Building the New Zion: Unfinished Conversations between the Jews of Venta Prieta, Mexico, and Their Neighbors to the North

In 1950, Raphael Patai published his research on Venta Prieta, a Mexican town in which some residents lived as Jews despite having little knowledge of Judaism. Like other visitors, Patai was perplexed. Why did they wish to live as Jews? While Patai never answered this question to his satisfaction, he believed the answer would be found by developing a psychological profile of the residents, an approach in keeping with culture and personality theorists of the day. The present article provides a different solution. Drawing on additional sources, and short visits, we argue that Venta Prieta was not only a stop on the Jewish tourist circuit by 1950 but also developed out of a unique exchange. While U.S. Jews, as evangelical Protestants before them, provided a model for upwardly mobile Mexicans, Venta Prieta enabled middle-class tourists to experience Judaism in a pastoral setting and to "repair the world" (tikkun). [Keywords: Judaism, tourism, dialogical anthropology, social change, social mobility]     

Characterizing dispersal patterns in a threatened seabird with limited genetic structure

Genetic assignment methods provide an appealing approach for characterizing dispersal patterns on ecological time scales, but require sufficient genetic differentiation to accurately identify migrants and a large enough sample size of migrants to, for example, compare dispersal between sexes or age classes. We demonstrate that assignment methods can be rigorously used to characterize dispersal patterns in a marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) population from central California that numbers approximately 600 individuals and is only moderately differentiated (F_ST～ 0.03) from larger populations to the north. We used coalescent simulations to select a significance level that resulted in a low and approximately equal expected number of type I and II errors and then used this significance level to identify a population of origin for 589 individuals genotyped at 13 microsatellite loci. The proportion of migrants in central California was greatest during winter when 83% of individuals were classified as migrants compared to lower proportions during the breeding (6%) and post‐breeding (8%) seasons. Dispersal was also biased toward young and female individuals, as is typical in birds. Migrants were rarely members of parent‐offspring pairs, suggesting that they contributed few young to the central California population. A greater number of migrants than expected under equilibrium conditions, a lack of individuals with mixed ancestry, and a small number of potential source populations (two), likely allowed us to use assignment methods to rigorously characterize dispersal patterns for a population that was larger and less differentiated than typically thought required for the identification of migrants.     

Widespread Abundance of Functional Bacterial Amyloid in Mycolata and Other Gram-Positive Bacteria

Until recently, extracellular functional bacterial amyloid (FuBA) has been detected and characterized in only a few bacterial species, including Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and the gram-positive organism Streptomyces coelicolor. Here we probed gram-positive bacteria with conformationally specific antibodies and revealed the existence of FuBA in 12 of 14 examined mycolata species, as well as six other distantly related species examined belonging to the phyla Actinobacteria and Firmicutes. Most of the bacteria produced extracellular fimbriae, sometimes copious amounts of them, and in two cases large extracellular fibrils were also produced. In three cases, FuBA was revealed only after extensive removal of extracellular material by saponification, indicating that there is integrated attachment within the cellular envelope. Spores of species in the genera Streptomyces, Bacillus, and Nocardia were all coated with amyloids. FuBA was purified from Gordonia amarae (from the cell envelope) and Geodermatophilus obscurus, and they had the morphology, tinctorial properties, and β-rich structure typical of amyloid. The presence of approximately 9-nm-wide amyloids in the cell envelope of G. amarae was visualized by transmission electron microscopy analysis. We conclude that amyloid is widespread among gram-positive bacteria and may in many species constitute a hitherto overlooked integral part of the spore and the cellular envelope.The gram-positive bacterial group mycolata (mycolic acid-containing actinomycetes) comprises a number of genera with disease-causing species, including the severely pathogenic organisms Corynebacterium diphtheriae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The latter species is the leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent globally (17). Furthermore, mycolata have great environmental and economical impact, since several species (e.g., Gordonia spp.) may lead to unwanted foaming in wastewater treatment plants (10, 27, 43). M. tuberculosis was recently shown to use long entangled pili (MTP) to adhere to endothelium, eventually invading and infecting human and animal tissue (1). MTP''s morphology and tinctorial properties are very similar to those of the amyloid-like curli fibrils found in Escherichia coli and Salmonella species (7), although it has not been determined whether they contain the characteristic cross-β structure with β-strands perpendicular to the long fibril axis (44). In higher organisms, amyloid occurs mainly as an aberrant product of protein misfolding in, e.g., neurodegeneration and systemic amyloidosis, but bacteria are adept at turning amyloid to good use. In addition to the two bacteria mentioned above, functional bacterial amyloid (FuBA) has also been reported for streptomycetes (8) and xanthomonads (35). These examples are only the tip of the iceberg. Our recent in situ studies using WO2 antibodies specific for the amyloid conformation (36) in conjunction with 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes for identification of the microbes revealed that amyloid-like adhesins are widespread in many phyla in environmental biofilms (29). In view of the occurrence of potential amyloid-like fibrils in one species belonging to the mycolata and the observed link between infection by a mycolata genus (Nocardia) and neurodegenerative Parkinson''s disease (13, 25, 26, 47), we have investigated this group of bacteria more closely for the presence of amyloid. Here we show that 12 of 14 different species of mycolata, as well as 6 of 6 other gram-positive bacteria, harbor amyloid. Furthermore, in some cases the amyloid can be visualized only after harsh saponification procedures which remove surrounding lipid molecules, indicating that the amyloid is deeply embedded in the cell envelope. Thus, amyloid may play a hitherto unappreciated central role in the composition of the bacterial envelope in many gram-positive bacteria.     

Mitochondrial proteomics on human fibroblasts for identification of metabolic imbalance and cellular stress

Background  

Mitochondrial proteins are central to various metabolic activities and are key regulators of apoptosis. Disturbance of mitochondrial proteins is therefore often associated with disease. Large scale protein data are required to capture the mitochondrial protein levels and mass spectrometry based proteomics is suitable for generating such data. To study the relative quantities of mitochondrial proteins in cells from cultivated human skin fibroblasts we applied a proteomic method based on nanoLC-MS/MS analysis of iTRAQ-labeled peptides.