Lors de l’infection orale par le parasite T. gondii, la réponse immunitaire intestinale fait intervenir des acteurs cellulaires et moléculaires initiateurs de l’inflammation servant à combattre l’infection. Cette réponse inflammatoire requiert l’intervention de mécanismes immuno-régulateurs pour permettre le maintien de l’homéostasie intestinale. Nous avons étudié le rôle du TLR9 dans l’initiation de la réponse immunitaire à T. gondii. Ce récepteur de l’immunité innée est largement distribué dans le système lymphoïde associé à la muqueuse intestinale, à la fois par les cellules constituant la barrière épithéliale et dans la lamina propria. L’expression du TLR9 est requise dans ces différents compartiments pour initier une réponse immunitaire protectrice contre l’infection par T. gondii. L’activation des voies de signalisation du TLR9, par la reconnaissance directe de motifs moléculaires exprimés par T. gondii, induit la production d’interférons (IFNs) de type I a et ß dans l’intestin grêle des souris infectées. Ces cytokines stimulent la production de Cryptdines (Crp-3 et -5) par les cellules de Paneth et leur libération dans la lumière intestinale. Au-delà de leur activité antimicrobienne, les Crps participent au recrutement de lymphocytes T CD4+ producteurs d’IFN-? en renforçant la production de chimiokines inflammatoires comme CCL2, CCL3 et CCL5. Dans la lamina propria, les cellules dendritiques initient la réponse inflammatoire au parasite par des mécanismes TLR9-depéndants. L’engagement de ce récepteur par T. gondii polarise la réponse immunitaire au parasite, induite par les cellules dendritiques, vers un profil Th1. Les lymphocytes B, bien qu’exprimant le TLR9, ne participent pas à l’initiation de la réponse inflammatoire à T. gondii. En revanche consécutivement à l’infection orale par le parasite, les cellules B activées amplifient d’une part le recrutement de cellules T CD4+ dans la lamina propria par la production de la chimiokine CCL3. D’autre part renforcent la production de la cytokine inflammatoire IFN-?, par les cellules T effectrices, par des interactions de contact faisant intervenir leur TNF-a membranaire. La réponse immunitaire à T. gondii dégénère chez les souris C57BL/6 en iléite létale. Les lymphocytes T régulateurs sont naturellement générés au cours de l’infection. La sensibilisation des cellules T regs par des antigènes de T. gondii, préalablement à l’infection par le parasite, protège dans notre modèle de la génération de l’iléite. Les T regs sensibilisés ont une expression renforcée des marqueurs de domiciliation intestinale CCR5 et a4ß7. Ils rééquilibrent la balance cytokinique dans le système lymphoïde associé à la muqueuse intestinale des souris infectées en limitant la production de cytokines Th1 par les lymphocytes purifiés de la lamina propria et renforçant leur production de cytokines Th2 et Th3. / We have investigated the role of TLR9 in the initiation of the immune response in the gut against Toxoplasma gondii. This innate immune receptor is widely expressed in the gut associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) : at the epithelial barrier and in the lamina propria. Expression of TLR9 is requiered in both these compartments to initiate a protective immune response against T. Gondii. Activation of TLR9 signaling pathways, by direct recognition of molecular motives expressed by T. gondii, induces the production of type I interferons (IFNs) in the small intestine. These interferons tregger the production of cryptdines (Crp-3 and -5) by paneth cells and their released into the lumen. Crps indirectly promote T cells (CD4 + IFN-y+) recruitmnent by enhancing the production of inflammatory chemokines. B-lymphocites express the TLR9 but do not contribute to the initiation of inflammatory response against T. gondii. However consecutively to the oral infection by the parasite, activated B cells amplify the inflammatory cytokine production (IFN-y), by effector T cells, via cell-cell interactions involving their mambrane bound TNF-a. In C57BL/6 mice, immune response against T. Gondii degenerates into a lethal ileitis. Regulatory T cells are naturally generated during infection. The sensibilisation of T regs by T. Gondii antigens, prior infection by the parasite, protects against the ileitis in our model. Sensibilized T regs overexpress gut homing receptors such as CCR5 AND a4ß7. By increasing their Th2 and Th3 cytokines production, sensibilized T regs readjust the cytokine balance in GALT of infected mice.

