Review of Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Roots of Modern Fantasy

Review of Michael Partridge and Kirsten Jeffrey Johnson. Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Roots of Modern Fantasy. (Hampden, CT: Winged Lion Press, 2018). 272 pages. ISBN 9781935688204

Life in a 'food desert'

This paper forms part of the 'Food Deserts in British Cities' project. It reports on the findings of a series of focus groups conducted with residents in the Seacroft 'food desert' (in Leeds) in the period prior to a major improvement in their food retail accessibility. The paper explores individual food shopping behaviour, consumption patterns and attitudes towards a healthy diet and, in so doing, begins to develop an understanding of how different demographic groups adapt to living within a 'food desert'. The focus is on the perceived economic and physical constraints of residents in the area, but interwoven with this are other considerations such as motivation to consider health, family responsibilities and individual smoking status

Recognition of β-linked self glycolipids mediated by natural killer T cell antigen receptors

The most potent foreign antigens for natural killer T cells (NKT cells) are α-linked glycolipids, whereas NKT cell self-reactivity involves weaker recognition of structurally distinct β-linked glycolipid antigens. Here we provide the mechanism for the autoreactivity of T cell antigen receptors (TCRs) on NKT cells to the mono- and tri-glycosylated β-linked agonists β-galactosylceramide (β-GalCer) and isoglobotrihexosylceramide (iGb3), respectively. In binding these disparate antigens, the NKT cell TCRs docked onto CD1d similarly, achieving this by flattening the conformation of the β-linked ligands regardless of the size of the glycosyl head group. Unexpectedly, the antigenicity of iGb3 was attributable to its terminal sugar group making compensatory interactions with CD1d. Thus, the NKT cell TCR molds the β-linked self ligands to resemble the conformation of foreign α-linked ligands, which shows that induced-fit molecular mimicry can underpin the self-reactivity of NKT cell TCRs to β-linked antigens