Parkin is an E3 ubiquitin ligase, mutations in which are responsible for autosomal recessive juvenile parkinsonism. Recently, several structures of Parkin have been solved, revealing its serpentine shape and modes of auto-inhibition.

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Counte...

Species with widespread distributions that grow in varied habitats may consist of ecotypes adapted to a particular habitat, or may exhibit cross-tolerance that enables them to exploit a variety of habitats. Populations of Arabidopsis lyrata ssp. lyrata (L.) O'Kane & Al-Shehbaz grow in a wide variety of edaphic settings including serpentine soil, limestone sand, and alluvial flood plains. While ...

Nymphs of Stenoscepa sp. feed on leaves of the Ni hyperaccumulator Berkheya coddii at serpentine sites in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. These sites contain Ni hyperaccumulators, Ni accumulators, and plants with Ni concentrations in the normal range. We conducted studies to: (i) determine the whole-body metal concentration of nymphs (including those starved to empty their guts); (ii) compar...

In ecology, there have been attempts to establish links between the relative species abundance (RSA), the fraction of species in a community with a given abundance, and a power-law form of the species area relationship (SAR), the dependence of species richness on sampling area. However the SAR and other patterns in ecology often do not exhibit power-law behavior over an appreciable range of sca...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Serpentine soils have attracted the attention of evolutionary biologists for decades because of their high number of rare and endemic taxa, though less is known about the ecological factors that govern the diversity and composition of serpentine communities. Theory suggests that vegetation on these low-productivity soils will be relatively resilient to fire, the most common...

A model for serpentine locomotion is derived from a novel perspective based on concepts from configurational mechanics. The motion is realized through the release of the elastic energy of a deformable rod, sliding inside a frictionless channel, which represents a snake moving against lateral restraints. A new formulation is presented, correcting previous results and including situations never a...