Job Satisfaction in the North Dakota State University Extension Service

Retirement rates are on the increase. Levels of job satisfaction and changing demographics raise concerns about attrition in the North Dakota State University Extension Service system. The study reported here examined data provided from the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire and a demographics questionnaire to describe the overall job satisfaction of employees in the North Dakota State University Extension Service as well as their satisfaction based on the 20 job satisfaction scales of the MSQ. Determining levels of satisfaction, especially in relation to specific aspects of the job, is a necessary priority in recruiting and retaining new employees

Sorting of mitochondrial and plastid heteroplasmy in Arabidopsis is extremely rapid and depends on MSH1 activity

The fate of new mitochondrial and plastid mutations depends on their ability to persist and spread among the numerous organellar genome copies within a cell (heteroplasmy). The extent to which heteroplasmies are transmitted across generations or eliminated through genetic bottlenecks is not well understood in plants, in part because their low mutation rates make these variants so infrequent. Disruption of MutS Homolog 1 (MSH1), a gene involved in plant organellar DNA repair, results in numerous de novo point mutations, which we used to quantitatively track the inheritance of single nucleotide variants in mitochondrial and plastid genomes in Arabidopsis. We found that heteroplasmic sorting (the fixation or loss of a variant) was rapid for both organelles, greatly exceeding rates observed in animals. In msh1 mutants, plastid variants sorted faster than those in mitochondria and were typically fixed or lost within a single generation. Effective transmission bottleneck sizes (N) for plastids and mitochondria were N ∼ 1 and 4, respectively. Restoring MSH1 function further increased the rate of heteroplasmic sorting in mitochondria (N ∼ 1.3), potentially because of its hypothesized role in promoting gene conversion as a mechanism of DNA repair, which is expected to homogenize genome copies within a cell. Heteroplasmic sorting also favored GC base pairs. Therefore, recombinational repair and gene conversion in plant organellar genomes can potentially accelerate the elimination of heteroplasmies and bias the outcome of this sorting process.publishedVersio

A Judge at the Crossroads of Cultures: Shi Tianlin

Shi Tianlin is one of only two known officials who was appointed to act as judge both in the West and the East of the Mongol Empire, during the period of the united empire when officials were often appointed cross-regionally. Coming from near today’s Beijing, he came to prominence for his knowledge of languages, and was granted a Mongol name. He was a judge in a Western campaign, probably that of Batu against the Qipchaqs and Russians. Later, he was sent by Möngke Khan to Qaidu in Central Asia, and detained there for 28 years, before returning to Yuan China. Despite his long absence from China and though his activity as judge was very short (he declined to be re-appointed as judge when he arrived back in China), the prestige of the appointment stuck, and his son and grandson were both judges in China. The shendaobei, or Spirit-Way Inscription, of Shi Tianlin is particularly interesting for the way in which it explains Mongol concepts in Chinese terms. One of these is the jasagh (held to be the law code of Chinggis Khan), which is equated with Chinese falü (statute or law code). Rather than explaining its contents however, the inscription talks about the importance of following “the jasagh of Confucius”, namely the Lunyu or Analects of Confucius. The inscription – and presumably Shi Tianlin during his lifetime – thus uses a widely-known Mongol concept to promote Chinese values, showing the complexities of intercultural communication and exchange during the Mongol era