Deciding the character and level of official patronage of religion are fundamental questions for all states. Yet we know next to nothing about the determinants of such patronage. Are democratic ...governments more or less inclined than autocratic ones to seek legitimacy through religious patronage? Is it ultimately ideological struggles that determine the extent of government backing of religion? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of the evolution of the state’s role as patron and protector of Buddhism (and other officially recognized religions) in Thailand. Specifically, it examines changes in government expenditure on Thailand’s religious bureaucracy from 1960 to 2016. It finds that democratization and ideological struggles have been the main drivers of a significant expansion of government spending on religious patronage.
Does religion shape political competition in Thailand? Despite the prominence of religiously inflected rhetoric of good and evil in contemporary political contestation, existing research suggests ...that it does not. This article challenges this conventional wisdom. Survey data collected in connection with Thailand’s 2019 general election, which marked a transition from direct military rule to a hybrid regime, allow us to examine the political relevance of religious belonging, belief, and behaviour. Our analysis finds evidence for the political salience of a secular/religious cleavage: voters who self-identified as more religious were more inclined to support the main pro-military party Palang Pracharath and its closest allies, whilst more secularised voters tended to support anti-military parties in general and the Future Forward Party in particular. We also find that Thailand’s religious minorities were politically divided: Muslims and Protestants backed the pro-military parties whilst Catholics opposed them. Our analysis underscores the need for more attention to the role of religious cleavages in Thai political contention.
Understanding cell type identity in a multicellular organism requires the integration of gene expression profiles from individual cells with their spatial location in a particular tissue. Current ...technologies allow whole-transcriptome sequencing of spatially identified cells but lack the throughput needed to characterize complex tissues. Here we present a high-throughput method to identify the spatial origin of cells assayed by single-cell RNA-sequencing within a tissue of interest. Our approach is based on comparing complete, specificity-weighted mRNA profiles of a cell with positional gene expression profiles derived from a gene expression atlas. We show that this method allocates cells to precise locations in the brain of the marine annelid Platynereis dumerilii with a success rate of 81%. Our method is applicable to any system that has a reference gene expression database of sufficiently high resolution.
Barnacle settlement involves sensing of a variety of exogenous cues. A pair of antennules is the main sensory organ that the cyprid larva uses to explore the surface. Antennules are equipped with a ...number of setae that have both chemo- and mechanosensing function. The current study explores the repertoire of sensory receptors in Balanus improvisus cyprid antennules with the goal to better understand sensory systems involved in the settling behavior of this species. We carried out transcriptome sequencing of dissected B. improvisus cyprid antennules. The generated transcriptome assembly was used to search for sensory receptors using HMM models. Among potential chemosensory genes, we identified the ionotropic receptors IR25a, IR8a and IR93a, and several divergent IR candidates to be expressed in the cyprid antennules. We found one gustatory-like receptor but no odorant receptors, chemosensory or odorant-binding proteins. Apart from chemosensory receptors, we also identified 13 potential mechanosensory genes represented by several transient receptor potential channels (TRP) subfamilies. Furthermore, we analyzed changes in expression profiles of IRs and TRPs during the B. improvisus settling process. Several of the sensory genes were differentially expressed during the course of larval settlement. This study gives expanded knowledge about the sensory systems present in barnacles, a taxonomic group for which only limited information about receptors is currently available. It furthermore serves as a starting point for more in depth studies of how sensory signaling affects settling behavior in barnacles with implications for preventing biofouling.
Cellulose from wood fibers can be modified for use in flame-retardant composites as an alternative to halogen-based compounds. For this purpose, sulfite dissolving pulp fibers have been chemically ...modified by phosphorylation, and the resulting material has been used to prepare cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) that have a width of approximately 3 nm. The phosphorylation was achieved using (NH4)2HPO4 in the presence of urea, and the degree of substitution by phosphorus was determined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, conductometric titration, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The presence of phosphate groups in the structure of CNF has been found to noticeably improve the flame retardancy of this material. The nanopaper sheets prepared from phosphorylated CNF showed self-extinguishing properties after consecutive applications of a methane flame for 3 s and did not ignite under a heat flux of 35 kW/m2, as shown by flammability and cone calorimetry measurements, respectively.
