UWOMJ Volume 36, Number 3, January 1966

Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistryhttps://ir.lib.uwo.ca/uwomj/1192/thumbnail.jp

Early Life Stress Delays Sexual Maturation in Female Mice

In humans, some forms of early life stress (ELS) have been linked with precocious puberty, altered brain maturation, and increased risk for a variety of forms of pathology. Interestingly, not all forms of ELS have been found to equally impact these metrics of maturation. In recent work, we have found that ELS in the form of limited bedding (LB) from P4 to P11, was associated with precocious hippocampus maturation in males and increased risk for depressive-like pathology and attentional disturbance in female mice. Here, we sought to test whether ELS in the form of LB also impacted the timing of sexual maturation in female mice. To establish rate of somatic and sexual development, distinct cohorts of mice were tested for weight gain, timing of vaginal opening, and development of estrous cycling. ELS animals weighed significantly less than controls at every timepoint measured. Onset of vaginal opening was tracked from P21 to 40, and ELS was found to significantly delay the onset of vaginal opening. To test the impact of ELS on estrous cycle duration and regularity, vaginal cytology was assessed in independent groups of animals using either a continuous sampling (daily from P40 to P57) or random sampling approach (single swab at P35, P50, or P75). ELS did impact measures of estrous cycling, but these effects were dependent upon the sampling method used. We also tested the impact of ELS on anxiety-like behaviors over development and across the estrous cycle. We observed a developmental increase in anxiety-like behavior in control but not ELS mice. No effect of estrous cycle stage was found on anxiety-like behavior for either group of mice. Together these results provide evidence that ELS in the form of LB delays somatic and sexual development. Additional work will be required to determine the mechanism by which ELS impacts these measures, and if these effects are common to other models of ELS in rodents

Histories of Australian Rock Art Research

Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with pictographs and petroglyphs found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces – in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms. First Nations people have been marking these places with figurative imagery, abstract designs, stencils and prints for tens of thousands of years, often engaging with earlier rock markings. The art reflects and expresses changing experiences within landscapes over time, spirituality, history, law and lore, as well as relationships between individuals and groups of people, plants, animals, land and Ancestral Beings that are said to have created the world, including some rock art. Since the late 1700s, people arriving in Australia have been fascinated with the rock art they encountered, with detailed studies commencing in the late 1800s. Through the 1900s an impressive body of research on Australian rock art was undertaken, with dedicated academic study using archaeological methods employed since the late 1940s. Since then, Australian rock art has been researched from various perspectives, including that of Traditional Owners, custodians and other community members. Through the 1900s, there was also growing interest in Australian rock art from researchers across the globe, leading many to visit or migrate to Australia to undertake rock art research. In this volume, the varied histories of Australian rock art research from different parts of the country are explored not only in terms of key researchers, developments and changes over time, but also the crucial role of First Nations people themselves in investigations of this key component of their living heritage

The Pollinating Mesh: The Ecological Thought in Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction

This thesis studies how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, humans and nonhumans, pollinates Indigenous Australian speculative fiction and how the aesthetics of these texts warrants their reading as sites of these enmeshments. It aims to put this literature in the context of Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, ontologies, or metaphysics to establish how these underpin Indigenous literature and frame its reading. To attend to the global pertinence of both the texts under study and the ecological thought as the main conceptual framework, the thesis engages Object Oriented Ontology and adjacent theories of the ontological turn alongside trans-national Indigenous critical thought. Thus, analysing Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2010), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015), as well as Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999) allows me to establish that the ecological thought thematically informs them in diverse but interlinked ways. The ecological thought establishes enmeshments among all beings in what I posit as the aesthetics and poetics of the uncanny to capture Alexis Wright’s writing as leading us to think ecologically about the enmeshments of all beings in irreducible ways. All beings’ enmeshments attune us to seeking and finding our kin among all beings and I explore this in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s trilogy. In Kwaymullina’s work, I argue that all beings’ enmeshments sees Indigenous survivance as aesthetically coalescing with Indigenous dreams, which are speculatively manoeuvred and explored as the interface between the real and surreal, the material and the spiritual to enact all beings’ enmeshments. The texts thus enact speculative worlds of enmeshments wherein humans, nonhumans, organic, synthetic (AI) alive, dead, undead, spiritual, and nonliving depend on and become with one another for life, survival and survivance. Kwaymullina’s trilogy ultimately enacts a community of beings mediated by thinking about interconnectedness as becoming with and part of one another. The implication of such a way of thinking brings us to rethink what it means to (not) be and the hauntings of identity from the perspective of Indigenous ecological thinking, which my intervention pursues in the reading of Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart. The core of my intervention on Benang establishes it as a wellspring of onto-epistemic affordances to understand being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, leaking, never rigid or definitive. My reading stages how all beings’ enmeshments enhance the protagonist Harley’s regeneration of his effaced Aboriginal identity as an ontological and identity transformation through blood memory, listening to and reading about his family stories, encountering, and becoming with Country and his Aboriginal culture in its material and spiritual aspects. The thesis ends with interrogating my own speaking position as a postcolonial African reader-critic, and what it means for any African to engage with Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, and meeting with these literary texts and their philosophical underpinnings. I establish similarities between both worlds and argue that such African texts as Daniel Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drunkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy, epitomise worlds that equally register aesthetics and poetics similar to those in Indigenous Australian literature

Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak

"Epic and the Russian Novel from Gogol to Pasternak examines the origin of the nineteen- century Russian novel and challenges the Lukács-Bakhtin theory of epic. By removing the Russian novel from its European context, the authors reveal that it developed as a means of reconnecting the narrative form with its origins in classical and Christian epic in a way that expressed the Russian desire to renew and restore ancient spirituality. Through this methodology, Griffiths and Rabinowitz dispute Bakhtin’s classification of epic as a monophonic and dead genre whose time has passed. Due to its grand themes and cultural centrality, the epic is the form most suited to newcomers or cultural outsiders seeking legitimacy through appropriation of the past. Through readings of Gogol’s Dead Souls—a uniquely problematic work, and one which Bakhtin argued was novelistic rather than epic—Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, this book redefines “epic”

Divergent cellulosome architecture in rumen bacteria : structure and function studies in cohesin-dockerin complexes of Ruminococcus flavefaciens

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências Veterinárias, na Especialidade de Produção AnimalProtein-protein interactions play a vital role in many cellular processes as exemplified by the assembly of the cellulosome, a bacterial multi-enzyme complex that efficiently degrades cellulose and hemicellulose. Cellulosome assembly involves the high-affinity binding of type I enzyme-borne dockerins to repeated cohesin modules located on non-catalytic structural proteins termed scaffoldins. In addition, the complex is anchored into the bacterial surface through the binding of a scaffoldin type II dockerin to cell-bound cohesins. Initially, the architecture and organization of cellulosomes was thought to rely uniquely on type I and type II cohesin-dockerin interactions. It was recently suggested that cellulosomes from rumen bacteria are organized through different mechanisms involving a third type of cohesin-dockerin complexes. Thus, the genome of the major ruminal bacterium Ruminococcus flavefaciens FD-1 revealed a particularly elaborate cellulosome system that is assembled from a library of more than 200 different components through divergent cohesin-dockerin pairs. Providing structural insights for the specificity displayed by the increasing repertoire of cohesin-dockerin interaction is not only of fundamental importance but essential for the development of novel cellulosome based tools. The present work aimed to identify the molecular basis for the organization of R. flavefaciens cellulosome by dissecting the structural basis of cohesin-dockerin specificity in cellulosomes of rumen bacteria. The data revealed a collection of unique cohesin-dockerin interactions, supporting the functional relevance of dockerin classification in groups based on primary sequence similarity. In addition, R. flavefaciens cellulosome is assembled through a mechanism involving single but not dual-binding mode dockerins. This contrasts with the majority of the cellulosomes described to date where dockerins generally present two similar cohesin-binding interfaces, supporting a dual-binding mode. To illustrate this, the structures of two cohesin-dockerin complexes containing an Acetivibrio cellulolyticus dual-binding mode dockerin were solved. Finally, structural information was used to engineer a dockerin presenting a dual cohesin specificity, revealing the plasticity of the cohesin-dockerin platform to design novel protein-protein interactions.RESUMO - Arquitetura celulossomal divergente em bactérias ruminais: estudos de estrutura e função em complexos coesina-doquerina do Ruminococcus flavefaciens - As interacções proteína-proteína desempenham um papel essencial em vários processos celulares, sendo exemplo disso a estruturação do celulosoma, um complexo bacteriano multienzimático altamente eficiente na degradação da celulose e hemicelulose. A montagem do celulosoma envolve interações de alta afinidade entre doquerinas do tipo I, presentes em enzimas, e os módulos coesina presentes em proteínas estruturais não catalíticas denominadas de escafoldinas. Adicionalmente, todo o complexo é ancorado à superfície bacteriana através da ligação de uma dockerina do tipo II, presente numa escafoldina, a coesinas ligadas à célula. Inicialmente, pensava-se que a arquitectura e organização dos celulosomas assentava exclusivamente em interacções coesina-doquerina do tipo I e II. Recentemente, foi sugerido que a microbiota ruminal contém bactérias produtoras de celulossoma com diferentes mecanismos de organização, envolvendo um terceiro tipo de complexos coesina-dockerina. O genoma da bactéria ruminal Ruminococcus flavefaciens FD-1, revelou um sistema celulossomal particularmente elaborado, montado a partir de uma biblioteca com mais de 200 componentes, através de complexos coesina-doquerina do tipo III. Estabelecer uma base estrutural para a especificidade exibida pelo crescente repertório de pares coesina-doquerina é não só fundamentalmente importante mas também essencial para o desenvolvimento de novas ferramentas com base no celulossoma. O presente trabalho teve como objetivo identificar a base estrutural para a especificidade coesina-doquerina do R. flavefaciens, permitindo descortinar os mecanismos por detrás da montagem dos celulosomas ruminais. Os dados obtidos revelaram uma colecção de interacções coesina-doquerina única, suportando a relevância funcional da classificação das doquerinas em grupos com base na homologia da sua estrutura primária. Mostraram ainda que o celulossoma do R. flavefaciens é montado através de um mecanismo envolvendo doquerinas com modo de ligação único mas não duplo. Isto contrasta com a maioria dos celulosomas descritos até à data, em que as doquerinas geralmente apresentam duas interfaces semelhantes de ligação à coesina, suportando um modo de ligação dupla. Tal é ilustrado pela estrutura de dois complexos coesina-doquerina do Acetivibrio cellulolyticus, envolvendo uma doquerina com modo de ligação dupla. Finalmente, esta informação estrutural foi usada para desenhar uma doquerina com dupla especificidade, mostranto a plasticidade da plataforma coesina-doquerina para o desenvolvimento de novas interações proteína:proteína.N/

