The Sign of the Fall, the Scars of Orestes and Odysseus

Classic

Host proteins interacting with the Moloney murine leukemia virus integrase: Multiple transcriptional regulators and chromatin binding factors

Background A critical step for retroviral replication is the stable integration of the provirus into the genome of its host. The viral integrase protein is key in this essential step of the retroviral life cycle. Although the basic mechanism of integration by mammalian retroviruses has been well characterized, the factors determining how viral integration events are targeted to particular regions of the genome or to regions of a particular DNA structure remain poorly defined. Significant questions remain regarding the influence of host proteins on the selection of target sites, on the repair of integration intermediates, and on the efficiency of integration. Results We describe the results of a yeast two-hybrid screen using Moloney murine leukemia virus integrase as bait to screen murine cDNA libraries for host proteins that interact with the integrase. We identified 27 proteins that interacted with different integrase fusion proteins. The identified proteins include chromatin remodeling, DNA repair and transcription factors (13 proteins); translational regulation factors, helicases, splicing factors and other RNA binding proteins (10 proteins); and transporters or miscellaneous factors (4 proteins). We confirmed the interaction of these proteins with integrase by testing them in the context of other yeast strains with GAL4-DNA binding domain-integrase fusions, and by in vitro binding assays between recombinant proteins. Subsequent analyses revealed that a number of the proteins identified as Mo-MLV integrase interactors also interact with HIV-1 integrase both in yeast and in vitro. Conclusion We identify several proteins interacting directly with both MoMLV and HIV-1 integrases that may be common to the integration reaction pathways of both viruses. Many of the proteins identified in the screen are logical interaction partners for integrase, and the validity of a number of the interactions are supported by other studies. In addition, we observe that some of the proteins have documented interactions with other viruses, raising the intriguing possibility that there may be common host proteins used by different viruses. We undertook this screen to identify host factors that might affect integration target site selection, and find that our screens have generated a wealth of putative interacting proteins that merit further investigation

Revolution in antiquity: the classicizing fiction of Naomi Mitchison

The writer and activist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) came from a prominent establishment family, but was a member of the Labour Party and wife of a Labour MP. Her work was explicitly marked by the Russian Revolution, even when she wrote about antiquity. In the 1920s and 1930s she produced a number of historical fictions set in ancient Greece and Rome, highly regarded at the time. The works use the canvas of antiquity to experiment with many forms of political and social radicalism, with a challenging focus on female sexuality. I shall discuss four specific representations of revolution, which mobilise female agency in ways that are themselves highly unconventional. However, these representations also invoke the Fraserian figure of the dying king, who leads the revolution, to disaster, compromising the revolutionary energy. This tension speaks to Mitchison’s own contradictory social positioning as a patrician radical. In 1972, however, the novel Cleopatra’s People revisits the theme and stages a more successful uprising. This novel centres on the sacrificial queen instead of king, enlists a mass of people, and saves the revolution by hiding its personnel in Africa. The final excursion into antiquity found a way to press the history into useful service

Tragedy at home and homeless: between politics and aesthetics

For this paper I shall look at ways of coordinating politics and entertainment, or in slightly other terms aesthetics and politics, as they have been used to construct ancient tragedy as a means to the good society. In my title this aspect of tragedy is identified as “home”, to indicate tragedy’s preoccupation with community. This is a note repeatedly struck in discourse about tragedy, both by the earliest commentators and by those negotiating the development of the nation-state, and of political reform, in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This essay thus first considers some of the different ways in which tragedy has been associated with the goal of the good community, by the theoretical works of Plato, Aristotle, Schlegel, Williams and Eagleton, as well as by harnessing productions and performances to the political effort of nation-building. The essay will then contrastingly explore tragedy’s “homelessness”, the ways in which it uproots its characters and sets them in restless motion. These latter reflections are prompted by recent receptions of tragedy that have responded to the global migrant crisis, and that are thus in dialogue with earlier critical understandings of tragedy which were more likely to foreground a sense of civic identity associated with the polis. I thus consider productions of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women in Syracuse and Edinburgh, and the new ancient trilogy, acted by Syrian women refugees, which has unfolded since 2013, in the Middle East and Europe, under the creative guidance of Omar Abu Saada and Mohammad Al Attar. The new focus is born of and gives voice to new global realities

Do we have a new song yet? The new wave of women’s novels and the Homeric tradition

The relationship between women and classical antiquity, its texts, artefacts, and study, has been fraught to say the least; the discipline of Classics has often been defined by the exclusion of women, in terms of their education and their ability to contribute to debates more generally. However, we are currently in the middle of an astonishing period when women are laying more of a claim to the discipline than ever before. This article examines three recent novels by women which take on the cultural weight of the Homeric epics, Iliad and Odyssey, to explore the possibilities of a ‘new song’ that foregrounds female characters. The novels experiment with different narrative voices and are self-conscious about the practices of story-telling and of bardic song. Their awareness of their challenge to and contest with Homeric tradition renders their ‘new songs’ fragile as well as precious

The Administration Of Nebraska Public Schools: Present Perceptions and Future Needs

The next generation of children will live in a world that promises to be substantially different than ours