Cash Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper

Picking up from Land Back, the first Red Paper by Yellowhead about the project of land reclamation, Cash Back looks at how the dispossession of Indigenous lands created a dependency on the state due to the loss of economic livelihood. Cash Back is about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth. From Canada’s perspective, the value of Indigenous lands rests on what can be extracted and commodified. The economy has been built on the transformation of Indigenous lands and waterways into corporate profit and national power. In place of their riches in territory, Canada set up for First Nations a weak, impoverished fiscal system — a cradle-to-grave bureaucracy — to control life through a stranglehold on each and every need. What is at stake here in Cash Back is the restitution of Indigenous economies. Canada’s dysfunctional fiscal system for First Nations is not an Indigenous economy. An Indigenous economy would be built upon the jurisdiction of Indigenous nations over our territories, not the 0.2 percent economies of reserves and the federal transfer system.1 Therefore, this report is explicitly about reparations and not about adjustments to the status quo. Cash Back is not a charity project; it is part of a decolonization process

Relaxation of the Plant Cell Wall Barrier via Zwitterionic Liquid Pretreatment for Micelle‐Complex‐Mediated DNA Delivery to Specific Plant Organelles

Targeted delivery of genes to specific plant organelles is a key challenge for fundamental plant science, plant bioengineering, and agronomic applications. Nanoscale carriers have attracted interest as a promising tool for organelle-targeted DNA delivery in plants. However, nanocarrier-mediated DNA delivery in plants is severely hampered by the barrier of the plant cell wall, resulting in insufficient delivery efficiency. Herein, we propose a unique strategy that synergistically combines a cell wall-loosening zwitterionic liquid (ZIL) with a peptide-displaying micelle complex for organelle-specific DNA delivery in plants. We demonstrated that ZIL pretreatment can enhance cell wall permeability without cytotoxicity, allowing micelle complexes to translocate across the cell wall and carry DNA cargo into specific plant organelles, such as nuclei and chloroplasts, with significantly augmented efficiency. Our work offers a novel concept to overcome the plant cell wall barrier for nanocarrier-mediated cargo delivery to specific organelles in living plants

A Synthetic Multidomain Peptide That Drives a Macropinocytosis-Like Mechanism for Cytosolic Transport of Exogenous Proteins into Plants

Direct delivery of proteins into plants represents a promising alternative to conventional gene delivery for probing and modulating cellular functions without the risk of random integration of transgenes into the host genome. This remains challenging, however, because of the lack of a protein delivery tool applicable to diverse plant species and the limited information about the entry mechanisms of exogenous proteins in plant cells. Here, we present the synthetic multidomain peptide (named dTat-Sar-EED4) for cytosolic protein delivery in various plant species via simple peptide-protein coincubation. dTat-Sar-EED4 enabled the cytosolic delivery of an active enzyme with up to ∼20-fold greater efficiency than previously described cell-penetrating peptides in several model plant systems. Our analyses using pharmacological inhibitors and transmission electron microscopy revealed that dTat-Sar-EED4 triggered a unique endocytic mechanism for cargo protein internalization. This endocytic mechanism shares several features with macropinocytosis, including the dependency of actin polymerization, sensitivity to phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase activity, and formation of membrane protrusions and large intracellular vesicles (>200 nm in diameter), even though macropinocytosis has not been identified to date in plants. Our study thus presents a robust molecular tool that can induce a unique cellular uptake mechanism for the efficient transport of bioactive proteins into plants

Profiles of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes in a Case of Trichilemmal Carcinoma with Spontaneous Regression

We describe the case of a 69-year-old Japanese patient with spontaneous regression of trichilemmal carcinoma. We investigated the immunohistochemical profiles of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, focusing on cytotoxic granules, granulysin-bearing cells and immunosuppressive cells, such as regulatory T cells and tumor-associated macrophages. Our present study describes some of the possible mechanisms of the self-regression of cutaneous malignant tumors and potential therapies for trichilemmal carcinoma by modifying the tumor microenvironment

Multiple Low-Grade Fibromyxoid Sarcoma on the Upper Arms with Atypical Histological Presentation

Low-grade fibromyxoid sarcoma (LGFMS) is a rare variant of spindle cell tumor that is composed of collagen-rich and myxoid parts. We describe the case of a 61-year-old Japanese patient with multiple, recurrent LGFMS on the upper arms with atypical histological presentation. In the present case, we resected the tumor several times with a minimal surgical margin, as in Moh's microsurgery. However, this can frequently lead to local recurrence of the tumor. Our case suggested that, regarding mesenchymal tumors with potential of malignancy in the skin, an initial wide excision is indispensable for complete remission of the tumor, even for low-grade malignancy such as LGFMS

Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Developing from Recessive Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa: A Case Report and an Immunohistochemical Study

We describe a 49-year-old Japanese woman with cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) developing from recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB). Interestingly, immunohistochemical staining revealed dense infiltration of CD163+ M2 macrophages and numerous Foxp3+ regulatory T cells (Tregs) around the tumor. Since the contribution of immunosuppressive factors (e.g. TGFβ) to the carcinogenesis of SCC from RDEB was recently reported, our present findings suggest one of the possible contributions of immunosuppressive cells, such as CD163+ M2 macrophages and Tregs, to the carcinogenesis of SCC from RDEB