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Microtubule Associated Protein 1 b (Map1b) is required for neurulation in zebrafish
No full textThe neural tube (the precursor of the brain and spinal cord) is shaped during neurulation from a flat sheet of cells on the dorsal surface of the embryo known as the neural plate. Neural convergence, an early stage of neurulation that is conserved across vertebrates, results in the narrowing and elongation of the neural plate. In zebrafish, this morphogenetic process is brought about by polarized cell movements within the neural plate directed towards the dorsal midline. Research in our laboratory focuses on understanding the role of microtubules (MTs) during neural convergence and the identification of pathways implicated in MT stabilization. Firstly, the stability of MTs increases as neurulation proceeds, as visualized using a marker for detyrosinated MTs. In addition, MTs are destabilized in linguini mutants, which are defective in neural convergence (but not convergence of the underlying mesodermal layer). The lack of mesodermal defects in these mutants further indicates that there are mechanisms in place to stabilize MTs in the neural ectoderm specifically. Based on these observations, we predict that microtubule associated proteins (MAPs) are likely to function as downstream signaling molecules to stabilize MTs during neural convergence. We report here on the role of Map1b during neurulation. Map1b is a developmentally regulated phosphoprotein that is predominantly expressed in nerve cells. It is one of the first structural MAPs to be expressed at high levels in growing axons and growth cones. Map1b mouse knockout studies have revealed a significant role for this protein during central nervous system development. However, a role for this protein in neurulation has not been investigated.To address whether Map1b is required for neural convergence, we first examined its expression using whole mount in situ hybridization. This study revealed ubiquitous expression of Map1b at the neural plate (tailbud) stage and continuing into later stages of neural tube development. In the newly formed neural tube Map1b expression became more concentrated in the hindbrain region. Thus, Map1b expression is consistent with a potential role for this molecule in neural convergence. To address whether Map1b is required for neural convergence we analyzed dlx3 (a marker for the edge of the neural plate) expression in embryos in which this protein was depleted using morpholinos. This assay revealed that the width of the neural plate was 1.5 times wider in the Map1b morpholino-injected as compared to control, uninjected, embryos. Since it is known that MTs are required for cell elongation during neural convergence, we measured the length-width ratio (LWR) of the cells in Map1b-depleted and control embryos. The quantification data revealed a 1.8 times increased LWR of cells in the control embryo as compared to Map1b MO-injected embryos. These findings suggest that Map1b mediates the polarization and elongation of cells during neural convergence by regulating MT stability, thus revealing a novel role for Map1b in regulating the morphogenetic movements that shape the vertebrate nervous system
Bubbletongueremix
No full textBubbleTongueRemix , is a series of performance-photographs. My goal in building this series was to deconstruct the photograph, allowing it to become both an enveloping structure and a surface-oriented representation of the event. The work borrows from the language of the photograph, as an agent of suspension, surface, witness and cargo. The work simultaneously borrows from performance, in its use of the body in relation to physical objects and physical space; and as an autonomous site from which to prescribe meaning. Within the series, each singular piece denotes a performative act that was constructed solely for the camera. These acts took place inside and outside of the studio, making use of material objects hard and soft, six different models varying in age and multiple environments, including, hand-built sets and the private residencies of participating women's homes. Each piece employs a color palette that is dominated by pale pinks, blues, creams and grays. The pieces range in size on a scale from twelve inches by eighteen inches, to twenty inches by thirty inches, and at largest, thirty-nine inches by fiftyeight inches. The pieces are hung within four clusters that collectively converge at a singular point, creating a "radial" network. This network shares one name, BubbleTongueRemix , 2010-2011
[EB 2011, Education Plenary Lecture]
No full text[Title supplied by cataloger]Vid Persaud delivering the Henry Gray Education Award Lecture at the Education Plenary Session, Experimental Biology 2011
Gingrich 0, Obama 0
No full textChildren, LiteratureGingrich 0, Obama 0
Ellen Handler Spitz
Sweet Land of Liberty | by Callista Gingrich
Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters | by Barack Obama
ON THE COVER of his Nutshell Library in 1962, Maurice Sendak posed a memorable visual analogy between a little boy engaged in eating a bowl of chicken soup and an alligator gleefully reading a book. Both activities nourish children, albeit in different ways. Authors of notable children’s books regard their projects with gravity as well as levity, and their youthful audiences with respect. They recall the hot passions and curious puzzlements of childhood. They aim high. In defiance of this wisdom, however, American publishers seem bent on producing a spate of trivial children’s books by celebrities. The nutritive content of most of these books is equivalent to lollipops, and yet they have met with appalling commercial success.
