Natural History Specimen Collections

The Fish Collection described in this document was transferred in 1992 to the Fish Collection of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin (at that time administratively in the Texas Memorial Museum, but at the time of publication of this digital version of the document it is one (https://biodiversity.utexas.edu/resources/collections/ichthyology) of the Biodiversity Collections in the University's Biodiversity Center (https://biodiversity.utexas.edu/). Thus, the data on the specimens in the Fish Collection described here are now included in the data published to GBIF (https://www.gbif.org/dataset/6080b6cc-1c24-41ff-ad7f-0ebe7b56f311) and other global biodiversity data aggregators by the UT Biodiversity Center's Fish Collection. The same data are also included in the Fishes of Texas Project (http://fishesoftexas.org - Hendrickson, Dean A., and Adam E. Cohen. 2015. “Fishes of Texas Project Database (Version 2.0)” doi:10.17603/C3WC70). Some of the UTMSI Fish Collection specimens remained at the UT Marine Science Insitute on long-term loan from 1992 until sometime in 2017 when the MSI disposed of all remaining specimens (including also Invertebrates). Some were disposed of by a professional HazMat company, but many were apparently taken to the Smithsonian Institution's (USNM) division of Invertebrate Biology. The fate of fish specimens, however, remains unresolved, but the Ichthyology Division at USNM had no knowledge of them at the time this report was archived here. Dean A. Hendrickson, Curator of Ichthyology, UT Austin, May 1, 2019The University of Texas Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas Marine Laboratory, Natural History Collection of Marine Organisms was initiated in the mid-1940's. Since that time specimens have been added from studies in the Gulf of Mexico, associated estuaries, and marine-influenced terrestrial habitats, with emphasis on the Texas and Mexico coasts. These studies were the baseline surveys for this area and have resulted in the collection of valuable marine organisms. The collection now holds approximately 5,000 catalogued specimens including all forms of biota, vertebrates, invertebrates, algae and flowering plants. The collection includes the marine fish and invertebrate specimens of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, incorporated into the UTMSI-PAML collection in 1976. This state collection, numbering 3,000, is composed primarily of Texas Gulf coast species of fish and invertebrates, representing baseline surveys conducted by the state fisheries biologists. With this collection are card catalogues by specimen number and phylogenetic order. Other collections incorporated are those from R/V Oregon cruises (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, exploratory fishing vessel), H. H. Hildebrand's faunal surveys of the brown and pink shrimp grounds , Whitten et al.'s faunal survey of Texas coast jetties , J. W. Hedgepeth’s specimens collected during numerous faunal surveys, tide trap studies, and vegetation and algal surveys. Noteworthy studies from which specimens have been added to the collection are listed in Table 1. The museum collection is housed in an air-conditioned building in a room specifically designed for this collection. The present facility contains 924 square feet with 1089 square feet of shelf space, which can be trebled to accommodate BLM collections. There are at present 32 1' x 12' shelves, totaling 384 square feet; 194 18" x 12-1/2" shelves, totaling 303 square feet; and 120 11-1/2" x 42" shelves, totaling 402 5 square feet. The collection is a working museum open to the scientific community; specimens are available on loan to members of this community. Specimens may be used by visiting researchers, graduate-level students, professors, and classes. Attached is an invoice form, "Invoice of Specimens" - a standard form used for loan of collection items. The Port Aransas Marine Laboratory is committed to the continuing curation of specimens and will continue to provide the supplies necessary to maintain the natural history specimen collections. The University of Texas Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas Marine Laboratory is willing to incorporate the Bureau of Land Management collection into its collection. Funding is requested from BLM to obtain and incorporate all archived BLM specimens from the S.T.O.C.S. survey into the collection.Integrative Biolog

