Cultural revitalization as a restorative process to combat racial and cultural trauma and promote living well.

OBJECTIVES: This article explores the impact of a decade of cultural education and revitalization with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, as they strive to recover from years of historical trauma and cultural oppression. The recovery or resilience is measured through behaviors (defined as living well") seen in tribal youth and community engagement. This study has 4 research questions focused on academic attainment, physical and mental health, community engagement, and national/tribal growth. METHOD: A series of studies using both qualitative (ethnographic-observation and interview) and quantitative measures (survey) examined language use, educational attainment, and tribal event engagement. The samples consisted of 32 Myaamia college students (59% female, 41% male) who matriculated at Miami University between 2013 and 2017 and about 800 community members in attendance at various community events from 2012 to 2017 upon which observational data were collected. RESULTS: Ethnographic content analysis of interviews and descriptive and regression analyses suggest an increase in graduation rates among the college sample who took culture courses, a stronger sense of belonging, an increase in language use and tribal event attendance among tribal members, and increases in scores on Snowshoe's (2015) Cultural Connectedness Scale for the college sample taking culture courses signaling shifts in identity. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that reclaiming one's culture and language has an impact on restoring wellness among this tribal nation. Cultural rejuvenation of the Myaamiaki may represent a shift in the way healthy living can be conceptualized within tribal communities. The authors stress the importance of using community knowledge in conjunction with global knowledge to develop community-specific and community-implemented interventions for health promotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The secreted protein discovery initiative (SPDI), a large-scale effort to identify novel human secreted and transmembrane proteins: a bioinformatics assessment.

A large-scale effort, termed the Secreted Protein Discovery Initiative (SPDI), was undertaken to identify novel secreted and transmembrane proteins. In the first of several approaches, a biological signal sequence trap in yeast cells was utilized to identify cDNA clones encoding putative secreted proteins. A second strategy utilized various algorithms that recognize features such as the hydrophobic properties of signal sequences to identify putative proteins encoded by expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from human cDNA libraries. A third approach surveyed ESTs for protein sequence similarity to a set of known receptors and their ligands with the BLAST algorithm. Finally, both signal-sequence prediction algorithms and BLAST were used to identify single exons of potential genes from within human genomic sequence. The isolation of full-length cDNA clones for each of these candidate genes resulted in the identification of >1000 novel proteins. A total of 256 of these cDNAs are still novel, including variants and novel genes, per the most recent GenBank release version. The success of this large-scale effort was assessed by a bioinformatics analysis of the proteins through predictions of protein domains, subcellular localizations, and possible functional roles. The SPDI collection should facilitate efforts to better understand intercellular communication, may lead to new understandings of human diseases, and provides potential opportunities for the development of therapeutics.