Showing 391 - 400 of 564 Items
The Scars of War: The Demonic Mother as a Conduit for Expressing Victimization, Collective Guilt, and Forgiveness in Postwar Japanese Film, 1949-1964
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Sophia Walker
Access: Open access
- Contemporary American viewers are familiar with the vengeful and terrifying ghost women of recent J-Horror films such as Ringu (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and Ju-On (Shimizu Takashi, 2002). Yet in Japanese theater and literature, the threatening ghost woman has a long history, beginning with the neglected Lady Rokujo in Lady Murasaki’s 11th century novel The Tale of Genji, who possesses and kills her rivals. Throughout history, the Japanese ghost mother is hideous and pitiful, worthy of fear as well as sympathy, traits that authors and filmmakers across the centuries have exploited. This project puts together four films that have never before been discussed together -- Kinoshita Keisuke's Shinsaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), Nakagawa Nobuo's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959) Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953), and Shindo Kaneto's Onibaba (1964) -- and discusses them as four different iterations of the demonic mother motif, presented as a projection of the Japanese collective’s postwar uncertainty over both the memory of suffering during World War II and the question of personal culpability.
Women’s Bodies Between Market and State: Lineages of the Transnational Indian Surrogacy Industry Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Shea Cristina Necheles
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
An Output Sensitive Algorithm for Computing Viewsheds and Total Viewsheds on 2D Terrains Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Andrew P Prescott
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Investigating the effect of Fuc-O-NAP on the glycosylation of Helicobacter pylori Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Panhasith Ung
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
"Cooperate with Others for Common Ends?": Students as Gatekeepers of Culture and Tradition on College Campuses
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Pamela Zabala
Access: Open access
- As colleges and universities have increased efforts to make their campuses more racially and ethnically inclusive, students of color still perceive their campuses as hostile spaces to racial and ethnic minorities. On the other hand, white students often feel as though their institutions do too much, leaving administrators to balance the interests of both groups. This thesis draws on archival, ethnographic, and interview data collected at Bowdoin College to examine the relationship between students and between students and administrators given the role of students as major agents of change on college campuses. I have found that when students feel threatened by institutional change, they go into crisis and create spaces of resistance on campus. Institutions are incapable or unwilling to find solutions that meet the needs of the various constituencies within the student body. Therefore, students and administration become locked in a power struggle that produces only surface-level institutional change rather than meaningful reform in the face of rising racial tensions.
Mathematical Modeling of the American Lobster Cardiac Muscle Cell: An Investigation of Calcium Ion Permeability and Force of Contractions
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Lauren A Skerritt
Access: Open access
- In the American lobster (Homarus americanus), neurogenic stimulation of the heart drives fluxes of calcium (Ca2+) into the cytoplasm of a muscle cell resulting in heart muscle contraction. The heartbeat is completed by the active transport of calcium out of the cytoplasm into extracellular and intracellular spaces. An increase in the frequency of calcium release is expected to increase amplitude and duration of muscle contraction. This makes sense because an increase in cytoplasmic calcium should increase the activation of the muscle contractile elements (actin and myosin). Since calcium cycling is a reaction-diffusion process, the extent to which calcium mediates contraction amplitude and frequency will depend on the specific diffusion relationships of calcium in this system. Despite the importance of understanding this relationship, it is difficult to obtain experimental information on the dynamics of cytoplasmic calcium. Thus, we developed a mathematical diffusion model of the myofibril (muscle cell) to simulate calcium cycling in the lobster cardiac muscle cell. The amplitude and duration of the force curves produced by the model empirically mirrored that of the experimental data over a range of calcium diffusion coefficients (1-16), nerve stimulation durations (1/6-1/3 of a contraction period), and frequencies (40-80 Hz). The characteristics that alter the response of the lobster cardiac muscle system are stimulation duration (i.e., burst duration), burst frequency, and the rate of calcium diffusion into the cell’s cytoplasm. For this reason, we developed protocols that allow parameters representing these characteristics in the calcium-force model to be determined from isolated whole muscle experiments on lobster hearts (Phillips et al., 2004). These parameters are used to predict variability in lobster heart muscle function consistent with data recorded in experiments. Within the physiological range of nerve stimulation parameters (burst duration and cycle period), calcium increased the cell’s force output for increased burst duration. For example, increased duration of stimulation increased the muscle contraction period and vice versa. In terms of diffusion, a slower rate of calcium diffusion out of the sarcoplasmic reticulum decreased both the calcium level and the contraction duration of the cell. Finally, changes in stimulation frequency did not produce changes in contraction amplitude and duration. When considered in conjunction with experimental stimulations using lobster heart muscle cells, these data illustrate the prominent role for calcium diffusion in governing contraction-relaxation cycles in lobster hearts.
