Book Reviews : "Off Limits: a parent’s guide to keeping kids safe from sexual abuse" and "Smart Parenting for Safer Kids"

Two important books on the topic of child sexual abuse prevention were recently published: Off Limits: A Parent’s Guide to Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse (Wurtele & Berkower, 2010) and Smart Parenting for Safer Kids (Briggs, 2010). The authors of both books are highly credentialed with long experience researching and writing about child sexual abuse prevention. Sandy Wurtele, PhD, is author of landmark child- and parent-focused sexual abuse prevention programs conducted in the USA over the past 30 years. She has published over 80 journal articles and book chapters on this topic. Her co-author, Feather Berkower, MSW, has been conducting workshops for adults on this topic for 25 years. Freda Briggs, PhD, has over 40 years’ experience in child protection in Australia and has also published numerous scholarly works on the topic. She was the inaugural recipient of the Australian Humanitarian Award in 1998, was Senior Australian of the Year in 2000, and was awarded an Order of Australia in 2005.

From classroom resistance to school reform

In the project described in this chapter, a group of educationally disengaged high school students investigated their peers' perspectives of factors related to low aspiration for and access to university. On the basis of their findings, they created an informative DVD to address the student needs.

Measurement equivalence of the dispositional resistance to change scale

Intended to bridge the gap between the latest methodological developments and cross-cultural research, this interdisciplinary resource presents the latest strategies for analyzing cross-cultural data. Techniques are demonstrated through the use of applications that employ cross national data sets such as the latest European Social Survey. With an emphasis on the generalized latent variable approach, internationally?prominent researchers from a variety of fields explain how the methods work, how to apply them, and how they relate to other methods presented in the book. Syntax and graphical and verbal explanations of the techniques are included. [from publisher's website]

Book reviews : "Biosecurity interventions: global health and security in question"

International Relations’ engagement with global health governance has proliferated in the last decade. There are a number of excellent works that seek to understand how the relationship between politics and health shapes and informs people’s lives and governments’ policies. However, the overt securitization of health by the IR field has, Biosecurity interventions argues, remained relatively unproblematized...

Green Cultural Criminology : Constructions of Environmental Harm, Consumerism, and Resistance to Ecocide

Over the last two decades, "green criminology" has emerged as a unique area of study, bringing together criminologists and sociologists from a wide range of research backgrounds and varying theoretical orientations. It spans the micro to the macro—from individual-level environmental crimes and victimization to business/corporate violations and state transgressions. There have been few attempts, however, to explicitly or implicitly integrate cultural criminology into green criminology (or vice versa). This book moves towards articulating a green cultural criminological perspective. Brisman and South examine existing overlapping research and offer a platform to support future excursions by green criminologists into cultural criminology’s concern with media images and representations, consumerism and consumption, and resistance. At the same time, they offer an invitation to cultural criminologists to adopt a green view of the consumption landscape and the growth (and depictions) of environmental harms.

Book Reviews: "Fashion Media: Past and Present"

The book Fashion Media: Past and Present is a timely insight into the historical relationship between fashion and media. Edited by Djurdja Bartlett (Senior Research Fellow at the London College of Fashion), Shaun Cole (Course Leader for the MA in the History and Culture of Fashion and MA Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion) and Agnès Rocamora (Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion), Fashion Media offers a wide historical perspective on how painting, photography, film, television and the Internet have intersected with fashion. The book also provides a useful understanding of social and cultural key issues related to this synergy...

The emerging role of microRNAs in resistance to lung cancer treatments

One of the major challenges in the treatment of lung cancer is the development of drug resistance. This represents a major obstacle in the treatment of patients, limiting the efficacy of both conventional chemotherapy and biological therapies. Deciphering the mechanisms of resistance is critical to further understanding the multifactorial pathways involved, and in developing more specific targeted treatments. To date, numerous studies have reported the potential role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in resistance to various cancer treatments. MicroRNAs are a family of small non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression by sequence-specific targeting of mRNAs causing translational repression or mRNA degradation. More than 1200 validated human miRNAs have been identified to date. While as little as one miRNA can regulate hundreds of targets, a single target can also be affected by multiple miRNAs. Evidence suggests that dysregulation of specific miRNAs may be involved in the acquisition of resistance to a number of cancer treatments, thereby modulating the sensitivity of cancer cells to such therapies. Therefore, targeting miRNAs may be an attractive strategy for developing novel and more effective individualized therapies, improving drug efficiency, and for predicting patient response to different treatments. In this review, we provide an overview on the role of miRNAs in resistance to current lung cancer therapies and novel biological agents.

The manipulation of apoptosis-related genes to generate resistance to Fusarium wilt and water stress in banana

