Le Voyage en Orient de Gérard de Nerval en tant que remise en question de la perspective eurocentriste

Dans son Voyage en Orient, Nerval tente de remettre en question la perspective coloniale et les principales idées reçues européennes concernant les moeurs orientales grâce à son rapprochement à la perspective de l’Autre, et réfutant la conception de la structure fixe de nos identités. La fluidité identitaire élaborée dans son récit de voyage est un moyen de concevoir la distance nécessaire des discours dominants qui construisent les cadres de nos pensées et de nos images de soi et de l’Autre. Nous envisageons mettre en valeur la proximité de cette vision a la pensée gadamérienne d’un dialogue interculturel où le soi serait toujours prêt à se remettre en question et à se reconstruire et avec la conception de l’expérience de l’étranger dans la phénoménologie de Bernhard Waldenfels. Cette expérience créative nous permet reconstituer nos propres fondements intellectuels et notre perception du monde

Scaling properties of protein family phylogenies

One of the classical questions in evolutionary biology is how evolutionary processes are coupled at the gene and species level. With this motivation, we compare the topological properties (mainly the depth scaling, as a characterization of balance) of a large set of protein phylogenies with a set of species phylogenies. The comparative analysis shows that both sets of phylogenies share remarkably similar scaling behavior, suggesting the universality of branching rules and of the evolutionary processes that drive biological diversification from gene to species level. In order to explain such generality, we propose a simple model which allows us to estimate the proportion of evolvability/robustness needed to approximate the scaling behavior observed in the phylogenies, highlighting the relevance of the robustness of a biological system (species or protein) in the scaling properties of the phylogenetic trees. Thus, the rules that govern the incapability of a biological system to diversify are equally relevant both at the gene and at the species level.Comment: Replaced with final published versio

Estimation of interdomain flexibility of N-terminus of factor H using residual dipolar couplings

Characterization of segmental flexibility is needed to understand the biological mechanisms of the very large category of functionally diverse proteins, exemplified by the regulators of complement activation, that consist of numerous compact modules or domains linked by short, potentially flexible, sequences of amino acid residues. The use of NMR-derived residual dipolar couplings (RDCs), in magnetically aligned media, to evaluate interdomain motion is established but only for two-domain proteins. We focused on the three N-terminal domains (called CCPs or SCRs) of the important complement regulator, human factor H (i.e. FH1-3). These domains cooperate to facilitate cleavage of the key complement activation-specific protein fragment, C3b, forming iC3b that no longer participates in the complement cascade. We refined a three-dimensional solution structure of recombinant FH1-3 based on nuclear Overhauser effects and RDCs. We then employed a rudimentary series of RDC datasets, collected in media containing magnetically aligned bicelles (disk-like particles formed from phospholipids) under three different conditions, to estimate interdomain motions. This circumvents a requirement of previous approaches for technically difficult collection of five independent RDC datasets. More than 80% of conformers of this predominantly extended three-domain molecule exhibit flexions of < 40 °. Such segmental flexibility (together with the local dynamics of the hypervariable loop within domain 3), could facilitate recognition of C3b via initial anchoring and eventual reorganization of modules to the conformation captured in the previously solved crystal structure of a C3b:FH1-4 complex

Origin of a folded repeat protein from an intrinsically disordered ancestor.

Repetitive proteins are thought to have arisen through the amplification of subdomain-sized peptides. Many of these originated in a non-repetitive context as cofactors of RNA-based replication and catalysis, and required the RNA to assume their active conformation. In search of the origins of one of the most widespread repeat protein families, the tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR), we identified several potential homologs of its repeated helical hairpin in non-repetitive proteins, including the putatively ancient ribosomal protein S20 (RPS20), which only becomes structured in the context of the ribosome. We evaluated the ability of the RPS20 hairpin to form a TPR fold by amplification and obtained structures identical to natural TPRs for variants with 2-5 point mutations per repeat. The mutations were neutral in the parent organism, suggesting that they could have been sampled in the course of evolution. TPRs could thus have plausibly arisen by amplification from an ancestral helical hairpin

Common Core Assessments in follow-up studies of adults born preterm-Recommendation of the Adults Born Preterm International Collaboration

