Bioaccumulation Trends of Ten Metals in a Pelagic Food Web of Lake Champlain

Many metals have serious toxic effects when ingested by aquatic organisms, and the process of bioaccumulation intensifies this problem. A better understanding of bioaccumulation trends of anthropogenically introduced metals in freshwater food webs is necessary for the development of effective management strategies to protect aquatic organisms, as well as organisms (including humans) that consume top-predator fish in these food webs. Various fish species representing different trophic levels of a pelagic food chain were sampled from Lake Champlain (VT/NY). Atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) was used to determine levels of chromium, copper, cobalt, cadmium, lead, zinc, nickel, rubidium, cesium and potassium in the fish samples. Metal concentrations for chromium, cobalt, nickel, cesium, cadmium (<5.0 ppm) and lead (<10.0 ppm) were found to be all below detection limits. Carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios were analyzed to determine the trophic relationship of each fish species. Stable isotope and AAS metal data were used in tandem to produce linear regressions for each metal against trophic level to assess biomagnification. Both potassium and zinc showed no biomagnification because they are homeostatically regulated essential trace metals. Copper was under the detection limits for all fish species with the exception of the sea lamprey; but showed a significant biodiminution among the invertebrates and lamprey. Rubidium, a rarely studied metal, was shown to increase with trophic level in a marginally significant linear relationship suggesting biomagnification is possible where more trophic levels are sampled.

CYSTATIN RELATED EPIDIDYMAL SPERMATOGENIC PROTEIN RESIDES IN THE OUTER DENSE FIBRES AND LIKELY TRANSIENTLY ASSOCIATES WITH THE SURFACE OF EPIDIDYMAL MOUSE SPERMATOZOA

Cystatin Related Epididymal Spermatogenic protein (CRES) is expressed in both the testis and epididymis and found associated with spermatozoa. It appears as non-glycosylated (14 and 12 kDa) and glycosylated isoforms (19 and 17 kDa). The role of CRES is enigmatic and dependent on localization of its isoforms, which is the objective of this study. The initial approach was to investigate testicular and epididymal origins of these isoforms by immunohistochemistry and immunogold cytochemistry. To further pinpoint CRES localization we then selectively extracted and fractionated epididymal spermatozoa in order to find by immunoblotting which sperm fractions contained CRES isoforms. Immunohistochemical analysis of mouse spermatogenesis showed that CRES was expressed in the tail cytoplasm of elongating spermatids from step 9-16, with a pattern reminiscent of outer dense fibre (ODF) proteins. Ultrastructural immunocytochemistry revealed that the immunogold label was concentrated over growing ODFs and mitochondrial sheath in the testes which persisted in spermatozoa through the epididymis. Sequential extractions of isolated sperm tails with Triton X-100-dithiothreitol (DTT) to remove the mitochondrial sheath, whose extract contained an unrelated 66 kDa immunoreactive band, followed by either sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)-DTT or urea-DTT to solubilise accessory fibres of the tail revealed a 14 kDa immunoreactive band associated with the ODF. In addition, Western blots revealed glycosylated and non-glycosylated CRES isoforms in nonyl phenoxylpolyethoxylethanol (NP40) extracts of the caput, but not cauda, sperm. Immunohistochemical analysis of the caput and cauda epithelium showed that CRES is secreted by the Golgi apparatus of the ii initial segment, fills the proximal caput lumen, and disappears by mid caput. Western blots of caput and cauda tissue and luminal fluid revealed 14 and 19 kDa immunoreactive bands in caput tissues and luminal fluid, but not in the cauda. This study concludes that there are two origins of CRES, one arising in the testis and the other in the epididymis. Testicular CRES is ionically and covalently associated with the ODF while epididymal CRES is detergent soluble and is most likely associated temporarily with the surface of caput epididymal sperm.

MENTAL HEALTH AND CRIMINALITY AMONG PSYCHIATRIC OFFENDERS IN SOUTHEASTERN ONTARIO

OBJECTIVES: (1) Describe the population of mentally ill offenders over whom Ontario Review Board (ORB) held jurisdiction. (2) Assess the influences of psychopathology and criminal factors on criminal career. METHOD: This study was a retrospective case series design that reviewed all offenders who were court ordered for psychiatric evaluation at Mental Health Services Site of Providence Care in Kingston, Ontario from 1993 to 2007 (N=347). Eighty five subjects were found not criminally responsible on the account of mental disorder and were included in statistical analysis (n=85). Bivariate associations between five key variables and two outcome variables, seriousness of crime and recidivism, were examined. Logistic regressions were conducted to test the role of the predictor variables on the outcome variables. RESULTS: Age and change in principal psychiatric diagnosis over time were shown to be associated with seriousness of crime. Timing of psychiatric onset, early signs of deviance and change in diagnosis were shown to be associated with recidivism. On the whole, study population did not markedly vary in their distribution of variables by the outcome variables. Regression model included timing of psychiatric onset; psychiatric history; existence of criminal associate; child abuse history; and early signs of deviance. Recidivism was shown to be predicted by early signs of deviance (OR=8.154, p<0.05). Existence of criminal associates was shown to have substantial values of odds ratio at marginal significance (OR=7.577, p=0.13). CONCLUSION: Seriousness of crime is a complex factor that could not be sufficiently predicted by any one or combinations of study variables. Recidivism is better predicted by criminality factors than psychopathology. In the future, an exploratory analysis that more broadly examines the psychopathology and criminal factors in Canadian forensic population is needed. Findings from this study have important clinical and legal implications.

