Swine ANP32A supports avian influenza virus polymerase

Avian influenza viruses occasionally infect and adapt to mammals, including humans. Swine are often described as 'mixing vessels', being susceptible to both avian and human origin viruses, which allows the emergence of novel reassortants, such as the precursor to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. ANP32 proteins are host factors that act as influenza virus polymerase cofactors. In this study we describe how swine ANP32A, uniquely among the mammalian ANP32 proteins tested, supports activity of avian origin influenza virus polymerases, and avian influenza virus replication. We further show that after the swine-origin influenza virus emerged in humans and caused the 2009 pandemic it evolved polymerase gene mutations that enabled it to more efficiently use human ANP32 proteins. We map the enhanced pro-viral activity of swine ANP32A to a pair of amino acids, 106 and 156, in the leucine-rich repeat and central domains and show these mutations enhance binding to influenza virus trimeric polymerase. These findings help elucidate the molecular basis for the 'mixing vessel' trait of swine and further our understanding of the evolution and ecology of viruses in this host.Importance Avian influenza viruses can jump from wild birds and poultry into mammalian species such as humans or swine, but only continue to transmit if they accumulate mammalian adapting mutations. Pigs appear uniquely susceptible to both avian and human strains of influenza and are often described as virus 'mixing vessels'. In this study, we describe how a host factor responsible for regulating virus replication, ANP32A, is different between swine and humans. Swine ANP32A allows a greater range of influenza viruses, specifically those from birds, to replicate. It does this through binding the virus polymerase more tightly than the human version of the protein. This work helps to explain the unique properties of swine as 'mixing vessels'

Social Class

Discussion of class structure in fifth-century Athens, historical constitution of theater audiences, and the changes in the comic representation of class antagonism from Aristophanes to Menander

An Unnoticed Allusion in Theocritus and Callimachus

published or submitted for publicatio

Doubling and Recognition in the Bacchae

Doubling and Récognition in the Bacchae (pp. 137-155) Cet article examine le problème de la reconnaissance dans les Bacchantes. Il traite de la difficulté d'appréhender Dionysos dont l'exigence de reconnaissance fonde le drame; il traite également du processus même de reconnaissance -en tant qu'il est informé par la répétition et la différence (re-connaissance). L'étude analyse en particulier la relation entre les pouvoirs de transformation de Dionysos, sa capacité à devenir «autre», et le processus de reconnaissance. On aborde cet ensemble de questions à partir de la première scène des Bacchantes, dans laquelle -on essaie de le montrer- les critiques n'ont pas su saisir de façon pertinente les correspondances entre Cadmos, Tirésias et Penthée.Goldhill Simon. Doubling and Recognition in the Bacchae. In: Mètis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens, vol. 3, n°1-2, 1988. pp. 137-156

Preposterous Poetics and the Erotics of Death

“Preposterous Poetics and the Erotics of Death” looks at two crucial issues of late antique poetics and the representation of gender through the Dionysiaca of Nonnus. First, it discusses how Nonnus constructs a narrative which links mythic stories in a willfully confused chronological patterning, which allows events in the future of narrative time to bear on the current story-telling. This is explored both in its aesthetics of exemplarity and in its theological understanding of narrative time. “Preposterous” is understood thus in its etymological sense of the confusion of the “pre-” and the “post-”. Second, this article explores through such a model of poetics how Nonnus represents a bizarre and un-paralleled scene of necrophiliac desire on the battle-field. On the one hand, this disturbing scene of corrupt erotic desire in action is expressed through the model of Achilles and Penthesileia (an event far in the future for the time of the Dionysiaca); on the other hand, it utilizes a strange narrative technique of the narrator describing the scene, followed immediately by the desire-stuck soldier also describing the scene from another perspective. The article explores how this doubled representation opens a question – a question that goes to the heart of late antique poetics – of what it means to repeat, to paraphrase, to rehearse the inherited language of classical, epic sexual desire in the new world of the Christian empire