Involvement of the Ets-1 transcription factor in early bovine and porcine embryo development

Early embryo development is dependent on maternally derived RNA and protein synthesized during oogenesis. In the bovine embryo this dependence lasts until the 8-16 cell stage, at which time embryonic transcripts become essential for continued development. One proposed mechanism for this transition from maternal to zygotic control of development (maternal to zygotic genome activation; MZGA) is the appearance of transcription factors that activate specific genes in the embryonic genome. The E26 transforming specific (Ets) family of transcription factors is involved in development, differentiation and protease regulation, and is a logical candidate gene to be involved in MZGA. Determining the role of Ets-1 in early embryo development may provide useful insight into mechanisms contributing to early embryonic death and pregnancy failure. Ets-1 transcripts were detected in bovine primary and secondary oocytes, primary and secondary cumulus oocyte complexes (COC), presumed zygotes, and 2- to 16-cell in vitro-derived embryos. Ets-1 transcripts were also detected in Days 10 and 12 porcine in vivo-derived embryos. Blocking Ets-1 expression with antisense oligonucleotides inhibited development in in vitro-derived bovine embryos. Urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) production by in vivo-derived bovine embryos was reduced with antisense oligonucleotides. These results suggest that Ets-1 is likely constitutively expressed in early cleavage stage bovine embryos. Although Ets-1 is probably not involved in MZGA, blocking translation of this transcript reduced bovine embryo development and protease production.Keywords: embryo, Ets-1, bovine, Plasminogen activato

Au-delà de l'expression « Le privé est politique » : de jeunes mères-activistes chicanas et la lutte pour un intérêt commun

Alors que la maternité a parfois inspiré et guidé les mouvements collectifs de femmes, particulièrement ceux concernant l'éducation et les droits de l'enfant, les pressions sociales et matérielles exercées sur les mères, telles que les contraintes de temps, de budget, et de mobilité, ont plus souvent limité la participation de ces femmes dans des mouvements sociaux de plus grande ampleur, particulièrement les mouvements qui ne visent pas directement les droits de l'enfant. Les grossesses précoces et la maternité chez les jeunes femmes ont été largement étudiées dans la littérature scientifique qui voit ces phénomènes comme limitant les opportunités sociales et la participation citoyenne de ces femmes. Pourtant, dans la ville américaine de Tucson, dans l'Arizona, où les habitants se battent fermement pour les droits des Américains d'origine mexicaine aux États-Unis, un petit contingent de « mères-activistes » est en train de tracer une nouvelle voie d'autodétermination, d'action citoyenne et d'activisme social. Cet article, qui est le résultat d'une étude ethnographique menée sur une période de dix ans, révèle le l’efficacité politique de l'activisme maternel qui se manifeste comme un large mouvement avant-gardiste du vingt-et-unième siècle sur la frontière entre les États-Unis et le Mexique.While motherhood has sometimes inspired and guided women’s collective movements, particularly around children’s education and civil rights, the social and material pressures of mothering – including strains on time, budgets, and mobility – have more often circumscribed women’s participation in broader social movements, particularly those not oriented specifically toward children’s rights. Early childbearing and young motherhood, meanwhile, have been well-documented in the scholarly literature as delimiting young women’s social opportunities and civic participation. Yet in the southwestern U.S. city of Tucson, Arizona – a site quickly moving to the forefront of today’s battles over Mexican American rights and representation in the United States – a small and powerful contingent of “mother-activists” are charting new courses of collective self-determination, civic action, and social activism. This article, which derives from ethnography conducted across ten years, reveals the uniquely powerful form of mother-activist organizing and action that has characterized one vanguard of a broadly visible twenty-first century movement on the U.S.-Mexico border.La maternidad en algunas ocaciones ha inspirado y guiada movimientos colectivos de mujeres, particularlmente en cuanto a la educación infantil y derechos civiles. Sin embargo, las presiones materiales y sociales sobre la maternidad – incluyendo limitaciones de tiempo, presupuestos, y mobilidad social – han circunscrito la participación de las mujeres en movimientos sociales más amplios, particularmente aquellos que no se orientan hacia los derechos de los niños. El tener niños en edad temprana y el ser madre joven, mientras tanto, han sido ampliamente documentados en la literature academica como delimitador de las oportunidades sociales y participación civica en las madres jovenes. A pesar de esto, en la ciudad de Tucson en Arizona, EEUU – un lugar que rapidamente se ha tomado un primer plano sobre las batallas en cuanto a los derechos civiles de Mexico-Americanos y su representación en los EEUU – un contingente pequeño pero poderoso de “madres activistas” están trazando nuevos caminos hacia la autodeterminación colectiva, acción civica, y activismo social. Este artículo, el cual surge de diez años de investigación etnografa, nos revela un ejemplo unico y poderoso de organización y acción de madres que ha caracterizado la vanguardia de un movimiento visible y amplio en la frontera de EEUU con Mexico