Background Of all newborns, 1%-2% are born very preterm (VP;Peer reviewe

Antibiotics Residues as Limiting Factor of Honey Quality

Residues of veterinary drugs represent a significant risk to the health of honey consumers. Antibiotics can get into honey by using the antibiotics for treatment and prevention of bees diseases but also through the plant nectar and pollen. In Serbia, the use of antibiotics in beekeeping for bacterial diseases treatment is prohibited and accordingly there is no prescribed maximum permissible concentration for them in honey. The aim of this paper is to monitor the presence of antibiotic residues in honey which necessarily indicate their illegal and uncontrolled use. The presence of antibiotic residues in honey was screened for microbiological method "Modified method 4 plates" (EUR 15127-EN). The total of 135 samples of different honey types has been examined. Five of them (3.7%) were positive to antibiotic residues. The presence of antibiotic residues was found in the acacia honey (0.31%), linden honey (0.33%), sunflower honey (0.19%), mixed honey (0.17%) and honeydew honey (0.10%). Such unprofessional, unconscionable and unlawful use of antibiotics leads to their presence in honey and other bee products, as well as in the highly desirable and valuable products making them unusable

An organelle-specific protein landscape identifies novel diseases and molecular mechanisms

Cellular organelles provide opportunities to relate biological mechanisms to disease. Here we use affinity proteomics, genetics and cell biology to interrogate cilia: poorly understood organelles, where defects cause genetic diseases. Two hundred and seventeen tagged human ciliary proteins create a final landscape of 1,319 proteins, 4,905 interactions and 52 complexes. Reverse tagging, repetition of purifications and statistical analyses, produce a high-resolution network that reveals organelle-specific interactions and complexes not apparent in larger studies, and links vesicle transport, the cytoskeleton, signalling and ubiquitination to ciliary signalling and proteostasis. We observe sub-complexes in exocyst and intraflagellar transport complexes, which we validate biochemically, and by probing structurally predicted, disruptive, genetic variants from ciliary disease patients. The landscape suggests other genetic diseases could be ciliary including 3M syndrome. We show that 3M genes are involved in ciliogenesis, and that patient fibroblasts lack cilia. Overall, this organelle-specific targeting strategy shows considerable promise for Systems Medicine

Litters Health Status and Growth Parameters in the Sows Feeding Diets Supplemented with Probiotic Actisaf Sc 47® within Pregnancy Or Lactation

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of supplementing standard diets for pregnant and lactating sows with live yeast culture (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) on their health status, as well as the health status and growth parameters of their litters during lactation. A total of 120 sows were divided into three groups: the first group was fed diets supplemented with probiotics during pregnancy (G+P, n=40), the second group was fed these diets during lactation (L+P, n=40), and the third group was the control group which was not fed diets supplemented with probiotics (C, n = 40). During the lactation period, a significantly (p<0.01) smaller proportion of probiotic treated sows (G+P=7.5%, L+P=12.5%) manifested clinical signs of the uterus and/or the udder disease in comparison with the control sows (22.5%). The incidence of infectious diarrhea in the nursing piglets was significantly (p<0.05) lower in the treated sows (12.5%) compared to the control sows (27.5 %). The average number of weaned piglets per litter (p/l) and average litter weight at weaning (lw) (G+P=11.6 p/l and 103.6 kg lw, L+P=11.1 p/l and 102.8 kg lw, C=10 p/l and 79 kg lw) were significantly higher (p<0.01 or p<0.05) in sows treated with probiotic compared to the control sows. These results clearly show that the use of probiotic significantly improves the health status of sows and nursing piglets, as well as the piglets growth parameters

ProtChemSI: a network of protein–chemical structural interactions

Progress in structure determination methods means that the set of experimentally determined 3D structures of proteins in complex with small molecules is growing exponentially. ProtChemSI exploits and extends this useful set of structures by both collecting and annotating the existing data as well as providing models of potential complexes inferred by protein or chemical structure similarity. The database currently includes 7704 proteins from 1803 organisms, 11 324 chemical compounds and 202 289 complexes including 178 974 predicted. It is publicly available at http://pcidb.russelllab.org

DAhunter: a web-based server that identifies homologous proteins by comparing domain architecture

We present DAhunter, a web-based server that identifies homologous proteins by comparing domain architectures, the organization of protein domains. A major obstacle in comparison of domain architecture is the existence of ‘promiscuous’ domains, which carry out auxiliary functions and appear in many unrelated proteins. To distinguish these promiscuous domains from protein domains, we assigned a weight score to each domain extracted from RefSeq proteins, based on its abundance and versatility. A domain's score represents its importance in the ‘protein world’ and is used in the comparison of domain architectures. In scoring domains, DAhunter also considers domain combinations as well as single domains. To measure the similarity of two domain architectures, we developed several methods that are based on algorithms used in information retrieval (the cosine similarity, the Goodman–Kruskal γ function, and domain duplication index) and then combined these into a similarity score. Compared with other domain architecture algorithms, DAhunter is better at identifying homology. The server is available at http://www.dahunter.kr and http://localodom.kobic.re.kr/dahunter/index.ht