John Charles Ryan

In vitro maturation is associated with increased early embryo arrest without impairing morphokinetic development of useable embryos progressing to blastocysts

STUDY QUESTIONS Does polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) or in vitro maturation (IVM) treatment affect embryo development events and morphokinetic parameters after time-lapse incubation? SUMMARY ANSWER There was an increase in some abnormal phenotypic events in PCOS-IVM embryos as well as an increase in early arrest of PCOS-IVM and PCOS-ICSI embryos; however, IVM treatment or PCOS status did not alter morphokinetic development of embryos suitable for transfer of vitrification. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY IVM has been less successful than standard IVF in terms of clinical pregnancy, implantation and live birth rates. There is currently no information available about the development of IVM embryos according to time-lapse analysis. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE AND DURATION This article represents a prospective case-control study. The study involved 93 participants who underwent 93 treatment cycles. Cycles were completed between January 2013 and July 2014. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING AND METHODS Participants were recruited for the study at Fertility Specialists of WA and Fertility Specialists South, Perth, Western Australia. Of the PCOS diagnosed patients, 32 underwent IVM treatment (PCOS-IVM) and 23 had standard ICSI treatment (PCOS-ICSI). There were 38 patients without PCOS who underwent standard ICSI treatment comprising the control group (control-ICSI). MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE The PCOS-IVM group showed significantly more embryos with multinucleated two cells (P = 0.041), multinucleated four cells (P = 0.001) and uneven two cells (P = 0.033) compared with the control-ICSI group, but not the PCOS-ICSI group. There were no significant differences in the rates of any abnormal events between the PCOS-ICSI and control-ICSI groups. Embryo arrest between Days 2 and 3 was higher in the PCOS-IVM and PCOS-ICSI groups compared with the control-ICSI group (P < 0.001 and P = 0.001). Embryo arrest from Days 3 to 4 was higher in the PCOS-IVM group compared with both the PCOS-ICSI and control-ICSI groups (P < 0.001). There were no differences in embryo arrest rates across all three groups at the compaction or blastulation stages. Cumulative rates of embryo arrest, from the time to second polar body extrusion (tPB2) to the time to formation of a blastocyst (tB), result in a decreased proportion of useable PCOS-IVM blastocysts compared with the other two treatment groups; however, of the embryos remaining, there was no significant difference in morphokinetic development between the three groups. LIMITATIONS AND REASONS FOR CAUTION This was a small study using time-lapse analysis of embryo development as the primary end-point. Larger, randomized, clinical trials are required to clarify the implications of time-lapse incubation of IVM embryos and the effects on implantation and ongoing pregnancy. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS This is the first study to compare the time-lapse analysis of IVM with standard ICSI for patients with and without PCOS. This allows for a more detailed and specific timeline of events from embryos generated using this approach for patients diagnosed with PCOS and shows that embryos generated from IVM have an increased rate of early embryo arrest, however; morphokinetic development is not impaired in embryos that progress to the useable blastocyst stage. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTERESTS The study was supported by the Womens and Infants Research Foundation of Western Australia. R.H. is the Medical Director of Fertility Specialists of Western Australia and a shareholder in Western IVF. He has received educational sponsorship from MSD, Merck-Serono and Ferring Pharmaceuticals. The other authors have no competing interests.

Landscapes of Research: Perceptions of Open Access (OA) Publishing in the Arts and Humanities

