The fading breadwinner role and the implications for young couples

It is a commonplace that the past few decades have been a time of increasing importance in the role of women as income providers, both within and outside of marriage. Drawing on data from the 1964 and 1993 March Current Population Surveys (CPS), we document the changing division of income provision within marriage and the association between changing marital income-provision roles and younger couples' economic welfare over the past thirty years. We find that the proportion of marriages in which husbands are primary breadwinners has declined dramatically, with a corresponding rise in "co-provider" marriages. Regression analyses show that (1) co- provider marriages are economically advantaged compared to other income-provision-role arrangements in both the early 1960s and the early 1990s; and (2) a relatively substantial part of the total improvement in younger couples' economic welfare over time stems from the shift towards co-provider marriages.

An interdomain sector mediating allostery in Hsp70 molecular chaperones

The Hsp70 family of molecular chaperones provides a well defined and experimentally powerful model system for understanding allosteric coupling between different protein domains.New extensions to the statistical coupling analysis (SCA) method permit identification of a group of co-evolving amino-acid positions—a sector—in the Hsp70 that is associated with allosteric function.Literature-based and new experimental studies support the notion that the protein sector identified through SCA underlies the allosteric mechanism of Hsp70.This work extends the concept of protein sectors by showing that two non-homologous protein domains can share a single sector when the underlying biological function is defined by the coupled activity of the two domains

Critical adsorption on curved objects

A systematic fieldtheoretic description of critical adsorption on curved objects such as spherical or rodlike colloidal particles immersed in a fluid near criticality is presented. The temperature dependence of the corresponding order parameter profiles and of the excess adsorption are calculated explicitly. Critical adsorption on elongated rods is substantially more pronounced than on spherical particles. It turns out that, within the context of critical phenomena in confined geometries, critical adsorption on a microscopically thin `needle' represents a distinct universality class of its own. Under favorable conditions the results are relevant for the flocculation of colloidal particles.Comment: 52 pages, 10 figure

Fertility, Living Arrangements, Care and Mobility

There are four main interconnecting themes around which the contributions in this book are based. This introductory chapter aims to establish the broad context for the chapters that follow by discussing each of the themes. It does so by setting these themes within the overarching demographic challenge of the twenty-first century – demographic ageing. Each chapter is introduced in the context of the specific theme to which it primarily relates and there is a summary of the data sets used by the contributors to illustrate the wide range of cross-sectional and longitudinal data analysed

Microscopic examination of bone marrow aspirates in malignant disorders of haematopoiesis—a comparison of two slide preparation techniques

It is mandatory to perform microscopic examinations of bone marrow aspirates during the diagnosis of many neoplastic haematopoiesis disorders. In 2008, The International Committee for Standardization in Hematology recommended the use of two types of slides for the microscopic evaluation of bone marrow: wedge-spread film and crush film slides. Because these techniques have not yet been compared, we performed such a comparison. Routine bone marrow samples from 250 patients diagnosed due to different neoplastic haematological disorders were evaluated. The major differences between the two compared techniques were identified in 13 patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, seven patients with systemic mastocytosis and 11 patients with acute leukaemias or myelodysplastic syndromes or chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia. Differences were noted also in many patients with multiple myeloma, but the clinical significance of these discrepancies was rather modest. The major causes of the differences observed seemed to be the dilution of marrow with blood cells and the focal growth of many neoplastic cells. We believe that the crush technique is more advantageous compared to the wedge-spread films. Therefore, we recommend the use of crush films as the primary method for establishing a diagnosis or for making therapeutic decisions based on the microscopic examination of bone marrow

Critical Casimir forces and adsorption profiles in the presence of a chemically structured substrate

Motivated by recent experiments with confined binary liquid mixtures near demixing, we study the universal critical properties of a system, which belongs to the Ising universality class, in the film geometry. We employ periodic boundary conditions in the two lateral directions and fixed boundary conditions on the two confining surfaces, such that one of them has a spatially homogeneous adsorption preference while the other one exhibits a laterally alternating adsorption preference, resembling locally a single chemical step. By means of Monte Carlo simulations of an improved Hamiltonian, so that the leading scaling corrections are suppressed, numerical integration, and finite-size scaling analysis we determine the critical Casimir force and its universal scaling function for various values of the aspect ratio of the film. In the limit of a vanishing aspect ratio the critical Casimir force of this system reduces to the mean value of the critical Casimir force for laterally homogeneous ++ and +- boundary conditions, corresponding to the surface spins on the two surfaces being fixed to equal and opposite values, respectively. We show that the universal scaling function of the critical Casimir force for small but finite aspect ratios displays a linear dependence on the aspect ratio which is solely due to the presence of the lateral inhomogeneity. We also analyze the order-parameter profiles at criticality and their universal scaling function which allows us to probe theoretical predictions and to compare with experimental data.Comment: revised version, section 5.2 expanded; 53 pages, 12 figures, iopart clas

Functional Diversity and Structural Disorder in the Human Ubiquitination Pathway

The ubiquitin-proteasome system plays a central role in cellular regulation and protein quality control (PQC). The system is built as a pyramid of increasing complexity, with two E1 (ubiquitin activating), few dozen E2 (ubiquitin conjugating) and several hundred E3 (ubiquitin ligase) enzymes. By collecting and analyzing E3 sequences from the KEGG BRITE database and literature, we assembled a coherent dataset of 563 human E3s and analyzed their various physical features. We found an increase in structural disorder of the system with multiple disorder predictors (IUPred - E1: 5.97%, E2: 17.74%, E3: 20.03%). E3s that can bind E2 and substrate simultaneously (single subunit E3, ssE3) have significantly higher disorder (22.98%) than E3s in which E2 binding (multi RING-finger, mRF, 0.62%), scaffolding (6.01%) and substrate binding (adaptor/substrate recognition subunits, 17.33%) functions are separated. In ssE3s, the disorder was localized in the substrate/adaptor binding domains, whereas the E2-binding RING/HECT-domains were structured. To demonstrate the involvement of disorder in E3 function, we applied normal modes and molecular dynamics analyses to show how a disordered and highly flexible linker in human CBL (an E3 that acts as a regulator of several tyrosine kinase-mediated signalling pathways) facilitates long-range conformational changes bringing substrate and E2-binding domains towards each other and thus assisting in ubiquitin transfer. E3s with multiple interaction partners (as evidenced by data in STRING) also possess elevated levels of disorder (hubs, 22.90% vs. non-hubs, 18.36%). Furthermore, a search in PDB uncovered 21 distinct human E3 interactions, in 7 of which the disordered region of E3s undergoes induced folding (or mutual induced folding) in the presence of the partner. In conclusion, our data highlights the primary role of structural disorder in the functions of E3 ligases that manifests itself in the substrate/adaptor binding functions as well as the mechanism of ubiquitin transfer by long-range conformational transitions. © 2013 Bhowmick et al

Has the Price of Motherhood Declined Over Time? A Cross-Cohort Comparison of the Motherhood Wage Penalty

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73089/1/j.1741-3737.2003.00597.x.pd