The way in which states formulate national positions is just as important to EU decision-making as their bargaining strength in the Council.

Which states get their way most often in the EU’s legislative process? Responding to an earlier EUROPP article, Stuart A Brown argues that analyses of Council decision-making must also account for the way in which states formulate their preferences prior to negotiations. While Council agreements on EU legislation appear to be more closely in line with the positions of smaller states like Finland, this does not necessarily mean that they have the most influence over the EU policy process as a whole

Insertion of proteins into the inner membrane of mitochondria: the role of the Oxa1 complex

The inner mitochondrial membrane harbors a large number of proteins that display a wide range of topological arrangements. The majority of these proteins are encoded in the cell\u27s nucleus, but a few polytopic proteins, all subunits of respiratory chain complexes are encoded by the mitochondrial genome. A number of distinct sorting mechanisms exist to direct these proteins into the mitochondrial inner membrane. One of these pathways involves the export of proteins from the matrix into the inner membrane and is used by both proteins synthesized within the mitochondria, as well as by a subset of nuclear encoded proteins. Prior to embarking on the export pathway, nuclear encoded proteins using this sorting route are initially imported into the mitochondrial matrix from the cytosol, their site of synthesis. Protein export from the matrix into the inner membrane bears similarities to Sec-independent protein export in bacteria and requires the function of the Oxa1 protein. Oxa1 is a component of a general protein insertion site in yeast mitochondrial inner membrane used by both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA encoded proteins. Oxa1 is a member of the conserved Oxa1/YidC/Alb3 protein family found throughout prokaryotes throughout eukaryotes (where it is found in mitochondria and chloroplasts). The evidence to demonstrate that the Oxa1/YidC/Alb3 protein family represents a novel evolutionarily conserved membrane insertion machinery is reviewed here

A novel mechanism of action for angiotensin-(1-7) via the angiotensin type 1 receptor

No abstract available

Art and psychoanalysis register at the White Hotel

My title refers to the fact that in D. M. Thomas's remarkable novel, both art, in the form of literary imagination, and psychoanalysis seek to comprehend the life of a woman named Lisa Erdman, and both register certain truths or part truths. The novel traces Lisa's life from the time she enters analysis with Freud in Vienna until her death at Babi Yar at the hands of the Nazis. In a final chapter entitled "the camp" that has troubled many readers we witness a kind of apotheosis in which Lisa and most of the characters we have met survive their own deaths. Most readers find The White Hotel to be a brilliant treatment of human aggression, which it certainly is; and an equally brilliant portrait of Freud, who is presented in his role as the man who first unlocked the secrets of hysteria. But the landscape of hysteria, which is the terrain of the novel, is also the landscape of imagination, and so there is a basic opposition between art and psychoanalysis from the outset