Search

This paper included the diversity and distribution of collembolan fauna in Jharkhand. A checklist of collembolan fauna from Jharkhand has been formulated. Endemic species from Jharkhand have also been reported. Affinities between species and habitat as well as another species of Collembola is basic character for diversity as well as distribution. Different types of methodologies have been deployed for collection from distinctive habitats. Climatic conditions are the limiting factor for species distribution and endemism. Lepidocyrtus is the most diverse and distributed genus. Isotomurus is the highest endemic genus. Some collembolan fauna from Jharkhand are prevailing only in this state while some are distributed in different biogeographic zone in world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates shared reading between parents and young children, theorised as 'sensory affinities', understood through a sociological lens. I argue that reading cannot be confined to educational aspects, and towards increased prominence for relational dimensions. I explore the narratives of 29 parents/carers of reading with young children. Drawing on data on the embodied aspects of reading, Mason's concept of affinities illuminates the sensory facets of reading applied to family intimacies. Interventions have hitherto distilled literacy from the wider social context. However, an understanding of reading in the context of families from diverse backgrounds, yields insights into the sensory character of everyday family life. Findings are of significance to sociology broadly, and specifically, families and relationships. Centring families facilitates a fuller understanding of literacy practices. Finally, the focus on an everyday, tangible practice such as reading can support understandings of hidden and taken-for-granted dimensions of family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing B cell affinity to pathogen‐specific antigens prior to or following exposure could facilitate the assessment of immune status. Current standard tools to assess antigen‐specific B cell responses focus on equilibrium binding of the secreted antibody in serum. These methods are costly, time‐consuming, and assess antibody affinity under zero force. Recent findings indicate that force may influence BCR‐antigen binding interactions and thus immune status. Herein, a simple laminar flow microfluidic chamber in which the antigen (hemagglutinin of influenza A) is bound to the chamber surface to assess antigen‐specific BCR binding affinity of five hemagglutinin‐specific hybridomas from 65 to 650 pN force range is designed. The results demonstrate that both increasing shear force and bound lifetime can be used to enrich antigen‐specific high‐affinity B cells. The affinity of the membrane‐bound BCR in the flow chamber correlates well with the affinity of the matched antibodies measured in solution. These findings demonstrate that a microfluidic strategy can rapidly assess BCR‐antigen‐binding properties and identify antigen‐specific high‐affinity B cells. This strategy has the potential to both assess functional immune status from peripheral B cells and be a cost‐effective way of identifying individual B cells as antibody sources for a range of clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant emphasis in Scandinavian cities on vital urban spaces and creative unfolding in urban development, there is a tendency towards designing for “finished” urban spaces with a pre-defined conclusion. The result is often standardised design and staged play, ignoring the diversity of lived experiences taking place in the here and now. How can urban spaces be generated to accommodate unforeseen encounters fostering moments of intensity, affect, and disorder? In this article, we explore the potential of improvisation in urban spaces by examining how urban public spaces facilitate improvisation in interactions between places, senses, materials, and participants. Improvisation is understood as a productive force in urban development that gives space to what occurs in urban encounters. The article draws on Richard Sennett’s concept of “disorder” and Jennifer Mason’s concept of “affinity.” By using design experiments and sensory and visual methods inspired by ethnographic methodology the article analyses two improvisational practices occurring in public spaces in Norway and Denmark, which emphasise the performative, affective, and sensory elements of urban life. The analysis brings forth a discussion of how improvisation unfolds in multimodal urban encounters, between order and disorder, and sensory and emotional connections. The authors argue for a more place-sensitive form of city-making and more improvisatorial urban designs that stimulate varied, spontaneous, and changeable use.

