Respect for outsiders? respect for the law? the moral evaluation of high scale issues by US immigration officers

High-scale morality is the study of moral ideas and sentiments deployed in relations that encompass multiple, geographically or socially distant populaces. The envisioning of distant people, their attributed moral personhood, the evaluation of their perceived behaviour, and the rectification of wrongs through the use of powerful organizations are key topics in high-scale morality. High-scale morality differs from existing anthropological approaches that emphasize local ethnography or contrastive moral ideas; it addresses the moralization of issues like world hunger, the drug trade, or international migration. The officers of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service understand and evaluate legal and illegal immigrants, as well as directly enacting moral rectification for the US polity. As they resolve moral dilemmas on their job, they utilize pervasive models for moral thought and action in capitalist, individualist, stratified, and bureaucratized societies. The article finishes by considering directions in which anthropology can contribute to understanding the moral dimension of global issues.     

Reduced nicotinamide–adenine dinucleotide–nitrite reductase from Azotobacter chroococcum

1. The assimilatory nitrite reductase of the N(2)-fixing bacterium Azotobacter chroococcum was prepared in a soluble form from cells grown aerobically with nitrate as the nitrogen source, and some of its properties have been studied. 2. The enzyme is a FAD-dependent metalloprotein (mol.wt. about 67000), which stoicheiometrically catalyses the direct reduction of nitrite to NH(3) with NADH as the electron donor. 3. NADH-nitrite reductase can exist in two either active or inactive interconvertible forms. Inactivation in vitro can be achieved by preincubation with NADH. Nitrite can specifically protect the enzyme against this inactivation and reverse the process once it has occurred. 4. A. chroococcum nitrite reductase is an adaptive enzyme whose formation depends on the presence of either nitrate or nitrite in the nutrient solution. 5. Tungstate inhibits growth of the microorganism very efficiently, by competition with molybdate, when nitrate is the nitrogen source, but does not interfere when nitrite or NH(3) is substituted for nitrate. The addition of tungstate to the culture media results in the loss of nitrate reductase activity but does not affect nitrite reductase.     

Preparation and characterization of a soluble nitrate reductase from Azotobacter chroococcum

Summary The assimilatory nitrate reductase of the N₂-fixing bacterium Azotobacter chroococcum has been prepared in a soluble form from cells grown with nitrate as the nitrogen source, and some of its properties (electron donors and cofactors, K _mvalues for substrates, molecular weight, inhibitors, activators, etc.) have been studied. The enzyme is of an inducible nature and can exist in two interconvertible forms, either active or inactive.Tungstate very efficiently inhibits growth of the microorganism in media with nitrate. When either nitrite or ammonia are substituted for nitrate as the nitrogen source, growth is unaffected by tungstate concentrations which otherwise completely suppress growth on nitrate. Tungstate interferes by decreasing the cellular level of nitrate reductase activity, preventing, as a consequence, utilization of nitrate.     

Coral bleaching response index: a new tool to standardize and compare susceptibility to thermal bleaching

As coral bleaching events become more frequent and intense, our ability to predict and mitigate future events depends upon our capacity to interpret patterns within previous episodes. Responses to thermal stress vary among coral species; however the diversity of coral assemblages, environmental conditions, assessment protocols, and severity criteria applied in the global effort to document bleaching patterns creates challenges for the development of a systemic metric of taxon‐specific response. Here, we describe and validate a novel framework to standardize bleaching response records and estimate their measurement uncertainties. Taxon‐specific bleaching and mortality records (2036) of 374 coral taxa (during 1982–2006) at 316 sites were standardized to average percent tissue area affected and a taxon‐specific bleaching response index (taxon‐BRI) was calculated by averaging taxon‐specific response over all sites where a taxon was present. Differential bleaching among corals was widely variable (mean taxon‐BRI = 25.06 ± 18.44%, ±SE). Coral response may differ because holobionts are biologically different (intrinsic factors), they were exposed to different environmental conditions (extrinsic factors), or inconsistencies in reporting (measurement uncertainty). We found that both extrinsic and intrinsic factors have comparable influence within a given site and event (60% and 40% of bleaching response variance of all records explained, respectively). However, when responses of individual taxa are averaged across sites to obtain taxon‐BRI, differential response was primarily driven by intrinsic differences among taxa (65% of taxon‐BRI variance explained), not conditions across sites (6% explained), nor measurement uncertainty (29% explained). Thus, taxon‐BRI is a robust metric of intrinsic susceptibility of coral taxa. Taxon‐BRI provides a broadly applicable framework for standardization and error estimation for disparate historical records and collection of novel data, allowing for unprecedented accuracy in parameterization of mechanistic and predictive models and conservation plans.     

