainstream Capital: The Ethnic Anchoring of "American" Franchise Growth
Authors: Parker Jennifer
Published: March 2013

This article argues the significance of ethnic resource mobilization to certain corporate restructuring and growth trends in the U.S. mainstream economy with the expansion of franchising and the importance of branding in giant corporate America. While the field of ethnic economies continues to debate how ethnic social structures function in the mainstream economy, it has overlooked this important part of the economy. “Bounded solidarity” helps explain how particular Asian Indian business communities have been integral to the changing franchisor-franchisee relationship, franchise operation procedures, and consumer marketing strategies, and has worked to counterbalance the industry’s heightening demands. In this way, ethnic social structures are integral to corporate growth strategies and norms of efficiency.
Seshadri constants via toric degenerations
Authors: Ito Atsushi
Published: March 2013

We give a method to estimate Seshadri constants
on toric varieties at any point. By using the estimations and toric degenerations,
we can obtain some new computations or estimations of Seshadri constants
on non-toric varieties. In particular,
we investigate Seshadri constants on hypersurfaces in projective spaces
and Fano 3-folds with Picard number 1 in detail.
The influence of p-regular class sizes on normal subgroups
Authors: Akhlaghi Zeinab , Beltrán Antonio , Felipe María José
Published: March 2013

Let
Local Sylow theory of totally disconnected, locally compact groups
Authors: Reid Colin D.
Published: March 2013

We define a local Sylow subgroup of a totally disconnected, locally compact (t.d.l.c.) group
Isolation and Sequencing of a Plant cDNA Encoding a Bifunctional Methylenetetrahydrofolate Dehydrogenase : Methenyltetrahydrofolate Cyclohydrolase Protein
Authors: Chen Liangfu , Nargang Frank E. , Cossin Edwin A.
Published: March 2013

In plant cells, the interconversion of formyl- and methylene-tetrahydrofolates is catalyzed by a bifunctional protein possessing methenyltetrallydrofolate cydohydrolase (EC 3.5.4.9) and methylenetetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase (EC 1.5.1.5) activities. The present work reports the isolation and sequencing of a cDNA that encodes this protein. Polydonal antibodies, raised against purified pea cytosolic dehydrogenase:cyclohydrolase, were used to screen a λgt 11 cDNA expression library, constructed from leaf extracts of this species. The screen identified a phage containing a cDNA insert with an open reading frame encoding a 294 amino acid protein (Mr 31,344). The deduced primary structure of this protein contained most of the conserved regions found in other dehydrogenase:cyclohydrolase proteins including the corresponding domains of the trifunctional C1-THF synthases of mammalian and yeast origins.
Level of Serum Neopterin and Interleukin-6 In Patients with Thyroid Diseases
Authors: Kondera-Anasz Zdzislawa , Mertas Anna
Published: March 2013

The purpose of the study was to characterize the immune status in 88 patients (64 women and 24 men) with thyroid diseases and in 36 healthy blood donors as control group. The clinical material consisted of 37 patients with nontoxic nodular goitre, 10 patients with thyroiditis, 27 patients with thyroid adenoma and 14 patients with thyroid carcinoma. The studied parameters included serum neopterin,interleukin-6 (IL-6), also anti-thyroglobulin autoantibodies (ATG) and anti-thyroid microsomal autoantibodies (MAB). The aim of the study was to investigate whether serum neopterin, IL-6, ATG and MAE have any value in distinction between non-toxic nodular goitre, thyroiditis, thyroid adenoma and thyroid carcinoma. 36.4% patients with thyroid carcinoma, 16.7% patients with nontoxic nodular goitre and 9.1 % patients with thyroid adenoma had neopterin levels higher than 10 nmol/1. In patients and in the control group the mean serum levels of neopterin were in normal range. The highest mean level of neopterin was found in patients with thyroid carcinoma (7.14± 5.95 nmol/1). The difference was statistically significant in comparison to the control (p < 0.001) and patients with thyroiditis and thyroid adenoma (p < 0.05). The significantly higher levels of IL-6 were in all patients in comparison to the control (p < 0.0001). Autoantibodies ATG were detected in serum of 45 patients (51.1 %) and autoantibodies MAE were in serum of 34 patients (38.6 % ). Mean levels of these autoantibodies in patients were statistically significantly higher than in the control ' p < 0.05). In patients with ATG and/or MAE mean level of neopterin was significantly higher than in patients without these autoantibodies (p < 0.05). This study has shown that neopterin represents an additional parameter with potential interest in clinical diagnosis of thyroid diseases.
Serum Neopterin Monitoring in Hepatitis B e Antigen Positive Chronic Type B Hepatitis with Recurrent Acute Exacerbation
Authors: Fukuda Akira , Tsuda Yasuhiro , Yoshimoto Satomine , Mazda Toshio
Published: March 2013

