Life Sciences Commons^™

Investigating The Driving Mechanisms Behind Differences In Bleaching And Disease Susceptibility Between Two Scleractinian Corals, Pseudodiploria Strigosa And Diploria Labyrinthiformis, Zoe A. Pratte

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Disease and bleaching are two conditions which commonly lead to coral death. Among coral species, susceptibility to disease and bleaching is variable, and Pseudodiploria strigosa tends to be diseased more than Diploria labyrinthiformis, while D. labyrinthiformis bleaches more readily. The focus of this dissertation was to investigate and compare multiple components of these two coral species, and identify how they may relate to disease and bleaching resistance. Compenetnts examined included the surface mucopolysacharide layer (SML) thickness, gene expression, microbial associates, and a white plague aquarium study. The SML thickness decresased with increasing temperature regardless of coral species, indicating that SML …

Distribution Of Abc Transporter Genes Across The Plant Kingdom, Thomas Scott Lane

Masters Theses

The ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter gene superfamily is ubiquitous among extant organisms. ABC transporters act to transport compounds across cellular membranes and are involved in a diverse range of biological processes and functions including cancer resistance in humans, drug resistance among vertebrates, and herbicide resistance in weeds. This superfamily of genes appears to be larger and more diverse in the plant kingdom—yet, we know relatively less about ABC transporter function in plants compared with mammals and bacteria. Therefore, we undertook a plant kingdom-wide transcriptomic survey of ABC transporters to better understand their diversity.

We utilized sequence similarity-based informatics techniques to …

Improved Evidence-Based Genome-Scale Metabolic Models For Maize Leaf, Embryo, And Endosperm, Samuel M. D. Seaver, Louis M. T. Bradbury, Océane Frelin, Raphy Zarecki, Eytan Ruppin, Andrew D. Hanson, Christopher S. Henry

Publications and Research

There is a growing demand for genome-scale metabolic reconstructions for plants, fueled by the need to understand the metabolic basis of crop yield and by progress in genome and transcriptome sequencing. Methods are also required to enable the interpretation of plant transcriptome data to study how cellular metabolic activity varies under different growth conditions or even within different organs, tissues, and developmental stages. Such methods depend extensively on the accuracy with which genes have been mapped to the biochemical reactions in the plant metabolic pathways. Errors in these mappings lead to metabolic reconstructions with an inflated number of reactions and …

Soybean Isoflavonoid Biosynthesis: Constituents And Circumstance At The Transcriptomic And Molecular Levels, Mehran Dastmalchi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Isoflavonoids are specialized metabolites, almost exclusive to the legume family of plants. They are actors in symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and in plant stress response. Isoflavonoids are noted for their human health benefits. Isoflavonoid content in legumes has proven to be a complex trait. The goal of the present research is to determine the mechanisms underlying isoflavonoid biosynthesis in soybean.

The first approach was to unravel the genetic factors of isoflavonoid biosynthesis. A branch-point enzyme of the phenylpropanoid pathway, chalcone isomerase (CHI), catalyzes the reaction producing flavanones, the nucleus for many downstream metabolites such as isoflavonoids. I identified twelve soybean …

Transcriptional Analysis Of Susceptible And Resistant European Corn Borer Strains And Their Response To Cry1f Protoxin, Neetha Nanoth Vellichirammal, Haichuan Wang, Seong-Il Eyun, Estuko N. Moriyama, Brad Coates, Nicholas Miller, Blair Siegfried

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

Background: Despite a number of recent reports of insect resistance to transgenic crops expressing insecticidal toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), little is known about the mechanism of resistance to these toxins. The purpose of this study is to identify genes associated with the mechanism of Cry1F toxin resistance in European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis Hübner). For this, we compared the global transcriptomic response of laboratory selected resistant and susceptible O. nubilalis strain to Cry1F toxin. We further identified constitutive transcriptional differences between the two strains.

Results: An O. nubilalis midgut transcriptome of 36,125 transcripts was assembled de novo from …

High-Throughput Comparison, Functional Annotation, And Metabolic Modeling Of Plant Genomes Using The Plantseed Resource, Samuel M. D. Seaver, Svetlana Gerdes, Océane Frelin, Claudia Lerma-Ortiz, Louis M. T. Bradbury, Rémi Zallot, Ghulam Hasnain, Thomas D. Niehaus, Basma El Yacoubi, Shiran Pasternak, Robert Olson, Gordon Pusch, Ross Overbeek, Valérie De Crécy-Lagarde, Doreen Ware, Andrew D. Hanson, Christopher S. Henry

Publications and Research

There is a growing demand for genome-scale metabolic reconstructions for plants, fueled by the need to understand the metabolic basis of crop yield and by progress in genome and transcriptome sequencing. Methods are also required to enable the interpretation of plant transcriptome data to study how cellular metabolic activity varies under different growth conditions or even within different organs, tissues, and developmental stages. Such methods depend extensively on the accuracy with which genes have been mapped to the biochemical reactions in the plant metabolic pathways. Errors in these mappings lead to metabolic reconstructions with an inflated number of reactions and …