How might a painter or a painting correspond? In this dialogue, artists Rebecca Fortnum and Kelly Chorpening explore the ambiguity of the word correspondence as a creative method in painting. They examine the word as a set of equivalences or affinities, forged through the act of painting, as well as painting as a form of address. They evoke Charles Baudelaire's poem 'Correspondences' (1857) and its many translations as a starting point to explore how things and ideas co-respond. Their discussion thinks through the relation between touch and sight within the painting process and how gestures or marks represent spatial dimensions and materialities. Debating ideas of mediation and copying suggested by the notion of correspondence, they propose that the term may be useful in allowing painters to forge multiple and varied connections and explore coincidences with and through their subject. Painting is positioned as a form of co-response that happens across time, allowing the painter to form correlations between past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the significant emphasis in Scandinavian cities on vital urban spaces and creative unfolding in urban development, there is a tendency towards designing for "finished" urban spaces with a pre-defined conclusion. The result is often standardised design and staged play, ignoring the diversity of lived experiences taking place in the here and now. How can urban spaces be generated to accommodate unforeseen encounters fostering moments of intensity, affect, and disorder? In this article, we explore the potential of improvisation in urban spaces by examining how urban public spaces facilitate improvisation in interactions between places, senses, materials, and participants. Improvisation is understood as a productive force in urban development that gives space to what occurs in urban encounters. The article draws on Richard Sennett's concept of "disorder" and Jennifer Mason's concept of "affinity." By using design experiments and sensory and visual methods inspired by ethnographic methodology the article analyses two improvisational practices occurring in public spaces in Norway and Denmark, which emphasise the performative, affective, and sensory elements of urban life. The analysis brings forth a discussion of how improvisation unfolds in multimodal urban encounters, between order and disorder, and sensory and emotional connections. The authors argue for a more place-sensitive form of city-making and more improvisatorial urban designs that stimulate varied, spontaneous, and changeable use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Ageing in place' is a key component of UK policy, aimed at supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. Although wide-ranging, the scholarly literature in this field has not sufficiently examined the interconnections between ageing in place and the changing experience of 'home' over time. This article addresses this gap in a novel way by bringing together qualitative secondary analysis of longitudinal data with critical literature on 'home' and Mason's cutting-edge concept of 'affinities' to understand the multi-dimensionality of home in relation to ageing in place. The article makes significant methodological, empirical, and theoretical contributions to the field of scholarship on home, by demonstrating how homes are made and unmade over time. Discussions of home emerged organically in the longitudinal data that focused on people's travel and transport use, allowing our qualitative secondary analysis approach to look anew at how experiences of home are dynamically shaped by people's potent connections inside and outside the dwelling. Presenting an empirical analysis of four case studies, the article suggests that future discussions in the field of ageing in place should pay closer attention to the factors that shape experiences of the un/making of home over time, such as how deteriorating physical and mental health can shape how people experience their dwelling and neighbourhood as well as their relationships across these settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Social Work is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Within this paper, we develop what we describe as an ethics of the bodies, which operationalises how design researchers and design students can deal with ethics through embodied reflections. Contrasting an "ethics of the eyes" and an ethics of the bodies, we argue that there are benefits when developing and using a sensory practice as an ethical approach when conducting design research in order to deal with ethics in situ and reflecting ethical dimensions that can be slippery to grasp. Based on an analysis of two empirical examples from design research projects, the paper contributes an approach for how design researchers, and students in design education, can work methodologically to activate a sensory approach to ethics by developing an ethics of the bodies. • Developing an ethics of the bodies provides a sensory reflective approach to ethics. • Some types of ethics shall be reflected and handled in situ. • Design students must learn to handle ethics through an embodied scholarship. • Treating doubt as positive can motivate a search for ethical understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates transnational families' experiences of the COVID‐19 pandemic outbreak and the accompanying sudden and unexpected travel restrictions. Our data consist of written stories collected in April–June 2020 from migrants with ageing kin living in another country. For many respondents, the situation provoked an acutely felt urge for physical proximity with their families. By analysing their experiences of 'not being there', we seek to understand what exactly made the urge to 'be there' so forceful. Bringing into dialogue literature on transnational families with Jennifer Mason's recent theoretical work on affinities, we move the focus from families' transnational caregiving practices to the potent connections between family members. We argue that this approach can open important avenues for future research on families—transnational or otherwise—because it sheds light on the multisensory and often ineffable charges between family members that serve to connect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reflects on how we read the classics from our location in South Africa, in conversation with the other essays in the special issue. How do our reading spaces shape our reading and re-reading of classic works of literature which come to hold meaning for us? How is our "sense of discovery" of a classic work re-ignited by conversations, spoken and written? How do we make, and re-make, connections between texts and contexts of reading, over time, and in different places? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to determine predictors and moderators of tourism well-being among destination emotions (DES) (total, joy, love, and positive surprise), loneliness (UCLA) (total, affinities, and isolation) and reasons to travel. Regression and moderation analyses were carried out; factor analysis (exploratory and confirmatory) to validate the emotions destination scale were performed. Marital status, family as a reason to travel, love (DES), positive surprise (DES), and affinities (UCLA) explain tourism well-being variance. Of the motivations for traveling, only family and work proved to moderate the relationship between DES and its subscales and tourism well-being. Traveling in Portugal or abroad was a moderator in the relationship between DES and its subscales and tourism well-being. The relationship between destination emotions and tourism well-being is stronger when people do not travel for family or work; this relationship is also stronger when people travel within Portugal than when traveling outside Portugal.

