Visual generational genres

Chapter 7 considers the role of generational literacies and etiquettes around visual genres. For example in our study, younger participants tended to take and share more pictures, while older participants tended to take less but comment more on their children’s images. Here, generational understandings of co-present gift giving rituals can be found

Personal visual collecting and self-cataloguing

Chapter 6 analyzes the growing role of the visual in social media practices in terms of tensions between sharing, impression management and self-cataloging

Friendly social surveillance

Chapter 3 seeks to frame Digital Kinship in terms of debates around the effects of media especially in terms of emotion, intimacy and surveillance. Bringing discussions around emotion and media by scholars, along with debates around social surveillance, mobility and transnationalism, this chapter considers the ways that different forms of mobility (chosen and enforced) are recalibrating familial ties

DNA polymerases ν and θ are required for efficient immunoglobulin V gene diversification in chicken

Polν and Polθ have specialized functions in immunoglobulin gene rearrangements and only contribute to DNA repair when other homologous recombination–related DNA polymerases are absent

TRPV4 is functionally expressed in oligodendrocyte precursor cells and increases their proliferation

This article is part of the special issue on Thermal biology in Pflügers Archiv – European Journal of Physiology.Oligodendrocytes, which differentiate from oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), ensheath axons with myelin, play an essential role in rapid conduction of action potentials and metabolically support neurons. Elucidation of the mechanisms underlying the proliferation, migration, differentiation, and survival of OPCs is considered indispensable for determining the causes of central nervous system diseases. However, the relationship between these functions of OPCs and their intracellular Ca²⁺ signaling has not been fully elucidated. Here, we investigated the function of transient receptor potential vanilloid 4 (TRPV4), a Ca²⁺-permeable channel that responds to hypo-osmolarity, mild temperature, mechanical stimulation, and endogenous arachidonic acid metabolites, in OPCs. Trpv4 mRNA was detected in OPCs in vivo and in primary cultured rat OPCs. In Ca²⁺ imaging experiments, treatment with the selective TRPV4 agonist GSK1016790A induced sustained elevation of the intracellular Ca²⁺ concentration in OPCs in a concentration-dependent manner, which was almost completely suppressed by co-treatment with the selective TRPV4 antagonist HC067047. Stimulation of TRPV4 by GSK1016790A augmented OPC proliferation, which was abolished by co-treatment with HC067047, the intracellular Ca²⁺ chelator BAPTA-AM, and the protein kinase C inhibitor bisindolylmaleimide II. By contrast, GSK1016790A did not significantly affect the migration or differentiation of OPCs. Taken together, these results suggest that TRPV4 is functionally expressed in OPCs and increases the proliferation of these cells without affecting their ability to differentiate into oligodendrocytes

Mobile media photography and intergenerational families

The visuality of apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp is becoming more apparent, especially as part of emotional work in contemporary relationships. In families, informal intergenerational literacy can be found throughout mobile media practices. Often, the emotional work around these practices remains tacit. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which mobile media photography has become imbricated in making-do practices of maintaining intimacy in intergenerational family contexts. Drawing from literature on mobile media visuality and transnational family relationships, this article considers Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labor and “feeling rules” to consider how intergenerational familial genres in Australia and Japan are used to perform contemporary notions of familial intimacy and copresence. The article thus contributes a cross-cultural consideration of Hochschild’s emotion work to examine how the circulation of images reveals the ideals of familyhood and aspirations of contemporary Asian families in a multicultural and monocultural context

Digital Media Practices in Households

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It explores the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics