When is women’s benevolent sexism associated with support for other women’s agentic responses to gender-based threat?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: Study materials, data, and syntax associated with these studies can be viewed at https://osf.io/bng7t/?view_only=c6ee5dbff0964814b2dcee4d9bd4198aThree studies examine how women’s benevolent sexism shapes support for other women’s agentic responses to gender-based threat. In Study 1, women read vignettes about a woman who agentically responded (vs. no response) to gender-based threat (e.g., sexism). As hypothesized, BS predicted more positive attitudes towards the woman who chose not to challenge sexism, and more negative attitudes towards the woman who did. Studies 2 and 3 focused on whether these effects are driven by the behaviour displayed by the target (response or not) or by the ideology it seeks to uphold (traditional or non-traditional). There may be circumstances under which BS is associated with positive attitudes towards women’s agentic (i.e., non-gender role conforming) behaviour, for instance when it is used to support traditional gender roles. Studies 2 and 3 showed that when women’s agentic behaviour is used to uphold traditional gender roles (vs. challenge them), BS is positively associated with support for such behaviour. These findings underscore the importance of ideology underlying women’s agentic behaviour: BS can support women’s agentic responses that violate prescribed gender roles, so long as they reinforce the status quo.Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technolog

Bad faith in All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well That Ends Well is a complicated and disturbing play that has a comic ending, but which seems anything but a comedy with a forced marriage based on bed-trickery between the reluctant Bertram and the feisty and witty Helena. Unsurprisingly, audiences have tended to side with Helena and the play has been classified as a “problem comedy” ever since William Lawrence identified this particular group of Shakespeare plays nearly a century ago. I want to argue in this essay that the play might better be classified as an “equivocation” play alongside Macbeth, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida and that the anxieties about fidelity, honesty and truthfulness in marriage need to be read in terms of the fear of religious tolerance/intolerance which dominated religious politics in the early years of James’s reign before the passing of the Oath of Allegiance (1606). The play is notable for its interest in chop logic, which the clown in particular displays throughout the play, a counterpoint to the arguments of Bertram and Helena who want very different things, but who are bound together as future husband and wife. Although the language of treason and treachery is used throughout, the play is less interested in answering the question of how far one can trust a stranger within than the issue of how far one can accommodate the needs of others. This article is published as part of a collection to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death

Development of an Affimer-antibody combined immunological diagnosis kit for glypican-3

Glypican-3 (GPC3) is a promising new marker for hepatocellular carcinoma, but the reported values for serum GPC3 differ markedly between currently available kits. Here we isolated Affimer non-antibody binding proteins against GPC3 by phage display and developed a new sandwich chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) combining an Affimer with a monoclonal antibody (Affimer-MAb CLIA). The proposed CLIA assay demonstrated a wide linear range  0.03–600 ng/mL) with a good linear correlation coefficient (0.9999), a high detection limitation (0.03 ng/mL) and specificity (0–0.002%) for detection of GPC3. The accuracy, hook effect and stability were demonstrated to be satisfactory. The mean level of GPC3 in serum was higher (>8.5 fold, P < 0.001) in hepatocellular carcinoma patients compared to healthy and other liver disease individuals. A poor correlation (correlation coefficients ranged from −0.286 to 0.478) was observed through pairwise comparison within different kits. However, only this newly developed CLIA test showed high specificity and correlated with the “gold standard” GPC3-immunohistochemistry. This study indicates that Affimer-MAb CLIA can be used to generate a sensitive immunodiagnostic kit, which offers the potential for a highly specific clinically-relevant detection system

ILK Induces Cardiomyogenesis in the Human Heart

Integrin-linked kinase (ILK) is a widely conserved serine/threonine kinase that regulates diverse signal transduction pathways implicated in cardiac hypertrophy and contractility. In this study we explored whether experimental overexpression of ILK would up-regulate morphogenesis in the human fetal heart.Primary cultures of human fetal myocardial cells (19-22 weeks gestation) yielded scattered aggregates of cardioblasts positive for the early cardiac lineage marker nk × 2.5 and containing nascent sarcomeres. Cardiac cells in colonies uniformly expressed the gap junction protein connexin 43 (C × 43) and displayed a spectrum of differentiation with only a subset of cells exhibiting the late cardiomyogenic marker troponin T (cTnT) and evidence of electrical excitability. Adenovirus-mediated overexpression of ILK potently increased the number of new aggregates of primitive cardioblasts (p<0.001). The number of cardioblast colonies was significantly decreased (p<0.05) when ILK expression was knocked down with ILK targeted siRNA. Interestingly, overexpression of the activation resistant ILK mutant (ILK(R211A)) resulted in much greater increase in the number of new cell aggregates as compared to overexpression of wild-type ILK (ILK(WT)). The cardiomyogenic effects of ILK(R211A) and ILK(WT) were accompanied by concurrent activation of β-catenin (p<0.001) and increase expression of progenitor cell marker islet-1, which was also observed in lysates of transgenic mice with cardiac-specific over-expression of ILK(R211A) and ILK(WT). Finally, endogenous ILK expression was shown to increase in concert with those of cardiomyogenic markers during directed cardiomyogenic differentiation in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs).In the human fetal heart ILK activation is instructive to the specification of mesodermal precursor cells towards a cardiomyogenic lineage. Induction of cardiomyogenesis by ILK overexpression bypasses the requirement of proximal PI3K activation for transduction of growth factor- and β1-integrin-mediated differentiation signals. Altogether, our data indicate that ILK represents a novel regulatory checkpoint during human cardiomyogenesis

The Glycosylphosphatidylinositol-PLC in Trypanosoma brucei Forms a Linear Array on the Exterior of the Flagellar Membrane Before and After Activation

Bloodstream forms of Trypanosoma brucei contain a glycosylphosphatidylinositol-specific phospholipase C (GPI-PLC) that cleaves the GPI-anchor of the variable surface glycoprotein (VSG). Its location in trypanosomes has been controversial. Here, using confocal microscopy and surface labelling techniques, we show that the GPI-PLC is located exclusively in a linear array on the outside of the flagellar membrane, close to the flagellar attachment zone, but does not co-localize with the flagellar attachment zone protein, FAZ1. Consequently, the GPI-PLC and the VSG occupy the same plasma membrane leaflet, which resolves the topological problem associated with the cleavage reaction if the VSG and the GPI-PLC were on opposite sides of the membrane. The exterior location requires the enzyme to be tightly regulated to prevent VSG release under basal conditions. During stimulated VSG release in intact cells, the GPI-PLC did not change location, suggesting that the release mechanism involves lateral diffusion of the VSG in the plane of the membrane to the fixed position of the GPI-PLC