James W. Vanstone 1925-2001

James W. VanStone died suddenly of heart failure on February 28, 2001 at the age of 75.... VanStone was one of anthropology's foremost and most prolific northern scholars.... Although VanStone's master's work was on Plains archaeology, we are fortunate that he met fellow Penn graduate student J. Louis Giddings and began to look north. In 1950, Jim accompanied Giddings to Norton Sound, Alaska, where they tested archaeological sites between Golovnin Bay and Shaktoolik and carried out the third season's excavation at Cape Denbigh.... In 1951, VanStone inherited the position formerly held by Giddings at the University of Alaska. While in Fairbanks, he did archaeological surveys and excavations on Nunivak Island, the Copper River, and the Kenai Peninsula. With Wendell Oswalt, VanStone co-founded Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska. During this period, Jim authored a number of papers. Perhaps the most significant was "Russian Exploration in Interior Alaska, an Extract from the Journal of Andrei Glazunov ... one of the first modern uses of Russian-language sources in Alaskan anthropology. Also during this period, he spent a full year living in Point Hope, the result of which was Point Hope: an Eskimo Village in Transition ... which remains a seminal work on Alaskan Eskimo modernization. Jim left the University of Alaska in 1958 and spent a year "bumming around Europe.... After his return to the United States, VanStone accepted a position at the University of Toronto, where he remained until 1966. While at Toronto, he initiated and carried out several significant projects, including ethnographic studies among the Chipewyan at Lutselk'e (formerly Snowdrift) and ethnohistorical and ethnoarchaeological studies in southwestern Alaska. VanStone and Wendell Oswalt's excavations at Crow Village on the Kuskokwim River pioneered the use of archaeology as a means to augment oral and written sources in constructing a historical ethnography of a Native people. The Crow Village work set the stage for much of VanStone's research between 1963 and 1979, which featured extensive use of archival sources, archaeology and ethnographic field studies in examining Alaska Native cultural change in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.... In the midst of this research, Jim returned to Chicago, becoming Curator of North American Archaeology and Ethnology for the Field Museum of Natural History, a position he held until his retirement in 1993.... In the course of his career, VanStone authored, co-authored, or edited more than 140 articles, books, and monographs. ... A nearly complete list of his publications can be found in the Arctic Anthropology festschrift, No Boundaries: Papers in Honor of James W. VanStone (Pratt et al., 1998)...

Associations between household and neighbourhood socioeconomic status and systolic blood pressure among urban South African adolescents.

Factors resulting in high risk for cardiovascular disease have been well studied in high income countries, but have been less well researched in low/middle income countries. This is despite robust theoretical evidence of environmental transitions in such countries which could result in biological adaptations that lead to increased hypertension and cardiovascular disease risk. Data from the South African Birth to Twenty cohort, Bone Health sub-sample (n = 358, 47% female), were used to model associations between household socioeconomic status (SES) in infancy, household/neighbourhood SES at age 16 years, and systolic blood pressure (multivariate linear regression) and risk for systolic pre-hypertension (binary logistic regression). Bivariate analyses revealed household/neighbourhood SES measures that were significantly associated with increased systolic blood pressure. These significant associations included improved household sanitation in infancy/16 years, caregiver owning the house in infancy and being in a higher tertile (higher SES) of indices measuring school problems/environment or neighbourhood services/problems/crime at 16 years of age. Multivariate analyses adjusted for sex, maternal age, birth weight, parity, smoking, term birth, height/body mass index at 16 years. In adjusted analyses, only one SES variable remained significant for females: those in the middle tertile of the crime prevention index had higher systolic blood pressure (β = 3.52, SE = 1.61) compared with the highest tertile (i.e. those with the highest crime prevention). In adjusted analyses, no SES variables were significantly associated with the systolic blood pressure of boys, or with the risk of systolic pre-hypertension in either sex. The lack of association between SES and systolic blood pressure/systolic pre-hypertension at age 16 years is consistent with other studies showing an equalization of adolescent health inequalities. Further testing of the association between SES and systolic blood pressure would be recommended in adulthood to see whether the lack of association persists

Als3 is a Candida albicans invasin that binds to cadherins and induces endocytosis by host cells.

Candida albicans is the most common cause of hematogenously disseminated and oropharyngeal candidiasis. Both of these diseases are characterized by fungal invasion of host cells. Previously, we have found that C. albicans hyphae invade endothelial cells and oral epithelial cells in vitro by inducing their own endocytosis. Therefore, we set out to identify the fungal surface protein and host cell receptors that mediate this process. We found that the C. albicans Als3 is required for the organism to be endocytosed by human umbilical vein endothelial cells and two different human oral epithelial lines. Affinity purification experiments with wild-type and an als3delta/als3delta mutant strain of C. albicans demonstrated that Als3 was required for C. albicans to bind to multiple host cell surface proteins, including N-cadherin on endothelial cells and E-cadherin on oral epithelial cells. Furthermore, latex beads coated with the recombinant N-terminal portion of Als3 were endocytosed by Chinese hamster ovary cells expressing human N-cadherin or E-cadherin, whereas control beads coated with bovine serum albumin were not. Molecular modeling of the interactions of the N-terminal region of Als3 with the ectodomains of N-cadherin and E-cadherin indicated that the binding parameters of Als3 to either cadherin are similar to those of cadherin-cadherin binding. Therefore, Als3 is a fungal invasin that mimics host cell cadherins and induces endocytosis by binding to N-cadherin on endothelial cells and E-cadherin on oral epithelial cells. These results uncover the first known fungal invasin and provide evidence that C. albicans Als3 is a molecular mimic of human cadherins

