Life Sciences Commons^™

Tissue Factor Expression, Regulation, And Signaling In Human Airway Cells, Michael D. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

Rationale: Tissue Factor (TF) is a transmembrane glycoprotein that canonically functions as the initiator of the coagulation cascade. Increased levels of TF have been associated with inflammatory airway diseases. Since lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is known to elicit and inflammatory response in airway epithelium, we hypothesized that airway epithelial cells release TF when exposed to LPS. Since TF aids in local wound healing, we also hypothesized that inhibition of TF would decrease NHBE growth. The specific aim of this work was to evaluate the effects of LPS exposure on TF production and release from airway epithelia and determine the signaling pathways involved. …

A Systems Biology Approach For Predicting Essential Genes And Deciphering Their Dynamics Under Stress In Streptococcus Sanguinis, Fadi El-Rami

Theses and Dissertations

Infectious diseases are the top leading cause of death worldwide. Identifying essential genes, genes indispensable for survival, has been proven indispensable in defining new therapeutic targets against pathogens, major elements of the minimal set genome to be harnessed in synthetic biology, and determinants of evolutionary relationships of phylogenetically distant species. Thus, essentiality studies promise valuable revenues that can decipher much of biological complexities.

Taking advantage of the available microbial sequences and the essentiality studies conducted in various microbial models, we proposed a framework for the prediction of essential genes based on our experimentally verified knowledge of the pathways involved in …

Epigenetic Editing To Validate Findings From Methylome-Wide Association Studies Of Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Robin F. Chan

Theses and Dissertations

DNA methylation is necessary for learning, memory consolidation and has been implicated in a number of neuropsychiatric disorders. Obtaining high quality and comprehensive data for the three common forms of methylation in brain is challenging for methylome-wide association studies (MWAS). To address this we optimized a panel of enrichment methods for screening the brain methylome. Results show that these enrichment techniques approach the coverage and fidelity of the current gold standard bisulfite based techniques. Our MBD-based method can also be used with low amounts of genomic material from limited human biomaterials. Psychiatric disorders have high prevalence and are often chronic …