Ancestral Roots Research Articles

Cross-species analysis of viral nucleic acid interacting proteins identifies TAOKs as innate immune regulators

The cell intrinsic antiviral response of multicellular organisms developed over millions of years and critically relies on the ability to sense and eliminate viral nucleic acids. Here we use an affinity proteomics approach in evolutionary distant species (human, mouse and fly) to identify proteins that are conserved in their ability to associate with diverse viral nucleic acids. This approach shows a core of orthologous proteins targeting viral genetic material and species-specific interactions. Functional characterization of the influence of 181 candidates on replication of 6 distinct viruses in human cells and flies identifies 128 nucleic acid binding proteins with an impact on virus growth. We identify the family of TAO kinases (TAOK1, −2 and −3) as dsRNA-interacting antiviral proteins and show their requirement for type-I interferon induction. Depletion of TAO kinases in mammals or flies leads to an impaired response to virus infection characterized by a reduced induction of interferon stimulated genes in mammals and impaired expression of srg1 and diedel in flies. Overall, our study shows a larger set of proteins able to mediate the interaction between viral genetic material and host factors than anticipated so far, attesting to the ancestral roots of innate immunity and to the lineage-specific pressures exerted by viruses.

National identity, cosmopolitanism, and attitudes toward immigrants

This study examines the effects of national and cosmopolitan self-identity on xenophobic attitudes across 33 countries with a multilevel analysis of data from the National Identity Module III of the International Social Survey Programme. Of primary interest is how country contexts are intertwined with the sense of national belonging to predict individuals’ anti-immigrant attitudes. The study finds that individuals with a stronger ethnicity-based national identity tend to evidence stronger xenophobia. Net of the individual-level effect of ethnic national identity, citizens of countries with a higher average of ethnic national identity also tend to be more xenophobic. Interestingly, the link between ethnic national identity and xenophobia is stronger in countries where this perspective is not shared as strongly. In the seemingly more ‘open’ country context, individuals’ belief in the requirement of ancestral roots for national membership may entail stronger exclusivism as a fringe ideology.

The Anxiety of Alienation: Observing ‘Trauma’ and ‘Exile Blues’ of Indian Diaspora in Select Poems of Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali is one of the most celebrated modern poets of Indian diaspora whose poetry echoes the sense of trauma, loss of ‘home’ and identity and deals with major concerns of dislocation, fragmentation from ancestry, nostalgia, and rootlessness. The sense of alienation is more evident in the works of diaspora writers who are constantly caught up between the cultural spaces of the ‘host’ land and creating a hyphenated identity. The diasporic self finds comfort only in memory rather than the existing contemporary realities hurtful to the ‘exiled’ individual and find themselves possessing a fueling desire to go back to their homeland. Trauma is a response of a distressing event that affects an individual’s ability to cope with life situations and triggers certain traumatic markers. The ‘trauma’ of exile is a psychological phenomenon while the geographical dislocation is more of a physical one. The paper is an attempt to observe the trauma question and exilic state of the diasporic subject in Ali’s poetry and their attempt to live in the ‘host’ land through disintegration from the familiarity of the ‘native’ homeland. The paper seeks to observe how Ali’s poetry is charged with his multicultural hyphenated identity- rendering him a nameless entity. His separation from nativity and ancestral roots showcases the anguish, dilemma triggered in the immigrant in varying degrees and progression of trauma in three select poems- “Postcard from Kashmir”, “Snowmen” and “Cracked Portraits”.

