Corosolic acid and its structural analogs: A systematic review of their biological activities and underlying mechanism of action

BackgroundThe corosolic acid (CA), also known as plant insulin, is a pentacyclic triterpenoid extracted from plants such as Lagerstroemia speciosa. It has been shown to have anti-diabetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor effects. Its structural analogs ursolic acid (UA), oleanolic acid (OA), maslinic acid (MA), asiatic acid (AA) and betulinic acid (BA) display similar individual pharmacological activities to those of CA. However, there is no systematic review documenting pharmacological activities of CA and its structural analogues. This study aims to fill this gap in literature.PurposeThis systematic review aims to summarize the medical applications of CA and its analogues.MethodsA systematic review summarizes and compares the extraction techniques, pharmacokinetic parameters, and pharmacological effects of CA and its structural analogs. Hypoglycemic effect is one of the key inclusion criteria for searching Web of Science, PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases up to October 2020 without language restrictions. ‘corosolic acid’, ‘ursolic acid’, ‘oleanolic acid’, ‘maslinic acid’, ‘asiatic acid’, ‘betulinic acid’, ‘extraction’, ‘pharmacokinetic’, ‘pharmacological’ were used to extract relevant literature. The PRISMA guidelines were followed.ResultsAt the end of the searching process, 140 articles were selected for the systematic review. Information of CA and five of its structural analogs including UA, OA, MA, AA and BA were included in this review. CA and its structural analogs are pentacyclic triterpenes extracted from plants and they have low solubilities in water due to their rigid scaffold and hydrophobic properties. The introduction of water-soluble groups such as sugar or amino groups could increase the solubility of CA and its structural analogs. Their biological activities and underlying mechanism of action are reviewed and compared.ConclusionCA and its structural analogs UA, OA, MA, AA and BA are demonstrated to show activities in lowering blood sugar, anti-inflammation and anti-tumor. Their oral absorption and bioavailability can be improved through structural modification and formulation design. CA and its structural analogs are promising natural product-based lead compounds for further development and mechanistic studies.     

A guide into glycosciences: How chemistry,biochemistry and biology cooperate to crack the sugar code

BackgroundThe most demanding challenge in research on molecular aspects within the flow of biological information is posed by the complex carbohydrates (glycan part of cellular glycoconjugates). How the ‘message’ encoded in carbohydrate ‘letters’ is ‘read’ and ‘translated’ can only be unraveled by interdisciplinary efforts.Scope of reviewThis review provides a didactic step-by-step survey of the concept of the sugar code and the way strategic combination of experimental approaches characterizes structure–function relationships, with resources for teaching.Major conclusionsThe unsurpassed coding capacity of glycans is an ideal platform for generating a broad range of molecular ‘messages’. Structural and functional analyses of complex carbohydrates have been made possible by advances in chemical synthesis, rendering production of oligosaccharides, glycoclusters and neoglycoconjugates possible. This availability facilitates to test the glycans as ligands for natural sugar receptors (lectins). Their interaction is a means to turn sugar-encoded information into cellular effects. Glycan/lectin structures and their spatial modes of presentation underlie the exquisite specificity of the endogenous lectins in counterreceptor selection, that is, to home in on certain cellular glycoproteins or glycolipids.General significanceUnderstanding how sugar-encoded ‘messages’ are ‘read’ and ‘translated’ by lectins provides insights into fundamental mechanisms of life, with potential for medical applications.     

Moral Horizons of Land and Place

ABSTRACT

A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land and place as groundings for moral challenges and practices that are nevertheless not place-bound. A critical moral anthropology of land and place should be directed, we argue, to the interplay of mobility and emplacement, to the dynamics of landscape and ‘dwelling’, and to the multiplicities of expectation and meaning that surround the making and exploitation of resources. In contexts of global and local change, land and place offer productive grounds from which to consider the moral horizons – both spatial and temporal – of our world and our discipline.     

Collaborations of Biocultural Hope: Community Science Against Industrialisation in Northwest Australia

ABSTRACT

The article discusses two community science projects organised in opposition to large-scale industrialisation in the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia. Between 2006 and 2013, a significant conflict took place on the region’s Indian Ocean coast. It was triggered by the proposal of Australia’s largest independent oil and gas company Woodside Ltd. to build a $45 billion AUD liquefied natural gas facility at James Price Point, 50?km north of the tourist town of Broome. The community science initiatives highlight particular ways in which the local community was able not only to enter into the debate, but to significantly influence its outcome. This points towards alternate configurations of the political subjectivities involved in this conflict. Drawing on the Aboriginal notion of ‘living country’, the article presents these projects as signs of biocultural hope, that hint towards a world different from the one built on neoliberal ideals and dreams of economic opportunity alone.     

