An epigenetic signature of developmental potential in neural stem cells and early neurons.

A cardinal property of neural stem cells (NSCs) is their ability to adopt multiple fates upon differentiation. The epigenome is widely seen as a read-out of cellular potential and a manifestation of this can be seen in embryonic stem cells (ESCs), where promoters of many lineage-specific regulators are marked by a bivalent epigenetic signature comprising trimethylation of both lysine 4 and lysine 27 of histone H3 (H3K4me3 and H3K27me3, respectively). Bivalency has subsequently emerged as a powerful epigenetic indicator of stem cell potential. Here, we have interrogated the epigenome during differentiation of ESC-derived NSCs to immature GABAergic interneurons. We show that developmental transitions are accompanied by loss of bivalency at many promoters in line with their increasing developmental restriction from pluripotent ESC through multipotent NSC to committed GABAergic interneuron. At the NSC stage, the promoters of genes encoding many transcriptional regulators required for differentiation of multiple neuronal subtypes and neural crest appear to be bivalent, consistent with the broad developmental potential of NSCs. Upon differentiation to GABAergic neurons, all non-GABAergic promoters resolve to H3K27me3 monovalency, whereas GABAergic promoters resolve to H3K4me3 monovalency or retain bivalency. Importantly, many of these epigenetic changes occur before any corresponding changes in gene expression. Intriguingly, another group of gene promoters gain bivalency as NSCs differentiate toward neurons, the majority of which are associated with functions connected with maturation and establishment and maintenance of connectivity. These data show that bivalency provides a dynamic epigenetic signature of developmental potential in both NSCs and in early neurons. Stem Cells 2013;31:1868-1880.

Achievement motives and goals: a developmental analysis

Achievement motivation represents the energization and direction of competence-based behavior. Despite the ubiquity and importance of achievement motivation across the life span, developmental research in this area is quite sparse. In this chapter, we discuss developmental considerations and provide an overview of the developmentally relevant research that has been conducted on achievement motivation. Our review focuses specifically on the two most prominent constructs that have emerged in the achievement motivation literature in the past century: Motive dispositions (the need for achievement and fear of failure) and goals (mastery-approach, performance-approach, mastery-avoidance, and performance-avoidance achievement goals). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)

The mirror of consumption: celebritization, developmental consumption and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade

This paper explores the shifting cultural politics of development as expressed in the changing narratives and discursive transparencies of fair trade marketing tactics in the UK. Pursued through what I call ‘developmental consumption’ and the increasing celebritization of development, it is now through the global media mega-star that the subaltern speaks. After a more general discussion of the implications of the celebritization of development, specific analysis focuses on two parallel processes complicit in the ‘mainstreaming’ of fair trade markets and the desire to develop fair trade as a product of ‘quality’. The first involves improving the taste of fair trade commodities through alterations in their material supply chains while the second involves novel marketing narratives designed to invoke these conventions of quality through highly meaningful discursive and visual means. The later process is conceptualized through the theoretical device of the shifting ‘embodiments’ of fair trade which have moved from small farmers’ livelihoods, to landscapes of ‘quality’, to increasing congeries of celebrities such as Chris Martin from the UK band Coldplay. These shifts encapsulate what is referred to here as fair trade’s Faustian Bargain and its ambiguous results: the creation of increasing economic returns and, thus, more development through the movement of fair trade goods into mainstream retail markets at the same time there is a de-centering of the historical discursive transparency at the core of fair trade’s moral economy. Here, then, the celebritization of fair trade has the potential to create ‘the mirror of consumption’, whereby, our gaze is reflected back upon ourselves in the form of ‘the rich and famous’ Northern celebrity muddling the ethics of care developed by connecting consumers to fair trade farmers and their livelihoods. The paper concludes with a consideration of development and fair trade politics in the context of their growing aestheticization and celebritization.

Disorder-specific functional abnormalities during temporal discounting in youth with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism and comorbid ADHD and Autism

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are often comorbid and share cognitive abnormalities in temporal foresight. A key question is whether shared cognitive phenotypes are based on common or different underlying pathophysiologies and whether comorbid patients have additive neurofunctional deficits, resemble one of the disorders or have a different pathophysiology. We compared age- and IQ-matched boys with non-comorbid ADHD (18), non-comorbid ASD (15), comorbid ADHD and ASD (13) and healthy controls (18) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a temporal discounting task. Only the ASD and the comorbid groups discounted delayed rewards more steeply. The fMRI data showed both shared and disorder-specific abnormalities in the three groups relative to controls in their brain-behaviour associations. The comorbid group showed both unique and more severe brain-discounting associations than controls and the non-comorbid patient groups in temporal discounting areas of ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum and anterior cingulate, suggesting that comorbidity is neither an endophenocopy of the two pure disorders nor an additive pathology.

