Partisan Representational Form and Partisan Bias in United States State Lower-House Legislative Elections: a District-Level Approach.

I explore the relationship between partisan votes and partisan seat allocation in U.S. state lower-house elections. Specifically, I measure the representational form (the rate of partisan seat changes given particular partisan vote changes) and partisan bias (asymmetry in the seats-votes relationship) of 441 lower-house state legislative elections in 46 states from 1968 to 1987. I then test a number of hypotheses that have been advanced to explain variation in representational form and partisan bias. Values for representational form and partisan bias are generated by creating simulations from actual election results. I simulate seat gains made by Republicans given one percent uniform party vote swings across all districts and assuming Republicans would win between 35% and 65% of the mean district vote. After generating 31 data points for each election year, I use a logit equation to operationalize representational form and partisan bias for each election year in each state. These data then become dependent variables in pooled, cross-sectional time-series analyses used to explain variation in representational form and partisan bias across time and across states. As in previous studies, I find that representational form is declining over time. I also find that representational form is a function of party competition across election districts. In elections having a large number of competitive districts, there is a rise in the value of representational form. The size of election districts (by population) as measured by Taagepera\u27s Index has a positive but substantively weak effect on representational form. Effective district magnitude (the existence of multimember districts) also has a positive but substantively weak impact on representational form. It was thought that partisan bias would result from partisan gerrymandering during redistricting. While party control of redistricting does have the hypothesized effect in eight of the nine even-numbered election years, only in 1970, 1976, and 1982 did gerrymandering effects reach statistical significance. The results for partisan bias support recent studies that suggest that gerrymandering at the state level is not pervasive but does occasionally occur

Allelic imbalance of 7q32.3-q36.1 during tumorigenesis in Barrett's esophagus

Malignant transformation of Barrett's esophagus is characterized by three distinct premalignant stages: intestinal metaplasia (MET), low- (LGD), and high-grade dysplasia (HGD). We reported recently an increase in the frequency of loss of 7q33-q35 between LGD and HGD as determined by comparative genomic hybridization (P. H. J. Riegman et al., Cancer Res., 61: 3164-3170, 2001). Now the 7q32.3-q36.1 region was additionally characterized by allelotype analysis with 11 polymorphic markers in 15 METs, 20 LGDs, 20 HGDs, and 20 Barrett's adenocarcinomas from different patients. Low percentages of imbalance were determined in METs and LGDs, 7% and 10%, respectively, whereas HGDs and Barrett's adenocarcinomas revealed high percentages of loss, 75% and 65%, respectively. This difference in frequency between LGDs and HGDs appeared highly significant: P = 0.00007. The majority of imbalances were found at D7S2439 and D7S483, located on 7q36.1. These data suggest that markers from this area can be used as a diagnostic tool in Barrett's esophagus, i.e., to distinguish between watchful waiting and active treatment

The reactive species interactome: evolutionary emergence, biological significance, and opportunities for redox metabolomics and personalized medicine

SIGNIFICANCE: Oxidative stress is thought to account for aberrant redox homeostasis and contribute to aging and disease. However, more often than not administration of antioxidants is ineffective, suggesting our current understanding of the underlying regulatory processes is incomplete. Recent Advances. Similar to reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS, RNS), reactive sulfur species (RSS) are now emerging as important signaling molecules, targeting regulatory cysteine redox switches in proteins, affecting gene regulation, ion transport, intermediary metabolism and mitochondrial function. To rationalize the complexity of chemical interactions of reactive species with themselves and their targets and help define their role in systemic metabolic control, we here introduce a novel integrative concept coined the reactive species interactome (RSI). The RSI is a primeval multi-level redox-regulatory system whose architecture, together with the physicochemical characteristics of its constituents, allows efficient sensing and rapid adaptation to environmental changes and various other stresses to enhance fitness and resilience at the local and whole-organism level. CRITICAL ISSUES: To better characterise the RSI-related processes that determine fluxes through specific pathways and enable integration, it is necessary to disentangle the chemical biology and activity of reactive species (including precursors and reaction products), their targets, communication systems and effects on cellular, organ and whole-organism bioenergetics using systems-level/network analyses. FUTURE DIRECTIONS: Understanding the mechanisms through which the RSI operates will enable a better appreciation of the possibilities to modulate the entire biological system; moreover, unveiling molecular signatures that characterize specific environmental challenges or other stresses will provide new prevention/intervention opportunities for personalized medicine

Nitric Oxide: Perspectives and Emerging Studies of a Well Known Cytotoxin

The free radical nitric oxide (NO•) is known to play a dual role in human physiology and pathophysiology. At low levels, NO• can protect cells; however, at higher levels, NO• is a known cytotoxin, having been implicated in tumor angiogenesis and progression. While the majority of research devoted to understanding the role of NO• in cancer has to date been tissue-specific, we herein review underlying commonalities of NO• which may well exist among tumors arising from a variety of different sites. We also discuss the role of NO• in human physiology and pathophysiology, including the very important relationship between NO• and the glutathione-transferases, a class of protective enzymes involved in cellular protection. The emerging role of NO• in three main areas of epigenetics—DNA methylation, microRNAs, and histone modifications—is then discussed. Finally, we describe the recent development of a model cell line system in which human tumor cell lines were adapted to high NO• (HNO) levels. We anticipate that these HNO cell lines will serve as a useful tool in the ongoing efforts to better understand the role of NO• in cancer

Comment on “Evidence that the ProPerDP method is inadequate for protein persulfidation detection due to lack of specificity”

The recent report by Fan et al. alleged that the ProPerDP method is inadequate for the detection of protein persulfidation. Upon careful evaluation of their work, we conclude that the claim made by Fan et al. is not supported by their data, rather founded in methodological shortcomings. It is understood that the ProPerDP method generates a mixture of cysteine-containing and non–cysteine-containing peptides. Instead, Fan et al. suggested that the detection of non–cysteine-containing peptides indicates nonspecific alkylation at noncysteine residues. However, if true, then such peptides would not be released by reduction and therefore not appear as products in the reported workflow. Moreover, the authors’ biological assessment of ProPerDP using Escherichia coli mutants was based on assumptions that have not been confirmed by other methods. We conclude that Fan et al. did not rigorously assess the method and that ProPerDP remains a reliable approach for analyses of protein per/polysulfidation