Ecdysteroid agonist and antagonist activities can be detected and quantified with the Drosophila melanogaster B(II) cell bioassay. This bioassay is convenient, sensitive and robust. We report the assessment with this bioassay of the activities of a wide range of compounds representing a number of classes of natural products. Many compounds were inactive over a wide concentration range (10(-8) to 10(-4) or 10(-3) M) or cytotoxic at high concentrations. However, antagonisitic activity was associated with several classes of compounds: cucurbitacins and withanolides (extending previous findings) and phenylalkanoids and certain alkaloids (described for the first time). A withanolide (withaperuvin D) is identified which possesses agonistic activity. Brassinosteroids, which have been ascribed (ant)agonistic properties in the past, were not found to be active in the B(II) bioassay, either as agonists or antagonists. Possible reasons for the prevalence of antagonists and for the low potency of the majority of them are discussed.
The term vaginal economy was first used by a feminist columnist of a leading newspaper in the Philippines to refer to "how the otherwise legitimate deployment of Filipino women entertainers has deteriorated into their massive trafficking into sex work." 1 In the dominant Philippine-as well as the global-context, the term, however, evokes a much larger scope than sex trafficking, though certainly this subaltern sphere is essentially constitutive of the economy. About half of the 2.45 million people trafficked worldwide, 1.36 million, are from the Asia-Pacific region. 2 Vaginal economy refers to the female sex as the primary instrument of national development and is characterized by the massive deployment of overseas contract workers (OCWs; as much as two-thirds are women), the greater sexualization of female domestic labor (sex work and trafficking as an extreme yet common feature; pigeonholed in "3D" jobs that are "domestic, degrading and demeaning"), the positions 19:2
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