Creating inspiration: The role of the arts in creating empathy for ecological restoration

Summary Australia’s natural areas have long been a source of inspiration for artists. Some of this art is a response to the natural environment or represents it in some way, and some is exhibited or performed in the natural environment itself. The objectives of this article are to: investigate the relationship between art and the artists who create it and people who make a living in extension, landcare or on the land; and, develop an understanding of whether the arts can encourage an emotional affinity with the natural environment. Eighty‐nine key informant interviews were conducted in Australia, the UK, USA, Canada and Norway, including people working in the arts and people working in natural resources management. Those in the latter group were people who either (i) worked in an extension (outreach) or community facilitation capacity, or (ii) people who played a voluntary role with community on‐ground restoration projects or who showed exemplary behaviour towards the environment. All the people working in natural resources management cited examples of visual or performing arts that they had found inspiring, that encapsulated or defined their attitudes towards the natural environment, or which reinforced their attitudes towards the natural environment. From these interviews, the idea of ‘chains of inspiration’ emerged. Each of the ‘chains’ began with people who worked directly on the environment. These people were in turn influenced or inspired by particular art from which they gained an emotional affinity towards the environment. The chains then progressed to the artists who created the art. All of the chains ended up with the natural environment from which the artists drew their inspiration. The paper concludes that by providing an emotional affinity or empathy for the natural environment, art can have a major role in influencing pro‐environmental attitudes.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism: second generation of Ethiopian Jews in Israel's ‘crisis of modernization’

Abstract

The core of this article sets out to examine the extent to which a multicultural society can prevent cultural racism, which, like multiculturalism, is by definition based on a culture of diversity and separation. The ‘first modernity’ was organized along national lines, with a centralist state that opted to create an essentialist and uncontested national identity. Immigrants, especially those who came from ‘third world’ countries, were expected to undergo a process of assimilation, and to integrate into the dominant culture by relinquishing their particular past and tradition. Multiculturalism, which emerged historically as a criticism of that perspective, aims at creating a kaleidoscope of associations and cultural communities, which inevitably presents a challenge to the one ‘truth’ of the nation-state with the argument that this ‘truth’ favours some groups over others. Within the multicultural model, identity politics of various groups is perceived as a means to achieve recognition, acceptance, respect and even public affirmation of differences. However, do multicultural society and identity-related differences provide a solution to cultural racism as well?

Investigating the second generation of the Ethiopian Jews, who migrated to Israel during its transformation from ethno-national republicanism to a neo-liberal, multicultural society, can help answer this question. By presenting their patterns of association, character of protest activities and the newly formed hybrid identity that Ethiopian youth have developed as a means to liberate themselves from a discriminating reality, and by examining the Others’ reaction to that challenge, this article uncovers certain mechanisms and methods of action through which a multicultural society, having a thin and mild version of multiculturalism, does not diminish cultural racism, particularly its everyday non-institutional version, but in fact augments it.     

Other Dark Sides of Resilience: Politics and Power in Community-Based Efforts to Strengthen Resilience

ABSTRACT

Oceanic people and places are increasingly labelled as either ‘resilient’ or ‘vulnerable’ to disasters and climate change. Resilience is often described in disaster discourse as a strategy designed to overcome vulnerability by helping communities to ‘bounce back’ in the wake of ‘natural’ disasters. Using ethnographic research conducted with Community Disaster and Climate Change Committees (CDCs) in Vanuatu in the wake of Tropical Cyclone Pam, this paper seeks to problematise disaster responses that see the ‘community’ as a space to be acted upon by outsiders, or where people will respond in a unified way to the challenges of rebuilding after disaster. Using political ecology framings this paper critiques the ideas of resilience that appear entrenched in community-based disaster and climate change adaptation discourse and practice in Oceania. Rather than presupposing resilience or vulnerability, this paper details the dispersal and distribution power and agency amongst individual actors and groups that either supported or manipulated, the distribution of goods by Community Disaster Committees. In this way, it moves beyond the limitations of conceptual framings of resilience in disaster management and climate change into a more considered appraisal of power, by exploring what James Ferguson has termed ‘the politics of distribution’ in the context of disaster.     

Are Bush Fires and Drought ‘Natural Disasters’? The Naturalisation of Politics and Politicisation of Nature in New Caledonia

ABSTRACT

Based on long-term doctoral fieldwork on bush fires in New Caledonia, this paper aims to explore the double assumption that bush fires were shaped as a public issue through specific categorisations of human and natural elements, and that this work resulted in negative outcomes as far as the environment is concerned. This paper will address the question of mediation between human agency (colonial history, population distribution and development choices) and the production of ‘bush fires’ as an event category and as a ‘public problem’ calling for a policy solution. More specifically it will address the validity of the definition of bush fires as a ‘disaster’. While this phenomenon is both a discursive creation rooted in colonial imagination and a consciously forgotten strategy used by administrators and settlers to control land and dominate indigenous people, its growing importance today is related to the emergence of environmental concerns. However, one must not forget other issues obscured by the smoke of bush fires, namely a declining cattle farming sector and its lasting environmental impacts on drought (also considered a ‘natural disaster’ in New Caledonia by inhabitants, local administrations and scientists) and biodiversity loss. Addressing this issue leads to more general questions about the manner in which policy-makers, naturalists and environmentalists conceptualise and morally address environmental (natural and man-made) phenomena through time in a colonial/postcolonial setting.     