It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and academic libraries are facilitating the change to OA by establishing institutional repositories, supporting OA policies, and hosting OA journals. In addition, research funding bodies, such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), are mandating that all published grant research outputs be made available in OA, unless legal and contractual obligations prevent this. Despite these broader changes, not all scholars are aware of the new publishing environment. In particular, the rate of adoption of OA models in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) has historically been lower than Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) disciplines. Nevertheless, some local and international OA exemplars exist in HSS. At Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, the faculty-administered environmental humanities journal, Landscapes, was migrated to the institutional open access repository in 2013. Subsequently, researchers in the Faculty of Education and Arts were surveyed regarding their knowledge, understandings, and perceptions of OA publishing. The survey was also designed to elicit the barriers to OA publishing perceived or experienced by HSS researchers. This article will present the findings of our small faculty-based OA survey, with particular attention to HSS academics (and within this subject group, particular attention to the arts and humanities), their perceptions of OA, and the impediments they encounter. We argue that OA publishing will continue to transform scholarship within the arts and humanities, especially through the role of institutional repositories. The “library-as-publisher” role offers the potential to transform academic and university-specific publishing activities. However, the ongoing training of university researchers and personnel is required to bring into balance their understandings of OA publisher and the demands of the broader Australian and international research environment.

Towards a Corporeal Aesthetics of Plants: Ethnographies of Embodied Appreciation Along the Wildflower Trail

This paper argues for the application of ethnographic practice, specifically participant observation and semi-structured interviewing, in the development of a corporeal aesthetics of flora. The study is characterized as an ethnography of botanists and, building upon emerging work in cultural ecology and human–plant geographies, is situated within the proposed context of cultural botany. During the Southwest Australian spring wildflower season between August and October of 2009 I conducted interviews with professional and amateur botanists, as well wildflower enthusiasts and tourists, at two places of remarkable floristic diversity: the Lesueur-Eneabba region and the Fitzgerald River National Park. Interview transcripts suggest the possibility of a corporeal aesthetics as a postcolonial countermeasure to the predominantly visual, scientific construction of the aesthetic value of wild flora.

This is Not an Article: a reflection on Creative Research Dialogues (This is Not a Seminar)

Abstract This is Not a Seminar (TINAS) is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visual arts. We established the TINAS programme to assist postgraduate research students in connecting their creative practices to methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches whilst fostering an atmosphere of rapport across creative disciplines. The pilot programme conducted for six months in 2012 comprised dialogues with experienced creative researchers; critical reading sessions on practice-led theory; and workshops in journaling, ethics and copyright. This article is a reflection on the strengths and limitations of TINAS and future projections. More than an additional teaching and learning service, the programme has become a vital forum for creative dialogue.

Biological Processes as Writerly?An Ecological Critique of DNA-based Poetry

This article examines the DNA-based biopoetry of Christian Bök in relation to its antecedents in the art-science experiments of Joe Davis, Pak Chung Wong, and Eduardo Kac. In particular, I develop an ecocritical analysis of the process of encipherment at the center of their works. Wong encoded lyrics from the song “It’s a Small World After All”within the DNA of a bacterium. Similarly, Kac employs encipherment in Genesis, a project aiming to demonstrate that “biological processes are now writerly.” In the same way, Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1, published in 2015, involved enciphering poetry into the genome of the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans. The organism’s cellular mechanisms “read” the encoded poem and produced a protein, the structure of which was then deciphered, resulting in another poem in response. In relation to these works, I ask the following: are biopoetry and the encipherment process merely conceptual and methodological experimentations, or do they reflect ecological consciousness and ethical imperative for life? Building on Foucault’s idea of the discourse of nature and Benjamin’s notion of a language of things, I explore how The Xenotext—and biopoetry more generally—reinscribe the power/knowledge relations implicit in the long-standing tropes of nature as a book, code, or cipher to be unraveled. Constructed as an inherently mute subject, nature is willed to speak purportedly on its own terms but through conspicuously humanmedia and in inescapably androgenic terms. An ecologically directed evaluation of biopoetry ultimately affirms the indebtedness of all literary production, including biopoetry, to other-thanhuman lives and bodies.

