Life Sciences Commons^™

Extrinsic And Intrinsic Factors In Liver Development, Amrita Palaria

Doctoral Dissertations

Liver is the largest internal organ of the human body. It performs a multitude of functions. Therefore, it is provided with a huge regenerative capacity however, because of the same reason it is also prone to various diseases. Hence, it is essential to understand liver development in order to understand liver regeneration and liver diseases to provide better therapeutic targets and solutions. Liver development is orchestrated by a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The major focus of this dissertation thesis is to elucidate the role of BMP signals and YY1/VEGFA regulated signals in liver development. Liver organogenesis initiates with …

Improving Techniques To Study Equine Cervical Mucociliary Clearance, Melissa A. Hawkes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bacterial uterine infections inflict major losses on the equine breeding industry. These infections usually arise from bacteria introduced at breeding. Micro-currents propelled by ciliated cells between the folds of the uterus and cervix have been proposed as a means by which contaminants are expelled. Previous data have shown possible ciliary micro-currents propelling carbon particles, occasionally rotating, through cervical folds. However, adherence to the epithelium may have interfered with movement of carbon in these studies. Therefore, we tested potentially non-adherent substances to reveal ciliary micro-currents on the equine cervix under high magnification video-endoscopy. We hypothesized that polyethylene green microspheres 1 - …

Bat Detective—Deep Learning Tools For Bat Acoustic Signal Detection, Oisin Mac Aodha, Rory Gibb, Kate E. Barlow, Michael Firman, Robin Freeman, Briana Harder, Libby Kinsey, Gary R. Mead, Stuart E. Newson, Ivan Pandourski, Stuart Parsons, Jon Russ, Abigel Szodoray-Paradi, Elena Tilova, Mark Girolami, Gabriel Brostow, Kate E. Jones

Bioacoustics Collection

Passive acoustic sensing has emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity, especially for echolocating bat species. To better assess bat population trends there is a critical need for accurate, reliable, and open source tools that allow the detection and classification of bat calls in large collections of audio recordings. The majority of existing tools are commercial or have focused on the species classification task, neglecting the important problem of first localizing echolocation calls in audio which is particularly problematic in noisy recordings. We developed a convolutional neural network based open-source pipeline for detecting ultrasonic, full-spectrum, search-phase …

Dog Behavior Co-Varies With Height, Bodyweight And Skull Shape, Paul D. Mcgreevy, Dana Georgevsky, Johanna Carrasco, Michael Valenzuela, Deborah L. Duffy, James A. Serpell

Paul McGreevy, PhD

Dogs offer unique opportunities to study correlations between morphology and behavior because skull shapes and body shape are so diverse among breeds. Several studies have shown relationships between canine cephalic index (CI: the ratio of skull width to skull length) and neural architecture. Data on the CI of adult, show-quality dogs (six males and six females) were sourced in Australia along with existing data on the breeds’ height, bodyweight and related to data on 36 behavioral traits of companion dogs (n = 8,301) of various common breeds (n = 49) collected internationally using the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire …

Water Transport In The Lateral Line Canal Of The Intertidal Fish Xiphister Mucosus (Girard 1858) And Its Significance To Evaporative Water With Preliminary Observations Of The Metabolic Consequences Of Water Loss, Whitney Anne Gayer

Dissertations and Theses

The lateral line canal system is a sensory organ found in all teleost fish that has a wide range of morphological variation. Variation in morphology may often be the result of evolutionary necessity where the need for function dictates form. Xiphister mucosus is an amphibious Stichaeid fish that inhabits the rocky intertidal zone of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The rocky intertidal is considered an extreme environment where crashing waves and ebbing tides may require the specialization of adaptations for surviving the many abiotic stressors encountered there.

The lateral line trunk canal of Xiphister is regarded as unique among teleosts with …

Encoding Of Emotional Valence In Wild Boar (Sus Scrofa) Calls, Anne-Laure Maigrot, Edna Hillmann, Elodie Briefer

Bioacoustics Collection

Measuring emotions in nonhuman mammals is challenging. As animals are not able to verbally report how they feel, we need to find reliable indicators to assess their emotional state. Emotions can be described using two key dimensions: valence (negative or positive) and arousal (bodily activation or excitation). In this study, we investigated vocal expression of emotional valence in wild boars (Sus scrofa). The animals were observed in three naturally occurring situations: anticipation of a food reward (positive), affiliative interactions (positive), and agonistic interactions (negative). Body movement was used as an indicator of emotional arousal to control for the effect of …