The trafficking and targeting of P2X receptors

The functional expression of P2X receptors at the plasma membrane is dependent on their trafficking along secretory and endocytic pathways. There are seven P2X receptor subunits, and these differ in their subcellular distributions because they have very different trafficking properties. Some are retained within the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), while others are predominantly at the cell surface or within endosomes and lysosomes. Changes in recruitment of receptors to and from the plasma membrane provides a way of rapidly up- or down-regulating the cellular response to adenosine triphosphate (ATP). An additional layer of regulation is the targeting of these receptors within the membranes of each compartment, which affects their stability, function and the nature of the effector proteins with which they form signaling complexes. The trafficking and targeting of P2X receptors is regulated by their interactions with other proteins and with lipids and we can expect this to vary in a cell-type specific manner and in response to changes in the environment giving rise to differences in receptor activity and function

Thoughts on Pride: no coal dug

Pride tells the story of a group of London lesbian and gay activists who offer their support to the striking miners in Dulais, South Wales. This article reflexively uncovers the layers through which the story of LGSM has been remembered, forgotten, and re-remembered through its personal and political connections

Exhibition review Punk’s 40th anniversary — an itchy sort of heritage

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Glimpsing queer history

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The 2011 riots: a story of community, locality, subculture and music, demystifying the mainstream media and politicians’ descriptions of feral youth, nihilistic gang culture, thug life and ignorance

The rioting of 2011 started in London and spread to a number of other cities in the UK. Experts gathered in Bristol recently to explore the links between popular music, civic unrest and communities, considering both the 2011 and unrest in the 1980s. In this post Peter Webb and Lucy Robinson, on behalf of the Subcultures Network, summarise the discussion and shares findings, showing how interpretations by the media and politicians fail to tell the real story of the riots

The Effect of Mood-Context on Visual Recognition and Recall Memory

Although it is widely known that memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval occur in the same state, the impact of elevated stress/arousal is less understood. This study explores mood-dependent memory's effects on visual recognition and recall of material memorized either in a neutral mood or under higher stress/arousal levels. Participants’ (N = 60) recognition and recall were assessed while they experienced either the same or a mismatched mood at retrieval. The results suggested that both visual recognition and recall memory were higher when participants experienced the same mood at encoding and retrieval compared with those who experienced a mismatch in mood context between encoding and retrieval. These findings offer support for a mood dependency effect on both the recognition and recall of visual information

Fetal liver blood flow distribution: role in human developmental strategy to prioritize fat deposition versus brain development

Among primates, human neonates have the largest brains but also the highest proportion of body fat. If placental nutrient supply is limited, the fetus faces a dilemma: should resources be allocated to brain growth, or to fat deposition for use as a potential postnatal energy reserve? We hypothesised that resolving this dilemma operates at the level of umbilical blood distribution entering the fetal liver. In 381 uncomplicated pregnancies in third trimester, we measured blood flow perfusing the fetal liver, or bypassing it via the ductus venosus to supply the brain and heart using ultrasound techniques. Across the range of fetal growth and independent of the mother's adiposity and parity, greater liver blood flow was associated with greater offspring fat mass measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, both in the infant at birth (r = 0.43, P<0.001) and at age 4 years (r = 0.16, P = 0.02). In contrast, smaller placentas less able to meet fetal demand for essential nutrients were associated with a brain-sparing flow pattern (r = 0.17, p = 0.02). This flow pattern was also associated with a higher degree of shunting through ductus venosus (P = 0.04). We propose that humans evolved a developmental strategy to prioritize nutrient allocation for prenatal fat deposition when the supply of conditionally essential nutrients requiring hepatic inter-conversion is limited, switching resource allocation to favour the brain if the supply of essential nutrients is limited. Facilitated placental transfer mechanisms for glucose and other nutrients evolved in environments less affluent than those now prevalent in developed populations, and we propose that in circumstances of maternal adiposity and nutrient excess these mechanisms now also lead to prenatal fat deposition. Prenatal developmental influences play important roles in the human propensity to deposit fa

