Transgendering shojo shosetsu: Girls' inter-text/sex-uality

This essay recognises the power of reading and intertextuality (embedding texts within texts) in fiction targeted at girls and young women.

Stressor categorization: acute physical and psychological stressors elicit distinctive recruitment patterns in the amygdala and in medullary noradrenergic cell groups

It has been hypothesized that the brain categorizes stressors and utilizes neural response pathways that vary in accordance with the assigned category. If this is true, stressors should elicit patterns of neuronal activation within the brain that are category-specific. Data from previous Immediate-early gene expression mapping studies have hinted that this is the case, but interstudy differences in methodology render conclusions tenuous. In the present study, immunolabelling for the expression of c-fos was used as a marker of neuronal activity elicited in the rat brain by haemorrhage, immune challenge, noise, restraint and forced swim. All stressors elicited c-fos expression in 25-30% of hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus corticotrophin-releasing-factor cells, suggesting that these stimuli were of comparable strength, at least with regard to their ability to activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-ad renal axis. In the amygdala, haemorrhage and immune challenge both elicited c-fos expression in a large number of neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala, whereas noise, restraint and forced swim primarily elicited recruitment of cells within the medial nucleus of the amygdala. In the medulla, all stressors recruited similar numbers of noradrenergic (A1 and A2) and adrenergic (C1 and C2) cells. However, haemorrhage and immune challenge elicited c-fos expression In subpopulations of A1 and A2 noradrenergic cells that were significantly more rostral than those recruited by noise, restraint or forced swim. The present data support the suggestion that the brain recognizes at least two major categories of stressor, which we have referred to as 'physical' and 'psychological'. Moreover, the present data suggest that the neural activation footprint that is left in the brain by stressors can be used to determine the category to which they have been assigned by the brain.

Book review of: 'Textual traffic: Colonialism, modernity and the economy of text' by S. Shankar

No abstract

Categorization and characterization of transcript-confirmed constitutively and alternatively spliced introns and exons from human

By spliced alignment of human DNA and transcript sequence data we constructed a data set of transcript-confirmed exons and introns from 2793 genes, 796 of which (28%) were seen to have multiple isoforms. We find that over one-third of human exons can translate in more than one frame, and that this is highly correlated with G+C content. Introns containing adenosine at donor site position +3 (A3), rather than guanosine (G3), are more common in low G+C regions, while the converse is true in high G+C regions. These two classes of introns are shown to have distinct lengths, consensus sequences and correlations among splice signals, leading to the hypothesis that A3 donor sites are associated with exon definition, and G3 donor sites with intron definition. Minor classes of introns, including GC-AG, U12-type GT-AG, weak, and putative AG-dependant introns are identified and characterized. Cassette exons are more prevalent in low G+C regions, while exon isoforms are more prevalent in high G+C regions. Cassette exon events outnumber other alternative events, while exon isoform events involve truncation twice as often as extension, and occur at acceptor sites twice as often as at donor sites. Alternative splicing is usually associated with weak splice signals, and in a majority of cases, preserves the coding frame. The reported characteristics of constitutive and alternative splice signals, and the hypotheses offered regarding alternative splicing and genome organization, have important implications for experimental research into RNA processing. The 'AltExtron' data sets are available at http://www.bit.uq.edu.au/altExtron/ and http://www.ebi.ac.uk/similar tothanaraj/altExtron/.