Leafhoppers (family: Cicadellidae) are among the most common plant sap-sucking pests, causing damage to wild and agronomic plants worldwide. The current paper aims to assess the zoogeography, diversity and population dynamics of the leafhopper species in an agricultural land converted ecosystem. Twenty species (two identified only to the genus level) belonging to 17 genera, 10 tribes, and three subfamilies were collected from Toshka Region, Aswan Governorate, Egypt, in 2020. The most common cicadellid species was Orosius albicinctus, representing 46.7% of the total catch. Low values of species richness and diversity were measured for leafhopper species as compared with those reported in our recent study carried out in Alexandria and Qena governorates. In sum, conversion of any natural ecosystem to agricultural land uses may cause declines in insect diversity. However, desert conversion may increase the diversity pattern of some insect pests. Analysis of the zoogeographic affinities of the leafhopper species from Toshka Region indicated a closer affiliation to the Palaearctic Region (35%) than any other region. Most leafhopper populations exhibited a unimodal seasonal pattern and were abundant in hot and dry months (May–September). The abundance of some leafhopper species correlated positively with temperature (seven species) and negatively with relative humidity (nine species). Six of these species correlated with both variables. This study is the first to investigate leafhopper communities in a converted ecosystem of Toshka Depression, Western Desert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we study some conics defined, up to dilatation, by an affinity of the plane. We discuss the mutual relations between the conic and the defining affinity and, in particular, we show how to reproduce affinities related to a given conic. As an application of the theory, we show that the orbital conics of equiaffinities are dilatations of the considered conics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection and staging of Alzheimer's disease (AD) using non-invasive imaging biomarkers is of substantial clinical importance. Positron emission tomography (PET) provides readouts to uncover molecular alterations in the brains of AD patients with high sensitivity and specificity. A variety of amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau PET tracers are already available for the clinical diagnosis of AD, but there is still a lack of imaging biomarkers with high affinity and selectivity for tau inclusions in primary tauopathies, such as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), corticobasal degeneration (CBD) and Pick's disease (PiD). This review aims to provide an overview of the existing Aβ and tau PET imaging biomarkers and their binding properties from in silico , in vitro , and in vivo assessment. Imaging biomarkers for pathologic proteins are vital for clinical diagnosis, disease staging and monitoring of the potential therapeutic approaches of AD. Off-target binding of radiolabeled tracers to white matter or other neural structures is one confounding factor when interpreting images. To improve binding properties such as binding affinity and to eliminate off-target binding, second generation of tau PET tracers have been developed. To conclude, we further provide an outlook for imaging tauopathies and other pathological features of AD and primary tauopathies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ceropegia jilongensis, a new species from Jilong, Xizang, China, is described and illustrated. This species is similar to C. hookeri, but clearly differs in its indumentum of pedicel and corolla tube, ovoid cage size, corolla lobes and interstaminal corona lobes shape. It is also similar to C. salicifolia and C. angustifolia, but easily distinguished by its leaf shape, peduncle length, indumentum of pedicel and corolla tube, interstaminal corona lobes shape. A comparison table of related species is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Límite: Revista de Estudios Portugueses y de la Lusofonía is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Orientation: This article is about the experience of meaningful work for self-employed individuals. Research purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore how meaningful work is experienced by