‘L’homosexualité? ça n’existe pas en banlieue’: the indigènes de la république and gay marriage, between intersectionality and homophobia

Since its founding in 2005, the anti-racist organisation Les Indigènes de la République has acquired a certain notoriety in the French public eye as a fresh voice of the anti-racist Left. The Indigènes combined postcolonial and intersectional analysis with more traditional forms of anti-racist activism. This article examines how the Indigènes engaged with LGBTQ minorities as they tried to articulate ‘intersectional’ views of the Republic. While the intersection of gender and race was central to the emergence of the organisation in 2004, the Indigènes have mostly avoided addressing issues relevant to the LGBTQ communities. The one exception to this rule occurred in the wake of the Marriage pour tous protests against the legalisation of same-sex marriage, where the organisation equated ‘homosexual identity’ with colonial oppression. Using interviews and publication material, this article explores the gestation of the Indigènes’ position on the issue of same-sex marriage, with its contradictions between a left-wing discourse that prioritised an idea of social justice through inclusion of all oppressed minorities and the desire to represent a marginalised constituency that was often unsympathetic to LGBTQ issues. Their choice highlights the difficulties of analysing the volatile political reality in contemporary France through abstract notions of social justice

Between Resistance and the State: Caribbean Activism and the Invention of a National Memory of Slavery in France

Between 1998 and 2006, the memory of slavery in France developed from a marginalized issue into a priority of the state. This article examines the process in which community activists and state actors interacted with and against one another to integrate remembrance and the commemoration of slavery and its abolitions into a Republican national narrative. It focuses on a series of actions from the protests against the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1998 to the creation of the 10 May National Memorial Day to Slavery and Its Abolitions in 2006. Basing its analysis on oral-history interviews and various publications, this article argues that “memory activists” – and particularly new anti-racist groups – mobilized the memory of slavery to address issues of community identity and resistance within the context of 21st-century Republicanism. In so doing, they articulated a new kind of black identity in France

Beyond memory wars: The indigènes de la république’s grass-roots anti-racism between the memory of colonialism and antisemitism

In the mid-2010s, the expression ‘memory wars’, which had been coined in debates about the role of various commemorations of France’s colonial history, became increasingly identified with an atmosphere of conflict between France’s Jewish population and other minority communities. Simultaneously, conflicts over remembrance of the Holocaust and France’s colonial past characterized a new dynamic of memorial anti-racism. This article examines the trajectory of the Indigènes de la République, an organization that was particularly identified with this kind of memorial anti-racism. Through oral history interviews as well as the organization’s publications and media appearances, this article outlines the role of memory in the growing atmosphere of conflict between Jews and other postcolonial minorities in France and ultimately questions the role of so-called memory wars in the growing conversation about race in the Fifth Republic

ResponseNet: revealing signaling and regulatory networks linking genetic transcriptomic screening data

Cellular response to stimuli is typically complex and involves both regulatory and metabolic processes. Large-scale experimental efforts to identify components of these processes often comprise of genetic screening and transcriptomic profiling assays. We previously established that in yeast genetic screens tend to identify response regulators, while transcriptomic profiling assays tend to identify components of metabolic processes. ResponseNet is a network-optimization approach that integrates the results from these assays with data of known molecular interactions. Specifically, ResponseNet identifies a high-probability sub-network, composed of signaling and regulatory molecular interaction paths, through which putative response regulators may lead to the measured transcriptomic changes. Computationally, this is achieved by formulating a minimum-cost flow optimization problem and solving it efficiently using linear programming tools. The ResponseNet web server offers a simple interface for applying ResponseNet. Users can upload weighted lists of proteins and genes and obtain a sparse, weighted, molecular interaction sub-network connecting their data. The predicted sub-network and its gene ontology enrichment analysis are presented graphically or as text. Consequently, the ResponseNet web server enables researchers that were previously limited to separate analysis of their distinct, large-scale experiments, to meaningfully integrate their data and substantially expand their understanding of the underlying cellular response. ResponseNet is available at http://bioinfo.bgu.ac.il/respnet.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (FP7-PEOPLE-MCA-IRG)United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant 2009323

CRISPR-Cas9 screens in human cells and primary neurons identify modifiers of C9ORF72 dipeptide-repeat-protein toxicity.

Hexanucleotide-repeat expansions in the C9ORF72 gene are the most common cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia (c9ALS/FTD). The nucleotide-repeat expansions are translated into dipeptide-repeat (DPR) proteins, which are aggregation prone and may contribute to neurodegeneration. We used the CRISPR-Cas9 system to perform genome-wide gene-knockout screens for suppressors and enhancers of C9ORF72 DPR toxicity in human cells. We validated hits by performing secondary CRISPR-Cas9 screens in primary mouse neurons. We uncovered potent modifiers of DPR toxicity whose gene products function in nucleocytoplasmic transport, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), proteasome, RNA-processing pathways, and chromatin modification. One modifier, TMX2, modulated the ER-stress signature elicited by C9ORF72 DPRs in neurons and improved survival of human induced motor neurons from patients with C9ORF72 ALS. Together, our results demonstrate the promise of CRISPR-Cas9 screens in defining mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

