Wasn\u27t it a Party?

My brother said it\u27s just withdrawal from the ecstasy. It\u27s such a high, he told me, that a normal low is so far down it\u27s like jumping off a building. Just don\u27t do it too often,he said. You might rewire your brain and your normal will never be the same again. He told me this while he helped me look for the stolen painting last weekend. When I told my landlord the painting from the second floor stairwell was ripped off the wall at a party my roommate Sandra and I had thrown, I\u27d steeled myself to hear it was irreplaceable. But he told me he thought he\u27d bought the print from a vendor outside the Met, and if I wanted to make things right, I would find a copy, buy it, hang it, and we would pretend the whole thing never happened. I\u27m relieved that at least this one problem might have a solution, so this is my second weekend getting off the subway at 86th and Lex and hiking my way over to the Met in search of a replacement for the stolen print

The application of existing genotoxicity methodologies for grouping of nanomaterials:towards an integrated approach to testing and assessment

The incorporation of nanomaterials (NMs) in consumer products has proven to be highly valuable in many sectors. Unfortunately, however, the same nano specific physicochemical properties, which make these material attractive, might also contribute to hazards for people exposed to these materials. The physicochemical properties of NMs will impact their interaction with biological surroundings and influence their fate and their potential adverse effects such as genotoxicity. Due to the large and expanding number of NMs produced, their availability in different nanoforms (NFs) and their utilization in various formats, it is impossible for risk assessment to be conducted on an individual NF basis. Alternative methods, such as grouping are needed for streamlining hazard assessment. The GRACIOUS Framework provides a logical and science evidenced approach to group similar NFs, allowing read-across of hazard information from source NFs (or non-NFs) with adequate hazard data to target NFs that lack such data. Here, we propose a simple three-tiered testing strategy to gather evidence to determine whether different NFs are sufficiently similar with respect to their potential to induce genotoxicity, in order to be grouped. The tiered testing strategy includes simple in vitro models as well as a number of alternative more complex multi-cellular in vitro models to allow for a better understanding of secondary NM-induced DNA damage, something that has been more appropriate in vivo until recently

Background Mutational Features of the Radiation-Resistant Bacterium Deinococcus Radiodurans

Deinococcus bacteria are extremely resistant to radiation, oxidation, and desiccation. Resilience to these factors has been suggested to be due to enhanced damage prevention and repair mechanisms, as well as highly efficient antioxidant protection systems. Here, using mutation-accumulation experiments, we find that the GC-rich Deinococcus radiodurans has an overall background genomicmutation rate similar to that of E. coli, but differs inmutation spectrum, with the A/T to G/C mutation rate (based on a total count of 88 A: T -> G: C transitions and 82 A: T -> C: G transversions) per site per generation higher than that in the other direction (based on a total count of 157 G: C -> A: T transitions and 33 G: C -> T: A transversions). We propose that this unique spectrumis shaped mainly by the abundant uracil DNA glycosylases reducing G: C -> A: T transitions, adenine methylation elevating A: T -> C: G transversions, and absence of cytosine methylation decreasing G: C -> A: T transitions. As opposed to the greater than 100x elevation of the mutation rate in MMR- (DNA Mismatch Repair deficient) strains of most other organisms, MMR- D. radiodurans only exhibits a 4-fold elevation, raising the possibility that other DNA repair mechanisms compensate for a relatively low-efficiency DNA MMR pathway. As D. radiodurans has plentiful insertion sequence (IS) elements in the genome and the activities of IS elements are rarely directly explored, we also estimated the insertion (transposition) rate of the IS elements to be 2.50 x 10(-3) per genome per generation in the wild-type strain; knocking out MMR did not elevate the IS element insertion rate in this organism.WoSScopu