From Marseille to Mecca: Reconciling the Secular and the Religious in Le grand voyage (The Big Trip) (2004)

By the early 1980’s, a generation of children of Maghrebi (North African) parents born and/or raised in France started to become more visible, particularly after they organized a march in 1983 from Marseille to Paris under the slogan “For Equality and against Racism.” This generation was introduced to the public as the “Beur generation.” The word ‘Beur,’ coined by this generation, is the result of a Parisian back slang and means ‘Arab.’ It quickly gained popularity and has been used to refer to children of Maghrebi origins living in France. As much as it has been hard for the Beurs to integrate the French society, they have also been rethinking their Maghrebi cultural heritage. In this paper, I analyse a film entitled Le grand voyage (2004) where a Maghrebi immigrant father ‘forces’ his son to drive him from Marseille to Mecca so that the father performs the Hajj (pilgrimage). I aim at exploring the different elements that separate and reconcile the father and his son along this long journey

Redefining Beur Cinema: Constituting Subjectivity through Film

This dissertation focuses on Beurs’ modes of identification in France as depicted in film. The term “Beur” is not used as an identity based on birth or citizenship but rather as a socio-cultural construct that serves as an analytical tool to dismantle the notion of Frenchness. This study, thus, investigates how cinema reflects on the experience of the Beurs through filmic narrative. The aim is to trace the changing lives of the Beurs as they have been reconstructed in movies since the early eighties. This process is both synchronic and diachronic. Synchronic as it engages in the analysis of films with respect to their historical context and diachronic as it will permit the distilling of the commonalities between these films to lead to the conception of Beur cinema as a film genre. The theoretical premises of this study are founded on existential phenomenology; particularly Paul Ricœur’s concept narrative identity and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of corporeality. As decolonized postcolonial subjects, the Beurs’ presence in France has become more visible than other groups, and their impact on French society is undeniable. Their corporeality is not conceptually configured but physically manifested as their subjectivities are visually constructed. The corpus of films in this study illustrates how Beur narrative identities are “decolonizing” the French nation. The first chapter traces back the emergence of the term “Beur” and discusses its linguistic derivation and metaphoric dimension. A discussion of Beur cinema as a genre constitutes the second chapter. The third chapter engages in an analysis of Beur comedy and the experiences of Beur characters as reflected through the narrative and the film techniques. The fourth and final chapter concentrates on gender in Beur films. It compares the image of the female Beur and that of the Beur gay respectively to that of the Arab nude and the “jeune arabe” of colonial postcards, and shows how these old colonial stereotypes still drive French perceptions today

Communication, culture et personnage littéraire

La littérature est une forme de communication qui permet de véhiculer la culture d’unesociété. L’auteur, et à travers son récit ainsi que les conversations des personnages transmet,leur Histoire, leurs valeurs, leurs croyances et leurs traditions

The true story behind the annotation of a pathway

On 2010 we worked on the annotation of the N-Glycosylation pathway in the Reactome database. During this process, we found some unclear points and errors in other databases, and we reported and helped fix them. After we finished, we realized that the work of reporting errors to a database is basically not acknowledged by the scientific community: this is unfortunate because if only this process would be a bit more recognized and transparent, we could have better data in the databases and a more active community. Moreover, the fact that many databases tend to keep error reporting private creates great issues to the reproducibility of a work.

Another way to look at this talk is: if you dedicate 6 months of your PhD thesis to annotate carefully a set of genes, in this case a pathway I have been studying, how many errors do you expect to find in other databases, or what should you be careful at

Breeding structure of Drosophila buzzatii in relation to competition in prickly pears (Opuntia ficus-indica)

International audienc

VCF2Networks: applying genotype networks to single-nucleotide variants data

Summary: A wealth of large-scale genome sequencing projects opens the doors to new approaches to study the relationship between genotype and phenotype. One such opportunity is the possibility to apply genotype networks analysis to population genetics data. Genotype networks are a representation of the set of genotypes associated with a single phenotype, and they allow one to estimate properties such as the robustness of the phenotype to mutations, and the ability of its associated genotypes to evolve new adaptations. So far, though, genotype networks analysis has rarely been applied to population genetics data. To help fill this gap, here we present VCF2Networks, a tool to determine and study genotype network structure from single-nucleotide variant data. Availability and implementation: VCF2Networks is available at https://bitbucket.org/dalloliogm/vcf2networks. Contact: [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

