Space Cleavage

[Consuelo Dular]

Bornand raised in northeast New Jersey, Rosanna Scimeca has lived in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Rosanna is the youngest child of a Sicilian immigrant family. Her parents brought their strict unchallenged morals of old school patriarchy along with behaviors of a rural peasant-life environment with them from the mountains of Sicily to a suburban Italian neighborhood in northern New Jersey. She faced an upbringing that hid many conflicting realities between the secretive aspects of domestic life and the urban. Farm animals would appear and disappear from her backyard, leading her to discover that the dark, dingy basement beneath her home was being used as an active slaughterhouse. A vibrant, colorful, and often repulsive environment served as a potent breeding ground for a young, curious mind to flourish. It was here that her interest in the provocative and sublime imagery of the dismembered body and mind began.

Rosanna currently lives and works in New Jersey, preparing her next venture: The transformation of a recently acquired 17,000 square foot historic theatre in Newburgh, NY, into a monumental art fabrication studio with an indoor and outdoor gallery and event space. For more info about 315 Broadway in Newburgh, visit: -broadway-newburgh/

Cleavage in Space was conceived during a difficult, transitory period in my life, shortly after moving to San Francisco. In my early 20s, jobless, and immersed in my first philosophy course, I'd spend hours after class at a nearby friend's place. As he edited photos at his desk in his dark room and I sat on the bed, we'd have long existential conversations and even longer silences. Who, if anything or anyone, is really in charge of us, of our thoughts and actions? During these hours, I'd stare up at the chandelier hanging directly overhead.

The apartment, in San Francisco's Upper Haight neighborhood, was occupied by a group of artists who divided the space into private quarters to share the high cost of the rent. My friend's room was formerly the dining room, thus the chandelier.

At one dark moment, staring up at the ceiling, I imagined the chandelier falling and impaling me. This vision repeated, expanded, and became more vivid until it had become a giant chandelier crash-landing from some far away place.

I drew exactly what I saw in my mind: A giant chandelier that crash-landed onto earth from a place of giants. I saw exposed wire and flicker lights as if there was an electrical short. Later, we added a cattle fence charger along the chandelier arms that gave a gentle electric shock when it was touched.

But where had this come from? How and why had it crash-landed on earth? It needed a story. With a rebellious streak against the strict catholic ideologies I'd grown up with, I imagined this chandelier had once lived in the pleasure palace of the gods where pleasure had been denied and a sexual rendezvous had gone awry. I shared my design and this seed of an idea with a friend, Chicken John. With his knowledge of mythology, we developed characters and the story of how Cleavage in Space came to life.

The building experience will always remain in my memory a magnificent journey. This was my first artwork of that scale. The process laid a foundation for my understanding of structure and for working with a team. I translated my visions into detailed hand-drawn images of the work with a building plan. To my delight, an engineer friend, impressed with the structural design, made a few minor suggestions and approved it for construction.

Once the funding was secured, Cleavage in Space was built in four and half months in West Oakland, CA at an artist warehouse called The Interval (aka The Meltdown). The build crew started with 3 friends and one of their roommates who would become my right-hand person on the project. By the end, we were a crew of 14, including two heavy equipment operators when it was first installed on the Playa at Burning Man in 2003. The design, crew, and build experience was like nothing I had ever known. For 5 months, we were a family with a common goal to create this giant sculpture, representing a life larger than we could imagine, as a gift to be installed on the Black Rock Desert. To learn more visit www.RosannaScimeca.com.

One of the most common desires among by patients when it comes to breast augmentation isn't necessarily always size, but rather cleavage. Patients and plastic surgeons often spend most of their consultation discussing volume, cup size, types and sizes of implants, etc. However, cleavage (the space between your breasts) is an extremely important aesthetic sign of a beautiful breast augmentation.

If you have already had breast surgery, but are concerned about your cleavage, there is good news: significant advances have been made to give patients more options to improve cleavage.

Before breast augmentation, the distance between your breasts, your skin tightness/laxity and the amount of breast tissue you have are some vital aspects to examine during your breast augmentation consultation. Depending on your measurements as well as your overall tissue between your breasts, the pocket for your breast implants may need to be adjusted to bring your breasts closer together or farther apart.

It's also important to note that your breast cleavage will vary depending on what type of bra and clothing you are wearing. A more natural look, with the option of wearing a cleavage-inducing bra, will probably give you the most options long term after your breast augmentation.

