by KARAN SHARMA (Under the Direction of Walter D. Potter) ABSTRACT In spite of the impressive successes of many Artificial Intelligence techniques in narrow domains, one of the unrealized goals of AI remains the creation of a generally intelligent machine. It is hypothesized that the capacity for being creative in a wide variety of environments is a necessary and sufficient condition for genera...

Forty undergraduate students participated in two experiments designed to investigate the impact of perceptual and conceptual encoding manipulations on implicit memory for emotional words in each cerebral hemisphere. Adopting a transfer appropriate processing approach, the encoding manipulations were designed to promote processing of the surface features of stimuli in Experiment 1, and their sem...

Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) plays a pivotal role in the inflammatory response in endotoxemia and in the delayed-type hypersensitivity response, but its potential as a regulator of immunologically induced disease is unknown. We have addressed this issue by administering a neutralizing anti-MIF antibody in a rat model of immunologically induced crescentic anti-glomerular basement...

We have shown that CD8(+) CTLs are the key mediators of accelerated rejection, and that CD8(+) T cells represent the prime targets of CD154 blockade in sensitized mouse recipients of cardiac allografts. However, the current protocols require CD154 blockade at the time of sensitization, whereas delayed treatment fails to affect graft rejection in sensitized recipients. To elucidate the mechanism...

An adoptive secondary antibody response to phosphorylcholine (PC) can be generated by the transfer of keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH)-primed T cells, PC-bovine gamma globulin-primed B cells, and PC-KLH into irradiated syngeneic BALB/c mice. If the KLH-primed T-cell donors were pretreated with anti-idiotype antibodies directed against the BALB/c PC-binding myeloma TEPC 15, their T cells were una...

BACKGROUND The complement system is crucial for the development of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV). In particular, C5a and its receptor on neutrophils, CD88, play a central role. The functional role of the second receptor of C5a, C5L2, remains unclear. In the current study, we investigated the role of C5L2 in C5a-primed neutrophils for ANCA-induced activat...