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Trees with weeping shoot architectures are valued for their beauty and serve as tremendous resources for understanding how plants regulate posture control. ThePrunus persica(peach) weeping phenotype, which has elliptical downward arching branches, is caused by a homozygous mutation in theWEEPgene. Until now, little was known about the function of WEEP protein despite its high conservation throughout Plantae. Here, we present the results of anatomical, biochemical, biomechanical, physiological, and molecular experiments that provide insight into WEEP function. Our data suggest that weeping peach does not have defects in branch structure. Rather, transcriptomes from the adaxial (upper) and abaxial (lower) sides of standard and weeping branch shoot tips revealed flipped expression patterns for genes associated with early auxin response, tissue patterning, cell elongation, and tension wood development.This suggests that WEEP promotes polar auxin transport toward the lower side during shoot gravitropic response, leading to cell elongation and tension wood development. In addition, weeping peach trees exhibited steeper root systems and faster root gravitropic response, just as barley and wheat with mutations in theirWEEPhomologEGT2. This suggests that the role of WEEP in regulating lateral organ angles and orientations during gravitropism may be conserved. Additionally, size-exclusion chromatography indicated that WEEP proteins self-oligomerize, like other SAM-domain proteins. This oligomerization may be required for WEEP to function in formation of protein complexes during auxin transport. Collectively, our results from weeping peach provide new insight into polar auxin transport mechanisms associated with gravitropism and lateral shoot and root orientation.

The vita of the reformed prostitute Mary of Egypt was a popular narrative in the middle ages, but its appeal is enigmatic to a modern audience. This study explores the narrative power of the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt through an analysis of its hermeneutic structure: the narrative constantly foregrounds the importance of the reader in the hermeneutic circle, moving back and forth between the "known" of the reader's expectations, and the "unknown" of the text's silences. On another level, the vita also depicts the impulse to transcend the too-familiar limitations of the flesh, and ascend into the undiscovered realms of the spirit. In order to represent this deep loathing of the body, the narrative constructs a binary opposition between the masculine ascetic body and the feminine sexual body, both in turn characterized by opposing notions of somatic integrity. The foundation and transgression of boundaries – again a dialectic between known and unknown -- extends to the topographical representations of the narrative and the ritualistic patterns traversing these boundaries. The text's complex rhetoric of boundaries and transgressions is a hermeneutic strategy used to explore the meaning of masculine bodily experience.

The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to beput into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is the negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: “One cannot find the words”, etc. A lot of searching must bedone tofind new rulesfor forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by a feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by thefeeling to have been useless. What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.Jean-Francois Lyotard