La vente féminine libre à Paris au XVIIIe siècle

La division du travail féminin en deux sphères, l'une publique et l'autre privée, constitue un phénomène relativement récent dans le monde occidental. La société préindustrielle urbaine l'ignore. Pour les femmes issues des classes populaires, travail et famille font partie "d'un même horizon". L'activité laborieuse, indissociable de la survie du menu peuple, fond dans un seul moule les rôles de fille, d'épouse, de mère, et veille à la survie de la femme restée célibataire. Dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle, cadre dans lequel cette recherche veut s'attarder, les femmes s'affairent à de nombreuses besognes, et les petits métiers féminins ne manquent pas. Les dictionnaires des "arts et métiers" élaborés au cours de cette époque nous donnent un aperçu des diverses tâches accomplies par les Parisiennes

Agency and economic change in regions: identifying routes to new path development using qualitative comparative analysis

This paper investigates the role of human agency in 40 phases of regional economic development in 12 Nordic regions over 30 years. It contributes with a theoretical framework to study agency over time and a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis based on a unique dataset combining over 200 interviews, with printed and online sources, and quantitative data. The paper identifies which combinations of agency types and context conditions make industrial upgrading or diversification possible, and investigates how such combinations come into being. The causal claims from this analysis are illustrated with empirical examples and discussed in relation to previous literature.Agency and economic change in regions: identifying routes to new path development using qualitative comparative analysispublishedVersio

Direct Correlation between Adsorption Energetics and Nuclear Spin Relaxation in a Liquid-saturated Catalyst Material.

The ratio of NMR relaxation time constants T 1 / T 2 provides a non-destructive indication of the relative surface affinities exhibited by adsorbates within liquid-saturated mesoporous catalysts. In the present work we provide supporting evidence for the existence of a quantitative relationship between such measurements and adsorption energetics. As a prototypical example with relevance to green chemical processes we examine and contrast the relaxation characteristics of primary alcohols and cyclohexane within an industrial silica catalyst support. T 1 / T 2 values obtained at intermediate magnetic field strength are in good agreement with DFT adsorption energy calculations performed on single molecules interacting with an idealised silica surface. Our results demonstrate the remarkable ability of this metric to quantify surface affinities within systems of relevance to liquid-phase heterogeneous catalysis, and highlight NMR relaxation as a powerful method for the determination of adsorption phenomena within mesoporous solids.Catalysis@Cambridge, BP pl

Combining Computational Prediction of Cis-Regulatory Elements with a New Enhancer Assay to Efficiently Label Neuronal Structures in the Medaka Fish

The developing vertebrate nervous system contains a remarkable array of neural cells organized into complex, evolutionarily conserved structures. The labeling of living cells in these structures is key for the understanding of brain development and function, yet the generation of stable lines expressing reporter genes in specific spatio-temporal patterns remains a limiting step. In this study we present a fast and reliable pipeline to efficiently generate a set of stable lines expressing a reporter gene in multiple neuronal structures in the developing nervous system in medaka. The pipeline combines both the accurate computational genome-wide prediction of neuronal specific cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) and a newly developed experimental setup to rapidly obtain transgenic lines in a cost-effective and highly reproducible manner. 95% of the CRMs tested in our experimental setup show enhancer activity in various and numerous neuronal structures belonging to all major brain subdivisions. This pipeline represents a significant step towards the dissection of embryonic neuronal development in vertebrates

Creation of a type IIS restriction endonuclease with a long recognition sequence

Type IIS restriction endonucleases cleave DNA outside their recognition sequences, and are therefore particularly useful in the assembly of DNA from smaller fragments. A limitation of type IIS restriction endonucleases in assembly of long DNA sequences is the relative abundance of their target sites. To facilitate ligation-based assembly of extremely long pieces of DNA, we have engineered a new type IIS restriction endonuclease that combines the specificity of the homing endonuclease I-SceI with the type IIS cleavage pattern of FokI. We linked a non-cleaving mutant of I-SceI, which conveys to the chimeric enzyme its specificity for an 18-bp DNA sequence, to the catalytic domain of FokI, which cuts DNA at a defined site outside the target site. Whereas previously described chimeric endonucleases do not produce type IIS-like precise DNA overhangs suitable for ligation, our chimeric endonuclease cleaves double-stranded DNA exactly 2 and 6 nt from the target site to generate homogeneous, 5′, four-base overhangs, which can be ligated with 90% fidelity. We anticipate that these enzymes will be particularly useful in manipulation of DNA fragments larger than a thousand bases, which are very likely to contain target sites for all natural type IIS restriction endonucleases

