874 research outputs found
Fashion Culture: Constance White in conversation with Valerie Steele
No full textOn February 27, 2018, author Constance White joined Dr. Valerie Steele to discuss the influence of black style on today’s fashion vernacular, drawing on striking images of trendsetters from Josephine Baker to Michelle Obama, Rihanna, and Pharrell Williams. White’s book, How to Slay, is one of the few surveys of black style and fashion ever published
Black Fashion Designers Symposium: Elizabeth Way in conversation with Teri Agins, Dario Calmese, and Constance White
No full textElizabeth Way, in conversation with Teri Agins, Dario Calmese, and Constance White at The Museum at FIT's annual fashion symposium, Black Fashion Designers, held on Monday, February 6, 2017.The one-day symposium featured talks by designers, models, journalists, and scholars on African diasporic culture and fashion.Elizabeth Way is curatorial assistant at MFIT. She co-curated the exhibitions Black Fashion Designers and Global Fashion Capitals.Teri Agins spent 25 years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she continues to write the “Ask Teri” fashion advice column. She is author of The End of Fashion.Dario Calmese writes for The Daily Beast and is a photographer, visual director, and whose clients have included Beyoncé, Pyer Moss, and Public School.Constance White is an award-winning journalist and author of Stylenoir, a pioneering book on black culture and style
Constance Fenimore Woolson House
No full textThe Woolson House, built in 1938, was a gift of Clare A. Benedict in memory of her aunt, author Constance Fenimore Woolson. The plaque on the door reads: "The Constance Fenimore Woolson English House." Along the path in front of the Woolson House ran Hamilton Holt's original Walk of Fame
Constance Myers Papers - Accession 725
No full textThis collection consists of letters, lesson plans, examination, photographs, student papers written, course syllabi, newspaper articles, excerpts of written material for class handouts. Constance Ashton Myers was a historian, author, and professor born in 1927 affectionately known to her family and friends as Connie. During the 1970s, Myers traveled around the United States and interviewed Suffragettes and other women and recorded their interviews. She participated actively in the women’s liberation movement throughout her years giving speeches, writing books, and interviewing women. Dr. Myers attended and taught at Sacramento State College, University of South Carolina at Aiken, and Augusta College as well as worked with many other institutions. In 1969 Myers was dismissed from her teaching at Augusta College in Georgia and she filed for sex discrimination. Throughout her career Myers gave many lectures on women’s history particularly on the Suffragettes, race relations in the south, Marxism, and Latin America. Some of her writings include: The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 and “God, Darwin, and the Founding Fathers: Voice of Resistance to the Woman Suffrage and Equal Rights Amendments a Study in Popular Culture”. In 2012 Myers was killed a bus-car collision her husband Cecil survived the crash. They had four children and many grandchildren.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/1715/thumbnail.jp
Reincarnation, Goodbye: 1992
No full textConstance Urdang is the author of a number of books, including Alternative Lives, poems (Pittsburgh), and The Woman Who Reads Novels and Peacetime, novellas (Coffee House Press). She lives in St. Louis
‘Dementors’ among Us: You Know Them. The Productive — But Morale-Killing — Employees.
No full textAuthor\u27s biography: Constance Campbell is a professor of management at Georgia Southern University and can be reached via email at [email protected]
Constance Fenimore Woolson and the next country
No full textCarolyn VanBergen examines Western Reserve author, Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short stories “Solomon” and “Wilhemina” and the author’s “treatment of the literary and political/historical issues of importance” in the years following the United States’ Civil War (1861-1865). Conference paper; originally published in Western Reserve Studies Symposium (3rd:1988 : Cleveland, Ohio
Role of FoxP2 during functional recruitment of post-hatch-generated medium spiny neurons in a brain region relevant for vocal learning in male zebra finches
No full textAdult neurogenesis is a process in which new neurons are generated in neurogenic niches and become recruited into distinct regions of the mature brain. In the adult songbird brain, new neurons are incorporated into areas that facilitate learning, production and maintenance of song. The striatal song nucleus Area X constantly receives new medium spiny neurons (MSNs) throughout adulthood, but it was not known if they are functionally integrated into the preexisting circuitry. To address this question, I applied Bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) and lentiviral vector-mediated labelling of progenitor cells and examined the maturation, connectivity and singing elicited activation and of their progeny in Area X after different survival periods. Six weeks after their birth, the majority of new neurons expressed a marker for mature MSNs, show pre- and postsynaptic connections and expressed dopamine receptors, indicative of dopaminergic innervation. The expression of the immediate early gene EGR-1 (early growth response protein 1) was used to assess if and at what age new neurons were activated by singing. Already three weeks after their labelling, a small fraction of new MSNs expressed EGR-1 after singing and this fraction increased with progressing maturation. Measuring MSN densities in zebra finches up to seven years of age provided insights into the dynamics of striatal adult neurogenesis and revealed that it is a process of constant new neuron addition.
