Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut—vignettes of "inner movements"—foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman. Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details—when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.

Tropisms, the defined vectorial stimuli, such as gravity, light, touch, humidity gradients, ions, oxygen, and temperature, which provide guidance for plant organ growth, is a rapidly growing and changing field. The last few years have witnessed a true renaissance in the analysis of tropisms. As such the conception of tropisms has changed from being seen as a group of simple laboratory curiosities to their recognition as important tools/phenotypes with which to decipher basic cell biological processes that are essential to plant growth and development. Plant Tropisms will provide a comprehensive, yet integrated volume of the current state of knowledge on the molecular and cell biological processes that govern plant tropisms.

One of the most important and outstanding characteristics of viruses is their cellular and host tropism. As parasitic entities, viruses have to compromise with numbers of positive and negative factors present in target cells for their survival. In the absence of an appropriate interaction with cells, they do not replicate at all. Viral tropism can be therefore determined at each replication step, from the entry to progeny production in target cells. There are two major types of viral tropism, that is, the receptor-dependent and -independent tropisms. Restriction of viral replication occurs on the cell surface (receptor-dependent viral entry step) and/or intracellularly (receptor-independent post-entry replication steps). Viruses have acquired some mechanisms through adaptive mutations and/or recombinations to counteract a wide variety of cellular restriction factors, or to correctly interact with numerous cellular factors necessary for replication. They thereby can replicate, spread and survive in certain cell lineages, tissues, organs and finally in host individuals. This evolutional process/pressure would have generated profound effects on the biological properties of viruses. Recently, many cellular anti-viral factors with unique action mechanisms in addition to co-viral factors have been discovered by extensive studies on molecular genetics of viruses. Researches of these factors would lead to the effective clinical applications, as well as the increase of basic biological knowledge. In this Research Topic, we focus on the receptor-independent and uniquely associated viral tropism other than the strictly receptor-dependent or -mediated one. By presenting a series of centered articles, we describe here the unique properties of various virus species. Any types of the tier 1 article would be accepted and included in this Topic.

Bogduk aims to provide a foundation of knowledge upon which an understanding of the various treatment and therapy techniques of the different specialities involved can be built. This edition includes discussion of the sacrum and sacro-iliac joint.

Reports the latest advances in defining the molecular basis of infection in both bacterial and viral systems.