GREGORY ROSE (b. 1948)Avebury Stone Circles (2013)

This chapter studies Gregory Rose’s Avebury Stone Circles (2013). This piece immediately grasps attention, as performer’s music par excellence. The composer’s own colourful texts, full of alliteration and syllabic felicities, indicate a close identification with his awe-inspiring subject: the cluster of ancient monuments which include the famed Avebury Ring in Wiltshire. The music mirrors the ritualistic resonances emanating from pre-Christian history. The vocal writing is often spectacular, brimful of huge leaps and lithe melismas, forthright and uninhibited in expression, with the tessitura judged unerringly to make the most of the voice’s timbral shadings. Well-varied piano parts complement and support the voice in exemplary fashion, never overwhelming its expressive nuances, and often providing reassuring pitch-cues. Plain monodies and echo figures, granitic blocks of chords, and fast repeated motifs all feature regularly. Ultimately, the piece bears a distinctive ceremonial flavour that is consistently compelling.

TATTERSHALL CASTLE AND THE NEWLY-BUILT PERSONALITY OF RALPH LORD CROMWELL

Tattershall Castle (Lincolnshire, UK) was built for the Lord Treasurer of England, Ralph Cromwell, in the mid-fifteenth century. Cromwell was a skilled politician who rose from relative obscurity via royal service; however, he never attained high social rank and made significant enemies in the royal council. He is noted to have been a prickly and self-righteous individual who wore his new-found status in society with towering pride. The architecture of Cromwell’s major building project at Tattershall offers clues towards his personality. Architectural details – grouped and repeated motifs such as ancient family armorials, the Treasurer’s purse and the truculent motto ‘Have I not right?’ – may reveal fault lines and anxieties about Ralph’s relative place in society as he struggled for political survival.

JOHN RITCHIE (1921–2014)Four Zhivago Songs (1977)

This chapter explores some New Zealand music from John Ritchie. Compact and tightly structured, this cycle is a model of its kind. It carries a powerfully evocative atmosphere with touching simplicity and directness. Ritchie has a gift for creating distinctive, repeated motifs that stay indelibly in the mind. He writes expertly for the voice, with arching lines in practicable spans, stretching over a wide range without strain. Vocal lines are so finely chiselled that pitches can be plotted with jewel-like precision, with time to gauge each interval cleanly in relation to the piano. The music maintains a natural fluency through changes of tempo and mood, from confiding intimacy and bitter reflection to emotional outpourings.

Characterization of novel Actinobacteriophage Giantsbane reveals potential genomic recombination hotspot and unexpected intra-cluster similarities

ABSTRACTBacteriophages that infect Arthrobacter, a genus of bacteria which play key ecological roles in soil, warrant further study. A novel Actinobacteriophage, Giantsbane, was isolated on Arthrobacter globiformis and purified. Particle stability was tested at various temperatures and salinity concentrations by observing titer differences; unpaired Student’s t-tests revealed these differences to be insignificant. Transmission electron microscopy and Illumina whole-genome sequencing revealed that Giantsbane’s morphology and genome length, respectively, were characteristic of Siphoviridae phages. 94 putative open reading frames were determined using Glimmer, GeneMark, and manual review; none were associated with lysogeny. Giantsbane was placed into phage cluster AU, and SplitsTree and batch ANI analyses revealed similarities with other AU phages. The annotated genome was further analyzed using Phamerator and MEME-Suite, which identified repeated motifs present in several other phages. These findings help further our understanding of the physiological and genomic aspects of phage biology.

Genome-wide microsatellite characteristics of five human Plasmodium species, focusing on Plasmodium malariae and P. ovale curtisi

Microsatellites can be utilized to explore genotypes, population structure, and other genomic features of eukaryotes. Systematic characterization of microsatellites has not been a focus for several species of Plasmodium, including P. malariae and P. ovale, as the majority of malaria elimination programs are focused on P. falciparum and to a lesser extent P. vivax. Here, five human malaria species (P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, P. ovale curtisi, and P. knowlesi) were investigated with the aim of conducting in-depth categorization of microsatellites for P. malariae and P. ovale curtisi. Investigation of reference genomes for microsatellites with unit motifs of 1–10 base pairs indicates high diversity among the five Plasmodium species. Plasmodium malariae, with the largest genome size, displays the second highest microsatellite density (1421 No./Mbp; 5% coverage) next to P. falciparum (3634 No./Mbp; 12% coverage). The lowest microsatellite density was observed in P. vivax (773 No./Mbp; 2% coverage). A, AT, and AAT are the most commonly repeated motifs in the Plasmodium species. For P. malariae and P. ovale curtisi, microsatellite-related sequences are observed in approximately 18–29% of coding sequences (CDS). Lysine, asparagine, and glutamic acids are most frequently coded by microsatellite-related CDS. The majority of these CDS could be related to the gene ontology terms “cell parts,” “binding,” “developmental processes,” and “metabolic processes.” The present study provides a comprehensive overview of microsatellite distribution and can assist in the planning and development of potentially useful genetic tools for further investigation of P. malariae and P. ovale curtisi epidemiology.

Early Experiments in Genre

This chapter focuses on the fiction Poe began writing in the early 1830s. New to the genre, Poe wrote his first tales as ironic experiments in the voices of established authors in the marketplace, which he satirized as an elite literary club where members exchanged and critiqued one another’s tales at invitation-only banquets. The chapter presents a reconstruction of this never-published Folio Club collection and suggests topics for its future exploration: repeated motifs in the members’ tales, ways in which the club’s organization burlesques the systems of production and reviewing in Poe’s print culture, and reiterations of underlying features of the design in the author’s later work.

Introduction

The introduction describes the historical contexts and theoretical framework of the book, beginning with an outline of the method of research. A brief literature review of affect theory in the Japanese context is followed by an introduction to Yoshimoto Takaaki’s Communal Fantasies (Kyōdōgensō ron, 1968). Giles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968) is juxtaposed with Yoshimoto’s philosophical investigation of repeated tropes in Japanese cultural production to form a theoretical framework for the analysis of selected repeated motifs in female cinematic representation that follows. Social changes during the occupation of Japan (1945-1952), particularly as regards roles and rights for women, are presented as key socio-political and historical contexts for the analyses of popular film texts which follow. The chapter concludes with a sample case study analysis of Mizoguchi Kenji’s Five Women Around Utamaro (1946).

The αRep artificial repeat protein scaffold: a new tool for crystallization and live cell applications

We have designed a new family of artificial proteins, named αRep, based on HEAT (acronym for Huntingtin, elongation factor 3 (EF3), protein pphosphatase 2A (PP2A), yeast kinase Tor1) repeat proteins containing an α-helical repeated motif. The sequence of the repeated motifs, first identified in a thermostable archae protein was optimized using a consensus design strategy and used for the construction of a library of artificial proteins. All proteins from this library share the same general fold but differ both in the number of repeats and in five highly randomized amino acid positions within each repeat. The randomized side chains altogether provide a hypervariable surface on αRep variants. Sequences from this library are efficiently expressed as soluble, folded and very stable proteins. αRep binders with high affinity for various protein targets were selected by phage display. Low micromolar to nanomolar dissociation constants between partners were measured and the structures of several complexes (specific αRep/protein target) were solved by X-ray crystallography. Using GFP as a model target, it was demonstrated that αReps can be used as bait in pull-down experiments. αReps can be expressed in eukaryotic cells and specifically interact with their target addressed to different cell compartments.