Textbook of Psychiatry First Edition, Draft 2

This multi-authored collaborative textbook on psychiatry, originally created on Wikibooks, discusses a range of psychiatric disorders, including psychotic, mood and and anxiety disorders, amongst many others. It covers other aspects of psychiatric care such as diagnosis, neurobiology, psychopharmacology, treatment methods, and dealing with agitated or violent patients

Twilight States: Sleepwalking, Liminal Consciousness, and Sensational Selfhood in Victorian Literature and Culture

Twilight States: Sleepwalking, Liminal Consciousness, and Sensational Selfhood in Victorian Literature and Culture argues that sleepwalking was everywhere in nineteenth-century culture, both as a topic for scientific, legal, and public debate, but also as a potent symbol in the Victorian imagination that informed literature and art. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century interest in the somnambulist was provoked by what the figure represented and revealed to the Victorians: namely, themselves. The sleepwalker represented the hidden potential within the self for either greatness or deviance, or, more mundanely, simply a fuller existence than consciousness has an awareness of. Sleepwalking writ large the multi-layered self at a time when the self—by psychiatry and society at large—was being accepted as increasingly multivalent. The sleepwalker was a visible and often sensational embodiment of the multilayered consciousness that became the accepted model of the mind over the course of the nineteenth century, visibly demonstrating what doctors and philosophers suggested that the mind could do. By connecting literary representations of sleepwalkers in the works of Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, and Sheridan Le Fanu to both nineteenth-century medical discourses of somnambulism and popular press’s accounts and illustrations of altered states, we see that the discourses surrounding the figure of the somnambulist indicate that it was a cultural receptacle for fears associated with the changing scientific and political landscape, but also a locus for hopes about human potential and innate goodness: an ambivalence possible because of the sleepwalker’s liminality

Unsettling Translation

This collection engages with translation and interpreting from a diverse but complementary range of perspectives, in dialogue with the seminal work of Theo Hermans. A foundational figure in the field, Hermans’s scholarly engagement with translation spans several key areas, including history of translation, metaphor, norms, ethics, ideology, methodology, and the critical reconceptualization of the positioning of the translator and of translation itself as a social and hermeneutic practice. Those he has mentored or inspired through his lectures and pioneering publications over the years are now household names in the field, with many represented in this volume. They come together here both to critically re-examine translation as a social, political and conceptual site of negotiation and to celebrate his contributions to the field. The volume opens with an extended introduction and personal tribute by the editor, which situates Hermans’s work within the broader development of critical thinking about translation from the 1970s onward. This is followed by five parts, each addressing a theme that has been broadly taken up by Theo Hermans in his own work: translational epistemologies; historicizing translation; performing translation; centres and peripheries; and digital encounters. This is important reading for translation scholars, researchers and advanced students on courses covering key trends and theories in translation studies, and those engaging with the history of the discipline