Attachment styles and personal growth following romantic breakups: The mediating roles of distress, rumination, and tendency to rebound

© 2013 Marshall et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The purpose of this research was to examine the associations of attachment anxiety and avoidance with personal growth following relationship dissolution, and to test breakup distress, rumination, and tendency to rebound with new partners as mediators of these associations. Study 1 (N = 411) and Study 2 (N = 465) measured attachment style, breakup distress, and personal growth; Study 2 additionally measured ruminative reflection, brooding, and proclivity to rebound with new partners. Structural equation modelling revealed in both studies that anxiety was indirectly associated with greater personal growth through heightened breakup distress, whereas avoidance was indirectly associated with lower personal growth through inhibited breakup distress. Study 2 further showed that the positive association of breakup distress with personal growth was accounted for by enhanced reflection and brooding, and that anxious individuals’ greater personal growth was also explained by their proclivity to rebound. These findings suggest that anxious individuals’ hyperactivated breakup distress may act as a catalyst for personal growth by promoting the cognitive processing of breakup-related thoughts and emotions, whereas avoidant individuals’ deactivated distress may inhibit personal growth by suppressing this cognitive work

Transcriptome-Wide Prediction of miRNA Targets in Human and Mouse Using FASTH

Transcriptional regulation by microRNAs (miRNAs) involves complementary base-pairing at target sites on mRNAs, yielding complex secondary structures. Here we introduce an efficient computational approach and software (FASTH) for genome-scale prediction of miRNA target sites based on minimizing the free energy of duplex structure. We apply our approach to identify miRNA target sites in the human and mouse transcriptomes. Our results show that short sequence motifs in the 5′ end of miRNAs frequently match mRNAs perfectly, not only at validated target sites but additionally at many other, energetically favourable sites. High-quality matching regions are abundant and occur at similar frequencies in all mRNA regions, not only the 3′UTR. About one-third of potential miRNA target sites are reassigned to different mRNA regions, or gained or lost altogether, among different transcript isoforms from the same gene. Many potential miRNA target sites predicted in human are not found in mouse, and vice-versa, but among those that do occur in orthologous human and mouse mRNAs most are situated in corresponding mRNA regions, i.e. these sites are themselves orthologous. Using a luciferase assay in HEK293 cells, we validate four of six predicted miRNA-mRNA interactions, with the mRNA level reduced by an average of 73%. We demonstrate that a thermodynamically based computational approach to prediction of miRNA binding sites on mRNAs can be scaled to analyse complete mammalian transcriptome datasets. These results confirm and extend the scope of miRNA-mediated species- and transcript-specific regulation in different cell types, tissues and developmental conditions

Microdissection of Shoot Meristem Functional Domains

The shoot apical meristem (SAM) maintains a pool of indeterminate cells within the SAM proper, while lateral organs are initiated from the SAM periphery. Laser microdissection–microarray technology was used to compare transcriptional profiles within these SAM domains to identify novel maize genes that function during leaf development. Nine hundred and sixty-two differentially expressed maize genes were detected; control genes known to be upregulated in the initiating leaf (P0/P1) or in the SAM proper verified the precision of the microdissections. Genes involved in cell division/growth, cell wall biosynthesis, chromatin remodeling, RNA binding, and translation are especially upregulated in initiating leaves, whereas genes functioning during protein fate and DNA repair are more abundant in the SAM proper. In situ hybridization analyses confirmed the expression patterns of six previously uncharacterized maize genes upregulated in the P0/P1. P0/P1-upregulated genes that were also shown to be downregulated in leaf-arrested shoots treated with an auxin transport inhibitor are especially implicated to function during early events in maize leaf initiation. Reverse genetic analyses of asceapen1 (asc1), a maize D4-cyclin gene upregulated in the P0/P1, revealed novel leaf phenotypes, less genetic redundancy, and expanded D4-CYCLIN function during maize shoot development as compared to Arabidopsis. These analyses generated a unique SAM domain-specific database that provides new insight into SAM function and a useful platform for reverse genetic analyses of shoot development in maize