While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. ...Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated eighty per cent of the world's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.
In the small town of Dogondoutchi, Niger, Malam Awal, a charismatic Sufi preacher, was recruited by local Muslim leaders to denounce the practices of reformist Muslims. Malam Awal's message has been ...viewed as a mixed blessing by Muslim women who have seen new definitions of Islam and Muslim practice impact their place and role in society. This study follows the career of Malam Awal and documents the engagement of women in the religious debates that are refashioning their everyday lives. Adeline Masquelier reveals how these women have had to define Islam on their own terms, especially as a practice that governs education, participation in prayer, domestic activities, wedding customs, and who wears the veil and how. Masquelier's richly detailed narrative presents new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim woman in Africa today.
This chronology for 2008 to 2017 compiles the chapters on Niger previously published in the Africa Yearbook. Politics, Economy and Society South of the Sahara.
In The Yearning for Relief Klaas van Walraven traces the history of the Sawaba movement in Niger and its rebellion against the French-protected regime during the 1960s. The book analyses its ...guerrilla campaign and failure, followed by the movement's destruction.
Seizing the space opened by the early 1990s democratization movement, Muslim women are carving an active, influential, but often-overlooked role for themselves during a time of great change. Engaging ...Modernity provides a compelling portrait of Muslim women in Niger as they confronted the challenges and opportunities of the late twentieth century.     Based on thorough scholarly research and extensive fieldwork—including a wealth of interviews—Ousseina Alidou’s work offers insights into the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger. Mixing biography with sociological data, social theory and linguistic analysis, this is a multilayered vision of political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath. Alidou offers a gripping look at one of the Muslim world’s most powerful untold stories.   Runner-up, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association, 2007
The development of cost-effective and sustainable catalytic methods for the production of enantiomerically pure chiral amines is a key challenge facing the pharmaceutical and fine chemical ...industries. This challenge is highlighted by the estimate that 40-45% of drug candidates contain a chiral amine, fueling a demand for broadly applicable synthetic methods that deliver target structures in high yield and enantiomeric excess. Herein we describe the development and application of a "toolbox" of monoamine oxidase variants from Aspergillus niger (MAO-N) which display remarkable substrate scope and tolerance for sterically demanding motifs, including a new variant, which exhibits high activity and enantioselectivity toward substrates containing the aminodiphenylmethane (benzhydrylamine) template. By combining rational structure-guided engineering with high-throughput screening, it has been possible to expand the substrate scope of MAO-N to accommodate amine substrates containing bulky aryl substituents. These engineered MAO-N biocatalysts have been applied in deracemization reactions for the efficient asymmetric synthesis of the generic active pharmaceutical ingredients Solifenacin and Levocetirizine as well as the natural products (R)-coniine, (R)-eleagnine, and (R)-leptaflorine. We also report a novel MAO-N mediated asymmetric oxidative Pictet-Spengler approach to the synthesis of (R)-harmicine.
Aspergillus niger YAT strain was obtained from Chinese brick tea (Collection number: CGMCC 10,568) and identified on the basis of morphological characteristics and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) ...sequence. The strain could degrade 54.83 % of β-cypermethrin (β-CY; 50 mg L⁻¹) in 7 days and 100 % of 3-phenoxybenzoic acid (3-PBA; 100 mg L⁻¹) in 22 h. The half-lives of β-CY and 3-PBA range from 3.573 to 11.748 days and from 5.635 to 12.160 h, respectively. The degradation of β-CY and 3-PBA was further described using first-order kinetic models. The pathway and mechanism of β-CY degraded by YAT were investigated by analyzing the degraded metabolites through high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Relevant enzymatic activities and substrate utilization were also investigated. β-CY degradation products were analyzed. Results indicated that YAT strain transformed β-CY into 3-PBA. 3-PBA was then gradually transformed into permethric acid, protocatechuic acid, 3-hydroxy-5-phenoxy benzoic acid, gallic acid, and phenol gradually. The YAT strain can also effectively degrade these metabolites. The results indicated that YAT strain has potential applications in bioremediation of pyrethroid insecticide (PI)-contaminated environments and fermented food.
