, 2006). While some CB hypolimnetic hypoxia is likely natural (Delorme, 1982), human activities during the second half of the 20th century exacerbated the rate and extent of DO depletion (Bertram, 1993, Burns et al., 2005, Rosa and Burns, 1987 and Rucinski et al., 2010). P inputs stimulated algal production; with subsequent algal settlement and decomposition, DO depletion rates increased during the mid-1900s with corresponding hypoxic areas as large as 11,000 km2 (Beeton, 1963). Average hypolimnion DO concentrations in August–September for CB stations with an average depth greater than 20 m increased from less than 2 mg/l in 1987 to over 6 mg/l in 1996, followed by an abrupt decrease to below 3 mg/l

in 1998 with concentrations remaining low and Screening Library solubility dmso quite Idelalisib purchase variable through 2011, the most recent year for which data are available (Fig. 6). Zhou et al. (2013) used geostatistical kriging and Monte Carlo-based conditional realizations to quantify the areal extent of summer CB hypoxia for 1987 through 2007

and develop a probabilistic representation of hypoxia extent. While substantial intra-annual variability exists, hypoxic area was generally smallest during the mid-1990s, with larger extents during the late 1980s and the early 2000s (Fig. 7). The increase in hypolimnetic DO from the 1980s to mid-1990s and the subsequent decline during the late 1990s and 2000s (Fig. 6) are consistent with trends in the DO depletion rate. Based on a simple DO model, driven by a one-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Beletsky and Schwab, 2001 and Chen et al., 2002), Rucinski et al.(2010) demonstrated that the change in DO depletion rates reflected changes in TP loads, not climate, between 1987 and 2005. Similarly, ifenprodil Burns et al. (2005) showed that the depletion rate is related to the previous year’s annual TP load. Several ecological processes that are influenced by hypoxia have the potential

to negatively affect individual fish growth, survival, reproductive success and, ultimately, population growth (e.g., Breitburg, 2002, Coutant, 1985, Ludsin et al., 2009 and Wu, 2009). Rapid changes in oxygen concentrations may trap fish in hypoxic waters and lead to direct mortality. In fact, there is recent evidence of such events in nearshore Lake Erie, whereby wind-driven mass movement of hypoxic waters into nearshore zones appears to have led to localized fish mortalities (J. Casselman, Queen’s University personal communication). While such direct mortality due to low DO is possible, a more common immediate fish response to hypolimnetic hypoxia is avoidance of bottom waters. Such behavioral responses can lead to shifts away from preferred diets (e.g., Pihl, 1994 and Pihl et al., 1992), increased total metabolic costs and potential reproductive impacts by occupying warmer waters and undertaking long migrations (e.g., Craig and Crowder, 2005 and Taylor et al.

All cores were split lengthwise and visually described for color, composition, sedimentary structures and grain size. Sediment components were further analyzed with a binocular microscope and an Environmental Scanning Electron

Microscope (ESEM) equipped with Energy Dispersive Analysis X-ray (EDAX). All SCH 900776 datasheet cores were subsampled (2-cm interval) and measured for wet and dry bulk density as well as water and organic content following the loss-on-ignition method of Dean (1974). Following the sieve and pipette methods of Folk (1980), grain-size was measured on 15 samples of representative lithologies. Trace metal analysis of core C4 was made following the total digestion methods of Lacey et al. (2001) and Mecray et al. (2001). Pb, Cu, Cr, and Zn were measured on a Perkin-Elmer 7000 Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer

(AAS) having a detection limit of 0.1 mg L−1. Measurement of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Buffalo River Sediment Reference Material yielded recoveries of between 90 and 101% of the reported values, indicating an efficient digestion process. Acid blank samples were below the detection limit of the AAS, indicating no contamination occurred during the digestion procedure. Four replicate samples reveal that variability within each sample was much less than downcore variability. In order to interpret the impoundment sediment in a historical context, core C4 was radiometrically dated. Core C4 recovered an undisturbed sediment surface and extended through the impoundment sediment to bedrock in the wide, deep downstream end of the dam pool (Fig. 2). RG7204 datasheet No obvious erosional boundaries were observed in core C4. The excess 210Pb that is not produced

