Profile of secreted hydrolases, associated proteins, and SlpA in Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum during the degradation of hemicellulose.

Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum, a Gram-positive thermophilic anaerobic bacterium, grows robustly on insoluble hemicellulose, which requires a specialized suite of secreted and transmembrane proteins. We report here the characterization of proteins secreted by this organism. Cultures were grown on hemicellulose, glucose, xylose, starch, and xylan in pH-controlled bioreactors, and samples were analyzed via spotted microarrays and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Key hydrolases and transporters employed by T. saccharolyticum for growth on hemicellulose were, for the most part, hitherto uncharacterized and existed in two clusters (Tsac_1445 through Tsac_1464 for xylan/xylose and Tsac_1344 through Tsac_1349 for starch). A phosphotransferase system subunit, Tsac_0032, also appeared to be exclusive to growth on glucose. Previously identified hydrolases that showed strong conditional expression changes included XynA (Tsac_1459), XynC (Tsac_0897), and a pullulanase, Apu (Tsac_1342). An omnipresent transcript and protein making up a large percentage of the overall secretome, Tsac_0361, was tentatively identified as the primary S-layer component in T. saccharolyticum, and deletion of the Tsac_0361 gene resulted in gross morphological changes to the cells. The view of hemicellulose degradation revealed here will be enabling for metabolic engineering efforts in biofuel-producing organisms that degrade cellulose well but lack the ability to catabolize C5 sugars.

Engendering development theory from the standpoint of women.

PIP: Although the field of "women and development" emerged as an aftermath of the UN Decade for Women, development planners have treated gender and development as interrelated but analytically distinct by simply tacking the category "women" onto established frameworks or considering women the social "contexts" of development projects. This paper challenges this tendency with a consideration of how the global process of development is conditioned by and constitutive of gender roles and relations in specific cultural contexts. The paper presents a framework for a distinctly feminist political economy of development that moves development theory from its present impasse caused by challenges to the Marxism that has dominated critical development theory. This post-impasse framework poses Marx's theory of exploitation against the experiences of women garment workers in Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka to illustrate how industrial development through free market channels is necessarily, not merely coincidentally, gendered. Therefore, the framework reveals the importance of engendering development theory itself. The paper opens with an introduction and continues with an exploration of the current theoretical impasse and post-impasse theory. The paper continues with a discussion of standpoint epistemology as the basis for women-centered research, a description of the research on the impact of factory employment on women from rural villages, a consideration of women's proletarianization in terms of the rise of the "new world order," a feminist reading of Marx's theory of exploitation from the standpoint of the garment workers, and an acknowledgement of the challenge posed by this application of standpoint methodology to the study of development to the current rejection by some Western feminists of universalizing categories such as "gender" and "women."^ieng

On the cultivation of the bacillus of leprosy by method of clegg

We have each suceeded, working independently, in establishing amoeba-cholera-lepra cultures from cases of leprosy (D.H.H. 1, W.R.B. 2, H.T.H. 1). One of us (D.H.C.) has obtained a strain in pure culture by the heating technique described by Clegg. the amoebacholeralepra cultures have been carried through from three to ten generations. The pure culture is now growing in its third generation.