•Solid-state fermentation (SSF) of plum by-products with A. niger and R. oligosporus.•Phenolic compounds and antioxidant levels increased significantly by SSF.•Plum kernel oil yield increased by ...21.90% for SSF with A. niger.•Polar lipids were enriched with n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.
Evolutions of phenolic contents and antioxidant activities during solid-state fermentation (SSF) of plum pomaces (from the juice industry) and brandy distillery wastes with Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus oligosporus were investigated. The effect of fermentation time on the oil content and major lipid classes in the plum kernels was also studied. Results showed that total phenolic (TP) amounts increased by over 30% for SSF with Rhizopus oligosporus and by >21% for SSF with A. niger. The total flavonoid contents presented similar tendencies to those of the TPs. The free radical scavenging activities of methanolic extracts were also significantly enhanced. The HPLC-MS analysis showed that quercetin-3-glucoside was the major phenolic compound in both fermented plum by-products. The results also demonstrated that SSF not only helped to achieve higher lipid recovery from plum kernels, but also resulted in oils with better quality attributes (high sterol ester and n-3 PUFA-rich polar lipid contents).
•Fusion expression enhanced the secretion of an acidic lipase in Pichia pastoris.•The fusion acidic lipase showed a higher catalytic efficiency than the parent.•The fusion acidic lipase is a suitable ...candidate for promoting gastric digestion.
The low expression level of acidic lipases from Aspergillus sp. remains a major obstacle for their use in industrial applications. In this study, fusion expression with three fusion partners was investigated to enhance the expression level of an acidic lipase from A. niger (ANL) in Pichia pastoris. When fused with a small ubiquitin-related modifier (SUMO), designated SANL, the highest activity reached 960 ± 40 U/mL in a 3 L fermenter, which was 1.85-fold higher than that of the parent ANL. SANL exhibited its maximum activity at pH 2.5 and had lower Km and higher kcat/Km values than those of ANL. In gastrointestinal digestion experiments, SANL was resistant to pepsin and had high hydrolytic activity against triolein from pH 3.0 to 6.0. However, SANL was significantly inhibited by NaTDC above its CMC, which may limit its application for intestinal digestion, but allow it to remain suitable for gastric digestion.
Aspergillus section
Nigri is an important group of species for food and medical mycology, and biotechnology. The
Aspergillus niger ‘aggregate’ represents its most complicated taxonomic subgroup ...containing eight morphologically indistinguishable taxa:
A. niger,
Aspergillus tubingensis,
Aspergillus acidus,
Aspergillus brasiliensis,
Aspergillus costaricaensis,
Aspergillus lacticoffeatus,
Aspergillus piperis, and
Aspergillus vadensis.
Aspergillus awamori, first described by Nakazawa, has been compared taxonomically with other black aspergilli and recently it has been treated as a synonym of
A. niger. Phylogenetic analyses of sequences generated from portions of three genes coding for the proteins β-tubulin (
benA), calmodulin (
CaM), and the translation elongation factor-1 alpha (
TEF-1α) of a population of
A. niger strains isolated from grapes in Europe revealed the presence of a cryptic phylogenetic species within this population,
A. awamori. Morphological, physiological, ecological and chemical data overlap occurred between
A. niger and the cryptic
A. awamori, however the splitting of these two species was also supported by AFLP analysis of the full genome. Isolates in both phylospecies can produce the mycotoxins ochratoxin A and fumonisin B
2, and they also share the production of pyranonigrin A, tensidol B, funalenone, malformins, and naphtho-γ-pyrones. In addition, sequence analysis of four putative
A. awamori strains from Japan, used in the koji industrial fermentation, revealed that none of these strains belong to the
A. awamori phylospecies.
► We examined
A. awamori by polyphasic approach within
A. niger “aggregate” group. ► Multilocus phylogenetic analyses evidenced
A. awamori as a cryptic species. ► Morphological and extrolites data overlap between
A. niger and the cryptic
A. awamori. ► AFLP analysis of the full genome support
A. awamori as species. ► Both phylospecies can produce the mycotoxins ochratoxin A and fumonisin B
2.
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