Protein Isolation Using Peptoid Based Affinity Chromatography

Protein purification is essential for advancements in biotechnology. There are several different methods employed in purifying a particular protein from a complex sample such as a cell lysate. These methods take advantage of differences in the size, charge or binding affinity of the protein. One such method is affinity chromatography which utilizes the binding affinity of a protein toward a certain ligand to purify a protein. This is usually used as a final step to extract the desired protein after the mixture has undergone other purification steps to remove unwanted materials. The goal of this project was to develop a one-step peptoid-based protein purification method. Poly-N-substituted glycines, or peptoids, were developed in the early 1990s and have been shown to have many biological applications. Peptoid side chains can be manipulated for unique circumstances by utilizing any free amine in synthesis. This is an advantageous quality in the determination of protein ligands. This study investigated using peptoids as a specific and efficient one-step process for purification methods. It showed there is potential of proteins binding to peptoids by determining protein concentration changes caused by incubation studies. However, these results could not be verified

Right to Rest in Peace: Missouri Prohibits Protesting at Funerals, The

The Westboro Baptist Church, led by Fred Phelps and based in Topeka, Kansas, has received national attention since the early 1990s, when members of this vehemently anti-homosexual group began actively protesting events involving prominent homosexual people. Eventually, these protests grew to include people who were even marginally supportive of homosexuality. While these protests incited outrage among various groups of people, no widespread effort was made to limit the group\u27s ability to protest at such events. In 2005, however, the group expanded its targets to include military funerals, maintaining that God was killing soldiers in Iraq because of His displeasure with the United States\u27 acceptance of homosexuality and as retribution for an attack on Westboro Baptist Church in 1995. Because of the strong negative public response to these protests, during the 2006 legislative session, state legislatures across the country began to consider legislation prohibiting or limiting picketing and protesting at funerals. In response, Westboro Baptist Church has asserted that it will challenge such laws as unconstitutional restrictions on the freedom of speech. On February 23, 2006, Missouri became one of the first states to pass this type of legislation into law. Currently, the Specialist Edward Lee Myer\u27s Law, as the law is known, greatly prohibits protesting activities at funerals. This Note will explain this legislation and the surrounding legal context and discuss possible treatment of it upon a constitutional challenge

Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 1

This report provides insights into the current practices of multicultural education and the opinions and understandings of New South Wales (NSW) public school teachers around increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in schools and the broader Australian community. The report is the outcome of the first stage of the Rethinking Multiculturalism/ Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME) Project, a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between the University of Western Sydney, the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) and the NSW Institute of Teachers. Surveying teachers about these and related matters seemed a useful first step in considering the state of multicultural education some forty years after its inception (Inglis, 2009). The project as a whole involved a state-wide survey – the focus of this report – as well as focus groups with teachers, parents and students in 14 schools in urban and regional NSW, and a professional learning program informing the implementation of action research projects in each school. Read also: Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 2: http://apo.org.au/node/42670 Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 3: http://apo.org.au/node/42671 &nbsp

BLS Spotlight on Statistics: Union Membership In The United States

[Excerpt] This Spotlight on Statistics examines historical trends in union membership among employed wage and salary workers. It also examines union membership by a variety of demographic characteristics

Skills and strategies of activist mermaids:from pretty to powerful pictures

One of the most noteworthy characteristics of the mermaiding community, which has arisen since the early 2000s when self-styled performers started to impersonate the mermaid myth, consists in the performers positioning of themselves as ocean conservation advocates. Pictures constitute a main resource for this advocacy. But how can pretty pictures become powerful tools drawing attention to the critical state of the climate? What does it take to make and script such pictures? Which skills are necessary? Based on interviews with mermaids and underwater photographers, we explore how pictures become a way of spurring activism and care for the oceans

Orthogonal Chemistries in the Directed Assembly of Complex Molecular Architectures

Chemical orthogonality is the ability of one or more reactions to efficiently proceed in the presence of other reactive functional groups. The concept of including orthogonal reactions to fabricate molecular structures has been applied to natural and synthetic polymers and often used as a tool to increase the level of chemical complexity. Nucleic acids (e.g., DNA and RNA), for instance, are polymers that serve as ubiquitous information-bearing species throughout biology, present the most versatile class of materials for producing diverse, specific nanostructures to date owing to their predictable, information-directed self-assembly. The information borne by nucleic acids is encoded in the sequences of orthogonal nucleobases affixed to a single (deoxy)ribophosphate strand. Thus, through careful consideration of their residue sequence, nucleic acids can be designed to predictably self-assemble via the hydrogen bond-based hybridization of complementary strands into arbitrary, although thermally and mechanically fragile, structures with nanometer precision. This dissertation investigated the use of orthogonal chemistries to fabricate and functionalize different molecular architectures to overcome some of the stability issues of nucleic acid-based structures. First, we explored the formation of cyclic peptoids through the archtypical “click” reaction, a copper (I) catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition reaction between terminal alkyne/azide residues. These cyclic peptoids were post-synthetically conjugated to a maleimide group through the specific spacing of furan groups on the initial oligomers that were designed to undergo a Diels-Alder reaction. This simple example of utilizing orthogonal chemistries to fabricate and decorate cyclic structures highlights the versatility of peptoids in forming more complex molecules. The subsequent chapters in this dissertation explored the information-directed hybridization of oligomeric sequences, analogous to nucleic acid assemblies; however, instead of the hydrogen bonding observed between complementary nucleic acid strands, we employed transient or ‘dynamic’ covalent bonds to produce more stable and robust structures. We fabricated molecular ladders from oligopeptoids by controlling the equilibrium of three different dynamic covalent chemistries. First, a thermally-reversible reaction between a furan and maleimide mimicked the melting and annealing process of nucleic acids to form a likewise double-stranded structure as confirmed by mass spectrometry. We then explored a pH-mediated reaction forming molecular ladders with boronate ester rungs from oligomeric strands comprised of boronic acid and catechol functional groups. In addition to double-stranded structures, we introduced a method assembling “molecular grids” from precursor peptoid oligomers as a preliminary effort towards the formation of cross-linked nanosheets and ribbons. The boronate ester chemistry was ultimately combined with the final dynamic covalent chemistry of an amine and aldehyde to form Schiff base imines; we were able to confirm the formation of molecular ladders and grids bearing rungs of both boronate ester and imines in an aqueous solution by utilizing mass spectrometry. This effectively created an information system encoded in base-4 that was able to mimic the assembly process and reaction conditions for nucleic acid hybridization. The described work expands upon the foundational principles for a method that will enable a route to the facile fabrication of complex and robust assembled structures through orthogonal chemistries.PHDChemical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149799/1/mdun_1.pd