Dimensions of Urban Blight in Emerging Southern Cities: A Case Study of Accra-Ghana

Urban blight functions inversely to city development and often leads to cities’ deterioration in terms of physical beauty and functionality. While the underlying causes of urban blight in the context of the global north are mainly known in the literature to be population loss, economic decline, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation, there is a research gap regarding the root causes of urban blight in the global south, specifically in prime areas. Given the differences in the property rights regimes and economic growth trajectories between the global north and south, the underlying reasons for urban blight cannot be assumed to be the same. This study, thus, employed a qualitative method and case study approach to ascertain in-depth contextual reasons and effects for urban blight in a prime area, East Legon, Accra-Ghana. Beyond economic reasons, the study found that socio-cultural practices of landholding and land transfer in Ghana play an essential role in how blighted properties emerge. In the quest to preserve cultural heritage/identity, successors of old family houses (the ancestral roots) do their best to stay in them without selling or redeveloping them. The findings highlight the less obvious but relevant functions that blighted properties play in the city core at the micro level of individual families in fostering social cohesion and alleviating the need to pay higher rents. Thus, in the global south, we conclude that there is a need to pay attention to the less obvious roles that so-called blighted properties perform and to move beyond the default negative perception that blighted properties are entirely problematic.

Treatment of keloids and hypertrophic scars. Position statement of the Brazilian expert group GREMCIQ.

Keloids (K) and hypertrophic scars (HS) are abnormal responses to wound healing that occur as the result of dermal inflammation. Despite the advances on their treatment, many patients still suffer from the negative effects of excessive scarring; its approach is impaired by the lack of objective data on different treatments and the large genetic variability among patients and the difficulties in producing multicentre studies. Their incidence among the Brazilian population is high, as the result of an admixture of Amerindians, Europeans and Africans ancestral roots. With the aim of producing multicentre studies on K and HS, a panel of senior Brazilian dermatologists focused on their treatment was invited to contribute with the K and HS Treatment Brazilian Guidelines. In the first part of this study, different treatment modalities for keloids and HS are fully reviewed by the panel. The second part of the study presents a consensus recommendation of treatment for different types of lesions. More than a literature review, this article aims to show the pitfalls and pearls of each therapeutic option, as well as a therapeutic approach by the Panelof Experts on keloids and Scars on a highly mixed population, providing simple guidelines.

Leza, Sungu, and Samba: Digital Humanities and Early Bantu History

AbstractIn 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover thelongue duréeacross multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.

A Postcolonial Approach to Abduction in Indigenous Folksongs

AbstractFolklore in Africa harbours ample records of the forceful migration of folks from the continent to the new world. Two prominent Ifa verses record this untoward development. What may not be in the public domain, however, is the record of the scars, and the amount of tears, wailing and pains that the dislocation might have caused folks on account of their estrangement from their loved ones. Record of the moment and pains of forceful severance from siblings, parents and ancestral roots may have been captured in two oral records subsisting in relevant axioms and tales of the unforgettable onslaught. The first arising from the moment of despair was that the pain of a dead child would be easier to bear and forgotten than the anxiety surrounding the whereabouts of a missing child and the disappearance of two sisters in one fell swoop leaving traces of an unfinished piece of fried yam and another uneaten yam on fire that they were preparing for breakfast prelude to the onslaught as well as the soul searing songs they rendered while being captured by two different marauders. Using a combination of postcolonialism and semiotic, the paper sets out to unravel the pains and despair of estrangement and complement same with the history of slave trade, concluding that man’s inhumanity to man has been a recurring decimal in the record of time.

Ethnobotanical Study on Plant Used by Semi-Nomad Descendants' Community in Ouled Dabbeb-Southern Tunisia.