Numt-Mediated Double-Strand Break Repair Mitigates Deletions during Primate Genome Evolution

Non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) is the major mechanism of double-strand break repair (DSBR) in mammalian cells. NHEJ has traditionally been inferred from experimental systems involving induced double strand breaks (DSBs). Whether or not the spectrum of repair events observed in experimental NHEJ reflects the repair of natural breaks by NHEJ during chromosomal evolution is an unresolved issue. In primate phylogeny, nuclear DNA sequences of mitochondrial origin, numts, are inserted into naturally occurring chromosomal breaks via NHEJ. Thus, numt integration sites harbor evidence for the mechanisms that act on the genome over evolutionary timescales. We have identified 35 and 55 lineage-specific numts in the human and chimpanzee genomes, respectively, using the rhesus monkey genome as an outgroup. One hundred and fifty two numt-chromosome fusion points were classified based on their repair patterns. Repair involving microhomology and repair leading to nucleotide additions were detected. These repair patterns are within the experimentally determined spectrum of classical NHEJ, suggesting that information from experimental systems is representative of broader genetic loci and end configurations. However, in incompatible DSBR events, small deletions always occur, whereas in 54% of numt integration events examined, no deletions were detected. Numts show a statistically significant reduction in deletion frequency, even in comparison to DSBR involving filler DNA. Therefore, numts show a unique mechanism of integration via NHEJ. Since the deletion frequency during numt insertion is low, native overhangs of chromosome breaks are preserved, allowing us to determine that 24% of the analyzed breaks are cohesive with overhangs of up to 11 bases. These data represent, to the best of our knowledge, the most comprehensive description of the structure of naturally occurring DSBs. We suggest a model in which the sealing of DSBs by numts, and probably by other filler DNA, prevents nuclear processing of DSBs that could result in deleterious repair

Mutability and Importance of a Hypermutable Cell Subpopulation that Produces Stress-Induced Mutants in Escherichia coli

In bacterial, yeast, and human cells, stress-induced mutation mechanisms are induced in growth-limiting environments and produce non-adaptive and adaptive mutations. These mechanisms may accelerate evolution specifically when cells are maladapted to their environments, i.e., when they are are stressed. One mechanism of stress-induced mutagenesis in Escherichia coli occurs by error-prone DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair. This mechanism was linked previously to a differentiated subpopulation of cells with a transiently elevated mutation rate, a hypermutable cell subpopulation (HMS). The HMS could be important, producing essentially all stress-induced mutants. Alternatively, the HMS was proposed to produce only a minority of stress-induced mutants, i.e., it was proposed to be peripheral. We characterize three aspects of the HMS. First, using improved mutation-detection methods, we estimate the number of mutations per genome of HMS-derived cells and find that it is compatible with fitness after the HMS state. This implies that these mutants are not necessarily an evolutionary dead end, and could contribute to adaptive evolution. Second, we show that stress-induced Lac+ mutants, with and without evidence of descent from the HMS, have similar Lac+ mutation sequences. This provides evidence that HMS-descended and most stress-induced mutants form via a common mechanism. Third, mutation-stimulating DSBs introduced via I-SceI endonuclease in vivo do not promote Lac+ mutation independently of the HMS. This and the previous finding support the hypothesis that the HMS underlies most stress-induced mutants, not just a minority of them, i.e., it is important. We consider a model in which HMS differentiation is controlled by stress responses. Differentiation of an HMS potentially limits the risks of mutagenesis in cell clones