Synthetic and structural aspects of metal coordination to pyrimidines, purines and nucleotides

Imperial Users onl

The administration and control of migratory labour on the S.A. gold mines: Capitalism and the state in the era of Kruger and Milner

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented April, 1975Almost from its infancy the Witwatersrand mining industry grew up under the shelter of substantial government encouragement and support. Although spokesmen for the mines have always attempted to portray their impressive achievements as a triumph of free enterprise capitalism, the leaders of the industry themselves assiduously courted state assistance from the time of Kruger's republic onward

William Gemill and South African expansion, 1920-1950

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The Making of Class, 9-14 February, 198

Public health and rural poverty in South Africa: "Social medicine" in the 1940s and 1950s

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 1988This paper is part of a larger study on the history and contemporary practice of health and healing in southern Africa. It argues that the medical history of the era of segregation and apartheid contains important lessons for health planners today. The region's post-apartheid governments are all committed to the establishment of national health care systems that will address the needs of the impoverished millions who live precariously at or below the margin of subsistence

White farms, black labour: agrarian transition in rural South Africa, 1930 - 1970

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990

Sequence specific assignment and determination of OSR1 C-terminal domain structure by NMR

The binding of SPAK and OSR1 kinases to their upstream WNK kinases is mediated by the interaction of their highly conserved SPAK and OSR1 C-terminal domain (CTD) to RFx [V/I] peptide sequences from WNK kinases. A SPAK CTD knock-in mouse, where SPAK was unable to bind WNK kinases, exhibited low blood pressure. This highlighted the inhibition of SPAK and OSR1 kinases binding to their upstream WNK kinases as a plausible strategy in the discovery of new antihypertensive agents. To facilitate such endeavour, we herein report the optimisation and expression of isotopically labelled OSR1 CTD in E.coli and a structural model based on the sequence specific NMR assignments giving insights into the structure of apo OSR1 CTD. Additionally, we identified the OSR1 CTD amino acid residues that are important for the binding of an 18-mer RFQV peptide derived from human WNK4. Collectively, the NMR backbone assignments and the generated OSR1 CTD 3D model reported in this work will be a powerful resource for the NMR-based discovery of small molecule OSR1 (and SPAK) kinase inhibitors as potential antihypertensive agents

Towards 'Economies of Generosity' in contemporary live art practice

Throughout this thesis, performance theory and the accompanying practice as research are utilised, along with anthropological and philosophical analysis, in order to examine how gift intersects with live art practice. The ways in which it is made and encountered in contemporary (predominantly UK) society are of particular focus. The Horse’s Teeth, a 2012 project that saw the authorship of six new performance works gifted to six artists, is used, along with Bourdieusian notions of cultural capital and Sara Ahmed’s theory around the ‘stickiness’ of emotions to explore how authorship is both subjective lived experience and a means of accumulating capital. By then analysing the affective dimensions of gift giving within The Horse’s Teeth, a model is developed to show how gift can effect subject-formation. Building on this model, organ transplantation is proposed as an exemplary instance of the ‘successful gift’, a gift that both bridges identities and affirmatively increases the capacities of the recipient(s). The Kindness of Strangers, a solo performance in which I investigate the relationship between the work’s audience, my anonymous bone marrow donor and Blanche Dubois, is then used to consider the potential of performance to be such a gift. In the proposed understanding, what the audience and performer give to the performance and each other is presented using Jean-Luc Marion’s work on anamorphosis and Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator. Referencing the autobiographical element of The Kindness of Strangers, the transformative potential of Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics is used to explain how the excess of trauma can sometimes be transformed into the excess of gift; a gift to both the traumatised self and, potentially, another. This develops the proposal made by thinkers such as Lyotard, Marion and Derrida that the gift cannot be fully comprehended at the time in which it is given. Inferring from this that the successful performance gift also resists being known by either audience or performer in its totality, the problem of how to make such unknowable performance is explored using Richard Sennett’s writing on craft. The second chapter concludes by considering reciprocity, in particular applause as a reciprocal gift from the audience, as an expression of thanks for what the performer has given. Having established a clear sense of how performance can be understood as gift, the final chapter examines how such gifts sit within capitalism. A variety of funding systems are considered, as well as the manner by which gift and performance, as Illichian blessings, defy capitalist valuation. Capital’s attempts to gain propriety by developing authorial relationships to the blessing is presented through analysis of corporate patronage, before an overview of current activist work to undermine this in the context of oil sponsorship is provided. The work of Liberate Tate, a group formed to break the relationship between BP and the Tate, is considered in particular depth here. The thesis concludes by proposing a reconsideration of how the arts are valued within funding systems, particularly in relation to waste and the way in which funders undermine the gift within performance by demanding quantified outcomes in advance

A novel pathway for outer membrane protein biogenesis in Gram-negative bacteria

The understanding of the biogenesis of the outer membrane of Gram‐negative bacteria is of critical importance due to the emergence of bacteria that are becoming resistant to available antibiotics. A problem that is most serious for Gram‐negative bacteria, with essentially few antibiotics under development or likely to be available for clinical use in the near future. The understanding of the Gram‐negative bacterial outer membrane is therefore critical to developing new antimicrobial agents, as this membrane makes direct contact with the external milieu, and the proteins present within this membrane are the instruments of microbial warfare, playing key roles in microbial pathogenesis, virulence and multidrug resistance. To date, a single outer membrane complex has been identified as essential for the folding and insertion of proteins into the outer membrane, this is the β‐barrel assembly machine (BAM) complex, which in some cases is supplemented by the Translocation and Assembly Module (TAM). In this issue of Molecular Microbiology, Dunstan et al. have identified a novel pathway for the insertion of a subset of integral membrane proteins into the Gram‐negative outer membrane that is independent of the BAM complex and TAM