Life Sciences Commons^™

Adaptation Reshapes The Distribution Of Fitness Effects, Diego Tenoch Morales Lopez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The process of adaptation has been of interest since the XIX century, when Darwin first proposed the idea of natural selection. Since then, there has been a myriad of theoretical and empirical works that have expanded the field. From the many evolutionary insights these works have produced, a foundational idea is that spontaneous mutations in the genome of organisms can produce changes to their reproductive success that might confer an advantage for the mutant organisms with respect to their peers. Therefore, mutations drive adaptive evolution by virtue of their heritable effects on fitness. Empirical measures of the distribution of these …

Modelling Walleye Population And Its Cannibalism Effect, Quan Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Walleye is a very common recreational fish in Canada with a strong cannibalism tendency, such that walleyes with larger sizes will consume their smaller counterparts when food sources are limited or a surplus of adults is present. Cannibalism may be a factor promoting population oscillation. As fish reach a certain age or biological stage (i.e. biological maturity), the number of fish achieving that stage is known as fish recruitment. The objective of this thesis is to model the walleye population with its recruitment and cannibalism effect. A matrix population model has been introduced to characterize the walleye population into three …

On Honey Bee Colony Dynamics And Disease Transmission, Matthew I. Betti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The work herein falls under the umbrella of mathematical modeling of disease transmission. The majority of this document focuses on the extent to which infection undermines the strength of a honey bee colony. These studies extend from simple mass-action ordinary differential equations models, to continuous age-structured partial differential equation models and finally a detailed agent-based model which accounts for vector transmission of infection between bees as well as a host of other influences and stressors on honey bee colony dynamics. These models offer a series of predictions relevant to the fate of honey bee colonies in the presence of disease …

Optimizing The Analysis Of Electroencephalographic Data By Dynamic Graphs, Mehrsasadat Golestaneh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The brain’s underlying functional connectivity has been recently studied using tools offered by graph theory and network theory. Although the primary research focus in this area has so far been mostly on static graphs, the complex and dynamic nature of the brain’s underlying mechanism has initiated the usage of dynamic graphs, providing groundwork for time sensi- tive and finer investigations. Studying the topological reconfiguration of these dynamic graphs is done by exploiting a pool of graph metrics, which describe the network’s characteristics at different scales. However, considering the vast amount of data generated by neuroimaging tools, heavy computation load and …

Molecular Dynamics Simulations Of Peptide-Mineral Interactions, Susanna Hug

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We present molecular dynamics (MD) simulations providing information about the mechanisms of biomineralization. We focus on osteopontin-related peptides, which inhibit the growth of calcium oxalate monohydrate (COM) the primary constituent of kidney stones.

First, we performed two ab initio MD simulations: aspartic acid (Asp) and the dimer of aspartic acid and phosphoserine (Asp-pSer) interacting with a fully hydrated COM crystal slab exposing the {100} face. For Asp we found that one of the carboxyl and the amine group both interact with the crystal surface but neither forms a stable contact during the simulation. Asp-pSer interacts preferably with its carboxyl groups …