Hope in the Most Unlikely Spaces: Thawra and the Contemporary Arabic Novel

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many novelists in the Arab world championed Arab nationalism in their literary reflections on the social and political struggles of their countries, depicting these struggles primarily in terms of spatial binaries that pitted the Arab world against the West, even as they imported Western literary models of progress and modernity into their own work. The intense experience of national awakening that infused their writing often placed these authors at a literary disadvantage, for in their literature, all too often the depth and diversity of Arabic cultures and the complexity of socio-political struggles across the Arab world were undermined by restrictive spatial discourses that tended to focus only on particular versions of Arab history and on a seemingly unifying national predicament. Between the Arab defeat of 1967 and the present day, however, an increasing number of Arab authors have turned to less restrictive forms of spatial discourse in search of a language that might offer alternative narratives of hope beyond the predictable, and seemingly thwarted, trajectories of nationalism. This study traces the ways in which contemporary Arab authors from Egypt and the Sudan have endeavoured to re-think and re-define the Arab identity in ever-changing spaces where elements of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, interact both competitively and harmoniously. I examine the spatial language and the tropes used in three Arabic novels, viewing them through the lens of thawra (revolution) in both its socio-political and artistic manifestations. Linking the manifestations of thawra in each text to different scenes of revolution in the Arab world today, in Chapter Two, I consider how, at a stage when the Sudan of the sixties was both still dealing with colonial withdrawal and struggling to establish itself as a nation-state, the geographical and textual landscapes of Tayeb Salih‟s Season of Migration to the North depict the ongoing dilemma of the Sudanese identity. In Chapter Three, I examine Alaa iii al-Aswany‟s The Yacoubian Building in the context of a socially diseased and politically corrupt Egypt of the nineties: social, political, modern, historical, local, and global elements intertwine in a dizzyingly complex spatial network of associations that sheds light on the complicated reasons behind today‟s Egyptian thawra. In Chapter Four, the final chapter, Gamal al-Ghitani‟s approach to his Egypt in Pyramid Texts drifts far away from Salih‟s anguished Sudan and al-Aswany‟s chaotic Cairo to a realm where thawra manifests itself artistically in a sophisticated spatial language that challenges all forms of spatial hegemony and, consequently, old and new forms of social, political, and cultural oppression in the Arab world.

Melancholy and the Early Modern University

Critics have observed that in early Stuart England, the broad, socially significant concept of melancholy was recoded as a specifically medical phenomenon—a disease rather than a fashion. This recoding made melancholy seem less a social attitude than a private ailment. However, I argue that at the Stuart universities, this recoded melancholy became a covert expression of the disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration produced by pressures there—the overcrowding and competition which left many men “disappointed” in preferment, alongside James I’s unprecedented royal involvement in the universities. My argument has implications for Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere, which he claims did not occur until the eighteenth-century. I argue that although the university was increasingly subordinated to the crown’s authority, a lingering sense of autonomy persisted there, a residue of the medieval university’s relative autonomy from the crown; politicized by the encroaching Stuart presence, an alienated community at the university formed a kind of public in private from authority within that authority’s midst. The audience for the printed book, a sphere apart from court or university, represented a forum in which the publicity at the universities could be consolidated, especially in seemingly “private” literary forms such as the treatise on melancholy. I argue that Robert Burton’s exaggerated performance of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, which gains him license to say almost anything, resembles the performed melancholy that the student-prince Hamlet uses to frustrate his uncle’s attempts to surveil him. After tracing melancholy’s evolving literary function through Hamlet, I go on to discuss James’s interventions into the universities. I conclude by considering two printed (and widely circulated) books by university men: the aforementioned The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, an Oxford cleric, and The Temple by George Herbert, who left a career as Cambridge’s public orator to become a country parson. I examine how each of these books uses the affective pattern of courtly-scholarly disappointment—transumed by Burton as melancholy, and by Herbert as holy affliction—to develop an empathic form of publicity among its readership which is in tacit opposition to the Stuart court.