The Power of the Public Defender Experience: Learning by Fighting for the Incarcerated and Poor

This Essay discusses how public defender apprenticeships impact law students and help mold their future careers. Brayer discusses the tangible advantages that the apprenticeship imparts on students as well as the transferable skills that students gain. Brayer then analyzes the internal and professional growth of students that participate in this apprenticeship. Brayer situates this growth within the context of Chief Justice John Marshall’s own similar experience, arguing how the public defender experience focuses and matures aspiring lawyers

Roger Nash Baldwin and the St. Louis Civil Liberties Trail: Celebrating 100 Years of the ACLU with a Search for the Organization’s Conceptual Founding

This article traces the role of Roger Nash Baldwin as a leading figure in the American civil liberties movement in the early twentieth century. In particular, the article highlights the central role of St. Louis in this history. At the advice of family friend Louis Brandeis, Baldwin moved to St. Louis to become a sociology professor at Washington University. At the time, St. Louis was a center of migration for African Americans escaping oppression in the South. The article traces a variety of geographical locations throughout St. Louis that were important to Baldwin’s development as a leader in the civil liberties movement

Mechanistic role of the catalytic residue D300 in human pancreatic alpha-amylase

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Molecular evolution of HoxA13 and the multiple origins of limbless morphologies in amphibians and reptiles

Developmental processes and their results, morphological characters, are inherited through transmission of genes regulating development. While there is ample evidence that cis-regulatory elements tend to be modular, with sequence segments dedicated to different roles, the situation for proteins is less clear, being particularly complex for transcription factors with multiple functions. Some motifs mediating protein-protein interactions may be exclusive to particular developmental roles, but it is also possible that motifs are mostly shared among different processes. Here we focus on HoxA13, a protein essential for limb development. We asked whether the HoxA13 amino acid sequence evolved similarly in three limbless clades: Gymnophiona, Amphisbaenia and Serpentes. We explored variation in ω (dN/dS) using a maximum-likelihood framework and HoxA13sequences from 47 species. Comparisons of evolutionary models provided low ω global values and no evidence that HoxA13 experienced relaxed selection in limbless clades. Branch-site models failed to detect evidence for positive selection acting on any site along branches of Amphisbaena and Gymnophiona, while three sites were identified in Serpentes. Examination of alignments did not reveal consistent sequence differences between limbed and limbless species. We conclude that HoxA13 has no modules exclusive to limb development, which may be explained by its involvement in multiple developmental processes

Recommendations for accurate genotyping of SARS-CoV-2 using amplicon-based sequencing of clinical samples.

Genotyping of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been instrumental in monitoring viral evolution and transmission during the pandemic. The quality of the sequence data obtained from these genotyping efforts depends on several factors, including the quantity/integrity of the input material, the technology, and laboratory-specific implementation. The current lack of guidelines for SARS-CoV-2 genotyping leads to inclusion of error-containing genome sequences in genomic epidemiology studies. We aimed to establish clear and broadly applicable recommendations for reliable virus genotyping. We established and used a sequencing data analysis workflow that reliably identifies and removes technical artefacts; such artefacts can result in miscalls when using alternative pipelines to process clinical samples and synthetic viral genomes with an amplicon-based genotyping approach. We evaluated the impact of experimental factors, including viral load and sequencing depth, on correct sequence determination. We found that at least 1000 viral genomes are necessary to confidently detect variants in the SARS-CoV-2 genome at frequencies of ≥10%. The broad applicability of our recommendations was validated in over 200 clinical samples from six independent laboratories. The genotypes we determined for clinical isolates with sufficient quality cluster by sampling location and period. Our analysis also supports the rise in frequencies of 20A.EU1 and 20A.EU2, two recently reported European strains whose dissemination was facilitated by travel during the summer of 2020. We present much-needed recommendations for the reliable determination of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences and demonstrate their broad applicability in a large cohort of clinical samples

Ancient transposable elements transformed the uterine regulatory landscape and transcriptome during the evolution of mammalian pregnancy

A major challenge in biology is determining how evolutionarily novel characters originate; however, mechanistic explanations for the origin of new characters are almost completely unknown. The evolution of pregnancy is an excellent system in which to study the origin of novelties because mammals preserve stages in the transition from egg laying to live birth. To determine the molecular bases of this transition, we characterized the pregnant/gravid uterine transcriptome from tetrapods to trace the evolutionary history of uterine gene expression. We show that thousands of genes evolved endometrial expression during the origins of mammalian pregnancy, including genes that mediate maternal-fetal communication and immunotolerance. Furthermore, thousands of cis-regulatory elements that mediate decidualization and cell-type identity in decidualized stromal cells are derived from ancient mammalian transposable elements (TEs). Our results indicate that one of the defining mammalian novelties evolved from DNA sequences derived from ancient mammalian TEs co-opted into hormone-responsive regulatory elements distributed throughout the genome.Vincent J. Lynch, Mauris C. Nnamani, Aurélie Kapusta, Kathryn Brayer, Silvia L. Plaza, Erik C. Mazur, Deena Emera, Shehzad Z. Sheikh, Frank Grützner, Stefan Bauersachs, Alexander Graf, Steven L. Young, Jason D. Lieb, Francesco J. DeMayo, Cédric Feschotte, Günter P. Wagne