The Federated Colored Catholics\u27 \u3cem\u3eChronicle, \u3c/em\u3e1929‐1932: A Monitor and Barometer of American Race Relations

This essay examines The Chronicle, the Federated Colored Catholics’ official periodical. The author argues that the short-lived publication was an educative vehicle that provided practical strategies for addressing the day-to-day racial disparities facing the larger Black community. Remnants of the social and economic issues that The Chronicle’s founder, Thomas Wyatt Turner, sought to address during the late 1920s and early 1930s remain with us today, and as such, continue to demand both attention and solutions

Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa

Review of: Life Narratives of African Americans in Iowa. Barnes, Charline J

The Almost Forgotten History of Claver College

This essay examines Claver College, an African American Catholic College located in Guthrie, Oklahoma, from 1936-1942. The author argues that while there is still much that is unknown about the short-lived college, the institution provided an opportunity for African Americans west of the Mississippi River to access higher education and served as an entre for the Catholic Church into an African American community

Polemical plot-coils: thematising the postmodern in 'Possession'

The postmodernity of A. S. Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (1990) has been much discussed. However, the novel’s formal treatment of postmodernism, through its use of intertextuality, pastiche and textual self-consciousness, diverges significantly from its treatment of postmodernism as a theme. In this essay, I will discuss the relatively neglected issue of Byatt’s thematic portrayal of the postmodern, and will show how Byatt sustains a fundamentally humanist impulse from within the novel’s framework of postmodern awareness

Structural divergence creates new functional features in alphavirus genomes

Alphaviruses are mosquito-borne pathogens that cause human diseases ranging from debilitating arthritis to lethal encephalitis. Studies with Sindbis virus (SINV), which causes fever, rash, and arthralgia in humans, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV), which causes encephalitis, have identified RNA structural elements that play key roles in replication and pathogenesis. However, a complete genomic structural profile has not been established for these viruses. We used the structural probing technique SHAPE-MaP to identify structured elements within the SINV and VEEV genomes. Our SHAPE-directed structural models recapitulate known RNA structures, while also identifying novel structural elements, including a new functional element in the nsP1 region of SINV whose disruption causes a defect in infectivity. Although RNA structural elements are important for multiple aspects of alphavirus biology, we found the majority of RNA structures were not conserved between SINV and VEEV. Our data suggest that alphavirus RNA genomes are highly divergent structurally despite similar genomic architecture and sequence conservation; still, RNA structural elements are critical to the viral life cycle. These findings reframe traditional assumptions about RNA structure and evolution: rather than structures being conserved, alphaviruses frequently evolve new structures that may shape interactions with host immune systems or co-evolve with viral proteins

Multiple conformations are a conserved and regulatory feature of the RB1 5' UTR

Folding to a well-defined conformation is essential for the function of structured ribonucleic acids (RNAs) like the ribosome and tRNA. Structured elements in the untranslated regions (UTRs) of specific messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are known to control expression. The importance of unstructured regions adopting multiple conformations, however, is still poorly understood. High-resolution SHAPE-directed Boltzmann suboptimal sampling of the Homo sapiens Retinoblastoma 1 (RB1) 5' UTR yields three distinct conformations compatible with the experimental data. Private single nucleotide variants (SNVs) identified in two patients with retinoblastoma each collapse the structural ensemble to a single but distinct well-defined conformation. The RB1 5' UTRs from Bos taurus (cow) and Trichechus manatus latirostris (manatee) are divergent in sequence from H. sapiens (human) yet maintain structural compatibility with high-probability base pairs. SHAPE chemical probing of the cow and manatee RB1 5' UTRs reveals that they also adopt multiple conformations. Luciferase reporter assays reveal that 5' UTR mutations alter RB1 expression. In a traditional model of disease, causative SNVs disrupt a key structural element in the RNA. For the subset of patients with heritable retinoblastoma-associated SNVs in the RB1 5' UTR, the absence of multiple structures is likely causative of the cancer. Our data therefore suggest that selective pressure will favor multiple conformations in eukaryotic UTRs to regulate expression