Originally presented as author's thesis, Uppsala. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-233) and index.

The basic problem involved in developing the curricular activity program at Galt High School was two-fold: (1) In what ways could the formal curriculum be modified and the schedule be adjusted in order to incorporate an informal club-activity program without impairing the regular educational opportunities?; (2) Could the use of school time for such a program be justified?

An examination of the 13 novels of John Galt on which his literary reputation mainly depends. After a brief account of his life intended to explain influences of place, language and thought which affected his work, these novels are considered in chronological order.1/ Galt's novels are diverse in technique and style and are often innovative, especially the "theoretical histories" and the political novels. 2/ Galt used the term "theoretical history" in a different sense from Dugald Stewart who applied it to a class of speculative enquiry practised by the philosophers and historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. On the other hand, many of his novels reflect the theories about the nature and evolution of society developed by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and especially by Adam Ferguson. Galt in fact intended that the novels should be read as "fables" to demonstrate the truth of these theories. 3/ Although it was only one of his modes, Galt was particularly successful in the ironic self-revelation of an imaginary narrator, as in Annals of the Parish or The Provost and in a more elaborate form in Ringan Gilhaize, which is a complex and subtle exercise of the historical imagination. 4/ One of Galt's strengths was his handling of a rich and exuberant Scots which is integral to his humour and characterisation. 5/ The last chapter is an account of the fluctuating standing of Galt in critical opinion. He was highly praised in his own lifetime by Scott, Byron and Coleridge, but he fell into disfavour as taste became more genteel. Interest in him revived in the 1890s, when J.H.Millar drew attention to his "philosophic insight" and relationship to Scottish 18th century thought. Critical attention to him has continued to develop and his reputation now rests on a more solid foundation than ever before.

Probiotics and prebiotics are emerging household terms, whose claimed health benefits share commonality. Their attributed health benefits include the production or induction of short chain fatty acids, maintaining bowel function, building colonization resistance (against pathogens) and treating antibiotic-associated diarrhea as well as colitis. Although both probiotic and prebiotic effects on immune system have been studied, the mechanisms of their activity are still not clearly defined and the conclusions drawn are elusive. While probiotics can act to influence the host at the cellular level, prebiotics, by definition, exert their effects indirectly through their impact on gut microbes. One purpose of this study was to investigate effects of Lactobacillus rhamnosus R0011 on innate immune parameters at the intestinal epithelial cell level, examining effects on both human and rat IEC. A second purpose was to define the effects of a range of prebiotic dietary fibres on the immune system at the mucosal and systemic level, using Biobreeding rats. L. rhamnosus demonstrated the ability to decrease proinflammatory cytokine and Toll-like receptor agonist-induced IL-8 and CINC-1 production from human and rat IEC, respectively. The timing of L. rhamnosus R0011 addition to HT-29 IEC, relative to proinflammatory challenge, influenced its ability to decrease IL-8 production. L. rhamnosus was more effective at decreasing production of IL-8 from human IEC when they were pre-incubated with this bacterium and subsequently challenged with proinflammatory stimuli. Certain effects of L. rhamnosus R011 were also observed in the absence of proinflammatory stimuli. Viable L. rhamnosus induced TNF-α production from rat IEC and heat-killed L. rhamnosus decreased constitutive TGF-β production from rat IEC and induced IL-8 or CINC-1 production from human and rat IEC, respectively. In Biobreeding rats, we demonstrated that oat dietary fibre significantly alters active TGF-β, CINC-1 and IL-6 levels in the colon in comparison to AIN-93G-fed rats. Wheat dietary fibre induced changes in active TGF-β, CINC-1 and IL-4 levels in the ileum in comparison to resistant starch-fed rats. Lastly, resistant starch exerted effects in the mesenteric lymph node, where changes in active TGF-β were observed in rats in comparison to AIN-93G-fed rats. Oat bran, wheat bran and resistant starch had no effects on cytokine levels in the serum or spleen of rats. Fructooligosaccharide-fed rats had a significant increase in active TGF-β levels in the colon and a significant decrease in active TGF-β levels in the spleen. Overall this suggests a FOS supplemented diet has both mucosal and systemic effects in rats, while wheat, oat and resistant starch supplemented diets had effects focused at the different locations at the mucosal level. These results illustrate differences in the ability of different dietary fibres to target immune parameters in specific mucosal tissues along the gastrointestinal tract and differential ability to exert systemic effects. Understanding the mechanism of action of probiotics provides insight into the downstream effects of prebiotics, while investigating effects of prebiotics on the immune system provides a broader view of the outcome of changes in gut microbiota composition and activity at the host organism level. / UOIT

