Production of monoclonal antibodies against serum immunoglobulins of black rockfish (Sebastes schlegeli Higendorf)

The present study was undertaken to produce monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) against immunoglobulin (Ig) purified from black rockfish (Sebastes schlegeli Higendorf) serum using protein A, mannan binding protein, and goat IgG affinity columns. These three different ligands were found to possess high affinity for black rockfish serum Ig. All of the Igs purified eluted at only 0.46 M NaCl concentration in anion exchange column chromatography and consisted of two bands at 70 kDa and 25 kDa in SDS-PAGE; they also had similar antigenicity for MAbs to Ig heavy chain in immunoblot assays. Therefore, black rockfish Ig is believed to exist as a single isotype within serum. The MAbs produced against Ig heavy chain reacted specifically with spots distributed over the pI range from 4.8 to 5.6 with a molecular weight of 70 kDa on two dimensional gel electrophoresis immunoblot profiles

EPISTEMOLOGIES OF MISSING DATA: COVID DATA BUILDERS AND THE PRODUCTION AND MAINTENANCE OF MARGINALIZED COVID DATASETS

During COVID-19, countless dashboards have served as central media where people learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and NGOs created and maintained these dashboards, conducting the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and taking care of COVID data. This study uncovers different forms of data practices and labor behind the building of these dashboards, based on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across India and the United States who have participated in COVID dashboard projects. Specifically, we are interested in projects that have focused on underrepresented or missing COVID data such as COVID cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, racial/ethnic breakdown of cases, as well as deaths due to COVID enforcement. These data builders employed sometimes creative, sometimes mundane and laborious data practices to not simply collect, but to produce these data that are often invisible in the official COVID dataset. In this process of data production, dashboard builders grappled with the questions of how certain data is collected, who/what is missing from the dataset, and how these data voids shape and manipulate our understanding of the pandemic. Interviewing 74 data builders who participated in COVID dashboard projects, this paper demonstrates the range of underrepresented and messy COVID data that these data builders have identified, fixed, and maintained to render them useful: disappearing data, lumped data, and absent data. Such critical engagement with messy COVID data reveals different data injustices that have tremendous potential to affect future pandemic preparation and management

SURVEILLANCE INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND FOR CRISES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CHINA AND SOUTH KOREA’S DEVELOPMENT OF QUARANTINE SURVEILLANCE MOBILE APPLICATIONS DURING COVID-19

This article examines China and South Korea’s health surveillance infrastructures that are being developed and deployed during COVID19. To control the outbreak and maintain the state, the Chinese government implemented the "Alipay Health Code” in collaboration with technology giants like Alibaba, while South Korea launched a “self-quarantine safety protection app” to enforce home isolation to suspected carriers and monitor their health statuses. By comparatively analyzing these quarantine surveillance mobile applications that the Chinese and South Korean governments are utilizing in pandemic control, we investigate how these two different governmental regimes - one authoritarian and the other democratic - construct and propagate what their state-of-the-art surveillance technologies can offer to the public in moments of emergency. Through a mixture of walk-through method and situational analysis, this article aims to unpack the processes in which these technologies become developed and examine the politics around their deployment. More broadly, we argue that analyzing them offers new opportunities to investigate the relationship between state surveillance and personal privacy in the context of a national crisis. As surveillance tactics that were deemed oppressive and undemocratic in ordinary times get easily normalized in crisis situations, these moments allow us to reveal the precarious and flexible nature of surveillance and privacy while destabilizing the West-oriented, dichotomic understanding of these concepts. This article tackles this question by observing the relationships among relevant actors – the state officials, industry professionals, and general users – and various contestations/negotiations involved in the processes of designing and deploying these quarantine surveillance apps

Regulation of Dendritic Spines, Spatial Memory, and Embryonic Development by the TANC Family of PSD-95-Interacting Proteins

PSD-95 (postsynaptic density-95) is thought to play important roles in the regulation of dendritic spines and excitatory synapses, but the underlying mechanisms have not been fully elucidated. TANC1 is a PSD-95-interacting synaptic protein that contains multiple domains for protein-protein interactions but whose function is not well understood. In the present study, we provide evidence that TANC1 and its close relative TANC2 regulate dendritic spines and excitatory synapses. Overexpression of TANC1 and TANC2 in cultured neurons increases the density of dendritic spines and excitatory synapses in a manner that requires the PDZ (PSD-95/Dlg/ZO-1)-binding C termini of TANC proteins. TANC1-deficient mice exhibit reduced spine density in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, but not in the CA1 or dentate gyrus regions, and show impaired spatial memory. TANC2 deficiency, however, causes embryonic lethality. These results suggest that TANC1 is important for dendritic spine maintenance and spatial memory, and implicate TANC2 in embryonic development.This work was supported by the Korea Science Foundation grant (to S.Y.C.; 313-2007-2-C00630), the Basic Science Research Program (to Y.C.B.; R13-2008-009-01001-0), and the National Creative Research Initiative Program (to E.K.) from the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology. A part of this work was technically supported by the core facility service of the 21C Frontier Brain Research Center (M103KV010023-07K2201-02510).

Regulation of dendritic spines, spatial memory, and embryonic development by the TANC family of PSD-95-interacting proteins

PSD-95 (postsynaptic density-95) is thought to play important roles in the regulation of dendritic spines and excitatory synapses, but the underlying mechanisms have not been fully elucidated. TANC1 is a PSD-95-interacting synaptic protein that contains multiple domains for protein-protein interactions but whose function is not well understood. In the present study, we provide evidence that TANC1 and its close relative TANC2 regulate dendritic spines and excitatory synapses. Overexpression of TANC1 and TANC2 in cultured neurons increases the density of dendritic spines and excitatory synapses in a manner that requires thePDZ(PSD-95/Dlg/ZO-1)-binding C termini of TANC proteins. TANC1-deficient mice exhibit reduced spine density in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, but not in the CA1 or dentate gyrus regions, and show impaired spatial memory. TANC2 deficiency, however, causes embryonic lethality. These results suggest that TANC1 is important for dendritic spine maintenance and spatial memory, and implicate TANC2 in embryonic development.This work was supported by the Korea Science Foundation grant (to S.Y.C.; 313-2007-2-C00630), the Basic Science Research Program (to Y.C.B.; R13-2008-009-01001-0), and the National Creative Research Initiative Program (to E.K.) from the Korean Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology