Showing 1441 - 1450 of 2039 Items
Lankapura: The Legacy of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka
Date: 2019-01-01
Creator: Justin W. Henry
Sree Padma
Access: Open access
- The five articles which make up this special issue of South Asia explore the role of the Ramayana in Sri Lankan art, literature, religious ritual and political discourse in shaping Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Saiva perceptions of the island’s distant past. Contributors work to answer the question as to when and how Sri Lanka came to be equated with the mythic ‘Lankapura’ of Valmiki’s epic, exploring both positive and negative portrayals of Ravana (ruler of Lanka antagonist of the Ramayana) in Sinhala and Tamil literature from the late medieval period to the present day. Authors work to account for the politicisation and historicisation of the Ramayana in twenty-first century Sri Lanka (including similarities to and differences from the contemporary Indian situation), along with the appropriation of Ravana as a Sinhala Buddhist cultural hero, and the incorporation of Vibhishana as a ‘guardian deity’ in the Sinhala Buddhist pantheon.
Local adaptation of a parasite to solar radiation impacts disease transmission potential, spore yield, and host fecundity*
Date: 2020-08-24
Creator: Mary Alta Rogalski
Meghan A. Duffy
Access: Open access
SR-Like RNA-binding protein Slr1 affects Candida albicans filamentation and virulence
Date: 2013-04-01
Creator: Chaiyaboot Ariyachet
Norma V. Solis
Yaoping Liu
Nemani V. Prasadarao
Scott G., Filler
Anne E. McBride
Access: Open access
- Candida albicans causes both mucosal and disseminated infections, and its capacity to grow as both yeast and hyphae is a key virulence factor. Hyphal formation is a type of polarized growth, and members of the SR (serine-arginine) family of RNA-binding proteins influence polarized growth of both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Aspergillus nidulans. Therefore, we investigated whether SR-like proteins affect filamentous growth and virulence of C. albicans. BLAST searches with S. cerevisiae SR-like protein Npl3 (ScNpl3) identified two C. albicans proteins: CaNpl3, an apparent ScNpl3 ortholog, and Slr1, another SR-like RNAbinding protein with no close S. cerevisiae ortholog. Whereas ScNpl3 was critical for growth, deletion of NPL3 in C. albicans resulted in few phenotypic changes. In contrast, the slr1δ/δ mutant had a reduced growth rate in vitro, decreased filamentation, and impaired capacity to damage epithelial and endothelial cells in vitro. Mice infected intravenously with the slr1δ/δ mutant strain had significantly prolonged survival compared to that of mice infected with the wild-type or slr1δ/δ mutant complemented with SLR1 (slr1δ/δ+SLR1) strain, without a concomitant decrease in kidney fungal burden. Histopathology, however, revealed differential localization of slr1δ/δ hyphal and yeast morphologies within the kidney. Mice infected with slr1δ/δ cells also had an increased brain fungal burden, which correlated with increased invasion of brain, but not umbilical vein, endothelial cells in vitro. The enhanced brain endothelial cell invasion was likely due to the increased surface exposure of the Als3 adhesin on slr1δ/δ cells. Our results indicate that Slr1 is an SR-like protein that influences C. albicans growth, filamentation, host cell interactions, and virulence. © 2013, American Society for Microbiology.
Homolog Pairing at the Push of a Button
Date: 2019-11-04
Creator: Jack R. Bateman
Judith A. Kassis
Access: Open access
- Homologous chromosomes pair in somatic cells in Drosophila, but how this occurs is poorly understood. In this issue of Developmental Cell, Viets et al. (2019) show that proteins and chromatin structure mediate pairing and argue against a DNA sequence-based mechanism.
