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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Machine Kinship: The Impossible Duet, Diana Sanchez
Machine Kinship: The Impossible Duet, Diana Sanchez
Masters Theses
Machine Kinship: The impossible duet What does it mean to vanish from earth when you are the last of your kind? In 1987 the Kauai OO was recorded singing his final song. It was meant to be a duet, but as the last of his kind his song hangs in the air, unanswered. The other half of the duet is forever lost. Built to sing at dawn, birds must wake up earlier to hear each other before human chaos interferes. So here, it is always almost sunrise. As a parallel past-future response, the last birdsong was fed into a machine …
Geographic Range Size As A Predictor Of Dispersal-Dependent Behavioral Traits In Two Clades Of A Terrestrial Salamander, Teah Evers
Masters Theses
Animal movement has the potential to affect diverse processes within ecology and evolution including range expansion, gene flow, adaptation, and speciation. Two aspects of animal personality that are germane to dispersal are exploratory and aggressive behavior. These behavioral categories may represent a trade-off such that energy invested in territorial defense leaves little energy for movement and dispersal. The Eastern Red-backed Salamander (Plethodon cinereus) is a wide ranging, dispersal limited, terrestrial salamander with well documented phylogeographic divisions. I examined dispersal-relevant behavioral traits within two clades of P. cinereus with disparate geographic ranges. The Northern Clade (NC) has a range extending from …
A New Adaptive Landscape: Urbanization As A Strong Evolutionary Force, Lauren Christie Breza
A New Adaptive Landscape: Urbanization As A Strong Evolutionary Force, Lauren Christie Breza
Masters Theses
Urbanization is rapidly increasing as human population growth steadily grows, but there is little consensus of the ecological consequence of this population shift and almost no information of the evolutionary consequences for local biodiversity. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will live in city centers by 2050 with profound impacts on landscapes that can act as important agents of selection. This study aims to identify 1) the net effect of urbanization on species richness, 2) how phylogenetic diversity varies between urban and rural sites, and 3) the strength of urbanization as a selection pressure. First, a meta-analysis was conducted in …
Evolutionary Convergence Of The Caffeine Biosynthetic Pathway In Chocolate Followed Duplication Of A Constrained Ancestral Enzyme, Andrew J. O'Donnell
Evolutionary Convergence Of The Caffeine Biosynthetic Pathway In Chocolate Followed Duplication Of A Constrained Ancestral Enzyme, Andrew J. O'Donnell
Masters Theses
Caffeine biosynthesis is widely distributed in flowering plants and requires three consecutive methylation steps of xanthine alkaloids. Genes that have previously been reported to participate in the multi-step pathway in Coffea sp. (coffee) and Camellia sinensis (tea) encode members of the SABATH family of methyltransferases. Two genes highly expressed in fruits of Theobroma cacao (cacao) are orthologous to the caffeine genes in tea and appear to have diversified following gene duplication. Biochemical characterization of the enzymes (XMTs) encoded by these genes strongly suggest an unprecedented major pathway to theobromine, a precursor to caffeine. These findings imply that caffeine biosynthesis evolved …
From A Rodent To A Rhetorician: An Ideological Analysis Of George Alexander Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric, James Begley
From A Rodent To A Rhetorician: An Ideological Analysis Of George Alexander Kennedy's Comparative Rhetoric, James Begley
Masters Theses
George Alexander Kennedy, a professor of classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has given birth to a new understanding of rhetorical studies: he argues for the evolution of rhetoric from animals to humans. Using Sonja Foss's methodology of "ideological criticism," this thesis examined Kennedy's case as presented in his book, Comparative Rhetoric: an Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. This study discovered that the book was heavily influenced by a secular, pro-evolutionary ideology which dually contributed to its selective use of scientific evidences and production of inconsistent arguments. Evaluated on the basis of Biblical principles, this thesis concluded …
Analysis Of A Wound-Induced Gene Family In Glycine Max, Gena Robertson
Analysis Of A Wound-Induced Gene Family In Glycine Max, Gena Robertson
Masters Theses
Gene families in plants are important in understanding genome evolution indicating when and where genome duplications and segmental duplications occurred as well as subsequent divergence and subfunctionalization. A gene family in Glycine max that encodes a WI12 protein, wound-induced protein, was found to consist of ten genes on five chromosomes. Wound-induced proteins are activated in response to wounding in plants, and the WI12 protein in particular is thought to be involved in cell wall modifications at the wound site. A variety of bioinformatics tools have been used to analyze the expansion of this family in soybean as well as identify …