Open access and data sharing: Easier said than done

This is an interview with Dr. Gholson Lyon, Assistant Professor and researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Lyon's work focuses on understanding the pathophysiological basis of neuropsychiatric conditions, with a long-term goal of expanding access to preventive services and treatment for these disorders. Dr. Lyon is also committed to the open discussion and management of the ethical implications of human genetics research, along with helping to move whole genome sequencing into the clinical world. He frequently speaks about the challenges of integrating genomics into clinical medicine and is vocal about the need for open access and data sharing and was among the 14,699 academicians who boycotted Elsevier for its restrictions on the dissemination of publications

Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865

Not until the eighteenth century was the image of the tender, full-time mother invented. This image retains its power today. Inventing Maternity demonstrates that, despite its association with an increasingly standardized set of values, motherhood remained contested terrain. Drawing on feminist, cultural, and postcolonial theory, Inventing Maternity surveys a wide range of sources--medical texts, political tracts, religious doctrine, poems, novels, slave narratives, conduct books, and cookbooks. The first half of the volume, covering the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, considers central debates about fetal development, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childbearing. The second half, covering the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, charts a historical shift to the regulation of reproduction as maternity is increasingly associated with infanticide, population control, poverty, and colonial, national, and racial instability. In her introduction, Greenfield provides a historical overview of early modern interpretations of maternity. She concludes with a consideration of their impact on current debates about reproductive rights and technologies, child custody, and the cycles of poverty. Honorable Mention for collaborative work from the Society for Early Modern Women Susan C. Greenfield is associate professor of English at Fordham University. Carol Barash is the author of English Women\u27s Poetry, 1649-1714 and co-editor of Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England. These essays offer fresh and vigorous arguments for the challenges maternal roles present to social values. —Choice It is extremely difficult to capture and convey the complex richness of this volume. Taken together, the constitutive essays offer a historical analysis of the making of modern maternity that is sure to appeal to a wide variety of readers. —Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering Makes a timely and valuable contribution to the current scholarly conversation concerning maternity, reproduction, and the gendered body in which histories of imaginative narrative are profitably understood in conjunction with theories of gender, sexuality, race, and class. —Julia Sternhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_gender_and_sexuality_studies/1005/thumbnail.jp

Metabolic Versatility and Antibacterial Metabolite Biosynthesis Are Distinguishing Genomic Features of the Fire Blight Antagonist Pantoea vagans C9-1

Smits THM, Rezzonico F, Kamber T, et al. Metabolic Versatility and Antibacterial Metabolite Biosynthesis Are Distinguishing Genomic Features of the Fire Blight Antagonist Pantoea vagans C9-1. PLoS ONE. 2011;6(7): e22247.Background: Pantoea vagans is a commercialized biological control agent used against the pome fruit bacterial disease fire blight, caused by Erwinia amylovora. Compared to other biocontrol agents, relatively little is currently known regarding Pantoea genetics. Better understanding of antagonist mechanisms of action and ecological fitness is critical to improving efficacy. Principal Findings: Genome analysis indicated two major factors contribute to biocontrol activity: competition for limiting substrates and antibacterial metabolite production. Pathways for utilization of a broad diversity of sugars and acquisition of iron were identified. Metabolism of sorbitol by P. vagans C9-1 may be a major metabolic feature in biocontrol of fire blight. Biosynthetic genes for the antibacterial peptide pantocin A were found on a chromosomal 28-kb genomic island, and for dapdiamide E on the plasmid pPag2. There was no evidence of potential virulence factors that could enable an animal or phytopathogenic lifestyle and no indication of any genetic-based biosafety risk in the antagonist. Conclusions: Identifying key determinants contributing to disease suppression allows the development of procedures to follow their expression in planta and the genome sequence contributes to rationale risk assessment regarding the use of the biocontrol strain in agricultural systems

Physiological Correlates of Volunteering

We review research on physiological correlates of volunteering, a neglected but promising research field. Some of these correlates seem to be causal factors influencing volunteering. Volunteers tend to have better physical health, both self-reported and expert-assessed, better mental health, and perform better on cognitive tasks. Research thus far has rarely examined neurological, neurochemical, hormonal, and genetic correlates of volunteering to any significant extent, especially controlling for other factors as potential confounds. Evolutionary theory and behavioral genetic research suggest the importance of such physiological factors in humans. Basically, many aspects of social relationships and social activities have effects on health (e.g., Newman and Roberts 2013; Uchino 2004), as the widely used biopsychosocial (BPS) model suggests (Institute of Medicine 2001). Studies of formal volunteering (FV), charitable giving, and altruistic behavior suggest that physiological characteristics are related to volunteering, including specific genes (such as oxytocin receptor [OXTR] genes, Arginine vasopressin receptor [AVPR] genes, dopamine D4 receptor [DRD4] genes, and 5-HTTLPR). We recommend that future research on physiological factors be extended to non-Western populations, focusing specifically on volunteering, and differentiating between different forms and types of volunteering and civic participation

Other Voices piece by Carol Isaacson Barash, Ph.D., of Hartford, a genetics an

Other Voices piece by Carol Isaacson Barash, Ph.D., of Hartford, a genetics and ethics consultant, essayist and children\u27s book author. Barash, a trained philosopher, kept copious notes on roadside litter, and during the summers of 1995 and 1996 recorded weekly averages of 65 returnable bottles and cans

Translating translational medicine into global health equity: What is needed?

While genomics, and other omics, research is rapidly advancing in the US and Europe, progress has been slower in less resourced countries. The imbalance has given rise to concern about whether the benefits of these advances, namely new and better tests, treatments, risk identification, and prevention strategies, will be shared and available to those living in less resourced reaches of the globe. In effort to give voice to researchers, an informal survey about barriers to advancing translational medicine was administered to attendees of the 11th Asia Pacific Conference on Human Genetics, 2015, Hanoi. The overall goal of the survey was to identify unmet needs and rank their importance. Most attendees completed the survey. Not surprisingly funding is indicated as a major need. Respondents reported that lack of bioinformatics and computational tools, trained data scientists and access to datasets is creating a significant lag behind better resourced regions. Results are intended to inform efforts to create a regional consensus statement of need. Such a regional statement could help funding organizations and policy makers seeking to promote global genomics benefit sharing