10 research outputs found
Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender, authority, and dissent
At the peak of the anti-religious campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev,
communist propaganda depicted women believers as either naĂŻve
dupes, tricked by the clergy, or as depraved fanatics; the Protestant
“sektantka” (female sectarian) was a particularly prominent folk-devil.
In fact, as this article shows, women’s position within Protestant
communities was far more complex than either of these mythical
figures would have one believe. The authors explore four important,
but contested, female roles: women as leaders of worship, particularly
in remote congregations where female believers vastly outnumbered
their male counterparts; women as unofficial prophetesses,
primarily within Pentecostal groups; women as mothers, replenishing
congregations through high birth rates and commitment to their
children’s religious upbringing; and women as political actors in the
defence of religious rights. Using a wide range of sources, which
include reports written by state officials, articles in the church journal,
letters from church members to their ecclesiastical leaders in
Moscow, samizdat texts, and oral history accounts, the authors
probe women’s relationship with authority, in terms of both the
authority of the (male) ministry within the church, and the authority
of the Soviet state
Cytoplasmic localization of alteration/deficiency in activation 3 (ADA3) predicts poor clinical outcome in breast cancer patients
A functional genomics screen identifies PCAF and ADA3 as regulators of human granzyme B-mediated apoptosis and Bid cleavage
The human lymphocyte toxins granzyme B (hGrzB) and perforin cooperatively induce apoptosis of virus-infected or transformed cells: perforin pores enable entry of the serine protease hGrzB into the cytosol, where it processes Bid to selectively activate the intrinsic apoptosis pathway. Truncated Bid (tBid) induces Bax/Bak-dependent mitochondrial outer membrane permeability and the release of cytochrome c and Smac/Diablo. To identify cellular proteins that regulate perforin/hGrzB-mediated Bid cleavage and subsequent apoptosis, we performed a gene-knockdown (KD) screen using a lentiviral pool of short hairpin RNAs embedded within a miR30 backbone (shRNAmiR). We transduced HeLa cells with a lentiviral pool expressing shRNAmiRs that target 1213 genes known to be involved in cell death signaling and selected cells with acquired resistance to perforin/hGrzB-mediated apoptosis. Twenty-two shRNAmiRs were identified in the positive-selection screen including two, PCAF and ADA3, whose gene products are known to reside in the same epigenetic regulatory complexes. Small interfering (si)RNA-mediated gene-KD of PCAF or ADA3 also conferred resistance to perforin/hGrzB-mediated apoptosis providing independent validation of the screen results. Mechanistically, PCAF and ADA3 exerted their pro-apoptotic effect upstream of mitochondrial membrane permeabilization, as indicated by reduced cytochrome c release in PCAF-KD cells exposed to perforin/hGrzB. While overall levels of Bid were unaltered, perforin/hGrzB-mediated cleavage of Bid was reduced in PCAF-KD or ADA3-KD cells. We discovered that PCAF-KD or ADA3-KD resulted in reduced expression of PACS2, a protein implicated in Bid trafficking to mitochondria and importantly, targeted PACS2-KD phenocopied the effect of PCAF-KD or ADA3-KD. We conclude that PCAF and ADA3 regulate Bid processing via PACS2, to modulate the mitochondrial cell death pathway in response to hGrzB