Thanks to its geographic location between two bioclimatic belts (arid and Saharan) and the ancestral nomadic roots of its inhabitants, the sector of Ouled Dabbeb (Southern Tunisia) represents a rich source of plant biodiversity and wide ranging of ethnobotanical knowledge. This work aims to (1) explore and compile the unique diversity of floristic and ethnobotanical information on different folk use of plants in this sector and (2) provide a novel insight into the degree of knowledge transmission between the current population and their semi-nomadic forefathers. Ethnobotanical interviews and vegetation inventories were undertaken during 2014–2019. Thirty informants aged from 27 to 84 were interviewed. The ethnobotanical study revealed that the local community of Ouled Dabbeb perceived the use of 70 plant species belonging to 59 genera from 31 families for therapeutic (83%), food (49%), domestic (15%), ethnoveterinary (12%), cosmetic (5%), and ritual purposes (3%). Moreover, they were knowledgeable about the toxicity of eight taxa. Nearly 73% of reported ethnospecies were freely gathered from the wild. The most commonly used plant parts were leaves (41%) followed by flowers and inflorescence (16%). We reported the use and collection of non-renewable parts (underground storage organs and roots) for 20 ethnospecies. Interestingly, a comparison with the available literature in Tunisia and neighboring countries reveals 13 new useful plants as well as 17 plants with new uses and demonstrates an important reservoir of traditional ethnobotanical heritage that is still sustained by respondents stemming from the semi-nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors (74% of cited taxa). These data could set a basis for further phytochemical and pharmacological research and conservative approach of the most relevant plant species including endemic overused and endangered taxa.

Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual Approaches to the Fitzmaurice Voicework Focus Line

ABSTRACT As Catherine Fitzmaurice describes it, “The ‘focus line’ (as a mental image only) […] extends from the dynamic action at the abdomen down and around the pelvis and up the spine into the head and out of the ‘third eye,’ so the attention is not on oneself, nor on the vocal tract, but on the point(s) of communication.” This article expands upon Fitzmaurice’s definition by providing practical approaches to the focus line in a creative context using three approaches: intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. The authors aim to demonstrate how the use of the focus line allows for truthful communication, compassionate connection, and cultural understanding in dynamic performance. In the intellectual approach, participants integrated well-established communication theory into an embodied experience that mirrored key aspects of the focus line. In the emotional approach, participants explored how text is affected by the flow of someone else’s focus line. In the spiritual approach, workshop participants explored—through storytelling and devising techniques—how the focus line gets us in touch with our ancestral and cultural roots and histories.

Population impact of pharmacogenetic tests in admixed populations across the Americas

The current population of the Americas (~1 billion people) is highly heterogeneous as a result of five centuries of admixture between three major parental populations, namely Native Amerindians, Europeans, and subSaharan Africans. This heterogeneity has important pharmacogenetic (PGx) implications. The present study explores this issue with respect to the population impact of PGx tests listed in the CPIC and DWPG guidelines for the cancer chemotherapeutic agents fluoropyrimidines, irinotecan, and thiopurines. Population impact was assessed by the number of individuals needed to genotype (NNG) and to treat [NNT] in order to prevent one additional adverse effect. The 1000 Genomes Project database was accessed to obtain genotypes for the relevant PGx markers and to estimate individual proportions of Native, European, and African ancestry for six recently admixed populations across the Americas. The ancestry proportions were then employed to devise three sub-cohorts, denoted NAT, EUR, and AFR, in which one of the three major ancestral roots predominates largely (8 to 30-fold) over the other two. Minor allele frequency (MAF) of NUDT15 rs116855232, TPMT rs1800460, and UGT1A1 rs887829 differed significantly across the three sub-cohorts, whereas no difference was observed for TPMT rs1142345 and 1800462, and the four DPYD variants interrogated. The frequency of combined TPMT/NUDT and UGT1A1, but not DPD, metabolic phenotypes differed significantly among the sub-cohorts. The NNGs for the drug/sub-cohorts pairs, ranged from 12 (irinotecan/UGT1A1 in EUR) to 360 (fluoropyrimidines/DPYD in NAT). Differences in MAF of the interrogated variants and consequently in the distribution of metabolic phenotypes, plus the variable individual proportions of biogeographical ancestry concur to the 30-fold range of NNGs for the PGx tests, across the sub-cohorts. This large variation is likely to influence the perceived benefits and the clinical adoption of PGx screening for the chemotherapeutic agents investigated. This is of especial concern for fluoropyrimidines, in view of the large NNGs observed in the study sub-cohorts (NNG = 176-360) and confirmed in cancer patients from Brazil (NNG = 312).

