Digital Commons Network^™

Reef Fish Assemblage Structure Variability Off Southeast Florida: Ongoing Research, R. Navarra, Aarti Raja

Aarti Raja

No abstract provided.

Integration Of Scientific Concepts Through A Hands-On Learning Program: Science Alive!, T. Gali, Aarti Raja

Aarti Raja

No abstract provided.

Telithromycin. Fresh From The Pipeline, Aarti Raja, J. Lebbos, P. Kirtpatrick

Aarti Raja

In April 2004, telithromycin (Ketek; Aventis), the first of a new class of antibacterial drugs derived from macrolides, was approved by the US FDA for the treatment of several respiratory-tract infections. After a delay in its approval owing to a need to address potential safety issues, is it likely to now attain the blockbuster status that had originally been widely predicted?

Fcas Service Learning Projects Winter Semester 2013, Aarti Raja, Robert P. Smith, L. Vigesaa

Aarti Raja

No abstract provided.

Interaction Of Hiv Reverse Transcriptase With Structures Mimicking Recombination Intermediates, Aarti Raja, J. Jeffrey, J. J. Destefano

Aarti Raja

Interactions between human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reverse transcriptase (RT) and structures mimicking intermediates proposed to occur during recombination (strand transfer) were investigated. One mechanism proposed for strand transfer is strand exchange in which a homologous RNA (acceptor) "invades" a donor RNA.DNA duplex (replication intermediate) on which DNA synthesis is occurring. The acceptor displaces the donor of the duplex and binds to the DNA. During exchange a transient trimeric structure forms. A model structure was designed with a replication intermediate to which an acceptor RNA was bound. The acceptor was bound to the 5'-end of the DNA over a 54-base region, …

In Vitro Strand Transfer From Broken Rnas Results In Mismatch But Not Frameshift Mutations, Jeffrey J. Destefano, Aarti Raja, Jason V. Christofaro

Aarti Raja

An in vitro system to compare the fidelity of strand transfers from truncated vs full-length RNAs was constructed. A donor RNA, on which reverse transcriptase (RT)-directed DNA synthesis was initiated, shared homology with an acceptor RNA, to which DNAs initiated on the donor could transfer. All RNAs were derived from the N-terminal portion of the alpha-lac gene. On full-length donors, transfers occurred when DNAs migrated to the acceptor prior to being completed on the donor. On donors that were truncated, most transfers occurred after DNAs reached the end of the donor. Transfer products were amplified by PCR and used to …

Biology On The Go – Science Outreach For K To 12 And Beyond!, A. William, Aarti Raja

Aarti Raja

No abstract provided.

Nitrogen Fertilization Has A Stronger Effect On Soil Nitrogen-Fixing Bacterial Communities Than Elevated Atmospheric Co2, Sean Berthrong, Chris Yeager, Laverne Gallegos-Graves, Blaire Steven, Stephanie Eichorst, Robert Jackson, Cheryl Kuske

Sean Berthrong

Biological nitrogen fixation is the primary supply of N to most ecosystems, yet there is considerable uncertainty about how N-fixing bacteria will respond to global change factors such as increasing atmospheric CO2 and N deposition. Using the nifH gene as a molecular marker, we studied how the community structure of N-fixing soil bacteria from temperate pine, aspen, and sweet gum stands and a brackish tidal marsh responded to multiyear elevated CO2 conditions. We also examined how N availability, specifically, N fertilization, interacted with elevated CO2 to affect these communities in the temperate pine forest. Based on data from Sanger sequencing …

Dihydrosterculate In Tobacco Transformed With Bacterial Cyclopropane Fatty Acid Synthase, Katherine Schmid

Katherine Schmid

Many gram negative bacteria accumulate cyclopropane fatty acids (CPFAs) in their membranes during stationary phase. In plants, on the other hand, CPFAs are best known as constituents of certain seed oils. CPFAs make up around 40% of Litchi chinensis seed oil [1] and a significant proportion of oils from other Sapindales. In order Malvales, small amounts of CPFA typically accompany cyclopropene fatty acids in seed oils, although up to 5% CPFA has been observed in the polar lipid fraction from Malvaceous roots [2]. Genetic engineering of oilseeds for unusual fatty acid production requires that the introduced fatty acids accumulate in …

Effects Of Cyclopropenoid Fatty Acids On Fungal Growth And Lipid Composition, Katherine Schmid, Glenn Patterson

