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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Intraspecific Variation In Dehydration Tolerance: Insights From The Tropical Plant Marchantia Inflexa, Rose A. Marks Jan 2019

Intraspecific Variation In Dehydration Tolerance: Insights From The Tropical Plant Marchantia Inflexa, Rose A. Marks

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

Plants are threatened by global change, increasing variability in weather patterns, and associated abiotic stress. Consequently, there is an urgent need to enhance our ability to predict plant community dynamics, shifts in species distributions, and physiological responses to environmental challenges. By building a fundamental understanding of plant stress tolerance, it may be possibly to protect the ecological services, economic industries, and communities that depend on plants. Dehydration tolerance (DhT) is an important mechanism of water stress tolerance with promising translational applications. Here, I take advantage natural variation in DhT to gain a deeper insight into this complex trait. In addition, …


Characterization Of A Large Vertebrate Genome And Homomorphic Sex Chromosomes In The Axolotl, Ambystoma Mexicanum, Melissa Keinath Jan 2017

Characterization Of A Large Vertebrate Genome And Homomorphic Sex Chromosomes In The Axolotl, Ambystoma Mexicanum, Melissa Keinath

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

Changes in the structure, content and morphology of chromosomes accumulate over evolutionary time and contribute to cell, developmental and organismal biology. The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is an important model for studying these changes because: 1) it provides important phylogenetic perspective for reconstructing the evolution of vertebrate genomes and amphibian karyotypes, 2) its genome has evolved to a large size (~10X larger than human) but has maintained gene orders, and 3) it possesses potentially young sex chromosomes that have not undergone extensive differentiation in the structure that is typical of many other vertebrate sex chromosomes (e.g. mammalian XY chromosomes …


Small Rna Expression During Programmed Rearragement Of A Vertebrate Genome, Joseph R. Herdy Iii Jan 2014

Small Rna Expression During Programmed Rearragement Of A Vertebrate Genome, Joseph R. Herdy Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) undergoes programmed genome rearrangements (PGRs) during embryogenesis that results in the deletion of ~0.5 Gb of germline DNA from the somatic lineage. The underlying mechanism of these rearrangements remains largely unknown. miRNAs (microRNAs) and piRNAs (PIWI interacting RNAs) are two classes of small noncoding RNAs that play important roles in early vertebrate development, including differentiation of cell lineages, modulation of signaling pathways, and clearing of maternal transcripts. Here, I utilized next generation sequencing to determine the temporal expression of miRNAs, piRNAs, and other small noncoding RNAs during the first five days of lamprey …