Dynamique de l'aveu et de la dénonciation dans les récits du sida d'Hervé Guibert

Les répercussions du sida sur la communauté intellectuelle préfiguraient un changement certain dans l’esthétique littéraire contemporaine. Le témoignage de l’expérience individuelle de l’écrivain, à cet instant de désarroi collectif et de répression sociale à l’égard de la communauté homosexuelle, cherchait à provoquer une reconfiguration de l’espace de l’aveu par la projection du sujet privé dans la sphère publique. Cette posture de mise à nu avait déjà vu le jour dans les écrits féministes des années 70, mais elle a subi dans les années 80 et 90 une transformation importante puisque c’est le sujet masculin qui s’est exposé par la médiation du corps dans le récit de la maladie à l’heure du sida. Les discours de l’intime tentaient de rapprocher les espaces social et littéraire tout en affirmant des formes définies par des éthiques et des esthétiques hétérogènes. La période d’écriture de la maladie, qui clôt l’oeuvre de Guibert, est caractérisée par l’ancrage du contexte social de l’épidémie du sida. Par conséquent, les trois récits qui la fondent, soit À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990), Le protocole compassionnel (1991) et Cytomégalovirus (1992), constituent le triptyque sur lequel s’appuiera ma réflexion, auquel s’ajoute le journal tenu par Guibert depuis son adolescence jusqu’à sa mort, Le mausolée des amants (2001), qui a été publié dix ans après la disparition de l’auteur. Cette oeuvre s’inscrit en partie dans cette mouvance du témoignage de la maladie, qui prend place entre 1987 et 1991, période pendant laquelle l’écrivain sent sa vulnérabilité sur le plan de sa santé. Il est proposé d’étudier à travers ces écrits l’écriture de l’aveu et de la dénonciation, telle qu’elle est pensée chez Guibert. Il s’agira de réfléchir sur les stratégies et les fonctions du témoignage littéraire d’une telle expérience à travers la mise en récit du sujet. Une problématique traverse toutefois cette posture de mise en danger individuelle où la nécessité de se révéler est l’objet d’un non-consensus. Or, cette recherche d’intensité par l’aveu, qui repose sur la maladie, la sexualité et la mort, veut dépasser sa dimension apocalyptique en tentant d’inscrire l’oeuvre dans une éthique sociale. De ce fait, le dévoilement, sur le mode de la dénonciation, s’oriente sur la dimension collective en prenant à partie la société et la communauté.The impact of Aids on the intellectual community anticipates an important change in contemporary literature’s aesthetics. Testimony of the writer’s experience, in an epoch of collective disarray and social repression towards homosexuals, strived to create a new context for self-confession by prospecting the personal subject into public sphere. This mode of self-exposure was already manifest in feminine texts from the 70’s, but it underwent an important transformation in the 80’s and 90’s. In the age of Aids, it is the masculine subject that, by means of the body, unveils itself in narratives about the disease. Discourses about personal intimacy attempted to bring social and literary spaces closer by elaborating forms of heterogeneous ethics and aesthetics. The closing period of Guibert’s work, which focuses on illness is anchored in the social context of the Aids epidemic. Consequently, the three texts, À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (1990), Le protocole compassionnel (1991) and Cytomégalovirus (1992) constitute the central subject of my reflection, along with the personal diary that Guibert kept from his teenage years until his death, Le mausolée des amants (2001). To a certain extent, this journal bears witness to the encroaching disease, which evolved between the years 1987 and 1991, the period during which the writer felt a growing vulnerability regarding his health. This study will focus on Guibert’s thinking about confession and denunciation. It will be a matter of reflecting on the strategies and functions of literature bearing intensity to the subjective experience of Aids. Moreover, the quest for achieving intensity by self-confession which concerns telling the story of illness, sexuality and death, seeks to go beyond an apocalyptic dimension by inscribing the work in a social and ethical context. In this way, self-exposure holds forth the collective aspect by confronting society and community

Modeling Chromosomes in Mouse to Explore the Function of Genes, Genomic Disorders, and Chromosomal Organization

One of the challenges of genomic research after the completion of the human genome project is to assign a function to all the genes and to understand their interactions and organizations. Among the various techniques, the emergence of chromosome engineering tools with the aim to manipulate large genomic regions in the mouse model offers a powerful way to accelerate the discovery of gene functions and provides more mouse models to study normal and pathological developmental processes associated with aneuploidy. The combination of gene targeting in ES cells, recombinase technology, and other techniques makes it possible to generate new chromosomes carrying specific and defined deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations that are accelerating functional analysis. This review presents the current status of chromosome engineering techniques and discusses the different applications as well as the implication of these new techniques in future research to better understand the function of chromosomal organization and structures

Discovery of a Small Non-AUG-Initiated ORF in Poleroviruses and Luteoviruses That Is Required for Long-Distance Movement.