Pre-conditioning the epigenetic response to high vapor pressure deficit increases the drought tolerance of Arabidopsis thaliana

Epigenetic modification of the genome via cytosine methylation is a dynamic process that responds to changes in the growing environment. This modification can also be heritable. The combination of both properties means that there is the potential for the life experiences of the parental generation to modify the methylation profiles of their offspring and so potentially to ‘pre-condition’ them to better accommodate abiotic conditions encountered by their parents. We recently identified high vapor pressure deficit (vpd)-induced DNA methylation at two gene loci in the stomatal development pathway and an associated reduction in leaf stomatal frequency.1 Here, we test whether this epigenetic modification pre-conditioned parents and their offspring to the more severe water stress of periodic drought. We found that three generations of high vpd-grown plants were better able to withstand periodic drought stress over two generations. This resistance was not directly associated with de novo methylation of the target stomata genes, but was associated with the cmt3 mutant’s inability to maintain asymmetric sequence context methylation. If our finding applies widely, it could have significant implications for evolutionary biology and breeding for stressful environments.

Endophytic bacterial community composition in wheat (Triticum aestivum) is determined by plant tissue type, developmental stage and soil nutrient availability

Aims: To understand effects of tissue type, growth stage and soil fertilisers on bacterial endophyte communities of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum cv. Hereward). Methods: Endophytes were isolated from wheat grown under six fertiliser conditions in the long term Broadbalk Experiment at Rothamsted Research, UK. Samples were taken in May and July from root and leaf tissues. Results: Root and leaf communities differed in abundance and composition of endophytes. Endophytes were most abundant in roots and the Proteobacteria were most prevalent. In contrast, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria, the Gram positive phyla, were most prevalent in the leaves. Both fertiliser treatment and sample time influenced abundance and relative proportions of each phylum and genus in the endosphere. A higher density of endophytes was found in the Nil input treatment plants. Conclusions: Robust isolation techniques and stringent controls are critical for accurate recovery of endophytes. The plant tissue type, plant growth stage, and soil fertiliser treatment all contribute to the composition of the endophytic bacterial community in wheat. These results should help facilitate targeted development of endophytes for beneficial applications in agriculture.

Reduced face preference in infancy: a developmental precursor to callous-unemotional traits?

Background Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits, a proposed precursor to adult psychopathy, are characterized by impaired emotion recognition, reduced responsiveness to others’ distress, and a lack of guilt or empathy. Reduced attention to faces, and more specifically to the eye region, has been proposed to underlie these difficulties, although this has never been tested longitudinally from infancy. Attention to faces occurs within the context of dyadic caregiver interactions, and early environment including parenting characteristics has been associated with CU traits. The present study tested whether infants’ preferential tracking of a face with direct gaze and levels of maternal sensitivity predict later CU traits. Methods Data were analyzed from a stratified random sample of 213 participants drawn from a population-based sample of 1233 first-time mothers. Infants’ preferential face tracking at 5 weeks and maternal sensitivity at 29 weeks were entered into a weighted linear regression as predictors of CU traits at 2.5 years. Results Controlling for a range of confounders (e.g., deprivation), lower preferential face tracking predicted higher CU traits (p = .001). Higher maternal sensitivity predicted lower CU traits in girls (p = .009), but not boys. No significant interaction between face tracking and maternal sensitivity was found. Conclusions This is the first study to show that attention to social features during infancy as well as early sensitive parenting predict the subsequent development of CU traits. Identifying such early atypicalities offers the potential for developing parent-mediated interventions in children at risk for developing CU traits.

Varieties of semantic ‘access’ deficit in Wernicke’s aphasia and semantic aphasia

Comprehension deficits are common in stroke aphasia, including in cases with (i) semantic aphasia (SA), characterised by poor executive control of semantic processing across verbal and nonverbal modalities, and (ii) Wernicke’s aphasia (WA), associated with poor auditory-verbal comprehension and repetition, plus fluent speech with jargon. However, the varieties of these comprehension problems, and their underlying causes, are not well-understood. Both patient groups exhibit some type of semantic ‘access’ deficit, as opposed to the ‘storage’ deficits observed in semantic dementia. Nevertheless, existing descriptions suggest these patients might have different varieties of ‘access’ impairment – related to difficulty resolving competition (in SA) vs. initial activation of concepts from sensory inputs (in WA). We used a case-series design to compare WA and SA patients on Warrington’s paradigmatic assessment of semantic ‘access’ deficits. In these verbal and non-verbal matching tasks, a small set of semantically-related items are repeatedly presented over several cycles so that the target on one trial becomes a distractor on another (building up interference and eliciting semantic ‘blocking’ effects). WA and SA patients were distinguished according to lesion location in the temporal cortex, but in each group, some individuals had additional prefrontal damage. Both of these aspects of lesion variability – one that mapped onto classical ‘syndromes’ and one that did not – predicted aspects of the semantic ‘access’ deficit. Both SA and WA cases showed multimodal semantic impairment, although as expected the WA group showed greater deficits on auditory-verbal than picture judgements. Distribution of damage in the temporal lobe was crucial for predicting the initially beneficial effects of stimulus repetition: WA cases showed initial improvement with repetition of words and pictures, while in SA, semantic access was initially good but declined in the face of competition from previous targets. Prefrontal damage predicted the harmful effects of repetition: the ability to re-select both word and picture targets in the face of mounting competition was linked to left prefrontal damage in both groups. Therefore, SA and WA patients have partially distinct impairment of semantic ‘access’ but, across these syndromes, prefrontal lesions produce declining comprehension with repetition in both verbal and non-verbal tasks.