Cultural Community Wealth: Project Pride (People Re-Collecting Insightful Data Effervescently) a Commemorative MEmorial Black Collective in Trenton, NJ

Presently, an insurgence is taking place in which Blacks are reclaiming Black bodies, Black community history, and Black responsibility. I employed the theoretical concepts of Cultural Community Capital and the conceptualization of two vectors-the vector of similarity and continuity, and the vector of difference and rupture. I positioned genealogy as a collective familial history that is integrated and aligned through ancestral roots and development as—“We as one, a village, are one.” Using narrative inquiry, I collected the stories of four Elders and showed how they positioned their bodies, their communal spaces, and their histories as an ancestral community family in relation to the city of Trenton, New Jersey. I define Elders as those 65 and older who serve as present-day sites of wisdom and historical knowledge and chose them as a sign of respect and honor. This paper provides a unique positioning as it gives voice to Elders (ages 68–99) and provides insight into the intricacies and dehumanizing components of enslavement coupled with a determination to thrive. These are stories that one will never experience through White-washed, indoctrinated, and sanitized history books.

Distribution and linkage disequilibrium of the enhancer SNP rs5758550 among Latin American populations: influence of continental ancestry.

A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs5758550, in a critical enhancer region downstream of the CYP2D6 promoter was proposed to modulate CYP2D6 activity, depending on its linkage disequilibrium (LD) with the common CYP2D6 SNP, rs16947. We examined the influence of individual biogeographical ancestry on the frequency distribution of rs5758550 and its LD with rs16947 in Latin American populations. We then inferred the impact of rs5758550 on the predictive accuracy of CYP2D6 metabolizer status based on CYP2D6 haplotypes. The study cohorts consisted of the Admixed American (AMR) superpopulation of the 1000 Genomes Project (n = 347) plus an admixed Brazilian (BR) cohort (N = 224). Individual proportions of Native, African and European ancestry estimated by ADMIXTURE analysis, were used to design four sub-cohorts, in which one of the three ancestral roots predominated largely (>6 fold) over the other two: AMR-NAT and AMR-EUR, comprised 80 AMR individuals each, with >70% Native or >70% European ancestry, BR-EUR and BR-AFR comprised Brazilians with >90% European (n = 80) or >70% African ancestry (n = 64), respectively. CYP2D6 haplotypes were inferred based on 10 commonly reported CYPD6 variants with or without addition of the enhancer rs5758550 SNP, pairwise LD was assessed by the R parameter, and activity scores were used to infer CYP2D6 metabolizer status. Minor allele frequency (MAF) of all CYP2D6 SNPs, except the rare (<0.02) rs5030656 and rs35742688, differed significantly across sub-cohorts, whereas no difference was observed for rs5758550. The R values for LD between rs5758550 and rs16947 ranged from 0.15 (BR-AFR) to 0.85 (AMR-NAT), with intermediate values in the predominantly European sub-cohorts (0.34-0.67). As a consequence, distribution of CYP2D6 haplotypes containing the rs16947 SNP plus rs5758550 wild-type (A) or variant (G) allele differed markedly across sub-cohorts. Comparison of the CYP2D6 activity scores assigned to the wild-type (CYP2D6*1) and the rs16947-containing haplotypes with or without inclusion of rs5758550, showed that knowledge of the rs5758550 genotype has negligible impact on predicted CYP2D6 phenotypes in AMR-EUR and AMR-NAT, but affects prediction in 10.7 and 21.6% of BR-EUR and BR-AFR individuals, respectively. Collectively, the present results reveal potential pharmacogenomic (PGx) implications of the population diversity in Latin America, affecting a major drug-metabolizing pathway. Thus, the influence of enhancer rs5758550 on assignment of CYP2D6 metabolic phenotypes varies markedly, according to the individual proportions of Native, European and African ancestry. This conclusion reinforces the notion that extrapolation of PGx data across the heterogeneous Latin American is risky, if not inappropriate.

