Life Sciences Commons^™

Tick Control Methods For Amblyomma Americanum In Virginia: Applications And Modeling, Alexis Lynn White

Biological Sciences Theses & Dissertations

Tick-borne diseases continue to increase in the United States, and yet no comprehensive method of tick control currently exists. The lone star tick, Amblyomma americanum, is an aggressive human-biting tick and vector of several pathogens which effect both humans and other animals. Standard control methods do not work as well for A. americanum as they do for the more commonly studied blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis. TickBot, a tick-killing robot, is a potential method to control A. americanum that lures ticks to its path with carbon dioxide and the ticks die from contact with a permethrin-treated cloth that is …

Sonification Of Epigenetic Processes, Joelle Strom

Senior Theses

Sonification is the process of creating sound or music from data for investigative or aesthetic purposes. Data sonification has been used in multiple fields to provide an additional layer of analysis to datasets, engage general audiences in a scientific topic, or create an evocative musical piece. Sonification has been extended to biological subjects, including macromolecules such as protein and DNA. Epigenetics, the processes by which gene expression is regulated, is a burgeoning field of molecular biology research. Epigenetic processes have been scarcely sonified, and the process of sonifying DNA base methylation has never been published. DNA methylation is an integral …

Artificial Neural Models Of Concentrations Of Fungal Spores In The Air For Aerobiological Research, Agnieszka Grinn-Gofron

Turkish Journal of Botany

This article describes in detail an advanced statistical method, the artificial neural network, and the possibilities for its application in aerobiological analyses. The study and models involve the concentration of fungal spores in the air and their relationship with various biological and environmental factors. The author hopes that this work will contribute to a wider use of this method not only in the study of spores but also the concentration of pollen grains.

Brave Spaces: Augmenting Interdisciplinary Stem Education By Using Quantitative Data Explorations To Engage Conversations On Equity And Social Justice, John R. Jungck, Jon Manon

Numeracy

In workshops and courses involving in-service teachers, participating teachers can engage in problem posing and exploration of difficult issues when they are asked to quantitatively model alternative scenarios, statistically analyze complex data, and visualize these data in multiple formats. Subsequent to these activities, discussions of sensitive issues, some even considered taboo in classrooms, can open up “brave spaces” in these teachers’ classrooms. Without coaching through elaborate facilitation strategies, the in-service teachers grappled openly with the nuances of such difficult issues and raised many alternatives involving quantitative reasoning as well as considering biological, cultural, economic, social, and political factors influencing social …

Contribution Of Juvenile Estuarine Residency In A Bar-Built Estuary To Recruitment Of Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus Tshawytscha), Emily Katherine Chen

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Estuaries are commonly touted as nurseries for out-migrating salmonids, providing higher prey availability than streams, a physiological transition zone, and refugee from marine predators. Yet the diversity of estuaries makes it difficult to generalize the effect they have on salmonid recruitment. In bar-built estuaries, sandbars form at the mouth of rivers during periods of low flow, closing access to the ocean and disrupting outmigration. In this thesis, I evaluated how residency in a bar-built estuary affects the growth, survival, and ultimately recruitment of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) in Redwood Creek, California. I conducted a mark-recapture experiment on out-migrating …

The Correlation Between Sleep And Lifespan In Drosophila Melanogaster, Joshua Randall Lisse

Masters Theses

”Adequate sleep is associated with an individual’s health. Too little sleep is associated with many health problems, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, and a general increase in all-cause mortality. Yet the molecular changes that link poor sleep and changes in health are still not well understood. Individuals have a unique daily need for sleep, and deviations from the animal’s regular sleeping patterns can be indicative of, or result in, underlying changes in its health. Therefore, we hypothesize that changes in the sleep architecture in Drosophila melanogaster reflect changes in the fly’s health.

We determined sleep architecture in wild-type male flies over …

Evaluation Of A Commercial Model For Predicting Growth Performance Of Pigs With Varying Diet Composition And Stocking Density, M. B. Menegat, F. Wu, J. C. Woodworth, M. D. Tokach, J. M. Derouchey, S. S. Dritz, R. D. Goodband

Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station Research Reports

The objective of this study was to validate the growth performance predictions of a commercial model (CAMERA®; INTL FCStone, New York, NY) by comparing the optimally-solved estimates with observed growth performance from published studies. Three studies were selected to create 3 feeding scenarios: 1) variation in dietary energy concentrations and fiber sources (Nitikanchana et al., 2015); 2) variation in dietary lysine level (Menegat et al., 2017); and 3) variation in space allowance (Carpenter et al., 2018). For each validation scenario, the growth performance of pigs from the best-performing treatment group was first estimated, calibrated using the observed performance, and used …