Viruses in the family Luteoviridae have positive-sense RNA genomes of around 5.2 to 6.3 kb, and they are limited to the phloem in infected plants. The Luteovirus and Polerovirus genera include all but one virus in the Luteoviridae. They share a common gene block, which encodes the coat protein (ORF3), a movement protein (ORF4), and a carboxy-terminal extension to the coat protein (ORF5). These three proteins all have been reported to participate in the phloem-specific movement of the virus in plants. All three are translated from one subgenomic RNA, sgRNA1. Here, we report the discovery of a novel short ORF, termed ORF3a, encoded near the 5' end of sgRNA1. Initially, this ORF was predicted by statistical analysis of sequence variation in large sets of aligned viral sequences. ORF3a is positioned upstream of ORF3 and its translation initiates at a non-AUG codon. Functional analysis of the ORF3a protein, P3a, was conducted with Turnip yellows virus (TuYV), a polerovirus, for which translation of ORF3a begins at an ACG codon. ORF3a was translated from a transcript corresponding to sgRNA1 in vitro, and immunodetection assays confirmed expression of P3a in infected protoplasts and in agroinoculated plants. Mutations that prevent expression of P3a, or which overexpress P3a, did not affect TuYV replication in protoplasts or inoculated Arabidopsis thaliana leaves, but prevented virus systemic infection (long-distance movement) in plants. Expression of P3a from a separate viral or plasmid vector complemented movement of a TuYV mutant lacking ORF3a. Subcellular localization studies with fluorescent protein fusions revealed that P3a is targeted to the Golgi apparatus and plasmodesmata, supporting an essential role for P3a in viral movement.ES and WAM were financed through a Gutenberg Chair (Région Alsace) grant awarded to WAM. Work in the AEF lab was funded by grants from the Wellcome Trust (088789) and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Research Council (BBSRC) (BB/J007072/1 and BB/J015652/1). WAM was also funded by a Fulbright Foundation Research Scholarship and grant number 5R01GM067104-09 from the NIH Institute of General Medical Sciences.This is the final version. It was first published by PLOS at http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1004868#ack

Controlled Somatic and Germline Copy Number Variation in the Mouse Model

Changes in the number of chromosomes, but also variations in the copy number of chromosomal regions have been described in various pathological conditions, such as cancer and aneuploidy, but also in normal physiological condition. Our classical view of DNA replication and mitotic preservation of the chromosomal integrity is now challenged as new technologies allow us to observe such mosaic somatic changes in copy number affecting regions of chromosomes with various sizes. In order to go further in the understanding of copy number influence in normal condition we could take advantage of the novel strategy called Targeted Asymmetric Sister Chromatin Event of Recombination (TASCER) to induce recombination during the G2 phase so that we can generate deletions and duplications of regions of interest prior to mitosis. Using this approach in the mouse we could address the effects of copy number variation and segmental aneuploidy in daughter cells and allow us to explore somatic mosaics for large region of interest in the mouse

Role Clarification Processes for Better Integration of Nurse Practitioners into Primary Healthcare Teams: A Multiple-Case Study

Cet article s'intéresse aux processus de clarification des rôles professionnels lors de l'intégration d'une infirmière praticienne spécialisée dans les équipes de première ligne au Québec.Role clarity is a crucial issue for effective interprofessional collaboration. Poorly defined roles can become a source of conflict in clinical teams and reduce the effectiveness of care and services delivered to the population. Our objective in this paper is to outline processes for clarifying professional roles when a new role is introduced into clinical teams, that of the primary healthcare nurse practitioner (PHCNP). To support our empirical analysis we used the Canadian National Interprofessional Competency Framework, which defines the essential components for role clarification among professionals. A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted on six cases in which the PHCNP role was introduced into primary care teams. Data collection included 34 semistructured interviews with key informants involved in the implementation of the PHCNP role. Our results revealed that the best performing primary care teams were those that used a variety of organizational and individual strategies to carry out role clarification processes. From this study, we conclude that role clarification is both an organizational process to be developed and a competency that each member of the primary care team must mobilize to ensure effective interprofessional collaboration.IRSC, MSS

