TRICHOTILLOMANIA: EDUCATIONAL ISSUES

Twenty journal articles that examined the condition trichotillomania that are included in national journal databases created for educators were reviewed by a special education teacher. The articles were classified by publication type (e.g., empirical studies, descriptive articles, guides). Fourteen of the 20 articles were empirical studies. The studies were classified by research design (quantitative or mixed methods), the participants and data sources were identified, and the findings were summarized. The author analyzed the 20 articles utilizing a modified version of the Stevick-Collaizi-Keen method to develop themes that represent the essence of the literature. The four themes that emerged from the analysis include: (a) trichotillomania demographics; (b) social behaviors associated with trichotillomania; (c) trichotillomania and the school experience; and (d) trichotillomania treatments. The themes were connected to the role of the author as a special education teacher. Finally, the author reflected upon the changes the understanding illuminated by the analysis of the literature will have on his caree

Pass-back chain extension expands multimodular assembly line biosynthesis.

Modular nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) and polyketide synthase (PKS) enzymatic assembly lines are large and dynamic protein machines that generally effect a linear sequence of catalytic cycles. Here, we report the heterologous reconstitution and comprehensive characterization of two hybrid NRPS-PKS assembly lines that defy many standard rules of assembly line biosynthesis to generate a large combinatorial library of cyclic lipodepsipeptide protease inhibitors called thalassospiramides. We generate a series of precise domain-inactivating mutations in thalassospiramide assembly lines, and present evidence for an unprecedented biosynthetic model that invokes intermodule substrate activation and tailoring, module skipping and pass-back chain extension, whereby the ability to pass the growing chain back to a preceding module is flexible and substrate driven. Expanding bidirectional intermodule domain interactions could represent a viable mechanism for generating chemical diversity without increasing the size of biosynthetic assembly lines and challenges our understanding of the potential elasticity of multimodular megaenzymes

Homotheties and topology of tangent sphere bundles

We prove a Theorem on homotheties between two given tangent sphere bundles $S_rM$ of a Riemannian manifold $M,g$ of $\dim\geq 3$, assuming different variable radius functions $r$ and weighted Sasaki metrics induced by the conformal class of $g$. New examples are shown of manifolds with constant positive or with constant negative scalar curvature, which are not Einstein. Recalling results on the associated almost complex structure $I^G$ and symplectic structure ${\omega}^G$ on the manifold $TM$, generalizing the well-known structure of Sasaki by admitting weights and connections with torsion, we compute the Chern and the Stiefel-Whitney characteristic classes of the manifolds $TM$ and $S_rM$.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in Journal of Geometr

Frobenius submanifolds

The notion of a Frobenius submanifold - a submanifold of a Frobenius manifold which is itself a Frobenius manifold with respect to structures induced from the original manifold - is studied. Two dimensional submanifolds are particularly simple. More generally, sufficient conditions are given for a submanifold to be a so-called natural submanifold. These ideas are illustrated using examples of Frobenius manifolds constructed from Coxeter groups, and for the Frobenius manifolds governing the quantum cohomology of CP^2 and CP^1 \times CP^1.Comment: 23 pages. LaTeX 2