Disaster as Opportunity? Cyclone Pam and the Transmission of Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

Culture, by its very nature, is always at risk of change – whether through transformation, destruction or redefinition. So how might culture be said to be particularly at risk in the context of ‘natural’ disasters, and how are disasters ‘naturalised’ or incorporated under the terms of different cultural regimes? An earlier focus on the impacts to built or tangible heritage is increasingly being balanced by a concern for the transformations wrought by disasters in the intangible heritage of communities. Through the recent event of Cyclone Pam in 2015, and a case study of the World Heritage site of Chief Roi Mata’s Domain (CRMD), we explore the ways in which repetitive natural hazards have shaped culture and tangible and intangible forms of heritage in Vanuatu. We focus in particular on the issue of cultural transmission at CRMD and its relationship to natural hazards through the device of a ‘disaster biography’. Risk can also carry with it the prospect of opportunity, and our paper seeks to understand how opportunity might be present in post-disaster reworkings of culture and heritage.     

Honokiol: A review of its pharmacological potential and therapeutic insights

BackgroundHonokiol is a pleiotropic compound which been isolated from Magnolia species such as Magnolia grandiflora and Magnolia dealbata. Magnolia species Magnolia grandiflora is used in traditional medicine for the treatment of various diseases.PurposeThe objective of this review is to summarize the pharmacological potential and therapeutic insights of honokiol.Study designHonokiol has been specified as a novel alternative to treat various disorders such as liver cancer, neuroprotective, anti-spasmodic, antidepressant, anti-tumorigenic, antithrombotic, antimicrobial, analgesic properties and others. Therefore, this study designed to represent the in-depth therapeutic potential of honokiol.MethodsLiterature searches in electronic databases, such as Web of Science, Science Direct, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus, were performed using the keywords ‘Honokiol’, ‘Health Benefits’ and ‘Therapeutic Insights’ as the keywords for primary searches and secondary search terms were used as follows: ‘Anticancer’, ‘Oxidative Stress’, ‘Neuroprotective’, ‘Antimicrobial’, ‘Cardioprotection’, ‘Hepatoprotective’, ‘Anti-inflammatory’, ‘Arthritis’, ‘Reproductive Disorders’.ResultsThis promising bioactive compound presented an wide range of therapeutic and biological activities which include liver cancer, neuroprotective, anti-spasmodic, antidepressant, anti-tumorigenic, antithrombotic, antimicrobial, analgesic properties, and others. Its pharmacokinetics has been established in experimental animals, while in humans, this is still speculative. Some of its mechanism for exhibiting its pharmacological effects includes apoptosis of diseased cells, reduction in the expression of defective proteins like P-glycoproteins, inhibition of oxidative stress, suppression of pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IL-10 and IL-6), amelioration of impaired hepatic enzymes and reversal of morphological alterations, among others.ConclusionAll these actions displayed by this novel compound could make it serve as a lead in the formulation of drugs with higher efficacy and negligible side effects utilized in the treatment of several human diseases.     

Kombinowanie: agency,informality, and the poetics of self in Highland Poland

This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities – kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a ‘master‐trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Górale (Highland) behaviour. By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.     

Forever Slaves? Inequality,Uncleanliness and Vigilance about Origins in the Southern Highlands of Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In the southern highlands of Madagascar, Betsileo free descendants strictly avoid marrying descendants of slaves, whom they regard as ‘unclean people’. A close examination of the history of a slave descent group shows that the most serious difficulty faced by former slaves after abolition was not access to land but ritual uncleanliness, which prevented intermarriage with free people and led to the essentialisation of the now pervasive hierarchical distinction between clean and unclean people. Today, free descendants actively maintain a social memory of ‘origins’ and remain extremely vigilant about not marrying the slave descendants, who are ‘locked’ into an unequal and unclean status that they cannot easily escape.     

