Rubbing Elbows and Blowing Smoke: Gender, Class, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Patent Office.

The United States Patent Office of the 1850s offers a rare opportunity to analyze the early gendering of science. In its crowded rooms, would-be scientists shared a workplace with women earning equal pay for equal work. Scientific men worked as patent examiners, claiming this new occupation as scientific in opposition to those seeking to separate science and technology. At the same time, in an unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, female clerks were hired to work alongside male clerks. This article examines the controversies surrounding these workers through the lens of manners and deportment. In the unique context of a workplace combining scientific men and working ladies, office behavior revealed the deep assumption that the emerging American scientist was male and middle class.

The Doctor's Dilemma: Paternalisms in the Medicolegal History of Assisted Reproduction and Abortion.

This article analyzes the comparative history of the law and practice of abortion and assisted reproduction in the United States to consider the interplay between medical paternalism and legal paternalism. It supplements existing critiques of paternalism as harmful to women's equality with the medical perspective, as revealed through the writings of Alan F. Guttmacher, to consider when legal regulation might be warranted.

Epigenetic regulation of milk production in dairy cows.

It is well established that milk production of the dairy cow is a function of mammary epithelial cell (MEC) number and activity and that these factors can be influenced by diverse environmental influences and management practises (nutrition, milk frequency, photoperiod, udder health, hormonal and local effectors). Thus, understanding how the mammary gland is able to respond to these environmental cues provides a huge potential to enhance milk production of the dairy cow. In recent years our understanding of molecular events within the MEC underlying bovine lactation has been advanced through mammary microarray studies and will be further advanced through the recent availability of the bovine genome sequence. In addition, the potential of epigenetic regulation (non-sequence inheritable chemical changes in chromatin, such as DNA methylation and histone modifications, which affect gene expression) to manipulate mammary function is emerging. We propose that a substantial proportion of unexplained phenotypic variation in the dairy cow is due to epigenetic regulation. Heritability of epigenetic marks also highlights the potential to modify lactation performance of offspring. Understanding the response of the MEC (cell signaling pathways and epigenetic mechanisms) to external stimuli will be an important prerequisite to devising new technologies for maximising their activity and, hence, milk production in the dairy cow.

Uberolysin: a novel cyclic bacteriocin produced by Streptococcus uberis.

Streptococcus uberis is commonly found in the environment and in association with various bovine body sites and is a major cause of bovine mastitis. Moreover, S. uberis is known to produce a variety of bacteriocin-like inhibitory substances, antimicrobial agents that generally inhibit closely related bacterial species. In this respect, S. uberis strain 42 has previously been shown to produce a novel nisin variant named nisin U. This paper reports that, in addition to nisin U, S. uberis strain 42 produces a second bacteriocin that induces the lysis of metabolically active, susceptible target bacteria and which has therefore been named uberolysin. Isolation of the native active antimicrobial agent revealed that uberolysin is a 7048 Da peptide that is refractory to sequence analysis by Edman degradation. Transposon mutagenesis was used to generate a uberolysin-negative mutant of S. uberis 42 and sequencing of DNA flanking the insertion site revealed, in addition to the structural gene (ublA), several open reading frames likely to be involved in post-translational modification, transport and producer self-protection (immunity), and possibly in regulation of the biosynthetic gene cluster. In addition, a pair of direct repeats that may be involved in bacteriocin acquisition were identified; indeed, ublA could be identified in 18 % of tested S. uberis strains. Enzymic hydrolysis of uberolysin was used to confirm that ublA does indeed encode the precursor of uberolysin, that an unusually short leader sequence of only six amino acids is cleaved during processing of the mature peptide and that uberolysin is post-translationally covalently modified to form a head-to-tail monocycle. Thus, uberolysin is a unique cyclic bacteriocin, belonging to the same family of bacteriocins as enterocin AS-48 and circularin A.

Expression of a beta-defensin mRNA, lingual antimicrobial peptide, in bovine mammary epithelial tissue is induced by mastitis.

The expression of a beta-defensin, the lingual antimicrobial peptide (LAP), in response to mastitis was investigated by real-time PCR of RNA from mastitic and control udder quarters. There was a positive relationship between somatic cell count in milk and LAP expression. In situ hybridization showed that LAP mRNA was expressed in epithelial cells of mastitic tissue. These results suggest that LAP plays a role in the innate immune response to mastitis.