There Has Been No Remorse over It: A Narrative Inquiry Exploring Enslaved Ancestral Roots through a Critical Family History Project

This paper explores the benefits and value of college students’ conducting critical family history (CFH) projects, which may serve as curricular material to expand students’ understanding of complex aspects of history and immigration. This article unpacks how one student came to see herself and others from a deeper perspective, particularly through the lens of someone who chose to continue digging into her enslaved ancestors’ roots. Using narrative inquiry, a college instructor and former student collaboratively reflect on the lessons learned from using a CFH project in a college-level class primarily for preservice teachers. A unique aspect of this paper is that it gives voice to a former student in the class, which provides a way of seeing the complexities and dehumanizing components of the lives of enslaved Africans in the U.S.—often sanitized out of history books. In addition, a university librarian suggests approaches to genealogical research, by focusing more on the lived experiences of ancestors that go beyond dates and locations. The perspectives from both a former student and the college instructor add multiple dimensions on lessons learned from a critical family history project, which uses students’ family histories as funds of knowledge as the primary curriculum.

Journeys of research, emotions and belonging: an exploratory analysis of the motivations and experience of ancestral tourists

ABSTRACTAncestral tourism and amateur genealogy are popular phenomena, driving members of diasporas to reconnect with their ancestral roots and discover family histories. Tourism researchers have not yet paid much attention to Scandinavian countries as ancestral destinations. After waves of emigration, there are now millions of individuals with Scandinavian roots in countries like the United States. We explore the demand-side of American ancestral tourism to Sweden. Our findings stem from nine interviews with Swedish-Americans who have been ancestral tourists in Sweden. Ancestral tourists live highly emotional experiences dependent on factors occurring prior to and during travels and involving many sites and stakeholders beyond the control of the destination. Our study reveals the importance for ancestral tourists of establishing a network of allies through genealogy research for their experience in Sweden to be positive. The accumulation of family memories and of information gained through genealogy research makes ancestral travels to Sweden a highly personal endeavor, rather than an elusive reconnection to a distant heritage. Yet reconnecting with the ancestral homeland and establishing a sense of belonging to its society also matters to these tourists, though cultural stereotypes influence this experience. We conclude with recommendations for destination development and future research.

Words of Turkic origin in ancient Greek

The article notes the functioning of turkisms in many languages of the world, including Greek, English, French, Russian and other languages. It is known that the Turks established socio-political and cultural ties with many ancient peoples, and sometimes settled on the territories of these peoples or in areas close to them. Such areal contacts caused language and lexical borrowings.N.A. Baskakov in the book “Russian surnames of Turkish origin”, wrote that the origins of 300 noble Russian families go back to Turkic roots, including genealogy and the scientist A.Kh. Khalikov notes numerous Turkic words in the Russian language. In the book “500 generations of Turkish-Bulgarian-Tatar origin, known as Russian”, he explores 500 surnames of Turkic origin. In the book “Turks in the ancestral roots of the Russians” also gives information about the origin of the Turks and the Turkic generations, known as the Russian generation. According to Chingiz Aitmatov, one third of Russian words are Turkic.Similar language Turkish loanwords are observed in ancient Greek and modern Greek, which is the subject of this article. According to some researchers, the Indo-European languages on the territory of the Balkan Peninsula appeared thanks to the Greeks. Even in ancient times, researchers noted that in the territory of modern Greece once lived people who did not speak the Indo-European language, which is approximately 2500 BC. The era of 2500-1600 BC is associated with the Hittites, later the Greeks settled on the territory of Hellas.According to some researchers, the most ancient inhabitants of the territory of Ancient Greece were the traki, whose language was later assimilated with the language of the hittites, and then the Greeks. In ancient scandinavian sources, there are relics of the language of tracts belonging to the Western branch of the proturks, which is confirmed by the praturkian vocabulary and onomastics. The Greek-Turkic language substrata and units imprinted in ancient Greek confirm the presence of Turkic loanwords, which have not lost their relevance in modern language contacts between Turkish and Greek