Review of George Eliot and the British Empire

In this fascinating and forcefully argued study, Nancy Henry addresses the kind of subject that has become the preserve of post-colonial criticism but does so in a way that challenges commonly held assumptions about the relations between empire and fiction in the Victorian period. Where post-colonial criticism tends to emphasize the determining power of the ideological and cultural forces to which individual writers were subordinate - in some cases seeing the novel as an inherently imperialist form, in others assuming the pervasive presence of an imperialist ideology - Henry puts the author and her own distinct experience firmly at the centre of the discussion. The crucial context here is the biographical one, in so far as it illuminates the larger framework in which lives were lived and actions undertaken. Persuasively arguing that British imperialism was a retrospective construction and that the Victorian experience of empire in the mid-nineteenth century was local and fragmented, Henry examines in detail George Eliot\u27s knowledge of, and relations to, Britain\u27s colonial expansion overseas between 1850 and 1880: what she read, what she wrote, how she reacted to the experience of Lewes\u27s sons in South Africa, and, most intriguingly, where she chose to invest the money she earned from her novels. Like many middle-class Victorians she had a stake in the empire which was, on the one hand, personal and emotional - through her involvement with the fate of the two younger Lewes boys - and, on the other, financial, through the investments she made, on the able professional advice of John Cross, in high-yield colonial stocks such as Indian railways (at the time of her death just under half her portfolio was made up of colonial stocks). To focus on these aspects of George Eliot\u27s life is, as Henry can justifiably claim, to offer a new perspective, and in exploring the particularities of the novelist\u27s involvement with empire, this study presents a complex and differentiated picture that cannot be properly subsumed under any blanket notion of \u27imperialist ideology’. As a reader and reviewer of literature about the colonies George Eliot was sceptical about the reliability of travellers\u27 tales; as a stepmother of colonial emigrants and a colonial shareholder, she was concerned about the welfare of her family and her own financial well-being, and seemed to take a practical view of empire as a fact of life in Victorian Britain; in her later years she was on occasions explicitly critical of imperial expansion, unequivocally describing the Zulu War of 1879, for instance, as wicked and unjustifiable. There are inconsistencies and shifts of attitude here, and Henry explores the disjunction between George Eliot’s consistent adherence to a realist aesthetic that did not allow her to write directly about the colonial life she had never experienced, and the exigencies of social life that encouraged practical decisions (for example, to despatch the Lewes boys to South Africa on the assumption that they might do better there with their limited abilities than at home, and to invest in colonial stock) that were based on slight knowledge and abstract notions of \u27the colonies\u27. But if, in this respect, her fiction and her life were governed by different principles, this study carefully examines how they interact, and shows how George Eliot\u27s imagination and aesthetic principles were shaped by her different connections to empire. Her commitment to realism seems to have been reinforced by her reading of colonial literature whose veracity she doubted, and Henry argues that she applied to representations of the empire the same standards that she famously applied to representations of peasant life in her review article \u27The Natural History of German Life\u27. The criticism of idealizing pastoral in that essay shows how alert she was to the kind of misrepresentation of marginalized groups that Edward Said sees as characteristic of the nineteenth-century colonial discourse he names Orientalism, and in her novels she is consistently aware of the treacherous power of representations that are divorced from lived experience. That awareness is implied, for example in Mordecai\u27s visionary conception of the Holy Land in Daniel Deronda, for George Eliot provides the grounds for a sceptical reading of that vision as one based entirely on religious texts and travellers\u27 tales and thus prey to the fallacy of all representations that merely reproduce other representations

Review of The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography

The literary biographer\u27s most difficult task is to find plausible, sophisticated ways of connecting a human life with the art that emerges from it. In the case of a major imaginative artist like George Eliot, the accumulated weight of previous biographies and critical studies only makes that task more challenging. Nancy Henry confronts this situation head-on in The Life of George Eliot. Her book is not just another re-telling of the familiar narrative, written as if it were starting anew. Instead, Henry has grappled with what a genuinely \u27critical biography\u27 might mean on a number of different levels. She interrogates previous assumptions that have been passed down from biographer to biographer in the absence of hard evidence. She articulates a critical method of connecting life situations with artistic patterns, arguing against one-to-one identifications of \u27originals\u27, and showing how certain charged situations in George Eliot\u27s intimate experience would be generalized and transformed in many fictional variations. She matches her canny sense of what biographies can and can\u27t do with George Eliot\u27s own fascination with biography and life story telling. Because Henry has such an impressive command over everything George Eliot wrote, she is always ready with the apt quotation, whether it\u27s from a major fiction or an obscure essay. At times the blending of George Eliot\u27s discourse with Henry\u27s arguments gives the impression that George Eliot is a co-author of this life. Henry has a fine ear for passages that suggest autobiographical meditation, wherever they may occur in the writing career, and she brings them to bear on her reconstruction of each phase of the life, creating a rich layering of biographical temporalities. In all these ways and more, The Life of George Eliot is an original, important landmark in George Eliot studies. Who is the George Eliot that emerges from this study? First, she\u27s a person who moves from one complex, troubled family situation to another, accumulating stores of secrets and social lies. Her mother, a second wife with stepchildren as well as children of her own, is incapacitated for childcare in some way that remains impenetrable. The Brays in Coventry adopt the husband\u27s illegitimate child, and probably harbour other secrets. The Chapman household in London involves a wife, a mistress in charge of the wife\u27s children, and Marian Evans starring briefly as yet another object of sexual interest. The marriages of George Henry and Agnes Jervis Lewes, and Thornton and Katherine Gliddon Hunt, create a large set of children, among them \u27Lewes\u27 children who are kept from knowing that their father is Thornton Hunt. When George Eliot connects with George Henry Lewes she becomes simultaneously a second wife and an adulterous \u27other woman\u27, as well as the \u27mother\u27 of boys whose real mother lives nearby. George Henry Lewes\u27s family of origin has made him the illegitimate child of a bigamous father, and the stepson of a man he deplores

A G protein-gated K channel is activated via beta 2-adrenergic receptors and G beta gamma subunits in Xenopus oocytes