by in situ radioactive decay can often be used to date sediment deposits spanning the last PtdIns(3,4)P2 150 years (Appleby, 2001). To determine the 210Pb profile, 21 subsamples from core C4 were sent to MyCore Scientific Inc., Ontario, Canada where the alpha radiation of the granddaughter 210Po was measured using alpha spectrometry. An age interpretation of the 210Pb profile was made by using the constant rate of supply model. In order to delineate the impoundment sediment fill, historic and modern maps were analyzed. Full details of how the maps were georeferenced and analyzed are provided in Mann (2012). After georeferencing, the 1906 topographic map (Wilson et al., 1906) still displayed significant mismatches in parts of the gorge study area. Therefore, we only use the 1906 map to obtain an average channel slope of 0.014 m m−1 within the gorge prior to dam construction. The 22 bathymetric cross sections of Cook (1918) were used to delineate the impoundment sediment surface present in September 1918 (Fig. 2). After georeferencing, the 1918 bathymetric cross sections were digitized. The latitude, longitude and water depth were determined every 3.05 m (10 ft) along the cross sections. It was possible to read water depth to the nearest 15 cm (i.e., half foot).

Similarly, the levels of Bax and Bak in the mitochondria were markedly increased in the epirubicin- and paclitaxel-treated cells, but this increase was more significant in the cotreated groups (Fig. 7). Moreover, the increase of Bax and Bak in the mitochondria upon drug treatment conformed well to the release of the enhanced cytochrome c in the apoptotic cells. However, no evident changes were observed in Bax or Bak in the whole-cell lysates. These results imply that the increased regulation of the released cytochrome

c that was observed in the co-treated HeLa cells resulted from the enhanced translocation of Bax and Bak proteins. The induction of apoptosis in cancer cells is a staple killing NU7441 mechanism for most antitumor therapies [2]. The cotreatment of anticancer reagents has been shown to be advantageous in malignancies that still partially respond to epirubicin or paclitaxel treatment because they may help amplify weak death signals. In this study, SG markedly potentiated epirubicin- or

paclitaxel-induced cancer cell death possibly because of the increase in the release of cytochrome c and the activation of caspases-9 and -3. Thus, cotreating cancer cells with SG and clinical drugs could be a novel strategy for enhancing the efficacy of current chemotherapies. The development of SG as a new adjuvant drug for cancer therapy also shows great potential. All authors declare no conflicts of interest. This work was supported by grants from the National Nature Science Foundation Bortezomib of China (Project 31240078), Grant of Talent Exploitation in 2012 from Jilin Province. “
“Panax ginseng (i.e., ginseng) is a well-known traditional oriental medicine used to prevent various human diseases such as inflammatory Methocarbamol diseases and cancer [1] and [2]. Ginsenosides are a major component of ginseng and more than 25 ginsenosides reportedly exist [3]. Ginsenosides can activate macrophages to produce reactive nitrogen intermediates

and induce a tumoricidal effect [4]. However, they may also attenuate cytokine production [5]. Monocytes comprise approximately 5–10% of blood leukocytes in humans [6] and mice [7]. They have an important role in establishing innate immune responses. Monocytes differentiate into macrophages or dendritic cells (DCs) in the presence of appropriate mediators such as granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF), or interleukin 4 (IL-4) [8]. On stimulation with lipopolysaccharide (LPS), monocytes and macrophages produce proinflammatory cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and the chemokines. Dendritic cells have a major role in initiating and inducing innate immunity and, perhaps more importantly, bridging with antigen-specific immune responses elucidated by T cells.

The growth of such landscapes thus documents the inception of the Anthropocene

epoch on planet Earth, if one agrees with the notion that human activity is shaping the earth and these activities warrant our recognition of a new geological age. Smith (2011) and Zeder (2012) review many ways in which humans create their own ecological niche, “engineering” their natural settings to suit their needs and habits. Similar anthropogenic landscape engineering can be clearly seen in the archeological record of East Asia. In this paper, we use archeological and historical sources to sketch a narrative overview of how this distinctively human process of niche creation developed and spread in China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East. We note also how differing geographies and climates affected developmental see more processes north and south, and give particular attention

