The Meanings of Deindustrialization

The point of departure for any discussion of deindustrialization must be respect for the despair and betrayal felt by workers as their mines, factories, and mills were padlocked, abandoned, turned into artsy shopping spaces, or even dynamited. While economists and business leaders often speak in neutral, even hopeful, terms such as restructuring, downsizing, or creative destruction, metaphors of defeat and subjugation are more appropriate for the workers who banked on good-paying industrial jobs for the livelihoods of their families and their communities

Heterogeneous gene expression changes in colorectal cancer cells share the WNT pathway in response to growth suppression by APHS-mediated COX-2 inhibition

Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), the prostaglandin (PG)-synthesizing enzyme overexpressed in colorectal cancer (CRC), has pleiotropic, cancer-promoting effects. COX-2 inhibitors (CIBs) interfere with many cancer-associated processes and show promising antineoplastic activity, however, a common mechanism of CIB action has not yet been established. We therefore investigated by microarray the global response towards the CIB APHS at a dose significantly inhibiting the growth of three COX-2-positive CRC but not of two COX-2-negative cell lines. None of the genes significantly (p = 0.005) affected by APHS were common to all three cell lines and 83% of the altered pathways were cell line-specific. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (QPCR) on selected pathways confirmed cell line-specific expression alterations induced by APHS. A low stringency data analysis approach using BRB array tools coupled with QPCR, however, identified small expression changes shared by all COX-2-positive cell lines in genes related to the WNT pathway, the key driver of colonic carcinogenesis. Our data indicates a substantial cell line-specificity of APHS-induced expression alterations in CRC cells and helps to explain the divergent effects reported for CIBs. Further, the shared inhibition of the WNT pathway by APHS suggests one potential common mechanism behind the antineoplastic effects of COX-2 inhibition

Structurally diverse hamigerans from the New Zealand marine sponge Hamigera tarangaensis: NMR-directed isolation, structure elucidation and antifungal activity

The NMR-directed investigation of the New Zealand marine sponge Hamigera tarangaensis has afforded ten new compounds of the hamigeran family, and a new 13-epi-verrucosane congener. Notably, hamigeran F (6) possesses an unusual carbon–carbon bond between C-12 and C-13, creating an unprecedented skeleton within this class. In particular, the structural features of 6, hamigeran H (10) and hamigeran J (12) imply a diterpenoid origin, which has allowed the putative biogenesis of three hamigeran carbon skeletons to be proposed based on geranyl geranyl pyrophosphate. All new hamigerans exhibited micromolar activity towards the HL-60 promyelocytic leukaemic cell line, and hamigeran G also selectively displayed antifungal activity in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Homozygous deletion profiling (HOP) analysis suggests Golgi apparatus function as a potential target of this unusual class of sponge-derived terpenoids

Soil nitrogen treatment alters microbiome networks across farm niches

Agriculture is fundamental for food production, and microbiomes support agriculture through multiple essential ecosystem services. Despite the importance of individual (i.e., niche specific) agricultural microbiomes, microbiome interactions across niches are not well-understood. To observe the linkages between nearby agricultural microbiomes, multiple approaches (16S, 18S, and ITS) were used to inspect a broad coverage of niche microbiomes. Here we examined agricultural microbiome responses to 3 different nitrogen treatments (0, 150, and 300 kg/ha/yr) in soil and tracked linked responses in other neighbouring farm niches (rumen, faecal, white clover leaf, white clover root, rye grass leaf, and rye grass root). Nitrogen treatment had little impact on microbiome structure or composition across niches, but drastically reduced the microbiome network connectivity in soil. Networks of 16S microbiomes were the most sensitive to nitrogen treatment across amplicons, where ITS microbiome networks were the least responsive. Nitrogen enrichment in soil altered soil and the neighbouring microbiome networks, supporting our hypotheses that nitrogen treatment in soil altered microbiomes in soil and in nearby niches. This suggested that agricultural microbiomes across farm niches are ecologically interactive. Therefore, knock-on effects on neighbouring niches should be considered when management is applied to a single agricultural niche

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Mexico City Morphologies

This essay uses Google Earth images to examine urban morphologies in Mexico City. Vertical views of the world embraced by cartographers and planners have long legitimated claims to authority, truth, and temporal power. Since its introduction in 2008, Google satellite view has only reinforced such presumptions, particularly given the company's entangled relations with the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, aerial photographs provide an undeniably useful source for architects and urbanists to study city form and metropolitan expansion. The vertical view is particularly valuable for its capacity to illuminate spatial relations that are otherwise difficult to trace on the ground, but which nonetheless shape everyday human experience. The goal of this essay is to discern a range of city forms in the rapidly expanding metropolis, and to contemplate the ways in which urban morphology frames everyday life in one of the world's largest conurbations. It is part of a longer-term study of Mexico City's urbanism based on fieldwork, mapping, and spatial analysis