A recent entry into the fray is an American history book in rhyme for the four-to-eight-year old set by Callista Gingrich, the third Mrs. Gingrich. Her thirteen double-spread paged effort featuring a cartoon elephant named Ellis has actually reached #3 on Amazon. Borrowing its title from the patriotic anthem “America,” the book serves up a propaganda dish of rather benign right-wing political ingredients. Gingrich’s pages trade in egregious simplification, the elimination of all conflict, suffering, and debate, a mindless joviality, the complete absence of diversity, and an elephant-child character that, apart from symbolizing the author’s political party, displays no discernable personality and undergoes no development of any kind. It is inconceivable that this book would have been published without its author’s high-level connections. An eight-year-old boy of my acquaintance disdainfully suggested that it was better suited for three-year-olds.
A roly-poly toy elephant sits in the reading room of the Library of Congress “reliving” a brief romp through Gingrich’s version of American history. Apparently for picaresque charm, a foolish-looking bald eagle, stripped of all the strength and power that in 1782 made this bird the choice for our national symbol, appears cheerily on every page. Throughout the book, continuously and idiotically, no matter what is going on, the human and animal characters, without exception, smile. Washington and his men, battling ice floes while crossing the Delaware in a hackneyed version of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic image of 1851, smile. Marines, captured in bronze on the familiar Iwo Jima Memorial, plant the American flag on that Pacific island and smile. Boston colonists, innocent of controversies swirling amongst them over their seditious act, toss tea leaves and smile. Victims of a disaster, assisted by volunteers (volunteerism will solve our social ills) picnic under cozy blue blankets while consuming quantities of donated picnic sandwiches, apples, and chocolate chip cookies and smile.
American flags proudly wave on more than half the book’s pages, often repeatedly within the same illustration. You will look in vain for the depiction of a single African American or anyone of Asian descent. Four innocuous female Native Americans smile at Thanksgiving, in Sweet Land of Liberty’s sole nod to the diversity of America’s population. And what about Abraham Lincoln? Rather than struggle to tell children anything about how our nation was torn apart in a great Civil War and explain to them the painful tribulations of Lincoln’s presidency, these pages portray our sixteenth president as a contented boy in patched overalls under a tree. The Ellis Island page even has a Statue of Liberty smiling, and children, while learning that people came “from distant shores, / arriving in a country they had never seen before/ Speaking different languages,” must stare at a New York harbor dotted with pleasure boats—speed and motor crafts—each bearing the Stars and Stripes: an absurd illustration for the subject of immigration. Are five-year-olds too young to hear a few lines by Emma Lazarus?
When children’s books evade uncomfortable truths and whitewash the history of what is real, they betray their audience. In addition to manipulating children and preying upon them, we adults, by writing, publishing, and purchasing such books, unpardonably underestimate, disrespect, and mistrust children. Callista Gingrich, after blithely addressing herself “to American Patriots, young and old, who make America a special nation,” not only fails to teach American history: she withholds it. The good news is that most children, after flipping through these pages once, will be sufficiently bored that no lasting impression is likely to be made.
Sweet Land of Liberty may have been intended, at least in part, as a riposte to the publication last year by President Obama of his own attempt at a patriotic book for children. Of Thee I Sing borrows from the same anthem but takes a different phrase for its title. Surely we can admire a president who cares enough about children and their education to make such an effort. (Theodore Roosevelt wrote a rather militaristic book for children, with Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1895, and called it Hero Tales from American History.) Obama’s book, addressed ostensibly to his daughters, who are named only on the jacket flap, serves up a concoction nearly as lacking in substance as Gingrich’s. Self-consciously politically correct, it consists of a medley of “snapshots” with no plot and no pretense of telling American history. Frankly and peculiarly ahistorical (Billie Holliday comes before George Washington), the book seeks to introduce children by a deft sentence or two to thirteen (yet again) American figures of note. Among its pantheon, you will find five women, five people of color, two artists, a scientist, a baseball player, three social reformers, and two American presidents. But the child reader learns almost nothing about any of them.
Owing to the extreme brevity of presentation, Obama’s book proves as lightweight as its Republican counterpart. Its illustrations resemble claymation figures and thus with few exceptions (the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. is one) produce an uncanny frisson of contrivance and weirdness, while at the same time the text tries to foreground the child reader by favoring direct address over rhyme. Yet this produces false notes of its own, because it comes across as neither genuinely personal nor as unashamedly impersonal. It rings inauthentic even as it tries hard to be genuine. Obama’s “you” is everyone and therefore no one.