No description available.

The epochal musical Hair is based predominantly on the actions and reactions to the cultural and societal occurrences of the Sixties. So, what can be done to help in the understanding of this historic musical? The answer: to produce an annotated text of the musical that will offer support to director and cast. The study consists of four chapters; the first, an introduction to the study; the second, a historical review (1960-1970); the third, the annotations which seeks to identify and explain all unfamiliar or unusual words, cultural obscurities, or personalities that might confuse, or otherwise mislead a full and comprehensive understanding of the author's original concept; and fourth, the worldwide performances of Hair and revivals after the original Broadway production.

Life is to be lived, savoured and engaged. Photography gives us permission to do that – to stop and simply look at something. As we hurry on with our day, it says, “Wait - over there! Look at that! Look how great that is!” If we stop to consider what we see, the looking may help restore our appreciation for the world around us. Photography, at its beginning, struggled with category; was it science or art, or was it something else? Once named photography – writing with light – we could place the craft among familiar practices of inscription such as writing and drawing. Unlike drawing and other forms of representation, however, as a trace photography constructs a direct and necessary relationship with its referent (its ostensible subject, if you will), creating a new set of questions and experiences. This condition is key to photography’s power, and the reason photography is a principle tool in modern-day story telling, and the culture of information. Why do we take pictures? What is it about photographs that intrigues and seduces us? What does photography have to offer architecture? Each time we take a picture we create a duplicate of experience, a duplicate that will exist unchanged. We create a second stream of existence for ourselves and immortalize a part of us. By doing so, we also give ourselves the opportunity and permission to return to that moment, and all that we associate with it, and to experience it again. The photographs we take and the photographs we see influence our experience. Photographic life is not found within the chaos of the world. It resides in fragments, millions of them, framed, cut off from any context. These pictures present us with evidence of moments, places and events. With them we can navigate the world in silence. And while the camera cannot be denied its objectivity, each photographer has a unique position, a developed opinion, and a personal practice; each photographer chooses what to show, and what to deny. Photographers select evidence to share with the world; as viewers we find our own meanings to the photographs that we see. We see texture, pattern, and forms created in light and shadow. We see a rhythm and episode and form we previously overlooked. When a photograph is successful, when there is some coincidence in the common relationship between photographer and viewer, via the photograph, that photograph becomes a site of experience.

Life is to be lived, savoured and engaged. Photography gives us permission to do that – to stop and simply look at something. As we hurry on with our day, it says, “Wait - over there! Look at that! Look how great that is!” If we stop to consider what we see, the looking may help restore our appreciation for the world around us. Photography, at its beginning, struggled with category; was it science or art, or was it something else? Once named photography – writing with light – we could place the craft among familiar practices of inscription such as writing and drawing. Unlike drawing and other forms of representation, however, as a trace photography constructs a direct and necessary relationship with its referent (its ostensible subject, if you will), creating a new set of questions and experiences. This condition is key to photography’s power, and the reason photography is a principle tool in modern-day story telling, and the culture of information. Why do we take pictures? What is it about photographs that intrigues and seduces us? What does photography have to offer architecture? Each time we take a picture we create a duplicate of experience, a duplicate that will exist unchanged. We create a second stream of existence for ourselves and immortalize a part of us. By doing so, we also give ourselves the opportunity and permission to return to that moment, and all that we associate with it, and to experience it again. The photographs we take and the photographs we see influence our experience. Photographic life is not found within the chaos of the world. It resides in fragments, millions of them, framed, cut off from any context. These pictures present us with evidence of moments, places and events. With them we can navigate the world in silence. And while the camera cannot be denied its objectivity, each photographer has a unique position, a developed opinion, and a personal practice; each photographer chooses what to show, and what to deny. Photographers select evidence to share with the world; as viewers we find our own meanings to the photographs that we see. We see texture, pattern, and forms created in light and shadow. We see a rhythm and episode and form we previously overlooked. When a photograph is successful, when there is some coincidence in the common relationship between photographer and viewer, via the photograph, that photograph becomes a site of experience.

