Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Actin-Based Feedback Circuits In Cell Migration And Endocytosis, Xinxin Wang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we study the switch and pulse functions of actin during two important cellular processes, cell migration and endocytosis. Actin is an abundant protein that can polymerize to form a dendritic network. The actin network can exert force to push or bend the cell membrane. During cell migration, the actin network behaves like a switch, assembling mostly at one end or at the other end. The end with the majority of the actin network is the leading edge, following which the cell can persistently move in the same direction. The other end, with the minority of the actin …

Bayesian Networks To Assess The Newborn Stool Microbiome, William E. Bennett Jr.

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In human stool, a large population of bacterial genes and transcripts from hundreds of genera coexist with host genes and transcripts. Assessments of the metagenome and transcriptome are particularly challenging, since there is a great deal of sequence overlap among related species and related genes. We sequenced the total RNA content from stool samples in a neonate using previously-described methods. We then performed stepwise alignment of different populations of RNA sequence reads to different indices, including ribosomal databases, the human genome, and all sequenced bacterial genomes. Each pool of RNA at each alignment step was subjected to compression to assess …

Revelation Of Yin-Yang Balance In Microbial Cell Factories By Data Mining, Flux Modeling, And Metabolic Engineering, Gang Wu

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The long-held assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biotechnology and especially in synthetic biology has been recently questioned, due to lack of substantial return of investment. One of the main reasons for failures in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering is the metabolic burdens that result in resource losses. Metabolic burden is defined as the portion of a host cells resources either energy molecules (e.g., NADH, NADPH and ATP) or carbon building blocks (e.g., amino acids) that is used to maintain the engineered components (e.g., pathways). As a result, the effectiveness of synthetic biology tools heavily dependents on cell capability to …

Genetic Imputation: Accuracy To Application, Shelina Raynell Ramnarine

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Genotype imputation, the process of inferring genotypes for untyped variants, is used to identify and refine genetic association findings. This body of work focuses on assessing imputation accuracy and uses imputed data to identify genetic contributors to mentholated cigarette preference.

Inaccuracies in imputed data can distort the observed association between variants and a disease. Many statistics are used to assess accuracy; some compare imputed to genotyped data and others are calculated without reference to true genotypes. Prior work has shown that the Imputation Quality Score (IQS), which is based on Cohens kappa statistic and compares imputed genotype probabilities to true …

Development And Application Of Comparative Gene Co-Expression Network Methods In Brachypodium Distachyon, Henry David Priest

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gene discovery and characterization is a long and labor-intensive process. Gene co-expression network analysis is a long-standing powerful approach that can strongly enrich signals within gene expression datasets to predict genes critical for many cellular functions. Leveraging this approach with a large number of transcriptome datasets does not yield a concomitant increase in network granularity. Independently generated datasets that describe gene expression in various tissues, developmental stages, times of day, and environments can carry conflicting co-expression signals. The gene expression responses of the model C3 grass Brachypodium distachyon to abiotic stress is characterized by a co-expression-based analysis, identifying 22 modules …