Toward a phen(omen)ology of the seasons: The emergence of the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP)

Since European settlement, the Western calendar has insufficiently accounted for the seasonal nuances and multiple temporalities of Australia. Beginning with Tim Entwistle’s recent proposal to revise the four-season Australian norm, this article traces the emergence of the Western calendar in Europe and its institutionalization ‘Down Under’. With its emphasis on land-based calendars, the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project (IWKP) is a partnership between Aboriginal communities and the Bureau of Meteorology aimed at preserving and promoting knowledge of the endemic seasons of Australian regions. As the most recent addition to the IWKP, the six-season Nyoongar calendar of the South-West of Western Australia is based on meteorological conditions (ecological time), such as wind directions and temperatures, but also on the procurement of food, maintenance of cultural knowledge, and performance of ceremonies (structural time). Through the fusion of phenomenological (experiential, sensory, place-based, actual) and phenological (cognitive, visual, enumerative, digital) approaches, the endemic seasons of Australia can be appreciated in their depth and extent.

The Substance of Memory： Plants, Objects, and Affect

The purpose of this article is to develop the concept “botanical memory” through an analysis of interviews conducted with indigenous plant enthusiasts in the biodiverse Southwest corner of Western Australia. The topic of this article can be described as memory-based studies of plant diversity or botanically-focused oral histories; and the method is ethnographic. Attending to the everyday practices constituting botanical memory, the article posits a material-affective framework to foreground the dynamics between plants, people, objects, and remembrance. The writings of Henry David Thoreau and C. Nadia Seremetakis, in conjunction with affect and materiality theory, offer conceptual anchor points for this exploration of human recollection and flora. The interviews indicate that plant-based objects and living plants deepen human memory, particularly through their appeal to touch, taste, smell, and sensation.

Sacred Ecology of Plants: The Vegetative Soul in the Botanical Poetry of Les Murray

With developments in the botanical sciences regarding signaling and behavior, the idea of plant sensitivity becomes an increasingly real possibility. In conjunction with empirically argued principles of percipience, intelligence, and memory in the plant world, the vegetative soul takes on a new signilcance. Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other Western commentators delineated between the ensoulment of plants, animals, and humans. They regarded the vegetative soul as the incomplete basis for the emergence of animal and human life. The vegetative soul resonates deeply in the cosmologies of Aboriginal Australian people who regard plants as spiritually imbued participants in creation stories, or the Dreaming. Circumventing a hierarchical typology of ensoulment, the Australian poet Les Murray invokes these diverse notions of soul in his botanical poetry. Shaped by the convergence of Christian beliefs and traditional Australian indigenous conceptions of mora, Murray’s verse positions plants within a sacred ecology as ensouled beings with intelligent capacities proper to their modes of existence.

Analogue Angels And Digital Diamonds: Tracing The Origins Of New Media Art

This paper explores the key vocabularies, themes, ideas, artistic movements, and technological innovations contributing to the development of the digital arts over time. As new media theorists have argued, one of the defining features of the digital arts is the break-down of divisions between art forms, and between art and society (for example, Manovich 2001, 2005). This paper outlines how digital processes intersect with aesthetic and conceptual forms. Relevant frameworks, such as materiality, embodiment, hybridity, interactivity, and narrativity, form the origins of the genre. Digital artworks, like digital media, are interactive, participatory, dynamic, and customizable, incorporating shifting data flows and real-time user inputs (Paul 2003, 67). The customization of content and technology, as well as the recontextualization of information, characterize projects of digital art.

Natural heritage conservation and eco-digital poiesis: A Western Australian example

A city of biodiversity, Perth in Western Australia faces significant environmental challenges. As species and habitats vanish, so too can their biocultural heritage. To address biological and cultural decline, FloraCultures is a digital conservation initiative that uses archival, ethnographic and design approaches to conserve and promote Perths ‘botanical heritage’. This article examines the projects conceptual foundations in terms of nature/culture, tangible/intangible and thinking/making dualisms, as well as some of the practical strategies used to address these dualisms. To articulate biocultural heritage, I have had to rethink categorical oppositions through ecopoiesis – the making of interactive digital objects as informed by ecological discourses. The repository being developed will incorporate cultural materials (texts, visual art, interview recordings, music and video) not conventionally associated with environmental conservation. Key community-building approaches, such as focus groups and crowdsourcing, discussed later in the article, provide digitally based interventions into biocultural heritage loss that reflect the ecopoietic basis of FloraCultures.