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- Creators: Brian, Jennifer
Passed in April of 2010, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 is nationally recognized as the first state-level anti-immigration legislation of its kind that deputized local police officers to enforce immigration laws. Though response strategies varied widely across activists and organizations, many community organizations devised strategies specifically aimed to protect and assist the undocumented community during the reign of terror that accompanied SB 1070. In looking at the reflections of activists and organization leaders on their own actions and decision-making rationale, I analyze how their strategies and tactics worked to both counter and reconceptualize hegemonic notions of citizenship, belonging, and community through the creation of networks and knowledge funds. By specifically examining the efforts made by No Mas Muerte, Puente Human Rights Movement, and the Calle Dieciseis Mural Project, I show that efforts that go beyond voter mobilization and legal action, which not only work to combat dominant rhetoric but also center the voices of the targeted population through disrupting public space, are essential to responding to political efforts designed to target vulnerable communities. Given their necessity, academics and institutional actors must acknowledge the importance of grassroots efforts in contributing to inter-institutional strategies and ensure that a ground-up analysis of community-based organizations informs their actions taken against state-level anti-immigration laws.
Agassiz’s desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) is a long-lived species native to the Mojave Desert and is listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. To aid conservation efforts for preserving the genetic diversity of this species, we generated a whole genome reference sequence with an annotation based on deep transcriptome sequences of adult skeletal muscle, lung, brain, and blood. The draft genome assembly for G. agassizii has a scaffold N50 length of 252 kbp and a total length of 2.4 Gbp. Genome annotation reveals 20,172 protein-coding genes in the G. agassizii assembly, and that gene structure is more similar to chicken than other turtles. We provide a series of comparative analyses demonstrating (1) that turtles are among the slowest-evolving genome-enabled reptiles, (2) amino acid changes in genes controlling desert tortoise traits such as shell development, longevity and osmoregulation, and (3) fixed variants across the Gopherus species complex in genes related to desert adaptations, including circadian rhythm and innate immune response. This G. agassizii genome reference and annotation is the first such resource for any tortoise, and will serve as a foundation for future analysis of the genetic basis of adaptations to the desert environment, allow for investigation into genomic factors affecting tortoise health, disease and longevity, and serve as a valuable resource for additional studies in this species complex.
Data Availability: All genomic and transcriptomic sequence files are available from the NIH-NCBI BioProject database (accession numbers PRJNA352725, PRJNA352726, and PRJNA281763). All genome assembly, transcriptome assembly, predicted protein, transcript, genome annotation, repeatmasker, phylogenetic trees, .vcf and GO enrichment files are available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/EH2S9K).