Chemical, molecular pharmacology and neuroprotective properties of the essential oil derived from Aloysia citrodora Palau

Essential oils derived from dried and fresh leaves of Aloysia citrodora were obtained by hydrodistillation, and were investigated for a range of pharmacological properties: receptor binding, in vitro acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitory, antioxidant activities, and neuroprotection properties relevant to neurodegenerative diseases. Fresh leaf A. citrodora essential oil inhibited [3H] nicotine binding to well washed rat forebrain membranes, with mean apparent IC50 of 0.0018 mg/ml. No significant binding activity was observed for A. citrodora essential oil derived from fresh or dried leaves, for GABAAR and NMDARs. A. citrodora essential oil, both dried and fresh, exhibited radical scavenging activity (up to 100%, IC50 < 0.0001 mg/ml) and iron (II) chelating properties (approx. IC50 = 0.05 mg/ml), and showed neuroprotective characteristics against the toxic effects of H2O2 (100%, 0.001 mg/ml) and β-amyloid (approx. 50%, 0.01 mg/ml) in CAD neuronal cell culture. Both EOs from dried and fresh leaves also displayed effective AChE inhibitory activity, with the dried leaves oil displaying more clear AChE inhibitory activity than fresh oil, which could be related to the higher respective levels of caryophyllene oxide. Recombinant human anticholinesterase enzyme was used for structure based in silico screening of A. citrodora essential oil constituents for AChE Inhibitors, and the top scoring hits with highest pharmacophore fit values showed common interactions with residues at the active site of that of donepezil. The top seven hits in order of fit score, were β-curcumene, curcumene bisabolene, trans-calamenene, caryophyllene oxide, β-sesquiphellandrene and geranyl acetate. This indicates that plants may yield novel effective and safe AChE inhibitors, other than alkaloids. To begin to identify the chemicals underpinning the pharmacological properties of A. citrodora, GC/MS analysis of the chemical composition of the essential oil from leaves of A. citrodora identified eighty three major chemicals, including the presence of terpenoids, monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, and 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, the main constituents being limonene, caryophyllene oxide, curcumene, spathulenol, 1,8-cineole constituting 47% of the total oil. Finally, a simple, inexpensive solid phase extraction method was developed for fractionation of essential oils. Collectively, this thesis provides a better understanding of the pharmacology of the Aloysia essential oil and its constituents relating to its potential use in the treatment neurodegenerative disease

Imagined and imaginary whales: Benedict Anderson, Salman Rushdie and George Orwell

George Orwell, anticipating many of the arguments made by Benedict Anderson in the “Patriotism and Racism” chapter of Imagined Communities, illuminated patriotism and nationalism as shifting aspects of a wider dialectical interplay between an identification with imagined communities and a loyalty to humanity. Orwell's essay “Inside the Whale” can be seen, contrary to Salman Rushdie's criticism that it advocates quietism, as an essay about imaginary homelands. In this reading the whale is a metaphor for a dialectical space created by a writer in order to gain purchase on the unceasing dialectic of history. Analysis of The Lion and the Unicorn in this article links Orwell's work with that of Anderson and Rushdie by exploring in his vision of a classless England the relationship between the personal imaginary homeland and the political imagined community

The Psy-Security-Curriculum ensemble: British Values curriculum policy in English schools

Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, ‘British Values’ (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on ‘British’ values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Post-millennial Literature

This chapter investigates the British novel since 2000 by thinking about how a range of novels demonstrate a concern with the ability of contemporary prose fiction to maintain the 'meanwhile' which, according to Benedict Anderson, has been crucial to the novel's representational techniques since its inception

Said, bhabha and the colonised subject

Homi K. Bhabha’s introduction to his collected essays, The Location of Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as one marked by disorientation, with the ‘posts’ of postmodernism, postcolonialism and postfeminism on the one hand and the sense of restless movements, a moving back and forth, ‘here and there’, that has unhooked contemporary critical theory from fixed and primary organisational categories, and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation”.1 The central proposition established in this opening is the argument that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference