L'idéologie de l'homogénéité culturelle dans l'archéologie préhistorique japonaise

L'idéologie de l'homogénéité culturelle dans l'archéologie préhistorique japonaiseDe nombreux Japonais, y compris un ancien premier ministre dont la remarque causa un remous international, affirment que la force de la nation japonaise réside dans son homogénéité culturelle et ethnique. L'idée selon laquelle une petite nation insulaire disposant d'un réseau rapide de communication peut développer une culture homogène est vraisemblable dans le contexte contemporain ; cependant, cela n'a pas toujours été le cas dans le passé. Si, encore aujourd'hui, l'homogénéité culturelle et ethnique du Japon semble réelle, c'est uniquement parce que l'existence de minorités culturelles et ethniques est évacuée de la conscience de la majorité des Japonais. L'idéologie de l'homogénéité culturelle se reflète non seulement dans les politiques nationales d'immigration et de citoyenneté, mais aussi dans la façon dont les données archéologiques sont interprétées et organisées pour créer une histoire nationale. Comme le montrent plusieurs exemples tirés de livres de préhistoire japonaise destinés au grand public et qui couvrent la période paléolithique jusqu'à la période Yayoi, l'image du présent est projetée sur le passé avec comme résultat la constitution de la longue histoire d'un peuple culturellement homogène. Ceci contribue en retour à maintenir l'idéologie de l'homogénéité culturelle et ethnique de la nation japonaise.Ideology of Cultural Homogeneity in Japanexe PrehistoryIt is held by many Japanese, including a former prime minister who caused an international stir by his remark, that the strength of the Japanese nation lies in its cultural and ethnie homogeneity. While cultural homogeneity in the small island nation with the fast communications network may be close to reality today, this has not always been the case in the past. The cultural and ethnie homogeneity of Japan holds true, even today, only because the existence of cultural and ethnie minorities is dismissed from the consciousness of the majority of Japanese. Yet, the ideology of cultural homogeneity is reflected not only in the nation's immigration and naturalization policies, but also in the way archaeological materials are interpreted and organized into a narrative of national history. As the examples show, in the books addressed to the général reading public on Japanese prehistory, from the Palaeolithic to the Yayoi Periods, the image of the présent is projected back to the past to create the long history of the culturally homogeneous Japanese people. This in turn contributes towards the maintenance of the ideology of cultural and ethnie homogeneity of the Japanese nation

Japanese tooth size: Past and present

Mesial-distal and buccal-lingual crown measurements were made on male and female samples of recent Japanese teeth from three locations, Fukuoka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and for Hokkaido Ainu and Koreans. Similar data were collected for prehistoric Middle-to-Late Jomon Japanese and from Yayoi specimens representing the first agriculturalists to appear in Japan. From a tooth-by-tooth comparison of cross-sectional areas, it was shown that the modern Japanese samples did not differ from one part of Japan to another. Korean tooth size also is not significantly different from Japanese, while Ainu have the smallest teeth recorded in Asia. The Yayoi who brought rice to Japan about 300 B.C. came in with teeth that were the same size as Chinese Neolithic teeth. They encountered a resident Jomon population whose teeth were 10% smaller. From tooth size measures alone, it is most economical to suggest that, if the rates of reduction observed elsewhere in the world applied in Japan, the recent Ainu would best be regarded as the direct descendants of the Jomon, while the modern Japanese are the results of in situ reduction from the incoming Yayoi. Other aspects of craniofacial morphology suggest that some Jomon was incorporated by the Yayoi. The modern Japanese, then, while predominantly derived from the Yayoi, would include a Jomon component.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/37619/1/1330590410_ftp.pd

2'-O-methoxyethyl splice-switching oligos correct splicing from IVS2-745 β-thalassemia patient cells restoring HbA production and chain rebalance

\u3b2-thalassemia is a disorder caused by altered hemoglobin protein synthesis and affects individuals worldwide. Severe forms of the disease, left untreated, can result in death before the age of 3 years (1). The standard of care consists of chronic and costly palliative treatment by blood transfusion combined with iron chelation. This dual approach suppresses anemia and reduces iron-related toxicities in patients. Allogeneic bone marrow transplant is an option, but limited by the availability of a highly compatible HSC donor. While gene therapy is been explored in several trials, its use is highly limited to developed regions with centers of excellence and well-established healthcare systems (2). Hence, there remains a tremendous unmet medical need to develop alternative treatment strategies for \u3b2-thalassemia (3). Occurrence of aberrant splicing is one of the processes that affects \u3b2-globin synthesis in \u3b2-thalassemia. The (C>G) IVS-2-745 is a splicing mutation within intron 2 of the \u3b2-globin gene. It leads to an aberrantly spliced mRNA that incorporates an intron fragment. This results in an in-frame premature termination codon that inhibits \u3b2-globin production. Here, we propose the use of uniform 2'-O-methoxyethyl (2'-MOE) splice switching oligos (SSOs) to reverse this aberrant splicing in the pre-mRNA. With these lead SSOs we show aberrant to wild type splice switching. This switching leads to an increase of adult hemoglobin (HbA) up to 80% in erythroid cells from patients with the IVS-2-745 mutation. Furthermore, we demonstrate a restoration of the balance between \u3b2-like- and \u3b1-globin chains, and up to an 87% reduction in toxic \u3b1-heme aggregates. While examining the potential benefit of 2'-MOE-SSOs in a mixed sickle-thalassemic phenotypic setting, we found reduced HbS synthesis and sickle cell formation due to HbA induction. In summary, 2'-MOE-SSOs are a promising therapy for forms of \u3b2-thalassemia caused by mutations leading to aberrant splicing