Mermaids as market creators:Cultural entrepreneurship in an emerging practice

With the example of the emergence of professional mermaids, this article shows how primarily young, female enterprising performers developed a new aesthetic category, generated employment from it, and in that way created a market for their services and products. To conceptualize this development, the article employs the Callonian program in market studies into research on cultural entrepreneurship, highlighting that markets are constantly in-the-making and innovation processes cannot be ascribed to the activities of singular “hero figures.” This adds to the existing literature on cultural entrepreneurship by calling attention to collective entrepreneurial practices taking place on the fringes of the cultural sector

Family Engagement Impact Project: Phase II Evaluation Report

In September 2013, the Heising-Simons Foundation (the Foundation) launched a new initiative called the Family Engagement Impact Project (FEIP). The purpose of the initiative is to offer new ways to build capacity for family engagement to promote positive educational outcomes for low-income immigrant children from birth through age 8 in California's San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The initiative leverages existing resources and strengthens public-private partnerships in order to coordinate and integrate efforts across organizations in the funded communities. The partnerships' efforts focus on building the skills of parents and professionals, with an emphasis on enhancing family engagement at home. The FEIP also supports partnerships in replicating at least one evidence-based family engagement model. The Foundation awarded 8-month FEIP planning grants to six communities (Phase I) in fall 2013. During this phase, the selected communities secured partners, defined their family engagement goals, and planned strategies and approaches to achieve their goals. In June 2014, five grantee partnerships received 24-month implementation grants (Phase II). During this phase, the partnerships were tasked with implementing the plans that they had developed during Phase I, including delivering coordinated family engagement programming in their geographic focus areas and implementing at least one evidence-based family engagement program. Table ES1 provides an overview of the five grantee partnerships that received Phase II implementation awards, including the grantee lead, the geographic area served, and the key activities and programs offered by the grantee partnerships

Effects of Body Shape on Literal Objectification: When Ideal May Be Less Than Ideal

Objectification, or the tendency to adopt an externalized view of self/other, is a ubiquitous process disproportionately affecting women (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Recent work has examined literal objectification, defined as “any outcome in which a person is perceived as, or behaves, objectlike, relative to humanlike” (Heflick & Goldenberg, 2014, p. 225). Focusing on women’s physical appearance heightens literal objectification, including reduced perceptions of warmth, competence, and morality (Heflick et al., 2011). We investigated whether participants’ ratings of literal objectification vary as a function of body type. Seventy-one college women (Mage = 19.23) viewed three photos of women, manipulated to depict low, average, and high ideal body shapes. Participants rated the degree to which each woman possessed competence, warmth and morality, and their desire to collaborate on a group project with them. Average images were rated as significantly higher on warmth, morality, and collaboration desirability than high ideal and low ideal images, and marginally more competent than high ideal images. High ideal images were rated as significantly lower on warmth and marginally lower on collaboration desirability than low ideal images. Future research should extend this work to evaluate behavioral manifestations of literal objectification and explore what other factors might moderate these effects

Ontology-based knowledge representation of experiment metadata in biological data mining

According to the PubMed resource from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, over 750,000 scientific articles have been published in the ~5000 biomedical journals worldwide in the year 2007 alone. The vast majority of these publications include results from hypothesis-driven experimentation in overlapping biomedical research domains. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of information being generated by the biomedical research enterprise has made it virtually impossible for investigators to stay aware of the latest findings in their domain of interest, let alone to be able to assimilate and mine data from related investigations for purposes of meta-analysis. While computers have the potential for assisting investigators in the extraction, management and analysis of these data, information contained in the traditional journal publication is still largely unstructured, free-text descriptions of study design, experimental application and results interpretation, making it difficult for computers to gain access to the content of what is being conveyed without significant manual intervention. In order to circumvent these roadblocks and make the most of the output from the biomedical research enterprise, a variety of related standards in knowledge representation are being developed, proposed and adopted in the biomedical community. In this chapter, we will explore the current status of efforts to develop minimum information standards for the representation of a biomedical experiment, ontologies composed of shared vocabularies assembled into subsumption hierarchical structures, and extensible relational data models that link the information components together in a machine-readable and human-useable framework for data mining purposes