The effect of initial stages of pulping of spruce, resembling prehydrolysis and alkaline cooking was studied using CP/MAS
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C-NMR, X-ray scattering, FSP and carbohydrate composition in order to ...study the impact of the pre-treatments on the fiber wall nanostructure. Removal of fiber wall components, hemicellulose and lignin, increased the fiber wall porosity and induced cellulose fibril aggregation. The effect of temperature and pH in the treatment on cellulose fibril aggregate size appears to be secondary. It is the removal of hemicellulose that has a profound effect on the supramolecular structure of the cellulose fiber wall. As the amount of hemicellulose dissolved from wood increases, the fibril aggregate size determined by NMR increases as well, ranging from 16 to 28 nm. Specifically, a good correlation between the amount of glucomannan in the fiber wall and the fibril aggregate size is seen. The lower the amount of glucomannan, the larger the aggregate size. Glucomannan thus seems to prevent aggregation as it acts as a very efficient spacer between fibrils. Elemental fibril size determined by NMR, was quite similar for all samples, ranging from 3.6 to 4.1 nm. By combining measurement methods, a more well-resolved picture of the structural changes occurring during was obtained.
A novel type of sponge-like material for the separation of mixed oil and water liquids has been prepared by the vapour deposition of hydrophobic silanes on ultra-porous nanocellulose aerogels. To ...achieve this, a highly porous (>99%) nanocellulose aerogel with high structural flexibility and robustness is first formed by freeze-drying an aqueous dispersion of the nanocellulose. The density, pore size distribution and wetting properties of the aerogel can be tuned by selecting the concentration of the nanocellulose dispersion before freeze-drying. The hydrophobic light- weight aerogels are almost instantly filled with the oil phase when selectively absorbing oil from water, with a capacity to absorb up to 45 times their own weight in oil. The oil can also be drained from the aerogel and the aerogel can then be reused for a second absorption cycle.
The increasing number of sequenced genomes has prompted the development of several automated orthology prediction methods. Tests to evaluate the accuracy of predictions and to explore biases caused ...by biological and technical factors are therefore required. We used 70 manually curated families to analyze the performance of five public methods in Metazoa. We analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the methods and quantified the impact of biological and technical challenges. From the latter part of the analysis, genome annotation emerged as the largest single influencer, affecting up to 30% of the performance. Generally, most methods did well in assigning orthologous group but they failed to assign the exact number of genes for half of the groups. The publicly available benchmark set (http://eggnog.embl.de/orthobench/) should facilitate the improvement of current orthology assignment protocols, which is of utmost importance for many fields of biology and should be tackled by a broad scientific community.
Bio-based nanocellulose has been shown to possess impressive mechanical properties and simplicity for chemical modifications. The chemical properties are largely influenced by the surface area and ...functionality of the nanoscale materials. However, finding the typical cross-sections of nanocellulose, such as cellulose nanofibers (CNFs), has been a long-standing puzzle, where subtle changes in extraction methods seem to yield different shapes and dimensions. Here, we extracted CNFs from wood with two different oxidation methods and variations in degree of oxidation and high-pressure homogenization. The cross-sections of CNFs were characterized by small-angle X-ray scattering and wide-angle X-ray diffraction in dispersed and freeze-dried states, respectively, where the results were analyzed by assuming that the cross-sectional distribution was quantized with an 18-chain elementary microfibril, the building block of the cell wall. We find that the results agree well with a pseudosquare unit having a size of about 2.4 nm regardless of sample, while the aggregate level strongly depends on the extraction conditions. Furthermore, we find that aggregates have a preferred cohesion of phase boundaries parallel to the (110)-plane of the cellulose fibril, leading to a ribbon shape on average.
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