Infographic Assignment

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Infographics are visual representations of information or data and provide an interesting way of considering how design affects the ways information is understood. The decision to represent wealth inequality through a line graph as opposed to icons of people drawn to scale to represent average salary speaks to issues of purpose and audience and is an engaging way to help students see the rhetorical role of design. In this assignment, Bill Wolff asks his students to engage with Edward Tufte’s and Ellen Lupton’s theories of design, typography, and evidence presentation through creating infographics with Piktochart (a free online infographic creator). Along with producing an infographic, students write a reflection in which they describe their objective, rhetorical strategies, and the ways in which they engaged with Tufte and Lupton’s theories of information design. While we have categorized this assignment under “Producing Design,” it includes a nice balance of both producing and reflecting, thus encouraging critical self-reflection

Comparative Genomics of Campylobacter fetus from Reptiles and Mammals Reveals Divergent Evolution in Host-Associated Lineages

Acknowledgments The authors like to thank Brian Brooks and John Devenish (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) for providing strains and valuable suggestions.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Identification of africanized honey bee (Hymenoptera: apidae) mitochondrial DNA: validation of a rapid polymerase chain reaction-based assay

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-ampliÞed mitochondrialDNA(mtDNA)assays have been used in studies of the Africanization process in neotropical feral and managed honey bee populations. The approach has been adopted, in conjunction with morphometric analysis, to identify Africanized bees for regulatory purposes in the United States such as in California. In this study, 211 Old World colonies, representing all known introduced subspecies in the United States, and 451 colonies from non-Africanized areas of the southern United States were screened to validate a rapid PCR-based assay for identiÞcation of Africanized honey bee mtDNA. This PCR-based assay requires a single enzyme digestion (BglII) of a single PCR-ampliÞed segment of the cytochrome b gene. The BglII polymorphism discriminates the mitochondrial haplotype (mitotype) of Apis mellifera scutellata L. (ancestor of Africanized bees) from that of A. m. mellifera, A. m. caucasia, A. m. ligustica, A. m. carnica, A. m. lamarcki, A. m. cypria, A. m. syriaca, and some A. m. iberiensis, but not from that of A. m. intermissa and some A. m. iberiensis. Nonetheless, given the very low frequency ( 1%) of African non-A. m. scutellata mitotype present before arrival of Africanized bees in the United States, cytochrome b/BglII assay can be used to identify maternally Africanized bees with a high degree of reliability

From CFTR biology toward combinatorial pharmacotherapy:expanded classification of cystic fibrosis mutations

More than 2000 mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) have been described that confer a range of molecular cell biological and functional phenotypes. Most of these mutations lead to compromised anion conductance at the apical plasma membrane of secretory epithelia and cause cystic fibrosis (CF) with variable disease severity. Based on the molecular phenotypic complexity of CFTR mutants and their susceptibility to pharmacotherapy, it has been recognized that mutations may impose combinatorial defects in CFTR channel biology. This notion led to the conclusion that the combination of pharmacotherapies addressing single defects (e.g., transcription, translation, folding, and/or gating) may show improved clinical benefit over available low-efficacy monotherapies. Indeed, recent phase 3 clinical trials combining ivacaftor (a gating potentiator) and lumacaftor (a folding corrector) have proven efficacious in CF patients harboring the most common mutation (deletion of residue F508, ΔF508, or Phe508del). This drug combination was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for patients homozygous for ΔF508. Emerging studies of the structural, cell biological, and functional defects caused by rare mutations provide a new framework that reveals a mixture of deficiencies in different CFTR alleles. Establishment of a set of combinatorial categories of the previously defined basic defects in CF alleles will aid the design of even more efficacious therapeutic interventions for CF patients

The impact of host metapopulation structure on the population genetics of colonizing bacteria

Many key bacterial pathogens are frequently carried asymptomatically, and the emergence and spread of these opportunistic pathogens can be driven, or mitigated, via demographic changes within the host population. These inter-host transmission dynamics combine with basic evolutionary parameters such as rates of mutation and recombination, population size and selection, to shape the genetic diversity within bacterial populations. Whilst many studies have focused on how molecular processes underpin bacterial population structure, the impact of host migration and the connectivity of the local populations has received far less attention. A stochastic neutral model incorporating heightened local transmission has been previously shown to fit closely with genetic data for several bacterial species. However, this model did not incorporate transmission limiting population stratification, nor the possibility of migration of strains between subpopulations, which we address here by presenting an extended model. We study the consequences of migration in terms of shared genetic variation and show by simulation that the previously used summary statistic, the allelic mismatch distribution, can be insensitive to even large changes in microepidemic and migration rates. Using likelihood-free inference with genotype network topological summaries we fit a simpler model to commensal and hospital samples from the common nosocomial pathogens Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium. Only the hospital data for E. faecium display clearly marked deviations from the model predictions which may be attributable to its adaptation to the hospital environment