Parasitoid developmental mortality in the field: patterns, causes and consequences for sex ratio and virginity

1. Sex ratio theory predicts that developmental mortality can affect sex ratio optima under Local Mate Competition and also lead to ‘virgin’ broods containing only females with no sibling-mating opportunities on maturity. 2. Estimates of developmental mortality and its sex ratio effects have been laboratory based, and both models and laboratory studies have treated mortality as a phenomenon without identifying its biological causes. 3. We contribute a large set of field data on Metaphycus luteolus Timberlake (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae), an endoparasitoid of soft scale insects (Hemiptera: Coccidae), which has sex allocation conditional on host quality and female-biased brood sex ratios. Developmental mortality within broods can be both assessed and attributed to distinct causes, including encapsulation by the host and larval–larval competition. 4. Thirty per cent of M. luteolus offspring die during development with 65% of this mortality because of encapsulation and 28% because of larval competition. The distributions of mortality overall and for each cause of mortality separately were overdispersed. 5. The probability of an individual being encapsulated increased with clutch size, while the probability of being killed by a brood mate declined with increasing clutch size and with increasing per capita availability of resources. 6. The sexual compositions of broods at emergence were influenced by both the degree and the type of mortality operating. At higher levels of mortality, single sex broods were more common and sex ratios were less precise. Overall, virginity was more prevalent than predicted and was more greatly affected by the occurrence of competition than by other sources of mortality, almost certainly because competition tended to eliminate males. 7. The reproductive and developmental biology of M. luteolus appears to be influenced by a complex interplay of maternal clutch size and sex allocation strategies, offspring–offspring developmental interactions, host defence mechanisms and postemergence mating behaviour. Despite the great sophistication of sex ratio theory, it has not yet evolved to the point where it is capable of considering all of these influences simultaneously

Curated genome annotation of Oryza sativa ssp. japonica and comparative genome analysis with Arabidopsis thaliana

We present here the annotation of the complete genome of rice Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica cultivar Nipponbare. All functional annotations for proteins and non-protein-coding RNA (npRNA) candidates were manually curated. Functions were identified or inferred in 19,969 (70%) of the proteins, and 131 possible npRNAs (including 58 antisense transcripts) were found. Almost 5000 annotated protein-coding genes were found to be disrupted in insertional mutant lines, which will accelerate future experimental validation of the annotations. The rice loci were determined by using cDNA sequences obtained from rice and other representative cereals. Our conservative estimate based on these loci and an extrapolation suggested that the gene number of rice is ~32,000, which is smaller than previous estimates. We conducted comparative analyses between rice and Arabidopsis thaliana and found that both genomes possessed several lineage-specific genes, which might account for the observed differences between these species, while they had similar sets of predicted functional domains among the protein sequences. A system to control translational efficiency seems to be conserved across large evolutionary distances. Moreover, the evolutionary process of protein-coding genes was examined. Our results suggest that natural selection may have played a role for duplicated genes in both species, so that duplication was suppressed or favored in a manner that depended on the function of a gene

Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic modelling approaches in paediatric infectious diseases and immunology.

Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PKPD) modelling is used to describe and quantify dose-concentration-effect relationships. Within paediatric studies in infectious diseases and immunology these methods are often applied to developing guidance on appropriate dosing. In this paper, an introduction to the field of PKPD modelling is given, followed by a review of the PKPD studies that have been undertaken in paediatric infectious diseases and immunology. The main focus is on identifying the methodological approaches used to define the PKPD relationship in these studies. The major findings were that most studies of infectious diseases have developed a PK model and then used simulations to define a dose recommendation based on a pre-defined PD target, which may have been defined in adults or in vitro. For immunological studies much of the modelling has focused on either PK or PD, and since multiple drugs are usually used, delineating the relative contributions of each is challenging. The use of dynamical modelling of in vitro antibacterial studies, and paediatric HIV mechanistic PD models linked with the PK of all drugs, are emerging methods that should enhance PKPD-based recommendations in the future