New MSNs that are recruited into Area X express the forkhead box protein P2 (FoxP2). This transcription factor has important functions in mammalian brain development and mutations in FOXP2 cause speech and language impairments in humans. In zebra finches, correct FoxP2 expression levels in Area X are crucial for successful song learning and for song modulation between different social contexts. FoxP2 levels in Area X are high during the phase of song learning but generally low in adults and are downregulated by singing. MSNs in Area X exhibit different FoxP2 expression levels. Since FoxP2 downregulation after singing only occurs in MSNs with low FoxP2 levels (FoxP2low) and not in MSNs with high FoxP2 levels (FoxP2high), I postulated that the latter were recently recruited and need to become FoxP2low MSNs before they would be activated by singing. This hypothesis was tested by measuring FoxP2 protein levels and EGR-1 expression in individual new MSNs of singing and non-singing birds at different time points after BrdU birth dating. Interestingly, FoxP2high and FoxP2low MSNs were equally activated during singing, indicating that this is a process independent of FoxP2 levels. Further, I identified that one third of new MSNs expressed FoxP2 at high levels during early stages of their maturation. However, the majority of matured MSNs expressed FoxP2 at low levels, indicating an age-related decrease of FoxP2 levels in a subset of newly recruited MSNs. Because Foxp2 was shown to enhance neuronal outgrowth and differentiation, I analyzed the dendrite morphology and the density of dendritic spines of FoxP2high and FoxP2low new MSNs that were virally labelled and expressed the green fluorescent protein. FoxP2high new MSNs had more complex dendrites and a higher density of the mature mushroom spines than FoxP2low new MSNs and thus probably received more pallial inputs during a narrow timeframe of their maturation. Comparing my results to what is known about MSNs of the direct and indirect pathway of the basal ganglia of rodents, I hypothesize that early differences in FoxP2 levels and concomitant diverging new MSNs morphology might indicate the existence of distinct MSN subtypes in Area X of zebra finches.
Altogether, the presented data illustrate that new MSNs recruited into Area X of adult zebra finches are functional and might play a role for the maintenance of song. Within the first six weeks after their birth new MSNs exhibited dynamic FoxP2 expression levels which are liked to their dendritic arborization and spine density, thus broadening FoxP2 function by an implication in striatal adult neurogenesis
Evaluating the role of hippocampal processing in encoding and storing reward relevant information for goal-directed behavior
No full textThe neural basis of goal-directed action in decision-making is theorized to incorporate the cognitive representations of external stimuli; the representations of future possibilities and the individual value assigned to each prospective outcome. In complex multimodal scenarios the same set of external stimuli may be represented in multiple ways, some of which more efficient for achieving the goal than others. For example, in spatial navigation, there are numerous ways by which space may be represented. It is believed that both the cognitive representation of space and of future possibilities are implemented in the hippocampus as a cognitive map. And yet, factors that determine which of the myriad possible representations will be learned and implemented by the hippocampus in a cognitive map to guide behavior are still unknown. Therefore, we devised two tasks in which the reward rule was manipulated to require the representation of different sets of stimuli:
In the first manipulation, we recorded the activity of CA1 neurons of rats performing a spatial navigation task where olfactory cues and spatial dimensions were selectively altered to predict rewarding outcomes. We found that when an olfactory rule governed reward, neuronal activity gradually shifted to represent olfactory coordinates. In contrast, when the reward rule was a spatial one, a gradual shift in neuronal representation occured towards better encoding of spatial coordinates. This reorganization of representation in CA1 preceded marked behavioral improvement, suggesting that the critical step in learning is downstream of CA1 rearrangement. These findings reveal that as learning progresses, CA1 place cell activity rearranges to encode those aspects of experience that are most relevant for goal-directed behavior.
