"The Greek world" in the perception of Latin intellectuals

The article examines the problem of the perception of "the Greek world" by the Latin intellectuals of the V and the beginning of the VI century AD, i.e. in the period of time when political, cultural and somewhat religious dissociation between the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire became visible. The hermeneutic analysis of narrative, epistolary and didactic works written in the Latin West in V–VI centuries has been carried out in the article. The «system codes» through which Latin intellectuals perceived both their own and the Greek world have been reconstructed by the identification of the tropes, metaphors and similes. It has been concluded that the Greek world had been still taking on a role of the creator and preserver of high culture, a kind of indicator of the cultural achievements of the West in the minds of Latin authors of the V–VI century. At the same time the Latin authors’ desire to establish their own self-sufficiency and even cultural superiority in the competition with the Greeks was quite obvious. The article shows that belonging to the Greek civilization served as an identifying feature of noble Roman's which also forced the representatives of German elite to strive for both the Roman and the Greek education in their ambition to legitimize their authority among the Italian population.peer-reviewe

Post-transcriptional regulation of LINE-1 retrotransposition by AID/APOBEC and ADAR deaminases

Long interspersed element-1 (LINE-1 or L1) retrotransposons represent the only functional family of autonomous transposable elements in humans and formed 17% of our genome. Even though most of the human L1 sequences are inactive, a limited number of copies per individual retain the ability to mobilize by a process termed retrotransposition. The ongoing L1 retrotransposition may result in insertional mutagenesis that could lead to negative consequences such as genetic disease and cancer. For this reason, cells have evolved several mechanisms of defense to restrict L1 activity. Among them, a critical role for cellular deaminases [activation-induced deaminase (AID)/apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing catalytic polypeptide-like (APOBEC) and adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADAR) enzymes] has emerged. The majority of the AID/APOBEC family of proteins are responsible for the deamination of cytosine to uracil (C-to-U editing) within DNA and RNA targets. The ADARs convert adenosine bases to inosines (A-to-I editing) within double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) targets. This review will discuss the current understanding of the regulation of LINE-1 retrotransposition mediated by these enzymes