Lineage-specific requirements of β-catenin in neural crest development

β-Catenin plays a pivotal role in cadherin-mediated cell adhesion. Moreover, it is a downstream signaling component of Wnt that controls multiple developmental processes such as cell proliferation, apoptosis, and fate decisions. To study the role of β-catenin in neural crest development, we used the Cre/loxP system to ablate β-catenin specifically in neural crest stem cells. Although several neural crest–derived structures develop normally, mutant animals lack melanocytes and dorsal root ganglia (DRG). In vivo and in vitro analyses revealed that mutant neural crest cells emigrate but fail to generate an early wave of sensory neurogenesis that is normally marked by the transcription factor neurogenin (ngn) 2. This indicates a role of β-catenin in premigratory or early migratory neural crest and points to heterogeneity of neural crest cells at the earliest stages of crest development. In addition, migratory neural crest cells lateral to the neural tube do not aggregate to form DRG and are unable to produce a later wave of sensory neurogenesis usually marked by the transcription factor ngn1. We propose that the requirement of β-catenin for the specification of melanocytes and sensory neuronal lineages reflects roles of β-catenin both in Wnt signaling and in mediating cell–cell interactions

Projet collectif de recherche : cartographie de l'espace parisien

Rapport final d'activité du PCR 2005-200

A new mouse model for the trisomy of the Abcg1-U2af1 region reveals the complexity of the combinatorial genetic code of down syndrome

Mental retardation in Down syndrome (DS), the most frequent trisomy in humans, varies from moderate to severe. Several studies both in human and based on mouse models identified some regions of human chromosome 21 (Hsa21) as linked to cognitive deficits. However, other intervals such as the telomeric region of Hsa21 may contribute to the DS phenotype but their role has not yet been investigated in detail. Here we show that the trisomy of the 12 genes, found in the 0.59 Mb (Abcg1-U2af1) Hsa21 sub-telomeric region, in mice (Ts1Yah) produced defects in novel object recognition, open-field and Y-maze tests, similar to other DS models, but induces an improvement of the hippocampal-dependent spatial memory in the Morris water maze along with enhanced and longer lasting long-term potentiation in vivo in the hippocampus. Overall, we demonstrate the contribution of the Abcg1-U2af1 genetic region to cognitive defect in working and short-term recognition memory in DS models. Increase in copy number of the Abcg1-U2af1 interval leads to an unexpected gain of cognitive function in spatial learning. Expression analysis pinpoints several genes, such as Ndufv3, Wdr4, Pknox1 and Cbs, as candidates whose overexpression in the hippocampus might facilitate learning and memory in Ts1Yah mice. Our work unravels the complexity of combinatorial genetic code modulating different aspect of mental retardation in DS patients. It establishes definitely the contribution of the Abcg1-U2af1 orthologous region to the DS etiology and suggests new modulatory pathways for learning and memor

Genome analysis of the necrotrophic fungal pathogens Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Botrytis cinerea

Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Botrytis cinerea are closely related necrotrophic plant pathogenic fungi notable for their wide host ranges and environmental persistence. These attributes have made these species models for understanding the complexity of necrotrophic, broad host-range pathogenicity. Despite their similarities, the two species differ in mating behaviour and the ability to produce asexual spores. We have sequenced the genomes of one strain of S. sclerotiorum and two strains of B. cinerea. The comparative analysis of these genomes relative to one another and to other sequenced fungal genomes is provided here. Their 38–39 Mb genomes include 11,860–14,270 predicted genes, which share 83% amino acid identity on average between the two species. We have mapped the S. sclerotiorum assembly to 16 chromosomes and found large-scale co-linearity with the B. cinerea genomes. Seven percent of the S. sclerotiorum genome comprises transposable elements compared t