Transboundary Watersheds: Changing Environments and Streams of Thought [abstract]

2 pages

Chicanismo in the New Generation: "Youth, Identity, Power" in the 21st Century Borderlands

The Chicano movements of the 1960s transformed protest and unrest into significant gains in the status of young Mexican Americans. Deriving strength from the political climate of their times, the movements were driven largely by youth organized around the common identity paradigm of Chicanismo and agitating for fundamental change in socio-political discourses and hierarchies within the United States. Since the 1960s, however, collective youth action has rarely been evident in the historical record of Chicanismo, and globalization and transnationalism have influenced the terms of Mexican American experience, identification, and social action themselves. Tucson, Arizona, somewhat in the periphery of the original Chicano movements, finds itself at the epicenter of today's ideological and practical contests over the legacies of the movimiento. This city, located just sixty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, until 2012 hosted one of the country's only public school departments of Mexican American Studies, which itself was home to one of the country's first formalized social-justice education curricula. In the first decade of the 21st century, precipitous increases in the number of graduates of these curricula converged with the collapse of world financial markets and resulting local crises in socio-political economy, which had intersecting, rippled effects on both side of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the ensuing climate of financial constriction and ideological transformation, subterranean questions about national belonging and legitimacy surfaced in local and national political challenges to Mexican immigration and "appropriate" schooling curriculum. Local Chicana/o youth responded to these local and larger contestations to their legitimacy as citizens and students by mobilizing some of the most significant public actions since the 1960s.This dissertation investigates the awakening into critical consciousness and pursuant social action of Mexican American high school students, youth "activists" and "organizers" in Tucson, Arizona. Building from ethnography conducted across nine years within youth actors' sites of activism and social justice engagement, this research reveals new complexities in our understanding of "activist" identity and enactments, and contends that understandings of both "activism" and "Chicanismo" must be revisited in the scholarship of youth movements, generally, and Chicana/o social action, specifically

Au-delà de l'expression « Le privé est politique » : de jeunes mères-activistes chicanas et la lutte pour un intérêt commun

While motherhood has sometimes inspired and guided women’s collective movements, particularly around children’s education and civil rights, the social and material pressures of mothering – including strains on time, budgets, and mobility – have more often circumscribed women’s participation in broader social movements, particularly those not oriented specifically toward children’s rights. Early childbearing and young motherhood, meanwhile, have been well-documented in the scholarly literature as delimiting young women’s social opportunities and civic participation. Yet in the southwestern U.S. city of Tucson, Arizona – a site quickly moving to the forefront of today’s battles over Mexican American rights and representation in the United States – a small and powerful contingent of “mother-activists” are charting new courses of collective self-determination, civic action, and social activism. This article, which derives from ethnography conducted across ten years, reveals the uniquely powerful form of mother-activist organizing and action that has characterized one vanguard of a broadly visible twenty-first century movement on the U.S.-Mexico border

Tangled pasts, healthier futures: Nursing strategies to improve American Indian/Alaska Native health equity

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations in the United States continue to experience overall health inequity, despite significant improvement in health status for nearly all other racial-ethnic groups over the past 30 years. Nurses comprise the bulk of healthcare providers in the U.S. and are in an optimal position to improve AI/AN health by transforming both nursing education and practice. This potential is dependent, however, on nurses' ability to recognize the distinct historical and political conditions through which AI/AN health inequities have been produced and sustained. Nurse providers, educators, and leaders must in turn recognize how the sustained conditions of marginalization and expropriation that underpin current AI/AN health inequities continue to shape contemporary AI/AN health outcomes. This manuscript builds upon the extant literature of AI/AN historical health policy and utilizes decolonial theorizations of nursing and a cultural safety framework to propose a series of immediately actionable steps for nursing intervention into AI/AN health inequity. Ultimately, we suggest that it is crucial for nurses to collaborate with AI/AN individuals and communities across educational and clinical settings to further refine these approaches in alignment with the disciplinary obligation of promoting social justice within healthcare.12 month embargo; published online: 16 June 2020This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Social and Economic Impacts of Outer Continental Shelf Activities on Individuals and Families, Volume 2: Case Studies of Morgan City and New Iberia, Louisiana

