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Introduction This article describes the association of two culturally different institutions opening a joint Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program for ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) women in order to enable them to find jobs due to changes in their society and increasing global demand for nurses in the labor market. The objective of this description is to illustrate the efforts and changes needed to facilitate the affiliation of two culturally and ideologically different organizations and the implications and conclusions of such a program. Methods The study is based on interviews with past administrators, a review of the literature, and supporting institution documents. Conclusions A joint nursing academic program was founded by two culturally different educational institutions for the ultra-Orthodox Jewish women population. Creating a culturally sensitive nursing academic program helped ultra-Orthodox women acquire an academic profession which enabled their integration into the academic professional's work world and add more nurses to the labor market. The authors reviewed the efforts and changes needed to facilitate the affiliation of two culturally and ideologically different organizations based on the Bolman and Deal four frames model.

Past research regarding the emotional characteristics of kibbutz children raised with communal sleeping arrangements (CSA) showed inconsistent findings for emotional difficulties, such as insecure attachment and lowered ability for intimacy. Only little research has examined these children's emotional characteristics in their adulthood. Trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) is a new concept measuring a constellation of correlated emotional traits that capture a person's typical way of processing emotional information and reacting to it.The present study examined if difficulties in intimacy and trait EI characterize adults who had been raised in CSA kibbutzim (Hebrew plural of kibbutz). Participants comprised 1185 adults, aged 30–79, of whom 735 were raised in CSA kibbutzim, and the rest did not grow up in a Kibbutz at all. The participants completed three self-report questionnaires: Schutte's Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) to measure trait EI; the Revised Adult Attachment Scale to measure adult attachment; and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Questionnaire to measure self-esteem.Results showed that most of the kibbutz CSA participants revealed levels of intimacy and trait EI comparable to the non-kibbutz group. However, a significant difference was found among adults with low self-esteem and poor attachment quality: For these participants, trait EI and intimacy were significantly lower for the CSA kibbutz group than for the non-kibbutz group. Furthermore, the CSA kibbutz group reported poorer non-verbal communication skills than the non-kibbutz group.We suggest that a minority of the CSA kibbutz children were less resilient to the kibbutz ecology. These children might have been more vulnerable to the effects of limited social options, decreased parental support, and the kibbutz education's ideological demands. For these children, the effects of communal upbringing on intimacy and attachment appear to be long-lasting, extending throughout their adulthood.

Coordinated development of muscles, tendons, and their attachment sites ensures emergence of functional musculoskeletal units that are adapted to diverse anatomical demands among different species. How these different tissues are patterned and functionally assembled during embryogenesis is poorly understood. Here, we investigated the morphogenesis of extraocular muscles (EOMs), an evolutionary conserved cranial muscle group that is crucial for the coordinated movement of the eyeballs and for visual acuity. By means of lineage analysis, we redefined the cellular origins of periocular connective tissues interacting with the EOMs, which do not arise exclusively from neural crest mesenchyme as previously thought. Using 3D imaging approaches, we established an integrative blueprint for the EOM functional unit. By doing so, we identified a developmental time window in which individual EOMs emerge from a unique muscle anlage and establish insertions in the sclera, which sets these muscles apart from classical muscle-to-bone type of insertions. Further, we demonstrate that the eyeballs are a source of diffusible all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) that allow their targeting by the EOMs in a temporal and dose-dependent manner. Using genetically modified mice and inhibitor treatments, we find that endogenous local variations in the concentration of retinoids contribute to the establishment of tendon condensations and attachment sites that precede the initiation of muscle patterning. Collectively, our results highlight how global and site-specific programs are deployed for the assembly of muscle functional units with precise definition of muscle shapes and topographical wiring of their tendon attachments.