Biomass production and fatty acid accumulation in Chlorella sp. (strain DEC1B) isolated from a petrol refinery in Huelva (Spain)

A microalgal strain was established from Cepsa's refinery wastewater treatment plant in Huelva (southwest of Spain). Genetic analysis of the chloroplastic rbcL gene encoding for the large subunit of the ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase enzyme (Rubisco) showed the strain had high homology with other known rbcL sequences of the genus Chlorella. The strain grows well autotrophically in minimum mineral medium, with a growth rate of 0.28 ± 0.012 day^?1 and a biomass productivity of 138.9 ± 6.7 mg L^?1 day^?1. N‐starvation and/or over illumination with 650 µmol photons m^?2 s^?1 of PAR light on the cultures induced a significant increase in the intracellular content of lipids in this microalga. Total lipids were extracted from the strain biomass with 2:1 chloroform‐methanol, and they accounted for approximately 50% of the dry biomass. Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) represented 60.4% of the total fatty acids found in the strain, thus making this biomass attractive as a high added‐value product source. The strain was able to grow efficiently in the refinery treated wastewater from which it was isolated, providing an attractive advantage for further development of more sustainable algal biomass production processes at reduced costs close to a petrol refinery area.     

Identification of a conserved 5′-dRP lyase activity in bacterial DNA repair ligase D and its potential role in base excision repair

Bacillus subtilis is one of the bacterial members provided with a nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ) system constituted by the DNA-binding Ku homodimer that recruits the ATP-dependent DNA Ligase D (BsuLigD) to the double-stranded DNA breaks (DSBs) ends. BsuLigD has inherent polymerization and ligase activities that allow it to fill the short gaps that can arise after realignment of the broken ends and to seal the resulting nicks, contributing to genome stability during the stationary phase and germination of spores. Here we show that BsuLigD also has an intrinsic 5′-2-deoxyribose-5-phosphate (dRP) lyase activity located at the N-terminal ligase domain that in coordination with the polymerization and ligase activities allows efficient repairing of 2′-deoxyuridine-containing DNA in an in vitro reconstituted Base Excision Repair (BER) reaction. The requirement of a polymerization, a dRP removal and a final sealing step in BER, together with the joint participation of BsuLigD with the spore specific AP endonuclease in conferring spore resistance to ultrahigh vacuum desiccation suggest that BsuLigD could actively participate in this pathway. We demonstrate the presence of the dRP lyase activity also in the homolog protein from the distantly related bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, allowing us to expand our results to other bacterial LigDs.     

Expression of the neurotrophin receptor TrkB in rat spleen macrophages

Increasing evidence suggests that some members of the family of the neurotrophins could be involved in immune system functioning. Both neurotrophins and their tyrosine-kinase signal-transducing receptors, the so-called Trk receptors, have been detected in various lymphoid tissues in a number of species. Nevertheless, their cellular localisation remains unclear in most cases. In this study, we used immunohistochemical techniques to localise TrkB in the rat spleen (from 0 days to 2 years). Cells expressing TrkB-like immunoreactivity were found exclusively within the white pulp of the spleen, along the marginal zone-follicle border and inside the follicles and periarteriolar lymphoid sheaths. These cells probably represented macrophage subpopulations, since they expressed the ED3 rat macrophage antigen. No evidence of TrkB-like protein expression in lymphocytes or follicular dendritic cells could be found. Furthermore, the density of TrkB-immunoreactive cells was observed to increase with age. Although the role of TrkB ligands in these cells remains to be clarified, the present findings provide further evidence for the supposed role of neurotrophins in immune system homeostasis.