And then there is Lincoln: Of Thee I Sing shows the Illinoisan grown up. He stands orating, a crowd gathered round him including a few uniformed Union soldiers, the flag waving, and a text reporting that he “kept our nation one.” Always trying to reach his audience, Obama refers to our “enslaved sisters and brothers,” and he exhorts children to work together as part of a family. Gingrich, by contrast, informs her audience that Lincoln was called “Honest Abe,” became a hero for freeing slaves, and was admired for his leadership qualities. The tone is what tells: whereas Obama attempts to bring children in, Gingrich favors distance and an odd conceit of “objectivity.” Neither book places Lincoln in visual proximity to anyone of color, despite the fact that this is what young children need to perceive pictorially. Only Gingrich mentions war; and neither gives children any real idea of the reasons we revere this beleaguered president.
Obama, too, provides his George Washington double-spread, where once again we find wintertime the chosen season. Here, instead of crossing the Delaware, our first president places his hands on the shoulders of one of his ragged troops. But this rare moment of truth and connection (“His barefoot soldiers crossed wintry rivers, forging ever on”) is belied by the illustrator, who paints the men shod in boots. And finally, a third comparison: both books devote a spread to Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk of July 20, 1969. Gingrich’s version predictably focuses attention on another enormous American flag that rises in an image with three additional flags, while Obama, talking again to his child readers, encourages them to imagine looking back at “the world from way up high” and channels the astronaut’s own words on that historic day by suggesting that they too can be “brave enough to take … big, bold strides.”
Rather than superficial glosses, what children need are American histories that treat important matters importantly. As Jerome Bruner famously wrote, we can teach highly complex ideas even to the smallest children when we know our subject well and know the capacities of our audience. We could use books—preferably not written by celebrities—that teach twenty-first century American children to value our country’s past and present in wide contexts that explore aspects of other countries as well as the planet itself—books of substance, which connect children to greater horizons by challenging them with unresolved problems and stimulate the growth of their innate powers of empathy, imagination, and responsibility.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book, Illuminating Childhood, was published in early 2011. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
No full textChildren, LiteratureAlice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Ellen Handler Spitz
The Alice Behind Wonderland
by Simon Winchester
Oxfod University Press, 128 pp., $11.95
IN A MERE HUNDRED PAGES, Simon Winchester’s new book encapsulates reams of research and commentary in the overcrowded field of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) studies. Dodgson, born in 1832, was a mathematician, logician, writer, Oxford don, and a devoted portrait photographer who for most of his adult life occupied rooms in Christ Church College, where he befriended the children of Dean Henry George Liddell, the eminent classicist and lexicographer. Winchester’s suggestive title hints at revelations heretofore unsuspected, but these are not forthcoming, as his account is principally factual rather than interpretive. But a canny reader might notice, and wonder at, Dodgson’s dramatic shifts in sensibility. His photographs of children, including those of Alice Liddell, the dean’s fourth child, of whom he made eleven portraits, radiate an intensity and ambiguity of mood, an aura of melancholy, often a sense of muted loss, that catch a viewer’s attention and sustain it. Dodgson’s child portraits (which he made by the dozens and preserved in lovingly labeled albums) attract and perturb; they slow us down and compel us to pay them unmeasured heed. Whereas his masterpiece of children’s literature sets a wholly different pace—brisk and vibrant.
Right from its second page, when that waistcoated rabbit consults his pocket watch and exclaims over his lateness, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland propels us forward impatiently, so much so that we cannot really linger over its every instance of logical mischief and playful nonsense, or parse its verbal jocularity. It leaves us delighted, bemused, and bewildered. How shall we account, then, for Carroll’s inconsistent aesthetic modes? Do they complement each other or compete? Winchester’s book stimulates this question without asking it directly, but the contrast is worth exploring.