Statement gathered at the Maine Correctional Center, Windham, Maine, April 17, 2015
Date: 2015-04-17
Creator: Travis McDonald
Clarence Meeks
Travis Murphy
Access: Open access
Implementing the optimal provision of ecosystem services
Date: 2014-04-29
Creator: Stephen Polasky
David J. Lewis
Andrew J. Plantinga
Erik Nelson
Access: Open access
- Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, though beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners' costs. The combination of spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services approaches. Here we show that an auction that sets payments between landowners and the regulator for the increased value of ecosystem services with conservation provides incentives for landowners to truthfully reveal cost information, and allows the regulator to implement the optimal provision of ecosystem services, even in the case with spatially dependent benefits and asymmetric information.
RoboGrams: A lightweight message passing architecture for RoboCup soccer
Date: 2015-01-01
Creator: Elizabeth Mamantov
William Silver
William Dawson
Eric Chown
Access: Open access
- RoboGrams is a lightweight and efficient message passing architecture that we designed for the RoboCup domain and that has been successfully used by the Northern Bites SPL team. This unique architecture provides a framework for separating code into strongly decoupled modules, which are combined into configurable dataflow graphs. We present several different architecture types and preexisting message passing implementations, but among all of these, we contend that Robo-Grams' features make it particularly well suited for use in RoboCup. As a success story, we describe the Northern Bites' use of RoboGrams and the benefits it has provided to a single team, but we also suggest that it could help SPL teams collaborate in the future.
Resistance to dislodgement: habitat and size-specific differences in morphology and tenacity in an intertidal snail
Date: 1993-01-01
Creator: G. C. Trussell
A. S. Johnson
S. G. Rudolph
E. S. Gilfillan
Access: Open access
- The authors quantified 1) shell size (defined as the maximum projected surface area, MPSA); 2) shell shape; 3) foot area; 4) maximum force to dislodge a snail in shear; and 5) tenacity (force per foot area required to dislodge) of the herbivorous Littorina obtusata. Wave-exposed snails were smaller (lower average MPSA), and were shorter and had larger foot area and greater dislodgement force than did protected snails of similar MPSA. The greater dislodgement force at the exposed site was due to larger foot area, not to greater tenacity. -from Authors
Two-loop graviton scattering relation and IR behavior in N = 8 supergravity
Date: 2008-12-11
Creator: Stephen G. Naculich
Horatiu Nastase
Howard J. Schnitzer
Access: Open access
- We derive an ABDK-like relation between the one- and two-loop four-graviton amplitudes in N = 8 supergravity. Specifically we show that the infrared-divergent part of the two-loop amplitude is one-half the square of the one-loop amplitude, suggesting an exponential structure for IR divergences. The difference between the two-loop amplitude and one-half the square of the full one-loop amplitude is therefore finite, and expressible in a relatively simple form. We give arguments for generalizations to higher loops and n-point functions, suggesting that the exponential of the full one-loop amplitude may be corrected, to low orders, by only simple finite terms. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Level-rank duality of untwisted and twisted D-branes of the over(so, ̂) (N)K WZW model
Date: 2007-12-24
Creator: Stephen G. Naculich
Benjamin H. Ripman
Access: Open access
- We analyze the level-rank duality of untwisted and ε-twisted D-branes of the over(so, ̂) (N)K WZW model. Untwisted D-branes of over(so, ̂) (N)K are characterized by integrable tensor and spinor representations of over(so, ̂) (N)K. Level-rank duality maps untwisted over(so, ̂) (N)K D-branes corresponding to (equivalence classes of ) tensor representations onto those of over(so, ̂) (K)N. The ε-twisted D-branes of over(so, ̂) (2 n)2 k are characterized by (a subset of ) integrable tensor and spinor representations of over(so, ̂) (2 n - 1)2 k + 1. Level-rank duality maps spinor ε-twisted over(so, ̂) (2 n)2 k D-branes onto those of over(so, ̂) (2 k)2 n. For both untwisted and ε-twisted D-branes, we prove that the spectrum of an open string ending on these D-branes is isomorphic to the spectrum of an open string ending on the level-rank-dual D-branes. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.