Thao Tran

What does it mean to be vulnerable in a pandemic? COVID-19 and its complex ramifications have challenged policymakers and researchers worldwide to redefine and reassess vulnerability. This paper presents experiences of being vulnerable during the pandemic among communities in Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam. From November 2020 to April 2021, we conducted qualitative research with communities in 13 locations including Jakarta, Bandung and Sumba in Indonesia; Morang & Sunsari, Kathmandu, Bhaktapur, Sindulpalchowk, Lower Mustang and Kapilvastu in Nepal; and Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nam Dinh and Dak Lak in Vietnam. We held discussions with key informants from local communities and healthcare systems to explore local ideas of vulnerability. Based on these discussions and findings from our media monitoring at all study locations, community members at high risk of adverse impacts from the pandemic were identified. Participants were purposively sampled to represent a range of age groups, occupations and levels of exposure to COVID-19 in the community and enrolled in semi-structured in-depth interviews about their experiences with the pandemic and public health responses. We analyzed and framed the results using Luna’s metaphor of “vulnerability layers”. In total we held discussions with 16 key informants from local communities and healthcare systems and collected 93 in-depth interviews with community participants. Using the “vulnerability layers” metaphor, we describe how stimulus conditions, namely stringent public health responses to COVID-19, may aggravate vulnerabilities a person already experiences or create new vulnerability experiences (for example, stigmatized status). A vulnerable experience can be exacerbated by the layering of multiple vulnerabilities or their cascade effects; on the other hand, it can be mediated by personal or collective protective factors. Our findings also demonstrate the role of context, including local disease control approaches and sociocultural attitudes and norms, in both the activation of and protection against vulnerability. Vulnerability assessments should take into account potential stimulus conditions (including public health responses) and local complexities rather than relying on groupings of impacted people. An understanding of the local context is also essential to improve the uptake and effectiveness of public health measures.

Tight control and multifactorial regulation of gene expression are important challenges in genetic engineering and are critical for the development of regulatory circuits. Meeting these challenges will facilitate transgene expression regulation and support the fine-tuning of metabolic pathways to avoid the accumulation of undesired intermediates. By employing the endoribonuclease Csy4 and its recognition sequence from Pseudomonas aeruginosa and manipulating 5'UTR of mRNA, we developed a two-component expression-repression system to tightly control synthesis of transgene products. We demonstrated that this regulatory device was functional in monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plant species, and showed that it can be used to repress transgene expression by >400-fold and to synchronize transgene repression. In addition to tissue-specific transgene repression, this system offers stimuli-dependent expression control. Using a bioinformatics approach, we identified 54 orthologous systems from various bacteria, and then validated in planta the activity for a few of those systems, demonstrating the potential diversity of such a two-component repressor system.