self-employed individuals. Motivation for the study: Research tends to focus on meaningful work from either the formally employed individual or the organisational perspective, and very little research has included the perspective of self-employed individuals. The number of employed individuals considering self-employment, however, has increased since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which triggered a global recession that has resulted in a substantial number of job losses and questionable job security in various employment sectors. Research design/approach and method: This was an interactive qualitative study to explore the experience of meaningful work for self-employed individuals. A social constructionist paradigm was adopted to study participants’ attitudes towards their work, their values and feelings, what drives them and their perceptions of meaningful work. Data was collected and analysed from a purposive sample of five self-employed individuals. Main findings: This study revealed that purpose is the primary driver in self-employed individuals’ experience of meaningful work. Purpose facilitates feeling stimulated and creative expression. Cooperation encourages participation in meaningful work. Fulfilment is the primary outcome of self-employed individuals’ experience of meaningful work. Practical/managerial implications: Self-employed individuals can create opportunities for meaningful work. This study provides an understanding of the experience of self-employed individuals when they perform work they consider meaningful and the implications thereof. Contribution/value-add: This study complemented existing literature on meaningful work and literature on self-employment, and may facilitate the experience of meaningfulness by the growing number of self-employed individuals.

This study aims to determine predictors and moderators of tourism well-being among destination emotions (DES) (total, joy, love, and positive surprise), loneliness (UCLA) (total, affinities, and isolation) and reasons to travel. Regression and moderation analyses were carried out; factor analysis (exploratory and confirmatory) to validate the emotions destination scale were performed. Marital status, family as a reason to travel, love (DES), positive surprise (DES), and affinities (UCLA) explain tourism well-being variance. Of the motivations for traveling, only family and work proved to moderate the relationship between DES and its subscales and tourism well-being. Traveling in Portugal or abroad was a moderator in the relationship between DES and its subscales and tourism well-being. The relationship between destination emotions and tourism well-being is stronger when people do not travel for family or work; this relationship is also stronger when people travel within Portugal than when traveling outside Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the use of interactive qualitative analysis (IQA), as a research methodology, to develop an understanding of students’ experiences of learning statistics in a threshold concepts-enriched tutorial programme. Interactive qualitative analysis methodology offered a systematic, rigorous and accountable approach to conducting qualitative research. The participants constructed their own meaning of reality from their experiences of interacting with the phenomenon in context and, in its refutation of traditional qualitative norms of enquiry that casts the role of the researcher as the expert, IQA stands out – entrusting participants with data generation, analysis and interpretation. Participants’ reflections of their experiences of the phenomenon under study are classified according to variously identified emergent themes called ‘affinities’. Relationships between these affinities are extricated and characterised in a visual representation of the phenomenon called a systems influence diagram. Thus, the researcher’s role was purely facilitative, greatly limiting the potential for skewed power relations and bias which is often hazardous in qualitative research. The paramount value of this article was that it offered a practical methodological approach to using IQA in qualitative statistics education research, in particular, and mathematical sciences education research, in general. A summarised account of the main findings of the broader study was also presented.

