Kitchen Quartet.

The power of food manifests in our lives in myriad ways. A patronizing food critic unknowingly affects a promising female chef through his review. Forced to question her culinary career, she reexamines her relationship with her hawker mum while the withdrawn young son of the critic uses food as a means of connecting with his father. Both daughter and son find themselves threading down the same path as they struggle to gain acceptance from their respective parents. While food inexplicably extends beyond taste, the two different families confront their inner selves without them realizing how their lives intertwine.Bachelor of Fine Art

Frail Line

Frail Line is a story about the changed dynamics of a father-daughter relationship after a separation of many years. The daughter is a hair dresser with long hair, she cuts her hair after the breakup with her boyfriend. Disillusioned with romantic love, the daughter seeks solace and escape in the company of her father, a male figure who has re-entered her life. Together, they question the value of human connections in the face of the capriousness of feelings. The climax of the story comes when in their vulnerability, the pair crosses the line of a father-daughter relationship, and a human being’s instinctive need to be needed and desired by another is brought to light. The seemingly familial reunion eventually leads to a different kind of bond. How will they struggle to redefine their changing relationships? Frail Line is told in a magic-realistic style and from a female point of view, it is a new exploration of familial ties in Singapore. It also explores the disenchantment with interpersonal relationships that youths face and what they do the stem the pain when relief seems elusive…Bachelor of Fine Art

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field