In the second manipulation, we trained mice in a complex odor discrimination task in a four- armed maze with an attentinal set-shifting paradigm. In this task, the reward rule was associated with one of two odors, which were presented in random positions in the maze. The correct arm choice in the maze was irrespective of the spatial dimensions of the task. After initial learning was completed, we introduced an interdimensional shift (ID) by using novel pairs of reward-relevant odors. We compared the learning performance of two mouse lines expressing different levels of the kainate receptor subunit, GluK2. GluK2 is a kainate type glutamate receptor with metabotrophic characterictics, whose disfunction has been implicated in humans with cognitive disabilities (Motazacker et al., 2007). The GluK2 wildtype mice successfully learned to associate a particular odor with the rewarding outcome and reached asymptomatic levels after 10 days of training. Moreover, they applied the reward rule to a different set of odors (ID shift) and reached asymptomatic levels after 5 days of training. In contrast, GluK2 knockout mice could only perform at chance levels. These data show that, mice are capable of associating olfactory information with rewarding outcomes. Furthermore, they can learn a rule and apply it to similar settings by forming an attentional set shift. These findings show that intact cortico-hippocampal processing as well as unimpaired Kainate receptor function in those structures are crucial in storing and recalling reward relevant information for goal-directed behavior
Testing different approaches for generating transgenic zebra finches towards optogenetic manipulation of interneurons for functional studies
No full textTransgenesis is a very effective tool to study the function of genes in vivo as it affords the best experimental control over particular cell types from the start of development. For popular animal models, such as mice or fruit flies, a variety of methods to generate transgenic animals are established and many transgenic strains are commercially available. In avian species, most research has been conducted on chickens and quails, but for songbirds, a pipeline to reliably produce transgenic individuals is still lacking. Songbirds offer a unique possibility to unravel questions concerning the neural basis of behavior, as many species are easy to keep and breed, exhibit a diversity of social behaviors including a rich repertoire of vocalizations used for communication. The use and production of many songbird vocalizations need to be learned during infancy, akin to speech learning in humans. Most research on the topic has been conducted on zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). A few publications describing the generation of transgenic zebra finches exist (Agate et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2015; Abe et al., 2015; Gessara et al., 2021), but have not enabled the scientific community of songbird researchers to create transgenic finches as a routine technique. It thus remains of great interest to investigate alternative methods or to improve on already published ones. In this thesis, two different methods for the generation of transgenic songbirds were tested. First, a method described in mice was tried to transfer to zebra finches involving microinjection and electroporation of testes. The difficulty was to overcome the different location of testes in birds and mice, e.g. inside versus outside of the body cavity respectively. Second, a previously published approach using progenitor cells of the germ line (PGC) was chosen (Gessara et al., 2021). This method was reported to lead to transgenic founders and offspring in a more efficient way than the first publication of transgenic finches, in which lentivirus was injected into the earliest stage of embryogenesis' (Agate et al., 2009). For the first approach, access to zebra finch gonads was achieved via laparotomy, and the manipulation of testes was conducted successfully without affecting male’s fertility. Different parameters were tested, and best conditions were determined by amount of reporter fluorescence in tissue sections of treated testes. Stable expression of the fluorescent reporter was achieved through stable integration of it by HypBase; suggesting that manipulation had long-term effect through integration of the transgene by transposition. The transgene could be detected in testes by PCR and slot blot genotyping as well as histology. Nevertheless, no transgenic offspring was identified yet. III For the second part of the study PGC extraction, culturing and transduction by lentivirus was implemented successfully. Similar levels in development of manipulated embryos as in Gessara et al., 2021 (45.5% vs. 56.3%) were generated. Hatching rates could not be compared as all tests were performed before 2/3 of embryonic development. Unfortunately, genotyping did not exhibit any transgenic founder or offspring among embryonic samples, which was the case for every hatchling in the previous study. In both approaches, difficulties with PCR genotyping (apparently due to contamination) were noted and consequently the method was switched to Slot blot, which lead to more reliable results. Here, a new method for transgenesis in zebra finches is presented that led to genetically modified testes of treated male zebra finches (through 'In vivo microinjection and electroporation of testes'). Unfortunately, this study was neither able to generate transgenic offspring by 'In vivo microinjection and electroporation of testes', used for the first time in a songbird, nor to repeat the outcome of Gessara’s PGC based approach. Still, both methods might be interesting for future studies as the Gessara publication had convincing more founder individuals than the classical 'Lentiviral injection into stage x embryos' approach. However, PGC heterogeneity (Jung et al., 2022) might be considered in future projects, that are PGCs based. Testes manipulation seems promising for songbird transgenesis after some refinements (e.g. optimized parameters, hemi-castration)
- …