Much of the scholarship on poor Black urban communities focuses on social disorganization at the neighborhood level and how Blacks experience various institutional inequalities that impact their access to quality education and housing, jobs, and equitable public transportation. But Black social life is not a monolith of chaos, subjugation, and inequalities, nor is it confined to stationary neighborhoods. Black urban life is in fact vibrant, celebratory, and communal. Using two years of ethnographic observations on Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains, we highlight the sociality of Black mobile experiences within Black spaces. Specifically, we examine how Blacks, while traveling into and through majority Black communities, form positive intraracial relationships that we refer to as Black transit affinities, which are a type of actively developed, temporal, meaningful interactions that take place on mobile systems. These transit affinities move beyond linked fate and solidarity but are actively formed and have four distinctive features, they are: 1) personal; 2) mutually engaged; 3) actively maintained although interrupted by stops on the bus or train; and, 4) particular to majority-minority areas of the city. These transit affinities are intraracial and were not observed, as defined, interracially or in majority White areas of the city. We do not argue that they are exclusive to Blacks but that they took place among Blacks in Black spaces that have often been ascribed a narrative of disorganization, violence, and social fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have applied social network analysis (SNA) to data on voluntary cow movement through a sort gate in an automatic milking system to identify pairs of cows that repeatedly passed through a sort gate in close succession (affinity pairs). The SNA was applied to social groups defined by four pens on a dairy farm, each served by an automatic milking system (AMS). Each pen was equipped with an automatic sorting gate that identified when cows voluntarily moved from the resting area to either milking or feeding areas. The aim of this study was two-fold: to determine if SNA could identify affinity pairs and to determine if milk production was affected when affinity pairs where broken. Cow traffic and milking performance data from a commercial guided-flow AMS dairy farm were used. Average number of milked cows was 214 ± 34, distributed in four AMS over 1 year. The SNA was able to identify clear affinity pairs and showed when these pairings were formed and broken as cows entered and left the social group (pen). The trend in all four pens was toward higher-than-expected milk production during periods of affinity. Moreover, we found that when affinities were broken (separation of cow pairs) the day-to-day variability in milk production was three times higher than for cows in an affinity pair. The results of this exploratory study suggest that SNA could be potentially used as a tool to reduce milk yield variation and better understand the social dynamics of dairy cows supporting management and welfare decisions.

In 1917, the heart of the World War I, but also the 4th centenary of Luther's Reformation, the germanist of Alsatian origin Charles Andler suggests to Xavier Léon, the manager of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, that a special issue should be dedicated to this anniversary, so as not to leave all the prestige to Germany. The result is a rich correspondence between Andler, Léon, his friend Élie Halévy, Maurice Blondel, Ferdinand Buisson and others ones. This allows understanding the "trade secrets" of a prestigious review, forced to take into account the qualities and the reputations of the potential contributors, but also, their national and denominational identities, even if it had to stay Universalist and secular. Eighteen months later appears a big number (425 pages), À propos du quatrième centenaire de la Réforme, which includes French authors and foreigners, Protestants but also Catholics (Pierre Imbart de La Tour and Jacques Chevalier), very widely dedicated to a geopolitics of the confessions and to its political, economic and cultural influences on the contemporary world. The result is uneven: here it states the musing of the old Émile Doumergue on Calvin's filiation to president Wilson, via Knox or Locke, but also a first adaptation in French of Ernst Troeltsch's theories dues to Edmond Vermeil, who was going to become a specialist of Germany of Weimar and the Nazism. The Swiss Carl Albrecht Bernoulli multiplies the overviews sometimes risky, but often fertile, in particular when he announces the appearance of the "tragic citizen". The commemorative aim moved in inventory of the modern world and the foresight of the history to come.

Plague is a zoonotic disease that is caused by Yersinia pestis. Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that bind to the V-antigen, a virulence factor that is produced by Y. pestis, can passively protect mice from plague. An analysis of protective mAbs that bind to V-antigen was made to assess binding sites, avidities, and affinities. Anti-V mAbs were screened for their efficacy in a murine model of plague. Antigen-binding sites of protective V mAbs were determined with a linear peptide library, V-antigen fragment, competitive binding, and surface plasmon resonance. The avidities to the V-antigen was determined by ELISA, and affinities of the mAbs to the V-antigen were determined by surface plasmon resonance. The most protective mAb 7.3 bound to a unique conformational site on the V-antigen, while a less protective mAb bound to a different conformational site located on the same V-antigen fragment as mAb 7.3. The avidity of mAb 7.3 for the V-antigen was neither the strongest overall nor did it have the highest affinity for the V-antigen. The binding site of the most protective mAb was critical in its ability to protect against a lethal plague challenge.