to how growing inequality in human social relations was fundamental to the long-term historical trajectory that brought East Asia into the Anthropocene. The ecological knowledge people gained through everyday hunting and collecting in the biotically improving postglacial environment was essential to the inception of subsequent cultivation and husbandry. It is critical, however, to note that growing environmental richness brought by global warming did not alone bring about agriculture. A crucial factor was the also-growing concentration of socio-economic control in the hands of an elite subset of social leaders, Cisplatin price which emerged out of the compelling organizational and planning necessities placed on preceding Upper Paleolithic communities that had to cope with seasonally extreme climates and a resource base that was abundant

during the warm season but greatly limited during the cold season. In Late Pleistocene northern Eurasia the organizational demands of arctic life were powerful in bringing strong leaders early to the fore, although the growth of centralized social authority and wealth became in Holocene times a worldwide phenomenon that was responsive in other settings to other factors, Cell Penetrating Peptide as discussed in broad perspective by Flannery and Marcus (2012). Archeological research along the Great Bend of the Yellow River in northwest China demonstrates that the ancestral forms of native plants later brought under domestication were being harvested and processed for human consumption in the middle latitudes at a time when glacial conditions still prevailed farther north (Liu et al., 2013). Because cultivation was so fundamental to all later developments, we discuss a number of key findings representing the incipient stage. Three grinding stones dated to ca.

2). The results of these analyses revealed that neither the three-way interaction for gaze duration (b = 5.59, t < 1) nor total time (b = 2.26, t < 1) were significant, suggesting that, when proofreading for wrong word errors, subjects processed words in a way that magnified the effects of both word frequency and predictability in a similar way. However, when gaze duration was analyzed separately by stimulus set, the task by frequency interaction was significant but the task find more by predictability interaction was not, and the three-way interaction, while not

significant, does suggest a trend in that direction. Thus, the data suggest that, in first pass reading, subjects certainly demonstrated increased sensitivity to frequency information (discussed above) and demonstrated

only slight increased sensitivity to predictability information (certainly more than they demonstrated increased sensitivity to predictability information when proofreading in Experiment 1). However, the substantial interaction between task and predictability does not ATM/ATR phosphorylation emerge until further inspection of the word (i.e., total time, see Section 4.2). The analyses reported in this section were performed on filler items from the reading task and items that contained errors in the proofreading task to assess the degree to which proofreading sentences that actually contain errors differs from reading error-free sentences for comprehension. When encountered in the reading block, sentences contained no errors and constituted the control sentences taken from Johnson (2009; i.e., “The runners trained for the marathon on the track behind the high school.”). When encountered in the proofreading block, sentences contained errors; In Experiment 1 errors constituted nonwords (i.e., “The runners trained for the marathon on the trcak behind the high school.”) and in Experiment 2 errors constituted wrong words (i.e., “The runners trained for the marathon on the trial behind the high school.”). To Erythromycin investigate

how errors were detected, we compared both global reading measures (reading time on the entire sentence) and local reading measures on the target word (shown in italics, above, but not italicized in the experiments) between the correct trials (when encountered in the reading block) and error trials (when encountered in the proofreading block). Task (reading vs. proofreading) and experiment (Experiment 1 vs. Experiment 2) were entered as fixed effects. We analyzed two global reading measures: total sentence reading time (TSRT; the total amount of time spent reading the sentence) and reading rate (words per minute: WPM), which index general reading efficiency ( Rayner, 1998 and Rayner, 2009), to assess the general difficulty of the proofreading task, compared to the reading task, across the two experiments (see Table 10). More efficient reading is reflected by shorter total sentence reading time and faster reading rate (more words per minute).

, 1996 and Graf, 1999), but they have had a dramatic effect on river form and function. Dam effects on river ABT-199 research buy morphology and fluvial processes have become increasingly important to watershed management during recent decades. Flow regimes, channel morphology, sediment transport, and ecological processes such as the quality of riparian and aquatic habitats have been influenced by dams (Heinz Center, 2002). The downstream impact of dams is well documented (Williams and Wolman, 1984, Brandt, 2000, Fassnacht et al., 2003, Grant et al., 2003, Graf, 2006, Petts and Gurnell, 2005, Schmidt and Wilcock,

