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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Cytochrome P450 Protein Family 4 Conservation And Diversification Among Flies, Kevin Croft May 2019

Cytochrome P450 Protein Family 4 Conservation And Diversification Among Flies, Kevin Croft

Scholars Week

Commercial fruit pests, such as flies within the Tephritidae family, have a large economic impact on the global food supply due to their ability to infest a wide range of host plants. The genus Rhagoletis, which contains the apple maggot fly, has become an important organism for understanding the process of switching and adapting to new hosts. The enzyme group responsible for this ability in Rhagoletis flies is the Cytochrome P450 proteins. This superfamily of proteins is also known to help organisms deal with various environmental stressors, such as detoxification of plant defensive compounds or insecticides. The Rhagoletis zephyria (the …


Effects Of Sport Fishing On Harbor Seal Hunting Success, Madison Mckay May 2019

Effects Of Sport Fishing On Harbor Seal Hunting Success, Madison Mckay

Scholars Week

Competitive interactions between marine mammals and fisheries are well documented. For example, pinnipeds (seals and sea lions) may impede the recovery of commercial fish stocks, and fisheries can negatively affect seals via bycatch and by diminishing food availability. However, the interactions between pinnipeds and sport fishers are not well documented, despite the fact that both utilize the same resources. I aimed to investigate whether sport fishermen affect the hunting success of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina). Whatcom Creek, a small and accessible river located in downtown Bellingham, WA, is a common place for sport fishers and harbor seals to aggregate and …


A Molecular Traffic Jam: How Overexpression Of Pericentrin Restricts The Movement Of Ift20 Between The Golgi Apparatus And The Primary Cilium, Josh Mcnamara May 2019

A Molecular Traffic Jam: How Overexpression Of Pericentrin Restricts The Movement Of Ift20 Between The Golgi Apparatus And The Primary Cilium, Josh Mcnamara

Scholars Week

Virtually every cell in the human body has a small antenna projecting from its surface called a primary cilium (plural, cilia). Proteins must be constantly moved to and from cilia in order for cilia to continue their function. This movement is referred to as protein trafficking. IFT20 is a protein that is heavily involved in protein trafficking in and out of cilia. The trafficking patterns of IFT20 can be studied by making it visible under a fluorescent microscope. We are particularly interested in how IFT20 interacts with another protein around the cilium called Pericentrin and how their interaction affects IFT20 …


Does Adaptation To Harsh Environments Provide Protection Against Parasites?, Arielle Michaelis May 2019

Does Adaptation To Harsh Environments Provide Protection Against Parasites?, Arielle Michaelis

Scholars Week

While host-parasite coevolution is generally well studied, much less attention has been paid to how parasite-host relationships are impacted by variation in the abiotic environment. This may be especially important when the host species' range includes both moderate and extreme environments, since the parasite might not be able to tolerate both climates. In such cases, adaptation to extreme environments might be a potential strategy to reduce parasitization. Studies have shown that parasites are more successful in the environment in which they originally coevolved with their host than in an environment with new abiotic stressors. In Washington, snowberry flies infest snowberries …


The Effect Of Anthropogenic Noise Disturbance On Day-Time Haul Out Patterns Of Harbor Seals (Phoca Vitulina) At Two Sites Available At All Tide Levels., Wyatt Heimbichner Goebel May 2019

The Effect Of Anthropogenic Noise Disturbance On Day-Time Haul Out Patterns Of Harbor Seals (Phoca Vitulina) At Two Sites Available At All Tide Levels., Wyatt Heimbichner Goebel

Scholars Week

Harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are one of the most abundant pinniped species in the northeast Pacific. Harbor seal haul-out behavior is influenced by a variety of factors, including anthropogenic disturbance. One component of anthropogenic disturbance is increases in ambient noise levels due to human activities, such as construction. There is evidence that noise disturbance can affect harbor seal hearing as well as cause short-term changes in haul-out behavior. However, it is unclear how noise disturbance affects harbor seal haul-out patterns over long temporal scales. In this proposed study, I aim to investigate the effect of ambient noise levels on long-term …


Unraveling Genetic Interactions At The Primary Cilium, Bailey Mccurdy May 2019

Unraveling Genetic Interactions At The Primary Cilium, Bailey Mccurdy

Scholars Week

Down syndrome is one of the most common genetic conditions in the world, with a prevalence of 1 in 700. Down syndrome is caused by an additional copy of chromosome 21. Although all individuals with Down Syndrome have an extra copy of chromosome 21, the clinical outcome of Down Syndrome varies. Why is this? One possibility is that disruption of other genes that are not on chromosome 21 also contributes to the clinical outcome. I have identified a strong genetic candidate called NPHP1 that disrupts a structure called the primary cilium—a vital signaling structure that is essential for human development. …


Nucjuke: A Web Tool For Re-Ranking Crispr-Cas9 Grnas Based On Chromatin Accessibility In Yeast, Gaea Turman May 2019

Nucjuke: A Web Tool For Re-Ranking Crispr-Cas9 Grnas Based On Chromatin Accessibility In Yeast, Gaea Turman

Scholars Week

A variety of papers published in the last decade have suggested that chromatin accessibility could have significant influence over the success of CRISPR-Cas9 experiments in S. cerevisiae; where chromatin accessibility refers to nucleosome presence at a targeted genomic location. It has been found that nucleosome presence can physically impede Cas9 from making a double stranded break at a specific target site, causing a decreased experimental efficiency. We have created a web-tool called NucJuke that seeks to mitigate this problem by categorically re-ranking gRNAs based on having high, partial, or low chromatin accessibility (referring to no nucleosome occupancy, partial nucleosome occupancy, …