Bananas are susceptible to a diverse range of biotic and abiotic stresses, many of which cause serious production constraints worldwide. One of the most destructive banana diseases is Fusarium wilt caused by the soil-borne fungus, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc). No effective control strategy currently exists for this disease which threatens global banana production. Although disease resistance exists in some wild bananas, attempts to introduce resistance into commercially acceptable bananas by conventional breeding have been hampered by low fertility, long generation times and association of poor agronomical traits with resistance genes. With the advent of reliable banana transformation protocols, molecular breeding is now regarded as a viable alternative strategy to generate disease-resistant banana plants. Recently, a novel strategy involving the expression of anti-apoptosis genes in plants was shown to result in resistance against several necrotrophic fungi. Further, the transgenic plants showed increased resistance to a range of abiotic stresses. In this thesis, the use of anti-apoptosis genes to generate transgenic banana plants with resistance to Fusarium wilt was investigated. Since water stress is an important abiotic constraint to banana production, the resistance of the transgenic plants to water stress was also examined. Embryogenic cell suspensions (ECS) of two commercially important banana cultivars, Grand Naine (GN) and Lady Finger (LF), were transformed using Agrobacterium with the anti-apoptosis genes, Bcl-xL, Bcl-xL G138A, Ced-9 and Bcl- 2 3’ UTR. An interesting, and potentially important, outcome was that the use of anti-apoptosis genes resulted in up to a 50-fold increase in Agrobacterium-mediated transformation efficiency of both LF and GN cells over vector controls. Regenerated plants were subjected to a complete molecular characterisation in order to detect the presence of the transgene (PCR), transcript (RT-PCR) and gene product (Western blot) and to determine the gene copy number (Southern blot). A total of 36 independently-transformed GN lines (8 x Bcl-xL, 5 x Bcl-xL G138A, 15 x Ced-9 and 8 x Bcl-2 3’ UTR) and 41 independently-transformed LF lines (8 x Bcl-xL, 7 x BclxL G138A, 13 x Ced-9 and 13 x Bcl-2 3’ UTR) were identified. The 41 transgenic LF lines were multiplied and clones from each line were acclimatised and grown under glasshouse conditions for 8 weeks to allow monitoring for phenotypic abnormalities. Plants derived from 3 x Bcl-xL, 2 x Ced-9 and 5 x Bcl-2 3’ UTR lines displayed a variety of aberrant phenotypes. However, all but one of these abnormalities were off-types commonly observed in tissue-cultured, non-transgenic banana plants and were therefore unlikely to be transgene-related. Prior to determining the resistance of the transgenic plants to Foc race 1, the apoptotic effects of the fungus on both wild-type and Bcl-2 3’ UTR-transgenic LF banana cells were investigated using rapid in vitro root assays. The results from these assays showed that apoptotic-like cell death was elicited in wild-type banana root cells as early as 6 hours post-exposure to fungal spores. In contrast, these effects were attenuated in the root cells of Bcl-2 3’ UTR-transgenic lines that were exposed to fungal spores. Thirty eight of the 41 transgenic LF lines were subsequently assessed for resistance to Foc race 1 in small-plant glasshouse bioassays. To overcome inconsistencies in rating the internal (vascular discolouration) disease symptoms, a MatLab-based computer program was developed to accurately and reliably assess the level of vascular discolouration in banana corms. Of the transgenic LF banana lines challenged with Foc race 1, 2 x Bcl-xL, 3 x Ced-9, 2 x Bcl-2 3’ UTR and 1 x Bcl-xL G138A-transgenic line were found to show significantly less external and internal symptoms than wild-type LF banana plants used as susceptible controls at 12 weeks post-inoculation. Of these lines, Bcl-2 3’ UTR-transgenic line #6 appeared most resistant, displaying very mild symptoms similar to the wild-type Cavendish banana plants that were included as resistant controls. This line remained resistant for up to 23 weeks post-inoculation. Since anti-apoptosis genes have been shown to confer resistance to various abiotic stresses in other crops, the ability of these genes to confer resistance against water stress in banana was also investigated. Clonal plants derived from each of the 38 transgenic LF banana plants were subjected to water stress for a total of 32 days. Several different lines of transgenic plants transformed with either Bcl-xL, Bcl-xL G138A, Ced-9 or Bcl-2 3’ UTR showed a delay in visual water stress symptoms compared with the wild-type control plants. These plants all began producing new growth from the pseudostem following daily rewatering for one month. In an attempt to determine whether the protective effect of anti-apoptosis genes in transgenic banana plants was linked with reactive oxygen species (ROS)-associated programmed cell death (PCD), the effect of the chloroplast-targeting, ROS-inducing herbicide, Paraquat, on wild-type and transgenic LF was investigated. When leaf discs from wild-type LF banana plants were exposed to 10 ìM Paraquat, complete decolourisation occurred after 48 hours which was confirmed to be associated with cell death and ROS production by trypan blue and 3,3-diaminobenzidine (DAB) staining, respectively. When leaf discs from the transgenic lines were exposed to Paraquat, those derived from some lines showed a delay in decolourisation, suggesting only a weak protective effect from the transgenes. Finally, the protective effect of anti-apoptosis genes against juglone, a ROS-inducing phytotoxin produced by the causal agent of black Sigatoka, Mycosphaerella fijiensis, was investigated. When leaf discs from wild-type LF banana plants were exposed to 25 ppm juglone, complete decolourisation occurred after 48 hours which was again confirmed to be associated with cell death and ROS production by trypan blue and DAB staining, respectively. Further, TdT-mediated dUTP nick-end labelling (TUNEL) assays on these discs suggested that the cell death was apoptotic. When leaf discs from the transgenic lines were exposed to juglone, discs from some lines showed a clear delay in decolourisation, suggesting a protective effect. Whether these plants are resistant to black Sigatoka is unknown and will require future glasshouse and field trials. The work presented in this thesis provides the first report of the use of anti-apoptosis genes as a strategy to confer resistance to Fusarium wilt and water stress in a nongraminaceous monocot, banana. Such a strategy may be exploited to generate resistance to necrotrophic pathogens and abiotic stresses in other economically important crop plants.