We present a new set of subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 299 words (158 nouns, 141 verbs) in 25 languages from five language families (Afro-Asiatic: Semitic languages; Altaic: one Turkic language: Indo-European: Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Slavic, and Romance languages; Niger-Congo: one Bantu language; Uralic: Finnic and Ugric languages). Adult native speakers reported the age at which they had learned each word. We present a comparison of the AoA ratings across all languages by contrasting them in pairs. This comparison shows a consistency in the orders of ratings across the 25 languages. The data were then analyzed (1) to ascertain how the demographic characteristics of the participants influenced AoA estimations and (2) to assess differences caused by the exact form of the target question (when did you learn vs. when do children learn this word); (3) to compare the ratings obtained in our study to those of previous studies; and (4) to assess the validity of our study by comparison with quasi-objective AoA norms derived from the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). All 299 words were judged as being acquired early (mostly before the age of 6 years). AoA ratings were associated with the raters’ social or language status, but not with the raters’ age or education. Parents reported words as being learned earlier, and bilinguals reported learning them later. Estimations of the age at which children learn the words revealed significantly lower ratings of AoA. Finally, comparisons with previous AoA and MB-CDI norms support the validity of the present estimations. Our AoA ratings are available for research or other purposes

Evolution of defence portfolios in exploiter-victim systems

Some organisms maintain a battery of defensive strategies against their exploiters (predators, parasites or parasitoids), while others fail to employ a defence that seems obvious. In this paper, we shall investigate the circumstances under which defence strategies might be expected to evolve. Brood parasites and their hosts provide our main motivation, and we shall discuss why the reed warbler Acrocephalus scirpaceus has evolved an egg-rejection but not a chick-rejection strategy as a defence against the common (Eurasian) cuckoo Cuculus canorus, while the superb fairy-wren Malurus cyaneus has evolved a chick-rejection but not an egg-rejection strategy as a defence against Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo Chrysococcyx basalis. We suggest that the answers lie in strategy-blocking, where one strategy (the blocking strategy) prevents the appearance of another (the blocked strategy) that would be adaptive in its absence. This may be common in exploiter-victim systems. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc

Dispersion of the second-order nonlinear susceptibility in ZnTe, ZnSe, and ZnS

We have measured the absolute values of the second-harmonic generation (SHG) coefficient |d| for the zinc-blende II-VI semiconductors ZnTe, ZnSe, and ZnS at room temperature. The investigated spectral region of the fundamental radiation λF ranges from 520 to 1321 nm using various pulsed laser sources. In the transparent region of the II-VI semiconductors, the SHG coefficient exceeds the values of birefringent materials as ammonium dihydrogen phosphate (ADP) and potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) by one or two orders of magnitudes. Above the E0 band gap a strong dispersion of |d| is observed, showing a maximum for a second-harmonic frequency close to the E1 gap. The experimental results are compared to calculated values using a simple three-band model including spin-orbit splitting. Substantial agreement is found to the experimentally observed dispersion of the second-order nonlinear susceptibility

Genetic effects on gene expression across human tissues

Characterization of the molecular function of the human genome and its variation across individuals is essential for identifying the cellular mechanisms that underlie human genetic traits and diseases. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project aims to characterize variation in gene expression levels across individuals and diverse tissues of the human body, many of which are not easily accessible. Here we describe genetic effects on gene expression levels across 44 human tissues. We find that local genetic variation affects gene expression levels for the majority of genes, and we further identify inter-chromosomal genetic effects for 93 genes and 112 loci. On the basis of the identified genetic effects, we characterize patterns of tissue specificity, compare local and distal effects, and evaluate the functional properties of the genetic effects. We also demonstrate that multi-tissue, multi-individual data can be used to identify genes and pathways affected by human disease-associated variation, enabling a mechanistic interpretation of gene regulation and the genetic basis of disease.Postprint (published version

Linking Proteomic and Transcriptional Data through the Interactome and Epigenome Reveals a Map of Oncogene-induced Signaling

Cellular signal transduction generally involves cascades of post-translational protein modifications that rapidly catalyze changes in protein-DNA interactions and gene expression. High-throughput measurements are improving our ability to study each of these stages individually, but do not capture the connections between them. Here we present an approach for building a network of physical links among these data that can be used to prioritize targets for pharmacological intervention. Our method recovers the critical missing links between proteomic and transcriptional data by relating changes in chromatin accessibility to changes in expression and then uses these links to connect proteomic and transcriptome data. We applied our approach to integrate epigenomic, phosphoproteomic and transcriptome changes induced by the variant III mutation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFRvIII) in a cell line model of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). To test the relevance of the network, we used small molecules to target highly connected nodes implicated by the network model that were not detected by the experimental data in isolation and we found that a large fraction of these agents alter cell viability. Among these are two compounds, ICG-001, targeting CREB binding protein (CREBBP), and PKF118–310, targeting β-catenin (CTNNB1), which have not been tested previously for effectiveness against GBM. At the level of transcriptional regulation, we used chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-Seq) to experimentally determine the genome-wide binding locations of p300, a transcriptional co-regulator highly connected in the network. Analysis of p300 target genes suggested its role in tumorigenesis. We propose that this general method, in which experimental measurements are used as constraints for building regulatory networks from the interactome while taking into account noise and missing data, should be applicable to a wide range of high-throughput datasets.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (DB1-0821391)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant U54-CA112967)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-GM089903)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (P30-ES002109