Katherine Schmid

Cyclopropenoid fatty acids (CPE) isolated fromSterculia foetida oil by urea clathration and reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) were introduced into fungal cultures. Stearate levels in phospholipids and triacylglycerols fromUstilago maydis sporidia rose considerably in response to 30 μM CPE. In addition, CPE themselves were incorporated into glycerolipid fractions. Sterol composition was unaffected. Changes in lipid composition were accompanied by inhibition of dry weight accumulation and sporidial number. Treated sporidia showed irregular wall deposition and a branched morphology. Oleate alleviated CPE effects on growth and morphology. Hyphal extension byRhizoctonia solani was inhibited somewhat by 30 μM sterculate, whileFusarium oxysporum …

Cyclopropane Fatty Acid Expression In Plants, Katherine Schmid

Katherine Schmid

Pants [sic] are transformed with a bacterial cyclopropane fatty acid synthase gene to produce lipids containing cyclopropane fatty acids. Using this technology dihydrosterculate is produced in oilseed crops such as rape.

Academic Instruction For Students With Asd: Teaching And Adapting Core Academic Content In Science And Math, Emily Schmitt Lavin

Emily F Schmitt Lavin

No abstract provided.

Physiological And Behavioural Correlates Of Life-History Variation: A Comparison Between Tropical And Temperate Zone House Wrens, Robert Mauck

Robert Mauck

Summary

• 1 We studied physiological, behavioural and demographic traits of House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon) in tropical Panama and temperate zone Ohio to explore the hypothesis that tropical birds with higher adult survival rates invest less in annual reproduction than their temperate zone counterparts.
• 2 Compared with wrens from Ohio, Panamanian wrens invested fewer resources in a given reproductive episode, as quantified by lower parental field metabolic rate (FMR) and water influx rate (WIR), a smaller number of feeding trips to the nest, and fewer chicks per brood.
• 3 Whole organism FMR and WIR were only 13–15% lower in …

Incubation Failure And Nest Abandonment By Leach's Storm‐Petrels Detected Using Pit Tags And Temperature Loggers, Robert Mauck

Robert Mauck

The nocturnal activity of burrow-nesting seabirds, such as storm-petrels and shearwaters, makes it difficult to study their incubation behavior. In particular, little is known about possible differences in the incubation behavior of adults at successful and unsuccessful nests. We combined the use of passive integrated transponder (PIT) technology and nest-temperature data loggers to monitor the incubation behavior of 10 pairs of Leach's Storm-Petrels (Oceanodroma leucorhoa). The mean incubation bout length was 3.31 +/- 0.59 (SD) days for individual adults at successful nests (N = 4) and 1.84 +/- 1.16 d for individuals at unsuccessful nests (N = 6). Mean bout …

Increase In The Constitutive Innate Humoral Immune System In Leach's Storm-Petrel (Oceanodroma Leucorhoa) Chicks Is Negatively Correlated With Growth Rate, Robert Mauck

Robert Mauck

1 Using a simple technique for assessing constitutive innate immune function recently adapted for use in wild populations, we characterize changes in avian immune system development by repeated measurements of individuals over the period of nestling growth in a wild population of Leach's Storm-Petrels (Oceanodroma leucorhoa). 2 We measured levels of natural antibodies (NAb) during the early, middle and late phases of storm-petrel development and related these levels and NAb rate of change to mass and wing length growth. We used natural variation in nestling growth to assess the influence of nutritional status on the development of innate immunity. 3 …

Asymmetrical Incest Avoidance In The Choice Of Social And Genetic Mates, Robert Mauck

Robert Mauck

Mating with close relatives generally results in reduced reproductive success (inbreeding depression) because it increases the risk that rare deleterious recessive alleles will be expressed in offspring. None the less, incest may occur when animals have incomplete knowledge about relatedness or when the costs of avoiding inbreeding are high. Over a 17-year period, Savannah sparrows, Passerculus sandwichensis, in an island population rarely paired incestuously (9 of 1110 pairs, 15 of 1609 nesting attempts). All but one case of close inbreeding (coefficient of inbreeding, F ≥ 0.25) involved 1-year-old males breeding for the first time, whereas more than half of …

Experience Versus Effort: What Explains Dynamic Heterogeneity With Respect To Age?, Robert Mauck

