Shaping Religious and Cultural Aspiration: Engraved Sutras in Southwestern Shandong Province from the Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577 CE), China

<p>This dissertation explores how the Buddhist texts carved on the cliffs of mountains served their patrons’ religious and cultural goals. During the Northern Qi period (550-577 CE), these carved Buddhist sutra texts and Buddha names were prevalent, and were carved directly onto the surfaces of numerous mountains in southwestern Shandong Province. The special focus of this study is on the Buddhist engravings at Mt. Hongding in Dongping, and at Mt. Tie in Zoucheng. Created in approximately 553-564 CE, the carvings at Mt. Hongding stand as the terminus a quo of the history of Buddhist sutras carved into the rocks of the Shandong mountains. The Buddhist carvings at Mt. Hongding served monastic goals. The monk patrons, Seng’an Daoyi, Fahong, and others created the carvings as an integral part of their Buddhist meditation practices. The carvings at Mt. Tie paint a very different picture. At Mt. Tie, a colossal Buddhist sculpture-style carving was created in 579 CE. Sponsored by several Han Chinese patrons, the carving was designed in the form of a gigantic Chinese traditional stele. This study suggests that several Han Chinese local elites proudly displayed their Han Chinese linage by using the gigantic stele form of Buddhist text carving as a means to proclaim Han Chinese cultural and artistic magnificence. To achieve these non-religious goals, they appropriated rhetorical devices often used by the Han elite, such as the stele form, written statements about the excellence of the calligraphy used, and discourse on calligraphy connoisseurship.</p>

Transcriptomic Analysis of the Host Response and Innate Resilience to Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli Infection in Humans.

BACKGROUND: Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a globally prevalent cause of diarrhea. Though usually self-limited, it can be severe and debilitating. Little is known about the host transcriptional response to infection. We report the first gene expression analysis of the human host response to experimental challenge with ETEC. METHODS: We challenged 30 healthy adults with an unattenuated ETEC strain, and collected serial blood samples shortly after inoculation and daily for 8 days. We performed gene expression analysis on whole peripheral blood RNA samples from subjects in whom severe symptoms developed (n = 6) and a subset of those who remained asymptomatic (n = 6) despite shedding. RESULTS: Compared with baseline, symptomatic subjects demonstrated significantly different expression of 406 genes highlighting increased immune response and decreased protein synthesis. Compared with asymptomatic subjects, symptomatic subjects differentially expressed 254 genes primarily associated with immune response. This comparison also revealed 29 genes differentially expressed between groups at baseline, suggesting innate resilience to infection. Drug repositioning analysis identified several drug classes with potential utility in augmenting immune response or mitigating symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: There are statistically significant and biologically plausible differences in host gene expression induced by ETEC infection. Differential baseline expression of some genes may indicate resilience to infection.

Internal carotid arterial canal size and scaling in Euarchonta: Re-assessing implications for arterial patency and phylogenetic relationships in early fossil primates.

Primate species typically differ from other mammals in having bony canals that enclose the branches of the internal carotid artery (ICA) as they pass through the middle ear. The presence and relative size of these canals varies among major primate clades. As a result, differences in the anatomy of the canals for the promontorial and stapedial branches of the ICA have been cited as evidence of either haplorhine or strepsirrhine affinities among otherwise enigmatic early fossil euprimates. Here we use micro X-ray computed tomography to compile the largest quantitative dataset on ICA canal sizes. The data suggest greater variation of the ICA canals within some groups than has been previously appreciated. For example, Lepilemur and Avahi differ from most other lemuriforms in having a larger promontorial canal than stapedial canal. Furthermore, various lemurids are intraspecifically variable in relative canal size, with the promontorial canal being larger than the stapedial canal in some individuals but not others. In species where the promontorial artery supplies the brain with blood, the size of the promontorial canal is significantly correlated with endocranial volume (ECV). Among species with alternate routes of encephalic blood supply, the promontorial canal is highly reduced relative to ECV, and correlated with both ECV and cranium size. Ancestral state reconstructions incorporating data from fossils suggest that the last common ancestor of living primates had promontorial and stapedial canals that were similar to each other in size and large relative to ECV. We conclude that the plesiomorphic condition for crown primates is to have a patent promontorial artery supplying the brain and a patent stapedial artery for various non-encephalic structures. This inferred ancestral condition is exhibited by treeshrews and most early fossil euprimates, while extant primates exhibit reduction in one canal or another. The only early fossils deviating from this plesiomorphic condition are Adapis parisiensis with a reduced promontorial canal, and Rooneyia and Mahgarita with reduced stapedial canals.

Risk Prediction for Epithelial Ovarian Cancer in 11 United States-Based Case-Control Studies: Incorporation of Epidemiologic Risk Factors and 17 Confirmed Genetic Loci.

Previously developed models for predicting absolute risk of invasive epithelial ovarian cancer have included a limited number of risk factors and have had low discriminatory power (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) < 0.60). Because of this, we developed and internally validated a relative risk prediction model that incorporates 17 established epidemiologic risk factors and 17 genome-wide significant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using data from 11 case-control studies in the United States (5,793 cases; 9,512 controls) from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (data accrued from 1992 to 2010). We developed a hierarchical logistic regression model for predicting case-control status that included imputation of missing data. We randomly divided the data into an 80% training sample and used the remaining 20% for model evaluation. The AUC for the full model was 0.664. A reduced model without SNPs performed similarly (AUC = 0.649). Both models performed better than a baseline model that included age and study site only (AUC = 0.563). The best predictive power was obtained in the full model among women younger than 50 years of age (AUC = 0.714); however, the addition of SNPs increased the AUC the most for women older than 50 years of age (AUC = 0.638 vs. 0.616). Adapting this improved model to estimate absolute risk and evaluating it in prospective data sets is warranted.