Romanian Art Historiography in the Interwar Period. Between the Search for Scholarship and Commitment to a Cause

At the end of World War I, Romania emerged as a much stronger nation, with a greatly enlarged territory. During the two world wars, the Romanian state was permanently looking for the best way to preserve the newly created national state and defend its frontiers. This was the only matter all Romanian parties seemed to agree on. The threat of territorial revisionism coming from Hungary, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria united all the political actors in defending the peace system of Versailles and supporting the League of Nations as the guarantor of this peace and stability. The interwar period was a remarkable time for Romania’s cultural history. Between the two world wars, the Romanian cultural scene was dominated by what Keith Hitchins calls the ‘Great Debate’ about national identity and development. The opponents were those advocating synchronism with the West, on the one hand, and those pleading for tradition, on the other, with many others looking for a third way. In Romanian interwar culture, the country’s modernity was emphasized in order to place the country within the larger family of European nations. An opposing, and at the same time, complementary line of thought was that of presenting the long and noble Romanian history, tradition and ancestral roots. These two themes have been present in Romanian culture since the mid-19th century. They were used by various authors, sometimes in a complementary fashion, while at others, in a conflicting manner in literature, historical writing or political discourse. This process did not end with the creation of the Greater Romania after the end of World War I. New threats, which are mentioned above, maintained the need to continue this discourse. In this context, historical arguments became political arguments and were used by the Romanians in order to justify the new territorial gains and the Versailles system. Art history, part of the family of historical disciplines, came to play an important part in this. Romanian art historical writing or political discourse. This process did not end with the creation of the Greater Romania after the end of World War I. New threats, which are mentioned above, maintained the need to continue this discourse. In this context, historical arguments became political arguments and were used by the Romanians in order to justify the new territorial gains and the Versailles system. Art history, part of the family of historical disciplines, came to play an important part in this. Romanian art historical writing did not exist as such until the end of the 19th century. It was only in the first years of the next century that the number of scholarly works produced following western standards steadily increased. As part of a general tendency of aligning Romanian academic practices with those in the West, art historiography established itself as a respectable academic discipline, a process which went hand in hand with the establishment of new institutions such as museums, university departments, research institutions and the Commission for historical monuments. All these institutions were founded and financed by the Romanian state, and most scholars were involved with these institutions in one way or another. Although Romanian art historiography of the period is dominated by the desire to produce academic works to the highest standards, the ideas of the Great Debate are present in the works of that time. At the same time, in several texts, the most prominent art historians of the day strongly affirm the necessity of putting their work in the service of the national cause. In this paper, we will be looking at the general histories of Romanian art written between the two world wars. The choice of these texts is motivated by the fact that these works are the result of larger research projects and have a broader scope and as such better summarise the trends of the interwar period.

RECLAIMING A SELF INTERTWINED IN THE EXIGENCIES OF AN UNWRITTEN HISTORY IN HINER SALEEM’S MY FATHER’S RIFLE

Throughout history, war and oppression and their painful physical and psychological effects on the people have inspired the perspective and works of many authors around the world. This study identifies and explores the ways in which Kurdish writers reflect such trends in their narratives. Adopting Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle (2004) as an expository example, the article studies the attempts of a Kurdish writer to construct a subaltern narrative as a means by which to challenge the acts of silencing and marginalization imposed on his people by the different hegemonic powers. Saleem’s novel portrays characters whose lives express the devastation, the pain, and the struggle of a nation torn by oppression and colonization. Situating the narrative in a broader political and historical context, the writer writes from a marginal position and endeavours to give voice to a community repressed by traditional discriminatory historiographies. In his project of reclaiming an identity that has not been recorded, the writer is forced to go back in time to a past where he can search for traces that link his characters to ancestral roots. In so doing, he represents the characters’ quest for identity and selfhood and their urgent need to reclaim their past in order to create a meaningful present.