Activation of cellular immunity, mainly cytotoxic T cells, plays an important role in the · mechanisms of cyclic acute exacerbation of hepatocellular damage (AE) in hepatitis B virus (HBV) carriers. Monitoring of the dynamics of immunoreactivity is clinically important to manage the patients and recognize the mechanism of liver damage. Serum neopterin has been widely- recognized as a marker of actiyation of cell-mediated immunity. We observed the clinical course of five hepatitis Be antigen I HBeAg ) positive HBV carriers with recurrent AE for mean eighteen months by monitoring of serum neopterin using a RIA kit. Alanine amino transferase (ALT) and HBeAg were also measured serially as markers for hepatocne necrosis and viral replication, respectively During follow-up period. each patient had several episodes of AE alternating with normal or nearly normal liver function. The levels of serum neopterin changed dynamically related to those of HBeAg and ALT Temporal analysis of these makers before, during and after the episodes of AE showed a close involvement of the viral replication prior to the hepatocellular injury as well as the activation of cellular immunity following the viral replication. Immunological monitoring of serum neopterin could provide useful information about the dynamic interaction between virus replication, cellular immunoreactivity and hepatocellular damage. It was thought that serum neopterin can be used as a complementary marker to follow and manage chronic hepatitis B patients.
Insulin Stimulates Tetrahydrobiopterin Synthesis in Mouse Brain Microvascular Endothelial Cells
Authors: Ishi Masakazu , Shimizu Shunichi , Nagai Tsutomu , Kiuchi Yuji , Yamamoto Toshinori
Published: March 2013

We examined the effects of insulin on tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) synthesis in mouse brain microvascular endothelial cells (MBMECs). Treatment of MBMECs with insulin increased the intracellular BH4 content in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. The insulin-induced increase in BH4 content was inhibited by treatment with 2,4-diamino-6-hydroxypyrimidine, a selective inhibitor of GTP cyclohydrolase I, and Nacetylserotonin, a selective inhibitor of sepiapterin reductase. These findings indicate that insulin stimulates BH4 synthesis in MBMECs through a de novo synthetic pathway of BH4.
Photoinduced cleavage of plasmid DNA in the presence of pterin
Authors: Lorente Carolina , Thomas Andrés Héctor , Villata Laura Sofia , Hozbor Daniela , Lagares Antonio , Capparelli Alberto
Published: March 2013

The photoinduced cleavage of plasmid DNA by UV -A light in the presence of pterin was investigated. Electrophoretic analysis of the irradiated plasmid pUCI8 in the presence of pterin showed that UV light of 350 nm induced the transformation of a significant proportion of the supercoiled plasmid to its relaxed form. A minor proportion of plasmid forms are also converted to the linear plasmid isomer at the longer irradiation times. All these transformations during irradiation can be observed in the absorption spectrum of DNA as function of time. Such spectral modifications correlated with the extent and the kinetics of plasmid relaxation, but not with the appearance of the linear plasmid. None of the exchanges were operative without the irradiation with UV-A light. Control experiments with pterin or plasmid DNA irradiated separately, showed no photochemical changes. Results taken together suggest that the observed changes in the supercoiled plasmid as well as the spectral modifications both derive from the generation of single-strand break in the DNA.
Determination by Site-directed Mutagenesis of Sites in Sepiapterin Reductase Phosphorylated by Ca2+/Calmodulin-dependent Protein Kinase II
Authors: Fujimoto Kengo , Inaba Akemi , Tomomura Akito , Katoh Setsuko
Published: March 2013

Phosphorylation sites of sepiapterin reductase (SPR) phosphorylated by Ca2+-dependent protein kinase II (CaM KII) were studied. By immunoreaction against phosphorylated amino acids, we found that Ser residues of SPR were phosphorylated. We constructed several point mutants of SPR by site-directed mutagenesis and expressed then in E. coli. In assays with anti-phospho Ser antibody, we determined that each of the three Ser residues, S46, S 196, and S214, of SPR was phosphorylated by CaM KIl. Each of these serine residues in SPR was found in a CaM KII phosphorylation site sequelce (Arg-X-X-Ser/Thr).