2008 and Hupp et al., 2009). Several authors have developed generalized conceptual models of the downstream effects of dams on rivers (Brandt, 2000, Grant et al., 2003 and Schmidt and Wilcock, 2008). The fundamental cause of channel change is the imbalance between sediment supply and stream flow, leading to post-dam sediment deficit or surplus and channel change that can persist for hundreds of kilometers downstream (Schmidt and Wilcock, 2008). Because of the differing degree of these imbalances (due to varying watershed, climate, and dam characteristics), channel adjustments downstream of dams are often complex. Previous

work emphasizes the variability of downstream channel response which include bed degradation and narrowing, changes in channel bed texture find more or armoring, bed aggradation, bar construction, channel widening (Williams and Wolman, 1984 and Brandt, 2000), or no measurable change TCL (Fassnacht et al., 2003 and Skalak et al., 2009). Bed degradation, in some instances, can persist for decades and extend spatially from a few kilometers to as far as 50 km or more (Williams and Wolman, 1984). Bed degradation downstream of the Hoover Dam extended more than 120 km thirty years after dam closure (Williams and Wolman, 1984). Hupp et al. (2009) also suggest that impacts on channel morphology on the Roanoke River are measurable 150 km downstream of the dam. A

wide variety of controls have been identified that create a diverse range of geomorphic responses for channels downstream of dams (Grant et al., 2003). Previous research suggests that sediment loads downstream of dams require long distances to recover. Williams and Wolman (1984) state that the North Canadian River required more than 182 km and possibly as much as 500 km of channel distance to provide enough sediment to have pre-dam concentrations. On the Missouri River (8 km downstream from Gavins Point dam), post-dam sediment load is 1% of pre-dam conditions; 1147 km downstream of Gavins Point dam the post-dam load is only 17% of pre-dam loads (Jacobson et al., 2009 and Heimann et al., 2011). Data for the Nile River in Egypt show that 965 km downstream from the dam, post-dam loads are only 20% of pre-dam conditions (Hammad, 1972).

A result has been the lasting favor among western scientists for environmental determinants of habitats and societies. An example is the reliance on factors such as “climate forcing” for explaining habitat patterning in the savannas and tropical forests of South America (Prance, 1982, Haberle, 1997, Oliveira, 2002 and Whitmore and Prance, 1987), despite the evidence for human landscape selleck inhibitor construction as well as inadvertent impacts, summarized in this article. Another example of this trend was the

environmental limitation theory of human societies, which arose from early theories of human evolution (Roosevelt, 1991a, Roosevelt, 2005, Roosevelt, 2010a and Roosevelt, 2010b). Despite recognition by most anthropologists and biologists of the errors of Social Darwinism, their disciplines did not fully escape its assumptions for research in the tropical forests. Leading American anthropologists who pioneered there in the 1950s and 1960s assumed that the human occupation was recent and learn more slight and the cultures primitive, due to limitations on population and development imposed by the tropical forest (Evans and Meggers, 1960, Meggers, 1954, Meggers

and Evans, 1957 and Steward, 1959). Even researchers who criticized environmental limitation theory nonetheless defined a modal human adaptation: “the tropical forest culture” (Lathrap, 1970). To their credit, the anthropologists defended the integrity of the forest, arguing that, once breached, it would be gone forever (Meggers, 1971). However, despite the survival of tropical rainforests worldwide mainly where indigenous people were (Clay, 1988), forest conservation strategists sometimes focused more on the supposed harm of people’s slash-and-burn cultivation and hunting than on the large-scale corporatized foreign exploitation that US agencies were promoting (Dewar, 1995). Nature reserves have often sought to move people out rather than collaborate, though forests divested of their inhabitants can be vulnerable to intrusion. The archeologists were not dissuaded from their assumptions about environment and human development Oxymatrine by what they

found because they applied theories rather than tested them (e.g., Meggers and Evans, 1957, Roosevelt, 1980 and Roosevelt, 1995). Recognition in the 1970s and 1980s of the long, intense human occupation came from technical innovations in research on the one hand and the insights of ethnographers, ethnobotanists, and cultural geographers on the other. Archeological research revealed, not one, recent tropical forest culture, but a long sequence of different cultures and adaptations, some of unsuspected complexity and magnitude. Human cultural evolution, therefore, had been multi-linear and dynamic, not monolithic and static. Some of the ancient societies were quite unlike those of current forest peoples, contrary to the theories that ethnographic adaptations were ancient patterns.