A report of a study which examined the nature of OCS-related work and its impacts on the lifestyle of individuals and families and on the communities in which they live, including case studies of Morgan City and New Iberia, Louisiana

Assessment of murine bone ultrastructure using synchrotron light: towards nano-computed tomography

To describe the different aspects of bone quality, we follow a hierarchical approach and assess bone tissue properties in different regimes of spatial resolution, beginning at the organ level and going down to cellular dimensions. For these purposes we developed different synchrotron radiation (SR) based computed-tomography (CT) methods to assess murine bone ultrastructure. In a first step, a tubular system and the osteocyte lacunar system within murine cortical bone have been established as novel ultrastructural quantitative traits. Results in two mouse strains showed that morphometry of these quantitative traits was dependent on strain and partially on gender, and that their scaling behavior with bone size was fundamentally different. In a second step, we explored bone competence on an ultrastructural level and related our findings to the two ultrastructural quantitative traits introduced before. We showed that SR CT imaging is a powerful tool to investigate the initiation and propagation of microcracks, which may alter bone quality and may lead to increased fracture risk by means of microdamage accumulation. In summary, investigation of ultrastructural bone tissue properties will eventually lead to a better understanding of bone quality and its relative contribution to bone competence

Ultrastructural properties in cortical bone vary greatly in two inbred strains of mice as assessed by synchrotron light based micro- and nano-CT

Nondestructive SR-based ?CT and nano-CT methods have been designed for 3D quantification and morphometric analysis of ultrastructural phenotypes within murine cortical bone, namely the canal network and the osteocyte lacunar system. Results in two different mouse strains, C57BL/6J-Ghrhrlit/J and C3.B6-Ghrhrlit/J, showed that the cannular and lacunar morphometry and their bone mechanics were fundamentally different.Introduction: to describe the different aspects of bone quality, we followed a hierarchical approach and assessed bone tissue properties in different regimens of spatial resolution, beginning at the organ level and going down to cellular dimensions. For these purposes, we developed different synchrotron radiation (SR)-based CT methods to assess ultrastructural phenotypes of murine bone.Materials and methods: the femoral mid-diaphyses of 12 C57BL/6J-Ghrhrlit/J (B6-lit/lit) and 12 homozygous mutants C3.B6-Ghrhrlit/J (C3.B6-lit/lit) were measured with global SR ?CT and local SR nano-CT (nCT) at nominal resolutions ranging from 3.5 ?m to 700 nm, respectively. For volumetric quantification, morphometric indices were determined for the cortical bone, the canal network, and the osteocyte lacunar system using negative imaging. Moreover, the biomechanics of B6-lit/lit and C3.B6-lit/lit mice was determined by three-point bending.Results: the femoral mid-diaphysis of C3.B6-lit/lit was larger compared with B6-lit/lit mice. On an ultrastructural level, the cannular indices for C3.B6-lit/lit were generally bigger in comparison with B6-lit/lit mice. Accordingly, we derived and showed a scaling rule, saying that overall cannular indices scaled with bone size, whereas indices describing basic elements of cannular and lacunar morphometry did not. Although in C3.B6-lit/lit, the mean canal volume was larger than in B6-lit/lit, canal number density was proportionally smaller in C3.B6-lit/lit, so that lacuna volume density was found to be constant and therefore independent of mouse strain and sex. The mechanical properties in C3.B6-lit/lit were generally improved compared with B6-lit/lit specimens. For C3.B6-lit/lit, we observed a sex specificity of the mechanical parameters, which could not be explained by bone morphometry on an organ level. However, there is evidence that for C3.B6-lit/lit, the larger cortical bone mass is counterbalanced or even outweighed by the larger canal network in the female mice.Conclusions: we established a strategy to subdivide murine intracortical porosity into ultrastructural phenotypes, namely the canal network and the osteocyte lacunar system. Nondestructive global and local SR-based CT methods have been designed for 3D quantification and subsequent morphometric analysis of these phenotypes. Results in the two different mouse strains C57BL/6J-Ghrhrlit/J and C3.B6-Ghrhrlit/J showed that the cannular and lacunar morphometry and the biomechanical properties were fundamentally differen