In 2006, India began formally reconstructing its national food safety policy, subsuming over seven laws and agencies into a single streamlined regulatory authority. This moment of reform offers a "most likely" test case for theories of global policy convergence. Scholars across multiple fields predict that national politics are becoming more similar over time. Those predictions are especially strong in the field of food safety policy, as the WTO now mandates that member states align with an encyclopedic policy resource called the Codex Alimentarius. The dissertation asks whether, how, and why we see both global pressures for and actual evidence of convergence in the Indian case. I ask if the details of the case map onto the prevailing account in sociology, which predicts convergence as a result of spreading political culture; the sociology of food's broad predictions of both convergence and low political autonomy vis a vis global trade mandates; or the prevailing account in political science, which sees domestic regulatory change as a result of global competitions for consumer markets. I find very limited convergence in the Indian case, mostly limited to a nascent movement toward norms of "science-based" regulation. I also find that theories of regulatory competition best explain why India has converged to the extent it has, though the case suggests new causal mechanisms whereby trade agreements and economic competition generate regulatory change.

Organic cations (OC's) are actively secreted by the renal proximal tubules in a number of species. The transepithelial transport of OC's involves a secondary active OC/H+ exchange process at the brush border (luminal) membrane. This study employed rabbit renal brush border membrane vesicles (BBMV) to investigate the structural requirements associated with substrate recognition at the OC transporter. A number of compounds (an N-alkylammonium series, an N1-alkylpyridinium series and some clinically important organic bases) were tested for their ability to competitively block the uptake of radioactively labelled tetraethylammonium (TEA) into BBMV. The inhibitory effectiveness of these compounds was correlated to the degree of hydrophobicity surrounding the positively-charged nitrogenous nucleus common to all the inhibitors. Preloading BBMV with N1-substituted pyridines trans-stimulated the uptake of TEA, suggesting that these compounds are translocated substrates for the OC transporter. The activity of the OC transport inhibitor and neurotoxin 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium was of special interest, and thus its transport characteristics were fully evaluated.

To study adaptation of pancreatic amylase to diet, an affinity adsorbent, alpha-GHI-AH-Sepharose 4B, was used to determine amylase synthesis in cultured pancreatic acinar cells. This adsorbent exhibited a consistent binding capacity and was specific for amylase. Acinar cells from rats fed high fat (HF) or carbohydrate (HC) diets for 7 d were cultured 1-48 h in serum-free medium. Amylase activity remained significantly higher in HC cells than in HF cells through 24 h in culture, despite its decrease with time in culture. The relative synthesis of amylase (3H-phe amylase/3H-phe total protein x 100) was significantly higher in HC than in HF cells at isolation and remained higher during culture. These results demonstrate that this affinity adsorbent can be used to determine amylase synthesis and suggest that the effect of diet on amylase activity and relative synthesis persists in cultured pancreatic acinar cells.

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