This dissertation examines the use of images of graveyards and death in the writings of the ‘Blackwood’s group’, a coterie of authors and poets who published their writing either within the influential Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine or with the publisher William Blackwood and Sons in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that Blackwoodian texts like Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822) by John Wilson imagined the rural Scottish graveyard as a repository for the traditional values and social structures which appeared to be under threat in the rapidly modernising British nation. In these texts the kirkyard functions as a key symbolic space, creating an imagined national ‘home’ for British readers in the idealised Scottish village graveyard. This nostalgic pastoral image of the eternal kirkyard is however in opposition to Blackwood’s Magazine’s reputation for violent, urbane wit and sensational gothic stories. The Noctes Ambrosianae and Tales of Terror articulate a modern, masculine and elite image of the magazine which seem at odds with the domestic, pastoral Scottishness offered in the ‘Scotch novels’ and regional tales. William Blackwood’s publishing house and magazine are at once synonymous with two apparently opposing world views and target readerships, and this tension is most strongly articulated in the tidy Scots graves and unburied corpses of the magazine’s fiction. I examine works published by John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, James Hogg, D.M. Moir, Henry Thomson, Robert McNish, John Galt, Samuel Warren, James Montgomery and Thomas de Quincey, between the magazine’s foundation in 1817 and the increasing defection of these original Blackwoodians to other periodicals and the retirement of the Noctes Ambrosianae series in the late 1830s. I identify a series of conventions associated with an idealised Blackwoodian rural death before examining the ways in which tales where the conventions of this 'good death' and burial are disrupted by crime, bodysnatching, epidemic disease and suicide challenge or reinforce the world view the rural texts articulated. Chapter one focuses on eighteenth-century ideas about death and sociability. Looking at a group of texts which span from Robert Blair’s The Grave (1746) to Edmund Burke’s revolutionary period writings of the 1790s, it traces what Ester Schor has termed a ‘transition from the “natural” sympathies of the Enlightenment to the “political” sympathies of a revolutionary age’ (75). I argue that in particular Edmund Burke’s creation of a conservative image of nation based on tradition and ancestry acted as a foundation for the type of politicised engagement with the dead which characterised the work of the Blackwood’s group. Chapter two builds upon recent identifications of a Blackwoodian regional tale tradition by highlighting the crucial role of death and the kirkyard in this provincial fiction. Placing John Wilson’s highly popular story series Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life in relation to contemporary debates about Evangelical religion, readership and nation, reveals a series of ideas and conventions which can be identified in other rural writing by John Galt, J.G. Lockhart and James Hogg. Having established an image of what a ‘good death’ might look like and stand for within the Blackwoodian imagination, I turn my attention to deaths which do not follow these conventions. Chapter three explores Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s well-documented fascination with spectacular violence in three of the magazine’s signature Tales of Terror and Thomas De Quincey’s ‘On Murder’ essays (1827, 1839). Chapter four looks at three stories from the magazine which feature bodysnatching, focusing on the role which doctors and provincial communities play within these texts. Chapter five compares responses to the 1832 cholera epidemic by James Montgomery and James Hogg. Finally, Chapter six argues for a reading of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) which foregrounds the role of the suicide’s body within the narrative based on the representations of suicide in contemporary discussion and in Galt’s Annals of the Parish (1821).