Women of Color Reclaiming Power

The following is the address that was given at the Sixth Annual Women of Color Day Celebration at the University of Massachusetts at Boston on March 5, 1993. In a racist and sexist world, our realities are hardly ever alluded to, let alone affirmed; the way we see ourselves and the way we experience the world is hardly ever reflected in the images we see around us or in the stories we read. We constantly have to translate information in order to make it relevant and applicable to our lives. Our realities, experiences are often discounted, overlooked and ignored. Both racism and sexism make us feel bad about ourselves and about each other. Sexism devalues our humanness, our goodness, abilities and power as females and encourages us to compete to get male attention. Racism devalues our humanness, our goodness, abilities and power as people of color, feeds false information about each other and pits us one against each other. It is no wonder that we have a hard time trying to remember who we really are and our natural deep connections with each other. As a community of women of color, we have all felt the effects of both racism and sexism. But the way racism and sexism work on each community of color is quite specific and different. (The stereotypes and messages put out for and about Hispanic. Afro-American. and Asian women are not quite the same, for example.

High-throughput telomere length measurement at nucleotide resolution using the PacBio high fidelity sequencing platform

AbstractTelomeres are specialized nucleoprotein structures at the ends of linear chromosomes. The progressive shortening of steady-state telomere length in normal human somatic cells is a promising biomarker for age-associated diseases. However, there remain substantial challenges in quantifying telomere length due to the lack of high-throughput method with nucleotide resolution for individual telomere. Here, we describe a workflow to capture telomeres using newly designed telobaits in human culture cell lines as well as clinical patient samples and measure their length accurately at nucleotide resolution using single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing. Our results also reveal the extreme heterogeneity of telomeric variant sequences (TVSs) that are dispersed throughout the telomere repeat region. The presence of TVSs disrupts the continuity of the canonical (5’-TTAGGG-3’)n telomere repeats, which affects the binding of shelterin complexes at the chromosomal ends and telomere protection. These findings may have profound implications in human aging and diseases.</jats:p

High-throughput telomere length measurement at nucleotide resolution using the PacBio high fidelity sequencing platform

There exist challenges in quantifying the length of individual telomeres at single nucleotide resolution. Here the authors report a method to capture telomeres and accurately analyse their length in human cell lines and patient peripheral blood leukocyte samples using single-molecule real-time sequencing