In contrast to the unanimity that the locus of expression of LTP of this synapse is presynaptic in WT animals, controversy exists as to whether calcium-dependent events intrinsic to CA3 pyramids (postsynaptic) or mf terminals (presynaptic) mediate induction of mf-LTP (reviewed by Nicoll and Schmitz, 2005). To address this question, we examined the effects of dialyzing the postsynaptic cell with the

calcium chelator BAPTA (50 mM) on induction of mf-LTP. In slices from WT animals, dialyzing a CA3 pyramid with BAPTA did not inhibit induction of LTP ( Figure 6, top panel). In contrast, BAPTA inhibited induction of mf-LTP in slices from ZnT3−/− mice ( Figure 6, middle panel). HFS of the mossy fibers in slices from ZnT3−/− mice induced an increase in the EPSC of 166 ± 16% (n = 12, paired t test, p = 0.001) in vehicle dialyzed CA3 pyramids, ABT-199 ic50 but only 123% ± 11% (n = 6, paired t test, p = 0.19 versus before HFS) in BAPTA dialyzed CA3 pyramids ( Figure 6, middle). Cilengitide concentration We conclude that chelation of intracellular calcium within postsynaptic CA3 pyramids inhibits induction of mf-LTP in slices from ZnT3−/− but not WT mice. One explanation for a postsynaptic locale underlying induction of mf-LTP in ZnT3−/− mice is that vesicular zinc inhibits postsynaptic mf-LTP in WT mice. If so, chelation of zinc with

ZX1 would be expected to reveal a postsynaptic mf-LTP in WT mice. To test this possibility, we examined the effects of dialyzing a CA3 pyramid with BAPTA on mf-LTP in the presence of ZX1 (100 μM) in the bath. In the presence of ZX1, dialyzing a CA3 pyramid with BAPTA abolished

mf-LTP in slices from WT mice ( Figure 6, bottom). With ZX1 (100 μM) in the bath, HFS of mf induced an increase in the EPSC of 134% ± 20% (n = 9) in vehicle dialyzed CA3 pyramids, but a small decrease in the EPSC of 82% ± 7% (n = 5) in BAPTA Branched chain aminotransferase dialyzed CA3 pyramids (p = 0.04, t test, vehicle versus BAPTA) ( Figure 6, bottom). Notably, dialyzing CA3 pyramids with BAPTA inhibits mf-LTP in the presence, but not the absence, of ZX1 in the bath ( Figure 6, bottom). Thus inclusion of a chelator of extracellular zinc in the bath unmasked a postsynaptic locus for induction of mf-LTP in slices from WT mice. To further test whether zinc inhibits postsynaptic LTP of the mf-CA3 synapse, we examined the effects of chelating extracellular zinc with ZX1 on the induction of mf-LTP in slices isolated from rim1α null mutant mice. The protein rim1α resides in the active zone of the presynaptic terminal and binds the synaptic vesicle protein, rab 3a; induction of mf-LTP is eliminated altogether in rim1α null mutant mice ( Castillo et al., 2002). Confirming Castillo et al. (2002), with vehicle in the bath, we found that HFS of the mf did not induce LTP in slices from rim1α null mutant mice; a small nonsignificant decrease of fEPSP of 93% ± 11%, n = 4 when measured after 50–60 min compared to the 10 min immediately preceding HFS ( Figure 7, top left).

5 did not result in any labeling of GFP cells (data not shown). This indicates that the

EGins labeled here are likely to be born before E10.5. We next analyzed the population of EGins using immunohistochemical approaches at two separate time points: early postnatal (P7) and adult stages (>P30). We first examined the distribution of GFP labeled cells within the adult hippocampus. Although a precise quantification of the density of EGins is impossible due to the variability in our labeling method, it is striking how few cells are labeled at these stages. Indeed, on average 4.8 ± 1.6 GFP neurons are present per hippocampal section in adult mice (n = 263 sections, seven mice; Figures 1A and 1B). On Ruxolitinib average, a similar number of GFP cells could be found at P7 (4.4 ± 1.2; n = 147 sections, seven mice; Figure 1C and Figure 2A), indicating that this subpopulation of cells is unlikely to experience massive developmental cell loss. The GFP reporter line used here provides the considerable benefit that after enhancement by immunohistochemistry, it produces a strong enough signal for the fine neuronal processes including axons to be examined. Although EGins represented only a few cells per hippocampal section, GFP axonal labeling displayed a remarkable