Navigation by mammals is believed to rely on a network of neurons in the hippocampal formation, which includes the hippocampus, the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), and additional nearby regions. Neurons in these regions represent spatial information by tuning to the position, orientation, and speed of the animal in the form of head direction cells, speed cells, grid cells, border cells, and unclassified spatially modulated cells. While the properties of single cells are well studied, little is known about the functional structure of the network in the MEC. Here, we use a generalized linear model to study the network of spatially modulated cells in the MEC. We found connectivity patterns between all spatially encoding cells and not only grid cells. In addition, the neurons’ past activity contributed to the overall activity patterns. Finally, position-modulated cells and head direction cells differed in the dependence of the activity on the history. Our results indicate that MEC neurons form a local interacting network to support spatial information representations and suggest an explanation for their complex temporal properties.

Striatin, a subunit of the serine/threonine phosphatase PP2A, is a core member of the conserved striatin-interacting phosphatase and kinase (STRIPAK) complexes. The protein is expressed in the cell junctions between epithelial cells, which play a role in maintaining cell–cell adhesion. Since the cell junctions are crucial for the function of the mammalian inner ear, we examined the localization and function of striatin in the mouse cochlea. Our results show that in neonatal mice, striatin is specifically expressed in the cell–cell junctions of the inner hair cells, the receptor cells in the mammalian cochlea. Auditory brainstem response measurements of striatin-deficient mice indicated a progressive, high-frequency hearing loss, suggesting that striatin is essential for normal hearing. Moreover, scanning electron micrographs of the organ of Corti revealed a moderate degeneration of the outer hair cells in the middle and basal regions, concordant with the high-frequency hearing loss. Additionally, striatin-deficient mice show aberrant ribbon synapse maturation. Loss of the outer hair cells, combined with the aberrant ribbon synapse distribution, may lead to the observed auditory impairment. Together, these results suggest a novel function for striatin in the mammalian auditory system.

Studies of cell fate focus on specification, but little is known about maintenance of the differentiated state. In this study, we find that the mouse tendon cell fate requires continuous maintenance in vivo and identify an essential role for TGFβ signaling in maintenance of the tendon cell fate. To examine the role of TGFβ signaling in tenocyte function the TGFβ type II receptor (Tgfbr2) was targeted in the Scleraxis-expressing cell lineage using the ScxCre deletor. Tendon development was not disrupted in mutant embryos, but shortly after birth tenocytes lost differentiation markers and reverted to a more stem/progenitor state. Viral reintroduction of Tgfbr2 to mutants prevented and even rescued tenocyte dedifferentiation suggesting a continuous and cell autonomous role for TGFβ signaling in cell fate maintenance. These results uncover the critical importance of molecular pathways that maintain the differentiated cell fate and a key role for TGFβ signaling in these processes.

Summary: Transcription factor (TF) binding to DNA is crucial for transcriptional regulation. There are multiple methods for mapping such binding. These methods balance between input requirements, spatial resolution, and compatibility with high-throughput automation. Here, we describe SLIM-ChIP (short-fragment-enriched, low-input, indexed MNase ChIP), which combines enzymatic fragmentation of chromatin and on-bead indexing to address these desiderata. SLIM-ChIP reproduces a high-resolution binding map of yeast Reb1 comparable with existing methods, yet with less input material and full compatibility with high-throughput procedures. We demonstrate the robustness and flexibility of SLIM-ChIP by probing additional factors in yeast and mouse. Finally, we show that SLIM-ChIP provides information on the chromatin landscape surrounding the bound transcription factor. We identify a class of Reb1 sites where the proximal −1 nucleosome tightly interacts with Reb1 and maintains unidirectional transcription. SLIM-ChIP is an attractive solution for mapping DNA binding proteins and charting the surrounding chromatin occupancy landscape at a single-cell level. : Mapping transcription factors binding to DNA by chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing is a key step in studying transcriptional programs. Gutin et al. introduce SLIM-ChIP, a simple, automation compatible protocol, that provides insights about the chromatin landscape at the bound sites. Using this protocol, they discover promoter architectures that enforce unidirectional transcription. Keywords: Reb1, CTCF, ChIP-seq, chromatin, transcription factor, DNA-binding, promoter directionality, nucleosomes