Expression and purification of recombinant G protein-coupled receptors: A review

Given their extensive role in cell signalling, GPCRs are significant drug targets; despite this, many of these receptors have limited or no available prophylaxis. Novel drug design and discovery significantly rely on structure determination, of which GPCRs are typically elusive. Progress has been made thus far to produce sufficient quantity and quality of protein for downstream analysis. As such, this review highlights the systems available for recombinant GPCR expression, with consideration of their advantages and disadvantages, as well as examples of receptors successfully expressed in these systems. Additionally, an overview is given on the use of detergents and the styrene maleic acid (SMA) co-polymer for membrane solubilisation, as well as purification techniques

Stranger in Your Own Land: An ethnography of rural schools and Western-educated Asomi in Kenya

In this ethnographic study of education in East Africa, I look at the legacy left behind by students in Kenya’s founding era—both those that negotiated an education within and outside the national school system—to ask the question: What does the imposition of Anglo-American educational values on Kenya say about the way post-colonial societies were shaped by—and resisted against—their European colonizers? This question is pertinent to the school compound as a place where curriculum was standardized to mimic Anglican formal education as well as the sojourn abroad made by a small class of Kenyans destined for influential political offices. While school grounds are a micropolitical hot spot for the creation and replication of disciplined students and “productive” citizens (Foucault 1975), an education abroad has been viewed as liberatory and transcendental (Harper 2006; Shachtman 2009) despite the way it continues to celebrate Euroamerican influence on the post-colonial world. This thesis explores the degree to which schooling both within and beyond Kenya’s national education system aligns students with a desire to mimic Western institutions and how those students in turn engage in acts of resistance (Taussig 1992). Ultimately, this is also a geographical project on a global scale—between Britain, Kenya, and the United States—in a time when knowledge gained in the colonial metropolises was translated into powerful credentials among a newly liberated people

Beyond lawn people : the role of emotions in suburban yard management practices

The lawn is a dominant feature in the suburban landscape that, under common resource-intensive management regimes, poses risks to human and broader ecosystem health and sustainability. This article examines the role played by emotions as homeowners maintain or change yard management practices, in order to extend existing understandings that focus on external drivers of yard management (e.g., Robbins 2007). Drawing on a high-resolution qualitative study of homeowners in the northern suburbs of Boston, this article describes how emotions circulate between homeowners, yards, and neighborhood political economies, creating collectivities of management practices bound by shared experience of emotions. Using a heuristic set of yard subjectivities drawn from interview data, we argue that emotional engagements are central to homeowners\u27 decision making around yard management practices. These findings provide new insight for those working to shift suburban ecologies away from resource-intensive turfgrass landscapes, by offering a better understanding of the processes that enable or inhibit change in yard management regimes. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7