In many tissues, inwardly rectifying K channels are coupled to seven- helix receptors via the Gi/Go family of heterotrimeric G proteins. This activation proceeds at least partially via G beta gamma subunits. These experiments test the hypothesis that G beta gamma subunits activate the channel even if released from other classes of heterotrimeric G proteins. The G protein-gated K channel from rat atrium, KGA/GIRK1, was expressed in Xenopus oocytes with various receptors and G proteins. The beta 2-adrenergic receptor (beta 2AR), a Gs-linked receptor, activated large KGA currents when the alpha subunit, G alpha s, was also overexpressed. Although G alpha s augmented the coupling between beta 2AR and KGA, G alpha s also inhibited the basal, agonist-independent activity of KGA. KGA currents stimulated via beta 2AR activated, deactivated, and desensitized more slowly than currents stimulated via Gi/Go-linked receptors. There was partial occlusion between currents stimulated via beta 2AR and the m2 muscarinic receptor (a Gi/Go-linked receptor), indicating some convergence in the mechanism of activation by these two receptors. Although stimulation of beta 2AR also activates adenylyl cyclase and protein kinase A, activation of KGA via beta 2AR is not mediated by this second messenger pathway, because direct elevation of intracellular cAMP levels had no effect on KGA currents. Experiments with other coexpressed G protein alpha and beta gamma subunits showed that (a) a constitutively active G alpha s mutant did not suppress basal KGA currents and was only partially as effective as wild type G alpha s in coupling beta 2AR to KGA, and (b) beta gamma subunits increased basal KGA currents. These results reinforce present concepts that beta gamma subunits activate KGA, and also suggest that beta gamma subunits may provide a link between KGA and receptors not previously known to couple to inward rectifiers

Intrinsic Gating Properties of a Cloned G Protein-activated Inward Rectifier K^+ Channel

The voltage-, time-, and K^+-dependent properties of a G protein-activated inwardly rectifying K^+ channel (GIRK1/KGA/Kir3.1) cloned from rat atrium were studied in Xenopus oocytes under two-electrode voltage clamp. During maintained G protein activation and in the presence of high external K^+ (V_K = 0 mV), voltage jumps from V_K to negative membrane potentials activated inward GIRK1 K^+ currents with three distinct time-resolved current components. GIRK1 current activation consisted of an instantaneous component that was followed by two components with time constants T_f~50 ms and T_s~400 ms. These activation time constants were weakly voltage dependent, increasing approximately twofold with maximal hyperpolarization from V_K. Voltage-dependent GIRK1 availability, revealed by tail currents at -80 mV after long prepulses, was greatest at potentials negative to V_K and declined to a plateau of approximately half the maximal level at positive voltages. Voltage-dependent GIRK1 availability shifted with V_K and was half maximal at V_K -20 mV; the equivalent gating charge was ~1.6 e^-. The voltage-dependent gating parameters of GIRK1 did not significantly differ for G protein activation by three heterologously expressed signaling pathways: m2 muscarinic receptors, serotonin 1A receptors, or G protein β1y2 subunits. Voltage dependence was also unaffected by agonist concentration. These results indicate that the voltage-dependent gating properties of GIRK1 are not due to extrinsic factors such as agonist-receptor interactions and G protein-channel coupling, but instead are analogous to the intrinsic gating behaviors of other inwardly rectifying K^+ channels

Expression of an atrial G-protein-activated potassium channel in Xenopus oocytes

Injection of rat atrial RNA into Xenopus oocytes resulted in the expression of a guanine nucleotide binding (G) protein-activated K+ channel. Current through the channel could be activated by acetylcholine or, if RNA encoding a neuronal 5HT1A receptor was coinjected with atrial RNA, by serotonin (5HT). A 5HT-evoked current (I5HT) was observed in oocytes injected with ventricle RNA fractions (of 2.5-5.5 kb) and 5HT1A receptor RNA. I5HT displayed strong inward rectification with very little conductance above the K+ equilibrium potential, was highly selective for K+ over Na+, and was blocked by 5-300 µM Ba2+. I5HT was suppressed by intracellular injection of the nonhydrolyzable analog of GDP, guanosine 5'-[ß-thio]diphosphate, but not by treatment with pertussis toxin (PTX), suggesting coupling of the receptor to the G-protein-activated K+ channel via a PTX-insensitive G protein, possibly endogenously present in the oocyte. Coexpression of the subunit of a PTX-sensitive G protein, Gi2, rendered I5HT sensitive to PTX inhibition. Native oocytes displayed a constitutively active inwardly rectifying K+ current with a lower sensitivity to Ba2+ block; expression of a similar current was also directed by atrial or ventricle RNA of 1.5-3 kb. Xenopus oocytes may be employed for cloning of the G-protein-activated K+ channel cDNA and for studying the coupling between this channel and G proteins

Implementing Pharmacist-Led Osteoporosis Testing and Education in Community Pharmacies

□ Osteoporosis is a common disease of the bones that is characterized by a decrease in bone density and bone strength, resulting in bone fragility. □ In the United States, approximately 44 million people have low bone density, 10 million of whom have osteoporosis and 34 million with osteopenia. This equates to about 55% of the U.S. population aged 50 years and older. The number of people with osteoporosis-related fractures is predicted to increase dramatically due to the aging population of the country. □ Osteoporotic bone fractures are responsible for pain, decreased quality of life, lost workdays, and disability. □ It is important to identify and test patients at high risk for developing osteoporosis, as well as implement strategies to help prevent or delay the onset of this disease. □ Pharmacists play a critical role in our healthcare system since they are easily accessible in the community