A Hot Gap Around Jupiter's Orbit in the Solar Nebula

The Sun was an order of magnitude more luminous during the first few hundred thousand years of its existence, due in part to the gravitational energy released by material accreting from the Solar nebula. If Jupiter was already near its present mass, the planet's tides opened an optically-thin gap in the nebula. We show using Monte Carlo radiative transfer calculations that sunlight absorbed by the nebula and re-radiated into the gap raised temperatures well above the sublimation threshold for water ice, with potentially drastic consequences for the icy bodies in Jupiter's feeding zone. Bodies up to a meter in size were vaporized within a single orbit if the planet was near its present location during this early epoch. Dust particles lost their ice mantles, and planetesimals were partially to fully devolatilized, depending on their size. Scenarios in which Jupiter formed promptly, such as those involving a gravitational instability of the massive early nebula, must cope with the high temperatures. Enriching Jupiter in the noble gases through delivery trapped in clathrate hydrates will be more difficult, but might be achieved by either forming the planet much further from the star, or capturing planetesimals at later epochs. The hot gap resulting from an early origin for Jupiter also would affect the surface compositions of any primordial Trojan asteroids.Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures. ApJ in press. Discussion of Jupiter's volatile enrichment revised in sec. 4.

Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Low Mass X-ray Binaries : Accretion Disk Contamination and Compact Object Mass Determination in V404 Cyg and Cen X-4

We present near-infrared (NIR) broadband (0.80--2.42 $\mu$m) spectroscopy of two low mass X-ray binaries: V404 Cyg and Cen X-4. One important parameter required in the determination of the mass of the compact objects in these systems is the binary inclination. We can determine the inclination by modeling the ellipsoidal modulations of the Roche-lobe filling donor star, but the contamination of the donor star light from other components of the binary, particularly the accretion disk, must be taken into account. To this end, we determined the donor star contribution to the infrared flux by comparing the spectra of V404 Cyg and Cen X-4 to those of various field K-stars of known spectral type. For V404 Cyg, we determined that the donor star has a spectral type of K3 III. We determined the fractional donor contribution to the NIR flux in the H- and K-bands as $0.98 \pm .05$ and $0.97 \pm .09$, respectively. We remodeled the H-band light curve from \citet{sanwal1996} after correcting for the donor star contribution to obtain a new value for the binary inclination. From this, we determined the mass of the black hole in V404 Cyg to be $M_{BH}= 9.0^{+.2}_{-.6}M_{\odot}$. We performed the same spectral analysis for Cen X-4 and found the spectral type of the donor star to be in the range K5 -- M1V. The donor star contribution in Cen X-4 is $0.94\pm.14$ in the H-band while in the K-band, the accretion disk can contribute up to 10% of the infrared flux. We remodeled the H-band light curve from \citet{shahbaz1993}, again correcting for the fractional contribution of the donor star to obtain the inclination. From this, we determined the mass of the neutron star as $M_{NS}= 1.5^{+.1}_{-.4}M_{\odot}$. However, the masses obtained for both systems should be viewed with some caution since contemporaneous light curve and spectral data are required to obtain definitive masses

How does military life shape service children's identity and school experiences?

Service children are identified by virtue of the occupation of their parents. Their lives are shaped by the unique demands placed on armed forces personnel. Service children are more likely to move (home and school) than their non-service peers and parental separation is common amongst service families. Alongside these experiences of mobility and separation, being part of an armed forces family results in the creation of a distinct identity, which further sets service children apart from their peers. As a result, they have unique educational experiences, associated needs and a distinctive identity which are often not fully understood, or supported, in the English state school context. Since 2011, service children in English state schools have received targeted funding, known as the Service Pupil Premium (SPP). In the academic year 2023-2024, £335 per child was provided to schools for 78,897 individuals, amounting to just over £26.43 million in total (Department for Education [DfE], 2024). Despite the significant amount of funding given to schools over the last 13 years, there has been considerable criticism of the SPP. Indeed, as a recent report – commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) – highlights, the SPP is “poorly understood and poorly used” (Walker, Selous & Misca, 2020, p.69). Bringing together voice research and creative methods, this research was undertaken with service children, to explore their thoughts and feelings around their service child identity and school experiences. In total, 19 service children, aged between 9 and 16 years old, participated in a range of innovative ‘data generation’ methods – self-portraits and relational maps, timelines and free responses – alongside discussion, within their respective English state school contexts. Findings from this doctoral research both enrich and widen current understanding of service children’s school experiences and further knowledge into how service children see themselves. Crucially, this thesis develops the concept of the ‘service child identity’ and explores the relationship between this identity and the broader concept of school belonging. From this, implications are derived, which serve to help inform SPP funding choices and wider school culture and practice within English state schools