From the body to the wallet: conceptualizing Akan witchcraft at home and abroad

This article focuses on the way that Akan witchcraft invokes imagery of new forms of modernity, especially a feature of the post-colonial monetary economy, the credit card. Credit card spending encodes relations within a technological monetary network, and it affects personal relations at home and abroad. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in 1990-1 at anti-witchcraft shrines in the Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. It looks at young entrepreneurs who work in the large commercial cities, and who visit shrines in the Dormaa-Ahenkro district in order to buy protection from witchcraft. These young businessmen distinguish between two types of witchcraft and explain how a witch at home, as opposed to a witch abroad, does not have the business acumen or technological knowledge to harm their finances.     

The Specificity and Patterns of Staining in Human Cells and Tissues of p16INK4a Antibodies Demonstrate Variant Antigen Binding

The validity of the identification and classification of human cancer using antibodies to detect biomarker proteins depends upon antibody specificity. Antibodies that bind to the tumour-suppressor protein p16INK4a are widely used for cancer diagnosis and research. In this study we examined the specificity of four commercially available anti-p16INK4a antibodies in four immunological applications. The antibodies H-156 and JC8 detected the same 16 kDa protein in western blot and immunoprecipitation tests, whereas the antibody F-12 did not detect any protein in western blot analysis or capture a protein that could be recognised by the H-156 antibody. In immunocytochemistry tests, the antibodies JC8 and H-156 detected a predominately cytoplasmic localised antigen, whose signal was depleted in p16INK4a siRNA experiments. F-12, in contrast, detected a predominately nuclear located antigen and there was no noticeable reduction in this signal after siRNA knockdown. Furthermore in immunohistochemistry tests, F-12 generated a different pattern of staining compared to the JC8 and E6H4 antibodies. These results demonstrate that three out of four commercially available p16INK4a antibodies are specific to, and indicate a mainly cytoplasmic localisation for, the p16INK4a protein. The F-12 antibody, which has been widely used in previous studies, gave different results to the other antibodies and did not demonstrate specificity to human p16INK4a. This work emphasizes the importance of the validation of commercial antibodies, aside to the previously reported use, for the full verification of immunoreaction specificity.     

Identifying vulnerable pathways in Mycobacterium tuberculosis by using a knockdown approach

We constructed recombinant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in which expression of specific genes was downregulated to identify vulnerable drug targets. Growth phenotypes in macrophages and culture were used to rank targets: the dprE1, clpP1, and fadD32 operons were the best targets and glnA1, glnE, pknL, regX3, and senX3 were poor targets.