Arabidopsis thaliana organelles mimic the T7 phage DNA replisome with specific interactions between Twinkle protein and DNA polymerases Pol1A and Pol1B

BackgroundPlant chloroplasts and mitochondria utilize nuclear encoded proteins to replicate their DNA. These proteins are purposely built for replication in the organelle environment and are distinct from those involved in replication of the nuclear genome. These organelle-localized proteins have ancestral roots in bacterial and bacteriophage genes, supporting the endosymbiotic theory of their origin. We examined the interactions between three of these proteins from Arabidopsis thaliana: a DNA helicase-primase similar to bacteriophage T7 gp4 protein and animal mitochondrial Twinkle, and two DNA polymerases, Pol1A and Pol1B. We used a three-pronged approach to analyze the interactions, including Yeast-two-hybrid analysis, Direct Coupling Analysis (DCA), and thermophoresis.ResultsYeast-two-hybrid analysis reveals residues 120–295 of Twinkle as the minimal region that can still interact with Pol1A or Pol1B. This region is a part of the primase domain of the protein and slightly overlaps the zinc-finger and RNA polymerase subdomains located within. Additionally, we observed that Arabidopsis Twinkle interacts much more strongly with Pol1A versus Pol1B. Thermophoresis also confirms that the primase domain of Twinkle has higher binding affinity than any other region of the protein. Direct-Coupling-Analysis identified specific residues in Twinkle and the DNA polymerases critical to positive interaction between the two proteins.ConclusionsThe interaction of Twinkle with Pol1A or Pol1B mimics the minimal DNA replisomes of T7 phage and those present in mammalian mitochondria. However, while T7 and mammals absolutely require their homolog of Twinkle DNA helicase-primase, Arabidopsis Twinkle mutants are seemingly unaffected by this loss. This implies that while Arabidopsis mitochondria mimic minimal replisomes from T7 and mammalian mitochondria, there is an extra level of redundancy specific to loss of Twinkle function.

Peru on a Plate: coloniality and modernity in Peru’s high-end cuisine

As global dining culture turns increasingly homogeneous, there is a parallel interest in reconnecting with locality. Two global food movements codify this return to the local: the Slow Food and New Nordic Cuisine movements, both European in origin. I explore the characteristically modernist global-local ambivalence in the work of Virgilio Martinez, Peru’s most highly awarded chef, whose project of bringing together a culturally rooted Peruvian cuisine appears closely aligned to the New Nordic Cuisine movement. Drawing on a decolonial framework, I argue that Martinez’s desire to connect with Peru’s ancestral cultural roots, not uncommon amongst upper-class Peruvian chefs, is hindered by an epistemic divide dating back to colonial times. Further vestiges of colonial history are also present in Martinez’s taxonomic search for new ingredients and the visual focus of his aesthetic, both reminiscent of the Spanish botanical expeditions of the late 18th century. Martinez’s latest project, Mil Centro, a restaurant and research centre located in an Inca archaeological site, offers new possibilities. The participatory involvement of neighbouring Quechua-speaking communities could signal new openings.

Is the Past Another Country? A Case Study of Rural�Urban Affinity on Mudik Lebaran in Central Java

This study is to explore the relations between the urban and rural in terms of their social as well as cultural significance. Referring to the idea of David Lowenthal (1985:39-52) who has pointed out that the connection between the past and present rests on the fact that the past has been the source of familiarity, guidance, identity, enrichment and escapethe central idea of the paper is to suggest that this notion of a familiar past is a fundamental aspect of the culture of contemporary urbanised Central Javanese, who, during the Lebaran holiday, revisit their ancestral roots to retain a degree of autonomy against modernity or to return to their disappearing past as tourists, so to speak. The cultural practice of mudik becomes the interaction zone (Leaf, 2008) that provides opportunities for city dwellers to keep ties with their village of origin. Finally, the paper suggests that the continuing intimate interplay between the village and town proves that neither pastpresent nor ruralurban dichotomies are in categorically opposed realms; metaphorically speaking, they are not in different countries.