This article explores how mundane objects are passed on through kinship networks and how these practices become part of the 'doing' of family and kinship. Using Mason's concept of affinities, I illuminate four strands of material affinities, each of which illustrates how passed on objects can reproduce, imagine and memorialise kin connections both biological and social, and in and through time. Crucially, I argue that it is everyday objects in use which reveal how materiality and kinship are woven together. By starting from the object rather than the subject material affinities are brought to life, illustrating how materials are inscribed with kinship both physically and imaginatively, but in turn inscribe kinship practices, operating as central characters in family narratives. The article stems from research exploring everyday contemporary thrift and involved one-to-one interviews and a Mass Observation Directive on the subject of 'Being thrifty'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fourteenth century witnessed a considerable change in the way in which knights were retained in royal service in England. The system of retaining 'household knights', which had been in operation since at least the twelfth century, gave way to a new system based around the retaining of 'chamber knights' and 'king's knights'. These new ranks were retained in different ways to the household knights and often performed different functions. Consequently, the place they occupied in fourteenth-century kingship was markedly different. Despite the significance of this development, the scholarship on it has been limited and often contradictory. This article offers a detailed reassessment of how and why this development occurred and what its impacts were for the fourteenth-century polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the 'south' and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with 'de-colonial theory', and with 'southern' theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, 'southern' is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent 're-awakenings' in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs in-depth qualitative interviews with Arab fans of Korean popular culture who live in Qatar to examine their cultural translation of Korean TV drama and K-pop music. It uses a transcultural approach to fandom studies, rather than foregrounding nationality as an analytic category. It focuses on fans’ appropriations of these cultural texts in relation to their affinities, feelings, emotions, and accumulations of cultural capital used to negotiate their consumption of Korean popular culture. This article identifies emotions of frustration and fascination as central to these fans’ transnational media engagement. It thereby shows that affinity is a central concern for research on transcultural receptions of non-Western cultures by non-Western audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zeliangrong is a collective nomenclature of four sub-structured tribes formed by the first syllables of the names of three tribal groups- Zeme, Liangmai and Rongmei. However, the nomenclature Zeliangrong is believed to encompass four tribal groups- Zeme, Liangmai, Rongmei and Inpui, believed to be cognate groups. Linguistically they belong to Naga-Bodo subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family. There are many written documents where the Zeliangrong are claimed to come from the same ancestor and their origin and migration are well narrated through myths, legends and traditions. However, none have carried out studies based on genetic markers. Aims: Allelic variation and haplotype diversity of the dopamine receptor gene DRD2 among the four sub-population of Zeliangrong Naga of Manipur. Methods: 292 unrelated individuals belonging to 4 tribal groups of Manipur, India were screened using the three TaqI sites (TaqIA,TaqIB, and TaqID). Results and Discussion: All the three sites are found to be polymorphic with greater interpopulation variation seen at the TaqlA site. The overall allele frequencies among the four presently studied groups show close resemblances with each other and indicate a common ancestry for Zeliangrong which is reaffirmed by haplotypes analysis (share seven of the eight haplotypes). Average heterozygosity, analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) and neighbor-joining tree analysis (constructed from the genetic distance matrix) reveals strong genetic affinities of Zeliangrong populations of Manipur with Chinese populations rather than with other Indian populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The red‐emitting indolium derivative compound (E)‐2‐(4‐(diphenylamino)styryl)‐1,3,3‐trimethyl‐3H‐indol‐1‐ium iodide (H3) was demonstrated as a sensitive membrane fluorescence probe. The probe located at the interface of liposomes when mixed showed much fluorescence enhancement by inhibiting the twisted intramolecular charge transfer state. After ultrasonic treatment, it penetrated into lipid bilayers with the emissions leveling off and a rather large encapsulation efficiency (71.4%) in liposomes. The ζ‐potential and particle size measurement confirmed that the charged indolium group was embedded deeply into lipid bilayers. The probe was then used to monitor the affinities of antioxidant flavonoids for membranes. It was verified that quercetin easily interacted with liposomes and dissociated the probe from the internal lipid within 60 s under the condition of simply mixing. The assessment of binding affinities of six flavonoids and the coincident results with their antioxidation activities indicated that it was a promising membrane probe for the study of drug bio‐affinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]