CSDE1 Intracellular Distribution as a Biomarker of Melanoma Prognosis

RNA-binding protein; Biomarker; MelanomaProteína de unión a ARN; Biomarcador; MelanomaProteïna d'unió a l'ARN; Biomarcador; MelanomaRNA-binding proteins are emerging as critical modulators of oncogenic cell transformation, malignancy and therapy resistance. We have previously found that the RNA-binding protein Cold Shock Domain containing protein E1 (CSDE1) promotes invasion and metastasis of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer and also a highly heterogeneous disease in need of predictive biomarkers and druggable targets. Here, we design a monoclonal antibody useful for IHC in the clinical setting and use it to evaluate the prognosis potential of CSDE1 in an exploratory cohort of 149 whole tissue sections including benign nevi and primary tumors and metastasis from melanoma patients. Contrary to expectations for an oncoprotein, we observed a global decrease in CSDE1 levels with increasing malignancy. However, the CSDE1 cytoplasmic/nuclear ratio exhibited a positive correlation with adverse clinical features of primary tumors and emerged as a robust indicator of progression free survival in cutaneous melanoma, highlighting the potential of CSDE1 as a biomarker of prognosis. Our findings provide a novel feature for prognosis assessment and highlight the intricacies of RNA-binding protein dynamics in cancer progression.A.I. and P.E. were supported by PhD4MD fellowships from the CRG and the Emerald program (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 101034290), respectively. This work was supported by the following grants to F.G.: PGC2018-099697-B-I00 and PID2021-127948NB-I00 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MCIN) funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033/ and by ERDF; “la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434) under the Grant LCF/PR/HR17/52150016; the Catalan Agency for Research and Universities (SGR-Cat-2021-01215) and intramural funds from the CRG on emergent translational research. We acknowledge the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa (CEX2020-001049-S, MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033) and the Generalitat de Catalunya through the CERCA programme

Thermal evolution of gene expression profiles in Drosophila subobscura

BACKGROUND: Despite its pervasiveness, the genetic basis of adaptation resulting in variation directly or indirectly related to temperature (climatic) gradients is poorly understood. By using 3-fold replicated laboratory thermal stocks covering much of the physiologically tolerable temperature range for the temperate (i.e., cold tolerant) species Drosophila subobscura we have assessed whole-genome transcriptional responses after three years of thermal adaptation, when the populations had already diverged for inversion frequencies, pre-adult life history components, and morphological traits. Total mRNA from each population was compared to a reference pool mRNA in a standard, highly replicated two-colour competitive hybridization experiment using cDNA microarrays. RESULTS: A total of 306 (6.6%) cDNA clones were identified as 'differentially expressed' (following a false discovery rate correction) after contrasting the two furthest apart thermal selection regimes (i.e., 13°C vs . 22°C), also including four previously reported candidate genes for thermotolerance in Drosophila (Hsp26, Hsp68, Fst, and Treh). On the other hand, correlated patterns of gene expression were similar in cold- and warm-adapted populations. Analysis of functional categories defined by the Gene Ontology project point to an overrepresentation of genes involved in carbohydrate metabolism, nucleic acids metabolism and regulation of transcription among other categories. Although the location of differently expressed genes was approximately at random with respect to chromosomes, a physical mapping of 88 probes to the polytene chromosomes of D. subobscura has shown that a larger than expected number mapped inside inverted chromosomal segments. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that a sizeable number of genes appear to be involved in thermal adaptation in Drosophila, with a substantial fraction implicated in metabolism. This apparently illustrates the formidable challenge to understanding the adaptive evolution of complex trait variation. Furthermore, some clustering of genes within inverted chromosomal sections was detected. Disentangling the effects of inversions will be obviously required in any future approach if we want to identify the relevant candidate genes

1000 Genomes Selection Browser 1.0: A genome browser dedicated to signatures of natural selection in modern humans

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Searching for Darwinian selection in natural populations has been the focus of a multitude of studies over the last decades. Here we present the 1000 Genomes Selection Browser 1.0 (http://hsb.upf.edu) as a resource for signatures of recent natural selection in modern humans. We have implemented and applied a large number of neutrality tests as well as summary statistics informative for the action of selection such as Tajima's D, CLR, Fay and Wu's H, Fu and Li's F* and D*, XPEHH, ΔiHH, iHS, FST, ΔDAF and XPCLR among others to low coverage sequencing data from the 1000 genomes project (Phase 1; release April 2012). We have implemented a publicly available genome-wide browser to communicate the results from three different populations of West African, Northern European and East Asian ancestry (YRI, CEU, CHB). Information is provided in UCSC-style format to facilitate the integration with the rich UCSC browser tracks and an access page is provided with instructions and for convenient visualization. We believe that this expandable resource will facilitate the interpretation of signals of selection on different temporal, geographical and genomic scales. © 2013 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (Spain); Direcció General de Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya (Grup de Recerca Consolidat 2009 SGR 1101); Subprogram BMC [BFU2010-19443 awarded to J.B.]; Post-doctoral scholarship from the Volkswagenstiftung [Az: I/85 198 to J.E.]; Spanish government [BFU-2008-01046; SAF2011-29239]; The Spanish government FPI scholarships [BES-2009-017731 and BES-2011-04502 to G.M.D. and M.P., respectively]; PhD fellowship from ‘Acción Estratégica de Salud, en el marco del Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 2008-2011’ from Instituto de Salud Carlos III (to P.L.). Funding for open access charge: Prof. Jaume Bertranpetit.Peer Reviewe