Characterization of expression of Sema1a variants in high-plasticity areas of the Gryllus bimaculatus nervous system
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Sara Spicer
Access: Open access
- The well-conserved semaphorin family of guidance molecules is known to play multiple complex roles in directing the growth and orientation of dendrites and axons within the developing invertebrate central and peripheral nervous system. Additionally, the expression of select semaphorins is maintained within some highly plastic areas of the adult central nervous system, such as the mushroom bodies, where they are associated with guidance of newly-born neurons as well as with synapse formation and modification. Within the cricket species Gryllus bimaculatus, deafferentation of the prothoracic ganglia and subsequent dendritic rearrangement of the auditory interneurons is associated with fluctuations in the expression of transmembrane Sema1a and diffusible Sema2a. Here, we characterize the expression of two different variants of Gryllus Sema1a, termed Horch Sema1a and Extavour Sema1a, in tissues associated with both developmental neuronal guidance and adult structural plasticity: the embryonic limb buds, the mushroom bodies of the brain, and the non-deafferented adult prothoracic ganglion. Although we were unable to visualize the expression of Extavour Sema1a in any tissue, we demonstrate via phylogenetic analysis that both Sema1a variants have homologs in species across the Insecta class, suggesting that Extavour SEMA1a is a conserved protein sequence. We observe no expression of Horch Sema1a in the embryonic limb bud, and suspect that Extavour Sema1a, which has a high pairwise identity with Schistocerca Sema1a, could be facilitating guidance of the tibial pioneer neuron growth in the limb bud, along with Sema2a. In the adult brain, we observe a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the mushroom bodies and in a vertical stripe across the calyx, which may be indicative of interactions between Horch SEMA1a and SEMA2a in maintaining synaptic plasticity and guiding newly-born Kenyon cells. We also report a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the anterior and posterior of the prothoracic ganglia on the ventral side, in the region of auditory interneuron cell bodies, suggesting the possibility that auditory interneurons may express both Horch Sema1a and Sema2a, which could interact with each other or with Plexin receptors to regulate dendrite morphology at the midline.
An Investigation of Genetics-Based Machine Learning as Applied to Global Crop Yields Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: William Gantt
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mythologies modernes : à la recherche des écrivaines dans la capitale littéraire de Paris de l’entre-deux-guerres This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2029-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Stephanie Ruth McCurrach
Access: Embargoed
Examining the role of GRP and LIK1 in Wall Associated Kinase (WAK) perception of pectin in the plant cell wall
Date: 2017-01-01
Creator: Jack Ryan Mitchell
Access: Open access
- Wall associated kinases (WAKs) are cell membrane bound receptor kinases that bind pectin and pectin fragments (OGs).The binding of WAKs to pectin sends a growth signal required for cell elongation and plant development. WAKs bind OGs with higher affinity than native pectin and instead activate a stress response. Glycine rich proteins (GRPs) are secreted cell wall proteins of unknown function. Seven GRPs with 65% sequence similarity are coded on a 90kb locus of Arabidopsis chromosome 2. GRP3 and WAK1 have been shown to bind in vitro, but single null mutations have no discernible phenotype, suggesting that the GRPs are redundant. Low recombination frequency has made multiple mutations difficult to achieve, but in this thesis, CRISPR/Cas9 technology was used to induce deletions of the GRP locus. The promoters pYAO and pICU2 drove Cas9 expression in transformed Arabidopsis plants. The presence of a deletion and Cas9 were detected by PCR. While somatic mutations were induced, there was no inheritance of the GRP deletion, indicating that pYAO and pICU2 do not drive Cas9 to induce deletions in progenitor cells. LIK1 is a CERK1 interacting kinase implicated in mediating response to various microbe associated molecular patterns (MAMP) such as chitin, flagellin, and peptidoglycans. LIK1 exhibits a drastic increase in phosphorylation in response to OG treatment, making it a candidate for a co-receptor to WAK. T-DNA insertions to the 5’UTR of LIK1 were used to examine the effect of a lik1 mutation on the OG induced stress response. lik1/lik1 mutant seedlings were grown in the presence and absence of OGs, and RNA was isolated. qPCR was used on cDNA to examine FADLOX expression, a reporter for the transcriptional response to OGs. The lik1/lik1 mutant caused a reduction in the OG induced transcriptional response. However, increased LIK1 expression was associated with the T-DNA insertion indicating that LIK1 inhibits the WAK stress response pathway. Understanding the roles of GRP and LIK1 in moderating WAK mediated pathogenic response in Arabidopsis will enable a better understanding of plant resistance to pathogen invasion in the greater plant kingdom.