The Cultural Importance of Plants in Western African Religions

This paper explores the importance of elements of the natural world, and particularly plants, among people of different religious affiliations in western Africa. Plants play an overriding role in African folk religions, which in turn are closely associated with health practices and influence management decisions concerning natural resources. In spite of the extensive literature documenting ritual plant use, the cultural importance of plants in this context has not been systematically assessed. Our objective was to see whether the importance of plants was reflected in people’s conceptions of global (i.e., Christianity, Islam) and folk religions (i.e., Vodoun and Bwiti) in Benin (West Africa) and Gabon (Central Africa). By performing a cultural domain analysis (CDA) with 96 individuals, we found that, regardless of the religious affiliation of informants, plants and other elements of the natural world were more present in people’s notions of folk religions than in global religions. We conclude by reflecting on the potentials and limitations of the data presented here as a starting point to explore the topic of cultural keystone species.     

An evaluation of educators’ views on the e-Bug resources in England

Introduction: e-Bug is an international educational resource for young people covering microbes, hygiene and antibiotics. e-Bug supports NICE guidance on changing public behaviour around antibiotic use. This study aimed to determine educators’ views of the e-Bug teacher resources to inform further development and dissemination of e-Bug. Methods: Age appropriate e-Bug resource packs were posted to every primary school (N = 19,142) and secondary school (N = 5637) in England with a cover letter signed by the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Executive of PHE and e-Bug Project Lead inviting educators to complete an online survey to evaluate the e-Bug resources. The online survey consisted of nine questions and took approximately 15 min to complete. Results: 695 participants completed the online survey. 94% of participants rated the e-Bug resource as excellent or good; one fifth of respondents used the e-Bug resources at least termly. Educators who used e-Bug rated the different lesson plans as excellent or good including ‘Introduction to Microbes’ (98%) and ‘Hand Hygiene’ (95%). Educators provided suggestions for the development of additional lessons plans. Conclusions: Educators view e-Bug as a valuable resource for teaching children about hygiene and antibiotics. Further e-Bug promotion and resource development is required to increase awareness and usage in schools.     

Collecting ethnic statistics in Europe: a review

Abstract

Statistics on ethnicity, if not on ‘race’, are common in a large number of countries around the world, but not in the western part of Europe. This divergence can be explained by legal prohibitions attached to data protection provisions and by a political reluctance to recognize and emphasize ethnic diversity in official statistics. Following different traditions of political framing, northern, central and eastern European countries have implemented different ways of collecting ‘ethnic statistics’. This article provides a review of the heterogeneity of methodologies used for converting ethnicity into statistics and discusses their limitations for any potential standardization. As part of the enforcement of anti-discrimination policies, European human rights institutions are urging a reconsideration of the choice of ‘colour-blind’ statistics. Counting or not counting by ethnicity raises epistemological and methodological dilemmas which this article attempts to identify.     

Doing the City from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Urban Marginality*

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on urban marginality in diverse contexts across the world (Africa, Latin America, Arab States and Europe) and proposes anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that take into account the complexity of the social positions of those city dwellers that are on the margins. Three aspects of urban margins come to the fore. First, urbanites respond to increasing marginalisation through the production of alternative meanings and narratives about the city. While grand, powerful narratives may present cities as ‘divided’, ‘dual’ or ‘conflicted’, urban dwellers may carve out symbolic space through discourses of the non-spectacular and non-political, emerging out of lived space. Second, the cuts and frictions constituting urban margins do not only limit urban dwellers capacities, but can also provide spaces of agentic possibilities. As it is well known, the absence of state control can be turned by versatile urbanites into opportunities of the ‘informal’ economy. Third, urban dwellers engage in manifold practices that connect and entangle their marginalised position with spaces of power and resources. Through their practices urban margins become a relation to, not a disconnection from the ‘centre’. In this special issue we understand ‘urban margins’ not as essence or entities, but as forms of relations between urban dwellers shaped by processes of political, economic, spatial and social marginalisation. Seen in this way, urban margins constitute a perspective on the urban: a lens to entice comparisons of urban agency in the world of cities [Robinson, J. 2011. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1): 1–23. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00982.x]].     

Wa Grotesque: Headhunting Theme Parks and the Chinese Nostalgia for Primitive Contemporaries

ABSTRACT

The Wa people have long occupied a special place in the state-directed political spectacle of minority nationalities, in both China and Burma. This fascination builds on older views of the Wa as dangerous barbarians, and closely evokes other primitivisms from around the world. In China and in neighbouring countries, state policy has recently combined with commercial entrepreneurism to cultivate a new, selective nostalgia for ‘primitive-exotic’ peoples like the Wa. In this paper, I discuss mainly China, and how the ‘wild’ Wa headhunting paraphernalia prohibited by the Chinese in the 1950s now reappear as kitsch. Some Wa of older generations see such revivals as dangerous, but younger people may embrace the revival. I discuss the new Chinese repackaging of primitive violence and the different Wa understandings of these staged exoticizations of their culture, including ways the staged representations are taken up in Wa attempts to revive aspects of their cultural past.     

Beyond the senses: perception,the environment,and vision impairment

The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non-vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.