Characterizing early drug resistance-related events using geometric ensembles from HIV protease dynamics:
- Authors: Amamuddy, Olivier S , Bishop, Nigel T , Tastan Bishop, Özlem
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/148126 , vital:38712 , DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-36041-8
- Description: The use of antiretrovirals (ARVs) has drastically improved the life quality and expectancy of HIV patients since their introduction in health care. Several millions are still afflicted worldwide by HIV and ARV resistance is a constant concern for both healthcare practitioners and patients, as while treatment options are finite, the virus constantly adapts via complex mutation patterns to select for resistant strains under the pressure of drug treatment. The HIV protease is a crucial enzyme for viral maturation and has been a game changing drug target since the first application. Due to similarities in protease inhibitor designs, drug cross-resistance is not uncommon across ARVs of the same class.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Niq Mhlongo told us# FeesMustFall, or why the surface matters in Dog Eat Dog:
- Authors: Dass, Minesh
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142609 , vital:38095 , DOI: 10.4314/eia.v45i3.6
- Description: In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion – subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study’s unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline’s predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo’s text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Rinistachya hilleri gen. et sp. nov.(Sphenophyllales), from the upper Devonian of South Africa
- Authors: Prestianni, Cyrille , Gess, Robert W
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/73883 , vital:30238 , https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-018-0385-3
- Description: A rich and diverse plant assemblage has been excavated from latest Devonian (Famennian) black shales of the Witpoort Formation (Witteberg Group) at Waterloo Farm, close to the city of Grahamstown (South Africa). Several specimens of a new sphenopsid have been collected. The description of this as a new taxon, here named Rinistachya hilleri, gen. et sp. nov., provides an important addition to the scarce early record of the group. Rinistachya hilleri presents a novel architecture that include apparently plesiomorphic characters, reminiscent of the organisation of the Iridopteridales (including the production of two types of laterals at one node, the location of fertile parts in loose whorls on lateral branches and an organisation of the fertile parts in which they branch several times before bearing distally elongate sporangia). Other characters unambiguously nest Rinistachya within the Sphenopsida (including presence of planate and slightly webbed ultimate appendages and lateral strobili made of successive whorls of fertile leaves with fertile parts located at their axil). This provides strong support for a close relationship between Sphenopsida and Iridopteridales. Rinistachya furthermore represents the first record of a Devonian sphenopsid from Gondwana and extends the known distribution of the Sphenopsida from the tropics to very high palaeolatitudes. It is a new sphenopsid with a peculiar organisation. The new taxon allows better characterization of the initial evolutionary radiation at the base of the group.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Silent and Complex Histories: in conversation with Buhlebezwe Siwani
- Authors: Makandula, Sikhumbuzo
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147236 , vital:38607 , https://artthrob.co.za/2018/11/05/silent-and-complex-histories-in-conversation-with-buhlebezwe-siwani/
- Description: A feature by Sikhumbuzo Makandula on the 5th of November 2018
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- Date Issued: 2018
The determination of CHARMM force field parameters for the Mg2+ containing HIV-1 integrase:
- Authors: Musyoka, Thommas M , Tastan Bishop, Özlem , Lobb, Kevin A , Moses, Vuyani
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/148139 , vital:38713 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cplett.2018.09.019
- Description: The HIV integrase enzyme is a validated drug target. However, its potential has remained largely unexploited until recently due to lack of structural and mechanistic information. Its catalytic core domain (CCD) is crucial for the viral-human DNA integration making integrase an ideal target for inhibitor design. However, in order to do so, force field parameters for the integrase magnesium ion need to be established. Quantum mechanical calculations were used to derive force field parameters which were validated through molecular dynamics studies. Our results show that the parameters determined accurately maintain the integrity of the metal pocket of the integrase CCD.
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- Date Issued: 2018
“Having it all”?’: ”?:(re) examining conspicuous consumption and pernicious masculinities in South African chick-lit
- Authors: Spencer, Lynda G
- Date: 2018
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/138798 , vital:37673 , https://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC-13f7e3010
- Description: A number of South African women writers have taken up chick-lit as a form of writing that enables them to reflect on the experiences of the modern woman in post-apartheid South Africa. The protagonists portrayed in chick-lit narratives occupy ambiguous positions: they may have benefitted from feminist politics, which has opened new possibilities for them; however, underlying this emancipation is an implicit collusion with patriarchy. Chick-lit refuses to offer a clear-cut construct of women’s lives; instead, it suggests a problematic terrain that is inherently ambiguous and contradictory, simultaneously empowering and oppressing women. It depicts a realistic world where contemporary women critique patriarchy and attempt to break free of its stranglehold by finding new methods of self-realisation. In this article, I argue that as a genre chick-lit offers a space of recognition and reflection for women who share a similar world view and emotional knowledge that stems from a common historical experience.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Using a transdisciplinary framework to examine mathematics classroom talk taking place in and through a second language
- Authors: Graven, Mellony , Robertson, Sally-Ann
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/69838 , vital:29586 , https://DOI: 10.1007/s11858-018-0952-2
- Description: This paper proposes a transdisciplinary framework to allow for a multifocal exploration of classroom talk practices. It draws on data from a broader study of talk in South African Grade 4 mathematics classrooms where the language of teaching and learning (English) was the home language for neither the teachers nor their students. Lesson transcript data from one teacher’s lessons on fractions are used to demonstrate how working with three strands of conceptual insight from the disciplines of psychology, sociology and linguistics conduces to a potentially richer understanding of a teacher’s use of classroom talk in mediating her students’ mathematical understanding. By drawing on elements of Vygotsky’s sociocultural psychology, we make visible in the lesson data the ways in which this teacher used the ‘everyday’ in trying to navigate her students’ towards more ‘scientific’ conceptualizations of unit fractions. By then taking up aspects of Bernstein’s sociological work, we articulate, and make visible, how societal circumstances impinge on students’ access to exploratory mathematical discourse needed for epistemological access to abstract and generalized mathematical concepts. Finally, through Halliday’s work on the power of particular linguistic registers for meaning-making, we highlight challenges in learning mathematics in and through a second language and reveal the constraints placed on students’ opportunity to maximally exploit the distinct forms of meaning contained within the mathematics register.
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- Date Issued: 2009