A parallel discrepancy concerns Dodgson’s visualizations of Alice. After making his own drawings to go with the story, which he had invented one summer afternoon and told to ten-year-old Alice Liddell, whom he had taken rowing with her sisters and who later asked him to write it down, Dodgson requested John Tenniel to do the famous illustrations, ubiquitously reproduced. These portray his heroine as a frizzy long-haired blonde, with an over-sized head and absurdly small feet. The now canonical image, clearly approved by Dodgson himself, differs dramatically from the likeness that emerges in his own photographs of the cuius causa, Alice Pleasance Liddell. She appears before us with delicate pre-Raphaelite features, graceful limbs, and a crown of rich chestnut brown bobbed hair. Not to mention her rather large feet. If Alice Liddell is indeed the model for the literary Alice, rather than simply a motive for the work, how should we understand this divergence? Should we see it as an element in some arcane process of distinguishing one Alice from the other, and deliberately not melding the two?
The literary character Alice, in my re-reading of the original alongside Winchester’s new book, recalled to mind a lecture in which I heard someone describe a poignant sense of loss for what is unrealized in each human being in terms of gender, an unconscious grief at the fateful assignment, male or female, that causes the relinquishing forever of the possibility of living as that which one is not. The idea harks back, of course, to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium and to the ancient myth of Tiresias. Dodgson, for all sorts of personal and cultural reasons, created his protagonist as a little girl. But even though he loved to play with and photograph little girls, both clothed and unclothed, and probably thought he knew them quite well, there is, regarding Alice, an uncanny quality, a strangeness, a sangfroid, and there is the inescapable fact that she is often frightening to children, even when they are attracted to the charms of Wonderland. A century of re-workings and updates have tamed and feminized her considerably, so that very few American children today encounter her any more in her original incarnation.
Children are sometimes frightened by Alice as much as for her. Sudden falling doesn’t faze her. (She even peeks into a marmalade jar on the way down.) Lost, she scarcely worries or misses anyone she ever cared for before the fall (except of course her cat Dinah, who, as she is fond of announcing to the rodent and avian population of Wonderland, enjoys eating birds and mice). She never fears that she will be missed at home by those who love her. Indeed, she meanders through Wonderland as if all her former human relationships have ceased to be. Whereas decades later in 1900, across the Atlantic, Dorothy desires desperately to go home, Alice, when asked by the Cheshire Cat where she wants to go, says she does not much care so long as she gets somewhere. She never befriends the peculiar creatures she meets in Wonderland or attaches herself to them as Dorothy does the oddball types she meets in Oz, whom she fiercely champions and staunchly defends, or, as Wendy does in Neverland, where she tenderly nurtures the Lost Boys and Peter. The menacing denizens of Wonderland fail to intimidate Alice. She holds her own, even when threatened by the Queen’s “voice of thunder.” Cruelty abounds in Dodgson’s fantasy, but it is children who feel it most.
Other girl characters in children’s fiction, while equally brave and independent, connect emotionally as Alice does not. This, I suggest, is because Dodgson, obsessed with intellectual puzzles, rhymes, word play, and games of all sorts, had little if any capacity to create a believable girl. Like playing cards and later chess pieces, Alice is a manipulated speaking object. To reassure herself that she is still herself after having changed size so many times, she tries a math problem: “Four times five is twelve,” she states, “and four times six is thirteen.” Thus, Dodgson pokes fun at her himself, adding another layer of emotional distance. Relying exclusively on cognition, Alice attempts to make her way by means of rudimentary logic and adherence to the rules of polite conduct. When the cook throws saucepans and hits the howling baby whose mother the Duchess has called a Pig, Alice responds by discussing the earth’s rotation. Literally remote from herself (“Good-bye, feet ... I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now”), she inhabits a world in which characters use and abuse one another with no grave consequences and where all that matters is the game.