web-like coverage of the entire hippocampal region in both age groups (Figures 1A and 1B and Figure 2A). Low-density but extensive axonal arbors were distributed www.selleckchem.com/products/forskolin.html in all hippocampal layers. However, no prominent axonal labeling could be found in the pyramidal cell layers (Figure 1B and Figure 2A), indicating that EGins were not principally targeting perisomatic regions. Axonal labeling was also frequently observed in the fimbria (Figure 2C). This is in marked contrast Atorvastatin with the spatially patterned and confined labeling obtained when interneurons are fate mapped at later developmental

time points (Figure 2B) or with a preferred perisomatic innervation like PV-expressing cells (Miyoshi et al., 2007). EGins could be multipolar or bipolar with horizontally or vertically oriented dendrites that, to a varying extent, were sparsely spiny (Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3). Their somata were evenly found in all hippocampal areas (Figure 1 and Figure 2), with a slightly higher proportion of them being located in the hilar region of the dentate gyrus (Figures 1A and 1C). We also examined within each region, the laminar distribution of EGins. These were found in all layers but with a preference for the CA1 stratum oriens, CA3 stratum radiatum and hilar region of the dentate gyrus (Figure 1C). Similar layer distributions were found in P7 and P30 hippocampal sections (Figure 1C; p < 0.05 Kolmogorov-Smirnov test). Interestingly, both the regional distribution and axonal pattern of EGins were reminiscent of those reported for interneurons with an extrahippocampal projection (Jinno et al., 2007) (Figure 1).

, 2004 and Rossner et al., 2006), fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) (Tomomura et al., 2001 and Lobo et al., 2006), or manual sorting (Sugino et al., 2006). These methods are often labor intensive and of low yield. Furthermore, the physical damage and stress inherent to these procedures may alter the physiological state of cells

and likely their gene expression. The recent invention of genetic tagging methods, such as TRAP (Heiman et al., 2008b) and Ribo-tag (Sanz et al., 2009), begin to overcome these obstacles, but these strategies have been limited to the analysis of mRNA expression. Here, we present a novel miRNA tagging and affinity-purification method, miRAP, which can be applied find more to genetically defined cell types in any complex tissues in mice. This method is based on the fact that mature miRNAs are incorporated into RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), in which the Argonaute protein AGO2 directly binds miRNAs and their mRNA targets (Hammond et al., 2001). We demonstrate that epitope tagging of AGO2 protein allows direct Selleck MLN8237 purification of miRNAs from tissue homogenates using antibodies against the engineered molecular tag. We further established

a Cre-loxp binary expression system to deliver epitope-tagged AGO2 (tAGO2) to genetically defined cell types. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach in the brain, we have analyzed miRNA profiles from five neuron types in mouse cerebral cortex and cerebellum by deep sequencing. Our study reveals the expression of a large fraction of known miRNAs (over 480) which show distinct profiles in heptaminol glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons, and subtypes of GABAergic neurons. Our method further detects 23 putative novel miRNAs and also provides evidence for tissue-specific strand selection

of miRNAs and miRNA editing in subset of neuron types. The miRAP method therefore enables a systematic analysis of miRNA expression and regulation in different neuron types in the brain and is generally applicable to other cell types and tissues in mice. Our strategy for molecular tagging and affinity purification is based on the knowledge that mature miRNA is incorporated into the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) where the miRNA and its mRNA target interact (Hammond et al., 2001). Argonaute (AGO) proteins are at the core of RISC complex and directly bind miRNAs. AGO immunoprecipitation has been successfully used to isolate miRNAs and their mRNA targets (Easow et al., 2007, Beitzinger et al., 2007, Hendrickson et al., 2008, Zhang et al., 2007, Hammell et al., 2008 and Karginov et al., 2007). Among the four members in the AGO family in human and mouse, only AGO2 exhibits endonuclase activity (Meister et al., 2004 and Ikeda et al., 2006) and is indispensible for Dicer-independent miRNA biogenesis (Cheloufi et al., 2010). We therefore chose to tag AGO2 by fusing GFP and MYC at its N terminus (tAGO2) (Figure 1B).