Robert Mauck

Age-related patterns of survival and reproduction have been explained by accumulated experience (‘experience hypothesis’), increased effort (‘effort hypothesis’), and intrinsic differences in phenotypes (‘selection hypothesis’). We examined the experience and effort hypotheses using a 40-year data set in a population of Leach's storm-petrels Oceanodroma leucorhoa, long-lived seabirds for which the effect of phenotypic variation has been previously demonstrated. Age was quantified by time since recruitment (‘breeding age’). The best model of adult survival included a positive effect of breeding age (1, 2, 3+ years), sex (male > female), and year. Among-individuals variation (fixed heterogeneity) accounted for 31.6% of the variance in …

The Scaling Of Reproductive Variability In Trees, Andrew Kerkhoff

Andrew J Kerkhoff

Seed output in perennial plant populations is temporally variable and often synchronous over large regions. The similarly complex spatiotemporal dynamics of animal populations have been characterized by the power-law scaling of the variance in population numbers with mean abundance. Here we show that a large compilation of published reproductive time series exhibits largely invariant mean–variance scaling properties across both angiosperm and conifer tree species. A simple model of seed production in tree stands shows that observed values of the scaling exponent reflect very general aspects of plant ecology and life history as well as the temporal dynamics of seed production. …

Allometric Growth, Life-History Invariants And Population Energetics, Andrew Kerkhoff

Andrew J Kerkhoff

Population and community level processes must be at least partially determined by variation in the body sizes of constituent individuals, implying quantitative scaling relations can be extended to account for variation in those processes. Here we integrate allometric growth and life-history invariant theories, and use this approach to develop theory describing the energetics of stationary populations. Our predictions approximate, with no free parameters, the scaling of production/biomass and assimilation/biomass ratios in mammalian populations and work partially for fish populations. This approach appears to be a promising direction and suggests the need for further development of the growth and life-history models, …

The Implications Of Scaling Approaches For Understanding Resilience And Reorganization In Ecosystems, Andrew Kerkhoff

Andrew J Kerkhoff

Managing ecosystems for resilience—the capacity to maintain function in response to perturbation—is among the most pressing ecological and socioeconomic imperatives of our time. The variability of biological and ecological systems at multiple scales in time and space makes this task even more challenging, yet diverse ecological systems often display striking regularities. These regularities often take the form of scaling laws, which describe how the structure and function of the system change systematically with scale. In this article, we review recent work on the scaling of human settlement sizes and fertility as well as the size distributions of forests. We demonstrate …

Ontogenetic Scaling Of Metabolism, Growth, And Assimilation: Testing Metabolic Scaling Theory With Manduca Sexta Larvae., Andrew Kerkhoff, Harry Itagaki

Andrew J Kerkhoff

Metabolism, growth, and the assimilation of energy and materials are essential processes that are intricately related and depend heavily on animal size. However, models that relate the ontogenetic scaling of energy assimilation and metabolism to growth rely on assumptions that have yet to be rigorously tested. Based on detailed daily measurements of metabolism, growth, and assimilation in tobacco hornworms, Manduca sexta, we provide a first experimental test of the core assumptions of a metabolic scaling model of ontogenetic growth. Metabolic scaling parameters changed over development, in violation of the model assumptions. At the same time, the scaling of growth rate …

Testing The Metabolic Theory Of Ecology., Andrew J. Kerkhoff

Andrew J. Kerkhoff

The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) predicts the effects of body size and temperature on metabolism through considerations of vascular distribution networks and biochemical kinetics. MTE has also been extended to characterise processes from cellular to global levels. MTE has generated both enthusiasm and controversy across a broad range of research areas. However, most efforts that claim to validate or invalidate MTE have focused on testing predictions. We argue that critical evaluation of MTE also requires strong tests of both its theoretical foundations and simplifying assumptions. To this end, we synthesise available information and find that MTE's original derivations require …

Injury In Aged Animals Robustly Activates Quiescent Olfactory Neural Stem Cells, Jessica Brann, Deandra Ellis, Benson Ku, Eleonora Spinazzi, Stuart Firestein

Jessica Brann

While the capacity of the olfactory epithelium (OE) to generate sensory neurons continues into middle age in mice, it is presumed that this regenerative potential is present throughout all developmental stages. However, little experimental evidence exists to support the idea that this regenerative capacity remains in late adulthood, and questions about the functionality of neurons born at these late stages remain unanswered. Here, we extend our previous work in the VNO to investigate basal rates of proliferation in the OE, as well as after olfactory bulbectomy, a commonly used surgical lesion. In addition, we show that the neural stem cell …