Dodgson, as has been the case with many brilliant and successful authors of children’s books, seems to have experienced childhood as a perennially available state—preserved out of time, like a photographic image—to which he could return and in which he could perpetually dwell. Childless, like Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter, he had no responsibility for the upbringing of children, a task that radically changes the rules of the game. Which is why the Alice behind Alice may really be the shy, curious, emotionally naïve Oxford mathematics don himself rather than, or as well as, the living, breathing Alice Liddell, even though it was to her he gave his first copy, called Alice’s Adventures Underground, in 1864, as a Christmas present. Perhaps he chose to write about a girl character as another way of approaching girlhood—along with the photographs—as his own lost idyllic state.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book is Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Slavery and Free Black Labor in Northern Maryland, 1762-1864: Rethinking the Focus at Hampton National Historic Site
No full textInterpreting Hampton National Historic Site as a plantation allows us to recognize important things about the Ridgely family, placing the Ridgelys' social, political, and economic situation in context. Consideration of the use of enslaved labor changes the story told at Hampton NHS. This thesis provides the site interpreters with an ipod tour that encourages visitors to explore the site's history through three compelling historical documents. The first document, a resignation letter, is from Charles Ridgely's estate doctor who cared for the enslaved and free laborers at Northampton Furnace; it exposes and explores the widespread system of slavery in the late 1700s, existing in industry as well as agriculture and the North as well as the South. The second document, a codicil to the will of Hampton's second master, highlights the widespread practice of gradual abolition and the motives of slave owners in putting such a system into place. The third document reveals tidbits about the life of Nancy Davis, a woman whose service to the Ridgely family both before and after emancipation conveys the experience of the other African Americans at Hampton and throughout the United States. The three documents cover three different topics and time periods, highlighting the many aspects of slavery and freedom on the Hampton plantation and in the surrounding area. Yet, the documents uncover the complexity of the subjects of slavery and freedom and the need to label Hampton as an industrial plantation in order to bring forward the story of all who lived and worked on the plantation in order to offer a more complete understanding of the history of Hampton, Maryland, and the United States
Writing resources used by graduate international students and their effect on academic satisfaction
No full textLanguage competence and social relations appear as key factors that impact the well-being and academic satisfaction of graduate international students (GISs). This study applies the situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and the social capital (Coleman, 1988, 1994) frameworks to describe GISs' access to resources to cope with the writing demands of their courses, and to determine whether there is an association between access to writing resources and academic satisfaction levels of graduate international students. A mixed methods approach, with a sequential qualitative/quantitative exploratory strategy was used in this study. Findings indicate that although graduate international students were aware of the writing services provided by the university, they used them partially. Graduate international students more likely consulted peers, academic advisors, and class professors when writing for their courses. Interesting patterns appeared when comparing students enrolled in the three biggest colleges at the university where the study was conducted. Graduate international students enrolled in the Engineering and Information Technology College used significantly fewer writing resources than students enrolled in the colleges of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Natural and Mathematical Sciences. In addition, graduate international students enrolled in the college of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences faced more writing demands than students in the other two colleges. Regression analyses showed that those graduate international students who sought support when writing for their courses and reported higher levels of English ability indeed showed higher levels of academic satisfaction. After controlling for social relations, English ability, and writing demands of graduate courses, writing resources use was also positively associated with academic satisfaction. This research has important implications for expanding our theoretical understanding of writing as a social practice as well as developing programs to improve graduate international students academic experiences
A Novel Solid Phase Derivatization Reagent for the Determination of Amines by Gas Chromatography- Flame Ionization Detection
No full textCombinatorial chemistry is a powerful tool in developing chemical libraries, which undergo high-throughput screening for potential drug leads, catalysts and materials. To address this demand, large combinatorial libraries of peptides, oligonucleotides, and other organic compounds have been developed based on solid phase synthesis (SPS). Polystyrene is the most popular SPS support for the majority of peptide synthesis while silica is preferred for oligonucleotides synthesis, but less frequently investigated. We have explored silica as a SPS support since it is inexpensive and has a higher coupling rate than polystyrene. Slica-bound 1-hydroxybenzotriazole (Si-HOBt) and polystyrene-bound 1-hydroxybenzotriazole (P-HOBt) based solid supports were prepared. Using these supports, a small combinatorial library of acetamides and benzamides were synthesized. Acetamides were obtained in higher yield irrespective of the solid support. Silica based synthesis had better yield of benzamides in comparison to polystyrene based synthesis. Besides this, Si-HOBt had retained a higher activity after five reuses. Therefore, Si-HOBt was chosen for further applications in analytical chemistry. Biogenic amines are precursors of carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds, and have been reported to cause liver cirrhosis, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and scombroid food poisoning. Hence, it is imperative that biogenic amines be monitored in food samples. Analysis of biogenic amines by gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID) exhibits peak tailing and adsorption on to the columns. To overcome these problems, Si-HOBt based solid phase analytical derivatization (SPAD) was performed to convert the biogenic amines into a thermally stable, non-polar benzamides. Each analyte was individually tested for SPAD. Later, the mixture of biogenic amines were collectively derivatized and analyzed by GC-FID. SPAD was optimized with respect to solvent, time, quantity of the reagent and mode of derivatization. In addition, the SPAD was validated by the determination of biogenic amines in tuna and mackerel. A two week study of mackerel sample at 3, 21 and 37 �C showed increasing peak areas and varying concentrations of tyramine and phenethylamine. The details of development, optimization and validation of SPAD will be discussed