Evolutionary constraints on the complexity of genetic regulatory networks allow predictions of the total number of genetic interactions

Genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) have been widely studied, yet there is a lack of understanding with regards to the final size and properties of these networks, mainly due to no network currently being complete. In this study, we analyzed the distribution of GRN structural properties across a large set of distinct prokaryotic organisms and found a set of constrained characteristics such as network density and number of regulators. Our results allowed us to estimate the number of interactions that complete networks would have, a valuable insight that could aid in the daunting task of network curation, prediction, and validation. Using state-of-the-art statistical approaches, we also provided new evidence to settle a previously stated controversy that raised the possibility of complete biological networks being random and therefore attributing the observed scale-free properties to an artifact emerging from the sampling process during network discovery. Furthermore, we identified a set of properties that enabled us to assess the consistency of the connectivity distribution for various GRNs against different alternative statistical distributions. Our results favor the hypothesis that highly connected nodes (hubs) are not a consequence of network incompleteness. Finally, an interaction coverage computed for the GRNs as a proxy for completeness revealed that high-throughput based reconstructions of GRNs could yield biased networks with a low average clustering coefficient, showing that classical targeted discovery of interactions is still needed.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 12 pages supplementary informatio

Egyptian stelae from Malta

In 1829, four Egyptian stelae of Twelfth and Eighteenth Dynasty date were found, surprisingly, on Malta. Based on their far-flung findspot, some have suggested that the stelae were locally made by Egyptian colonists who had settled on the island during the second millennium BC. This contribution argues that the stelae offer no basis for such historical reconstructions. Style, content and petrology demonstrate that all four stelae were made in Egypt and that they originally stood in the necropolis of Abydos in Upper Egypt. Microfossils show that these stelae are made of Egyptian limestones, which are of a different geological age to limestones available on Malta. The examination of polished thin sections of samples from the stelae using scanning electron microscopy suggests that the limestones employed were quarried from four geological formations of different ages in the Nile Valley.peer-reviewe

'I Have Every Reason to Love England': Black (neo)Victorianism and Transatlantic Fluidity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Within neo-Victorianism, or contemporary fiction which rewrites the Victorian age, Marie-Lousie Kohlhe has pointed out a critical “reluctance to engage head-on in cross-cultural comparisons, which seem essential in order to get fully to grips with exactly how cultural memory of the nineteenth century is mediated and shaped by a genre that is hardly exclusively ‘British’ in any self-contained sense” (Kohlke 2009, 255). Setting off from that premise, I tackle the neo-Victorian genre in its global dimension by focusing on the transoceanic links between Antebellum America and Victorian Britain as it is exhibited in two postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, namely Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) and Nora Hague's Letters from an Age of Reason (2001), both of them dealing with African Americans crossing the Atlantic ocean towards Victorian Britain. These texts provide a remediation on significant loopholes in Victorian literature, namely the absence of race as an explicit subject in general and the under-representation of interracial love affairs in particular. Similarly, these neo-Victorian texts provide imaginative acts of fictional recovery coalescing with historical reconstructions on the growing presence of African Americans in Victorian Britain which, according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, feature as a gap in the historiography of Black British history (Holbrook Gerzina 2003, 5). The transatlantic interplay between African Americans and nineteenth-century Britain, or “Black America’s romance with Victorian Britain” (Dickerson 2008, 4) was not free from contradictions, though, given that African Americans were then appealing to a country which at the time was setting the foundations for late-Victorian scientific racism, a project which secured the British Empire’s subjugation of non-white races and provided the basis for modern-day racism (Brantlinger 2011, 6-7). The transatlantic fluidity between Black America and Victorian Britain reveals a double drive, a conduit for mutual influence which finds resonance in the recovery of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s term for the hybrid, fractal and transcultural circulation of subjects and ideas across the Atlantic ocean as a result of the slave trade which unearths black subjects as historical agents with an intellectual history (Gilroy 1993, 4-6). In the novels under analysis, the Atlantic ocean comes to stand for a liquid conduit facilitating both the reconstruction of broken transatlantic family ties and the appropriation of European radical discourses in order to support African-American abolitionism. Ultimately, I contend that for the African-American characters in the texts under scrutiny, Victorianism represents a model of respectability, democracy and modernity, the very values of citizenship that black slaves were denied by the American slave system. The inherent contradictions of associating the Victorian age, the epitome of imperialism and colonial domination, with the liberation of African-American slaves only reveals the complexities of the term ‘Victorianism’ and what it has meant to past and present generations.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Book Review: Three Hundred Verses of Bhartrhari

A review of Three Hundred Verses of Bhartrhari by Rev. Dr-Dr. Jacob Kattackal

The origin of the Goths

Witold Ma´nczak has argued that Gothic is closer to Upper German than to Middle German, closer to High German than to Low German, closer to German than to Scandinavian, closer to Danish than to Swedish, and that the original homeland of the Goths must therefore be located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, not in Scandinavia (1982, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1992). I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes’ classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia. We must therefore reconsider the grounds for adopting the latter position and the reasons why it always has remained popular

Creating the Old Testament: the Emergence of the Hebrew Bible. (Book Summary)

A summary of this book published 1989 and still in press (print on order). This material is created; the book itself is edited with three substantial chapters by the editor

Legal imagery on the edge of symbolism : the decoration projects for the Belgian Cour de Cassation

This paper scrutinizes decoration projects, both unexecuted and realized, for the two Cour de Cassation courtrooms in the Brussels Palais de Justice, against the backdrop of the shift from historical to symbolist monumental art and in the context of law and art's symbiosis in fin-de-siècle Brussels

Book Review: Influences of Ancient Hinduism on Early Christianity

A review of Influences of Ancient Hinduism on Early Christianity by A. L. Herman