ASU Scholarship Showcase

Introduction: Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a heterogeneous disease characterized by chronic joint inflammation of unknown cause in children. JIA is an autoimmune disease and small numbers of autoantibodies have been reported in JIA patients. The identification of antibody markers could improve the existing clinical management of patients.

Methods: A pilot study was performed on the application of a high-throughput platform, the nucleic acid programmable protein array (NAPPA), to assess the levels of antibodies present in the systemic circulation and synovial joint of a small cohort of juvenile arthritis patients. Plasma and synovial fluid from 10 JIA patients was screened for antibodies against 768 proteins on NAPPAs.

Results: Quantitative reproducibility of NAPPAs was demonstrated with > 0.95 intra-array and inter-array correlations. A strong correlation was also observed for the levels of antibodies between plasma and synovial fluid across the study cohort (r = 0.96). Differences in the levels of 18 antibodies were revealed between sample types across all patients. Patients were segregated into two clinical subtypes with distinct antibody signatures by unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis.

Conclusion: The NAPPAs provide a high-throughput quantitatively reproducible platform to screen for disease-specific autoantibodies at the proteome level on a microscope slide. The strong correlation between the circulating antibody levels and those of the inflamed joint represents a novel finding and provides confidence to use plasma for discovery of autoantibodies in JIA, thus circumventing the challenges associated with joint aspiration. We expect that autoantibody profiling of JIA patients on NAPPAs could yield antibody markers that can act as criteria to stratify patients, predict outcomes and understand disease etiology at the molecular level.

In July 2012, the Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information, Tifatul Sembiring, declared that the government had shut down one million websites in view of the Islamic holy month of Ramadhan. This was in addition to another one million sites the ministry claimed to have blocked back in February 2012. Minister Sembiring, a politician from the Islamic-based Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party, PKS), said that his staff would continue blocking access to online pornography beyond the holy month.

This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report, the authors trace the genealogy of energy security, elucidating how it establishes a morality of efficiency that orients policy action under the guise of security toward the liberalizing of markets in resource states and a robust program of energy research and development in the United States. This evidence challenges the pervasive historical anchoring of the concept in the 1970s and illustrates the importance of the genealogical approach for the emerging literature on energy and sociotechnical imaginaries. Exploring the genealogy of energy security also unpacks key social, political, and economic undercurrents that disrupt the seeming universality of the language of energy, leading the authors to question whether energy security discourse is appropriate for guiding policy action during ongoing global energy transitions.