Farm Animal Welfare and Quality Verification

Existing empirical evidence suggests that farm animal welfare may not be a top-of-mind issue for many consumers in North America. Nevertheless, there is pressure from animal welfare groups on food retailers and processors to implement more stringent requirements for their suppliers. Is the demand for more stringent animal welfare protocols primarily determined by a subset of consumers with very strong preferences or by an underlying change in consumer and societal preferences? Who do consumers trust for credible quality assurances with respect to farm animal welfare attributes? This paper provides a basis for further analysis of these issues. The roles of different stakeholders in delivering farm animal welfare quality assurances to consumers are first discussed. Then a social welfare analysis of the Canadian market for animal friendly pork is presented under different scenarios with respect to the strength of consumer preferences and the existence of voluntary standards versus mandatory standards. The analysis suggests that a situation of voluntary labelling that is reasonably credible is desirable as it maximizes the welfare that accrues to all players on the market. Furthermore, this scenario allows heterogeneous consumers to choose between different combinations of price and quality according to their preferences. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research.farm animal welfare, quality assurance, labelling, certification, heterogeneous consumers., Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Q13, Q18,

Chaos/Art

Historically chaos has been considered the inferior and negligible opposite of order. Either an incoherent melange of disparate elements and forces that preceded the existence of the universe, or an undesired state of confusion and disarray. A lot of contemporary thought however, from mathematics to physics and philosophy, has negated this traditional conception by recognizing the essential role chaos plays in all existence. Rather than just a diminished state of matter or circumstance, chaos is now seen as a vital and necessarily productive omnipresence that results in change, innovation - the new, and many, intrinsically mutual, and coexisting orders as opposed to a single, regulatory and universal order. By tracing the conception of chaos through Western history I seek to reveal some of the significant misconceptions that have lead to its diminished status. I then posit what I determine as the philosophical qualification of chaos by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari. From this qualification I derive a set of ubiquitous principles, and apply them to the practice of six artists; Joseph W Turner, Gerhard Richter, Cecily Brown, Cornelia Parker and Katy Moran, and myself. I strive to show how an art that directly expresses the qualities of chaos attributable to the philosophic project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari can restore chaos to the central position it occupies. Meanwhile revealing the shortcomings of any institutional claim that the highest forms of truth and knowledge are universal, eternal, and unchanging

Natriuretic peptide receptor-3 underpins the disparate regulation of endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation by C-type natriuretic peptide

CM Panayiotou was the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Prize PhD studentship. RS Khambata was the recipient of a Medical Research Council PhD studentshi

A novel high-throughput screen for identifying lipids that stabilise membrane proteins in detergent based solution

Membrane proteins have a range of crucial biological functions and are the target of about 60% of all prescribed drugs. For most studies, they need to be extracted out of the lipid-bilayer, e.g. by detergent solubilisation, leading to the loss of native lipids, which may disturb important protein-lipid/bilayer interactions and thus functional and structural integrity. Relipidation of membrane proteins has proven extremely successful for studying challenging targets, but the identification of suitable lipids can be expensive and laborious. Therefore, we developed a screen to aid the high-throughput identification of beneficial lipids. The screen covers a large lipid space and was designed to be suitable for a range of stability assessment methods. Here, we demonstrate its use as a tool for identifying stabilising lipids for three membrane proteins: a bacterial pyrophosphatase (Tm-PPase), a fungal purine transporter (UapA) and a human GPCR (A(2A)R). A(2A)R is stabilised by cholesteryl hemisuccinate, a lipid well known to stabilise GPCRs, validating the approach. Additionally, our screen also identified a range of new lipids which stabilised our test proteins, providing a starting point for further investigation and demonstrating its value as a novel tool for membrane protein research. The pre-dispensed screen will be made commercially available to the scientific community in future and has a number of potential applications in the field.Peer reviewe

The effects of nitroxyl (HNO) on soluble guanylate cyclase activity: interactions at ferrous heme and cysteine thiols

It has been previously proposed that nitric oxide (NO) is the only biologically relevant nitrogen oxide capable of activating the enzyme soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC). However, recent reports implicate HNO as another possible activator of sGC. Herein, we examine the affect of HNO donors on the activity of purified bovine lung sGC and find that, indeed, HNO is capable of activating this enzyme. Like NO, HNO activation appears to occur via interaction with the regulatory ferrous heme on sGC. Somewhat unexpectedly, HNO does not activate the ferric form of the enzyme. Finally, HNO-mediated cysteine thiol modification appears to also affect enzyme activity leading to inhibition. Thus, sGC activity can be regulated by HNO via interactions at both the regulatory heme and cysteine thiols