Multi-sensory treatment for children with developmental motor speech disorders

What this paper adds? What is already known on the subject? Multi-sensory treatment approaches have been shown to impact outcome measures positively, such as accuracy of speech movement patterns and speech intelligibility in adults with motor speech disorders, as well as in children with apraxia of speech, autism and cerebral palsy. However, there has been no empirical study using multi-sensory treatment for children with speech sound disorders (SSDs) who demonstrate motor control issues in the jaw and orofacial structures (e.g. jaw sliding, jaw over extension, inadequate lip rounding/retraction and decreased integration of speech movements). What this paper adds? Findings from this study indicate that, for speech production disorders where both the planning and production of spatiotemporal parameters of movement sequences for speech are disrupted, multi-sensory treatment programmes that integrate auditory, visual and tactile–kinesthetic information improve auditory and visual accuracy of speech production. The training (practised in treatment) and test words (not practised in treatment) both demonstrated positive change in most participants, indicating generalization of target features to untrained words. It is inferred that treatment that focuses on integrating multi-sensory information and normalizing parameters of speech movements is an effective method for treating children with SSDs who demonstrate speech motor control issues.

Schizophrenic urban reality: the changing urban landscapes of the Mediterranean region and developmental influences

This chapter considers aspects of urban design and associated identity of place that shifts over time and has to identify with aspects of economic pressures to develop as well as cultural concerns about change.

Using developmental evaluation methods with communities of practice

Purpose This research explored the use of developmental evaluation methods with community of practice programmes experiencing change or transition to better understand how to target support resources. Design / methodology / approach The practical use of a number of developmental evaluation methods was explored in three organisations over a nine month period using an action research design. The research was a collaborative process involving all the company participants and the academic (the author) with the intention of developing the practices of the participants as well as contributing to scholarship. Findings The developmental evaluation activities achieved the objectives of the knowledge managers concerned: they developed a better understanding of the contribution and performance of their communities of practice, allowing support resources to be better targeted. Three methods (fundamental evaluative thinking, actual-ideal comparative method and focus on strengths and assets) were found to be useful. Cross-case analysis led to the proposition that developmental evaluation methods act as a structural mechanism that develops the discourse of the organisation in ways that enhance the climate for learning, potentially helping develop a learning organization. Practical implications Developmental evaluation methods add to the options available to evaluate community of practice programmes. These supplement the commonly used activity indicators and impact story methods. 2 Originality / value Developmental evaluation methods are often used in social change initiatives, informing public policy and funding decisions. The contribution here is to extend their use to organisational community of practice programmes.

Coming of age in L3 initial stages transfer models: deriving developmental predictions and looking towards the future

Aims: Over the past decade in particular, formal linguistic work within L3 acquisition has concentrated on hypothesizing and empirically determining the source of transfer from previous languages—L1, L2 or both—in L3 grammatical representations. In view of the progressive concern with more advanced stages, we aim to show that focusing on L3 initial stages should be one continued priority of the field, even—or especially—if the field is ready to shift towards modeling L3 development and ultimate attainment. Approach: We argue that L3 learnability is significantly impacted by initial stages transfer, as such forms the basis of the initial L3 interlanguage. To illustrate our point, the insights from studies using initial and intermediary stages L3 data are discussed in light of developmental predictions that derive from the initial stages models. Conclusions: Despite a shared desire to understand the process of L3 acquisition in whole, inclusive of offering developmental L3 theories, we argue that the field does not yet have—although is ever closer to—the data basis needed to effectively do so. Originality: This article seeks to convince the readership for the need of conservatism in L3 acquisition theory building, whereby offering a framework on how and why we can most effectively build on the accumulated knowledge of the L3 initial stages in order to make significant, steady progress. Significance: The arguments exposed here are meant to provide an epistemological base for a tenable framework of formal approaches to L3 interlanguage development and, eventually, ultimate attainment.