If you've already had breast augmentation and feel that your breasts are still too far apart in the middle, there are options including fat grafting or surgery to reposition the breast implant pocket.

If your breasts are too close and your cleavage is narrow after your breast augmentation, then typically repositioning your breast implant pockets will be able to address this issue. Some cases may require placement of surgical tissue products to maintain the separation of your right and left breast and preserve the cleavage that you want.

When you're looking for a board-certified plastic surgeon and looking at before and after photos, make sure to look at the areas between the right and left breast. The overall shape, volume and other aspects of breast augmentation photos may catch your eye initially.

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The exonuclease activity of Apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE1) is responsible for processing matched/mismatched terminus in various DNA repair pathways and for removing nucleoside analogs associated with drug resistance. To fill in the gap of structural basis for exonucleolytic cleavage, we determine the APE1-dsDNA complex structures displaying end-binding. As an exonuclease, APE1 does not show base preference but can distinguish dsDNAs with different structural features. Integration with assaying enzyme activity and binding affinity for a variety of substrates reveals for the first time that both endonucleolytic and exonucleolytic cleavage can be understood by an induced space-filling model. Binding dsDNA induces RM (Arg176 and Met269) bridge that defines a long and narrow product pocket for exquisite machinery of substrate selection. Our study paves the way to comprehend end-processing of dsDNA in the cell and the drug resistance relating to APE1.

a, b Substrate preference of mAPE1 in digesting ssDNA and dsDNA. Higher activity in digesting dsDNA substrates is observed for mAPE1. The activities of full-length and truncated mAPE1 display similar activity levels toward dsDNA, except mAPE1(Δ58) which shows a significant reduction in dsDNA degrading activity. a, b Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

To reveal the molecular mechanism by which APE1 conducts terminal processing of dsDNA and distinguishes different substrate structures, we determine two crystal structures of mAPE1 complexing dsDNA products, including mAPE1 bound to a blunt-ended dsDNA and to a recessed dsDNA (Fig. 4a, b). Both structures reveal the unprecedented atomic details of exonucleolytic cleavage for mAPE1 in a terminal-binding mode. The crystallization conditions, data collection, and refinement statistics are listed in Supplementary Tables 2 and 3.

Orientations of the active residues, particularly Asp69, Glu95, Tyr170, Asp209, Asn211, Asp307, and His308 in the terminal-binding mAPE1 blunt-ended dsDNA structure, are similar to those in the 5WN5 structure, in which hAPE1 binds the dsDNA substrate in the middle (Fig. 4d). After introducing the E95A and H308A mutation to the active site mAPE1, we find that both the endo- and exonuclease activity of mAPE1 reduce drastically (Supplementary Fig. 5), indicating the importance of these residues in delivering both types of nuclease activity.

The interaction maps between mAPE1 and dsDNA in mAPE1 blunt-ended dsDNA and in mAPE1-recessed dsDNA structures are shown in Supplementary Fig. 6. In both cases of terminal binding, a channel-like pocket is observed in the active site of mAPE1 to accommodate the leaving group (Fig. 5a, b). The channel is formed by Arg176 and Met269 in two separate loops, which interact in a bridge-like fashion (the RM bridge) across the active site. In the middle-binding structures of APE1 with mismatched and AP site containing dsDNA11,17,35, the corresponding hMet270 and hArg177 residues arrange in a similar manner, but it is unclear if it could be retained in the terminal-binding mode and applicable to process a more recalcitrant, matched dsDNA substrate exonucleolytically.

With this structural basis, we conduct binding affinity measurements of APE1 to elucidate the effects of different substrate structures on binding. For dsDNAs with the same length in scissile and non-scissile strands, 20-bp dsDNA with 1- or 2-nt mismatch is synthesized for the electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) of binding with APE1. As a controlled comparison, 20-nt ssDNA is also synthesized for the EMSA measurement. Without the consistent interaction zone in ssDNA, its binding affinity with mAPE1 is clearly lower than that of dsDNA substrates, and only a few mAPE1-ssDNA complexes appear in the gel (Supplementary Fig. 10b). For the impact of having mismatched base pairs, the band of 2-nt mismatch dsDNA complexing with mAPE1 is similar to that of blunt-ended dsDNA and 1-nt mismatch dsDNA (Fig. 6c), suggesting that the common interaction zone in these dsDNA substrates bears similarity for the consensus binding behaviors to emerge.

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