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The Iron Age hill fort at Burrough Hill, Leicestershire, eastern England, lies in a lowland landscape of Mesozoic sedimentary rocks comprising mudstones with thin limestone units, sandstones and ironstones, which are blanketed by Pleistocene till. During the late Iron Age the hill fort was an important central place; permanent occupation probably began in Early–Middle Iron Age and continued into the Roman period. A variety of materials in archaeological contexts from the site, including clay rampart bonding and the clay linings of storage pits and floors, are found to yield characteristically mixed microfossil assemblages of Early to Late Jurassic ostracods and foraminifera, together with foraminifera from the Late Cretaceous. These provide a unique microfossil signature that indicate provenance from the local till. Microfossils can also be recovered from Middle to Late Iron Age potsherds at Burrough Hill, and these too suggest a local glacial source for the clay. Our analysis demonstrates the power of microfossils to provenance clay materials used for construction and manufactures at an Iron Age site, where a detailed baseline understanding of the local geology is firmly established.

The G2/M arrest function of human papillomavirus (HPV) E4 proteins is hypothesized to be necessary for viral genome amplification. Full-length HPV18 E1^E4 protein is essential for efficient viral genome amplification. Here we identify key determinants within a CDK-bipartite consensus recognition motif in HPV18 E1^E4 that are critical for association with active CDK–cyclin complexes and in vitro phosphorylation at the predicted CDK phosphorylation site (threonine 23). The optimal cyclin-binding sequence ( 43 RRLL 46 ) within this E4 motif is required for G2/M arrest of primary keratinocytes and correlates with cytoplasmic retention of cyclin B1, but not cyclin A. Disruption of this motif in the E4 ORF of HPV18 genomes, and the subsequent generation of stable cell lines in primary keratinocytes revealed that this motif was not essential for viral genome amplification or L1 capsid protein induction. We conclude that the HPV18 E4 G2/M arrest function does not play a role in early vegetative events.

Mycobacterium abscessus is a rapidly growing environmental mycobacterium commonly found in soil and water which is often also associated with infections in humans, particularly of the lung. We report herein the draft genome sequence of M. abscessus strain 47J26.