The Friesner Herbarium (But) Of Butler University, Rebecca Dolan

Rebecca W. Dolan

The Friesner Herbarium (BUT) of Butler University is a collection of over 100,000 specimens built from the personal herbarium of Ray C. Friesner. He and other botanists at Butler amassed one of the largest and most complete collections of Indiana plants. Active exchange from the 1920’s through the 1940’s increased the holdings of plants from other states. Although the collection does not contain many type specimens, it is rich in vouchers from floristic and ecological studies conducted in the first half of the 20th century and published in the scientific journal,Butler University Botanical Studies.

Hypericum Cumulicola Demography In Unoccupied And Occupied Florida Scrub Patches With Different Time-Since-Fire, Pedro Quintana-Ascencio, Rebecca Dolan, Eric Menges

Rebecca W. Dolan

1 Metapopulation models predict that unoccupied, but suitable, patches will exist for species subject to extinction and colonization dynamics. We compared the demographic responses of Hypericum cumulicola, a rare herbaceous species almost entirely restricted to Florida rosemary scrub, when transplanted to occupied or unoccupied patches. 2 Seedlings were transplanted and seeds buried into Florida rosemary scrub patches differing in time since last fire, and in the presence or absence of H. cumulicola. We used a replicated, factorial design to place the transplants and seeds in the field, and monitored their performance for 18 months. 3 Neither time-since-fire nor prior H. …

Academic Instruction For Students With Asd:Teaching And Adapting Core Academic Content In Science And Math, Emily Schmitt Lavin

Emily F Schmitt Lavin

No abstract provided.

Surveying Coral Reef Fishes : A Manual For Data Collection, Processing, And Interpretation Of Fish Survey Information For The Tropical Northwest Atlantic, Emily Schmitt Lavin, Deena Feeley, Kathleen Sullivan-Sealey

Emily F Schmitt Lavin

In order to utilize the untapped resources of volunteers, REEF and TNC, in active partnership, established the REEF Fish Survey Project. The Project involves the training and mobilization of a large corps of volunteers and is currently the only program with the technical and organizational ability to gather marine biodiversity data in a systematic and reliable manner. Objectives of the project are: 1.) to provide training and education opportunities for SCUBA divers and snorkelers to learn to identify and appreciate marine life 2.) to make data and summary reports readily accessible to the marine science, resource management, and conservation communities …

Migration And The Evolution Of Sexual Dichromatism: Evolutionary Loss Of Female Coloration With Migration Among Wood-Warblers, Richard Simpson, Michele Johnson, Troy Murphy

Troy G Murphy

The mechanisms underlying evolutionary changes in sexual dimorphism have long been of interest to biologists. A striking gradient in sexual dichromatism exists among songbirds in North America, including the wood-warblers (Parulidae): males are generally more colourful than females at northern latitudes, while the sexes are similarly ornamented at lower latitudes. We use phylogenetically controlled comparative analysis to test three nonmutually exclusive hypotheses for the evolution of sexual dichromatism among wood-warblers. The first two hypotheses focus on the loss of female coloration with the evolution of migration, either owing to the costs imposed by visual predators during migration, or owing to …

Migration And The Evolution Of Sexual Dichromatism: Evolutionary Loss Of Female Coloration With Migration Among Wood-Warblers, Richard Simpson, Michele Johnson, Troy Murphy

Michele A Johnson

The mechanisms underlying evolutionary changes in sexual dimorphism have long been of interest to biologists. A striking gradient in sexual dichromatism exists among songbirds in North America, including the wood-warblers (Parulidae): males are generally more colourful than females at northern latitudes, while the sexes are similarly ornamented at lower latitudes. We use phylogenetically controlled comparative analysis to test three nonmutually exclusive hypotheses for the evolution of sexual dichromatism among wood-warblers. The first two hypotheses focus on the loss of female coloration with the evolution of migration, either owing to the costs imposed by visual predators during migration, or owing to …

It Isn't Always Sexy When Both Are Bright And Shiny: Considering Alternatives To Sexual Selection In Elaborate Monomorphic Species, Keith Tarvin, Troy Murphy

Troy G Murphy

No abstract provided.