Digital Commons Network^™

Impacts Of Experimental Flooding On Microbial Communities And Methane Fluxes In An Urban Meadow, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Gary M. King, Katherine Henry

Faculty Publications

© 2019 King and Henry. The impacts of extended flooding on microbial communities and their activities in natural and agricultural wetlands have been well-documented, but there is little basis for predicting the responses of urban soil microbial communities to infrequent, short-term flooding. To assess these responses, surface soil samples (0–1 cm) and intact soil cores (10 cm depth) were collected from an urban meadow in Baton Rouge, LA subsequent to an unprecedented flood during August 2016. During the flood, a topographically low region of the meadow (LM) was inundated for at least several days, while an elevated area (upper meadow …

Role Of Type I Interferon (Ifn) In The Respiratory Syncytial Virus (Rsv) Immune Response And Disease Severity, Diego R. Hijano, Luan D. Vu, Lawrence M. Kauvar, Ralph A. Tripp, Fernando P. Polack, Stephania A. Cormier

Faculty Publications

© 2019 Hijano, Vu, Kauvar, Tripp, Polack and Cormier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common cause of lower respiratory tract disease in children patients, such as premature infants, patients with cardiac …

Research At Cct (2019), Lsu Center For Computation And Technology

Components

No abstract provided.

Effector Gene Reshuffling Involves Dispensable Mini-Chromosomes In The Wheat Blast Fungus, Zhao Peng, Ely Oliveira-Garcia, Guifang Lin, Ying Hu, Melinda Dalby, Pierre Migeon, Haibao Tang, Mark Farman, David Cook, Frank F. White, Barbara Valent, Sanzhen Liu

Faculty Publications

Newly emerged wheat blast disease is a serious threat to global wheat production. Wheat blast is caused by a distinct, exceptionally diverse lineage of the fungus causing rice blast disease. Through sequencing a recent field isolate, we report a reference genome that includes seven core chromosomes and mini-chromosome sequences that harbor effector genes normally found on ends of core chromosomes in other strains. No mini-chromosomes were observed in an early field strain, and at least two from another isolate each contain different effector genes and core chromosome end sequences. The mini-chromosome is enriched in transposons occurring most frequently at core …

Lsu General Catalog 2019-2020, Louisiana State University And Agricultural And Mechanical College

LSU General Catalog

The LSU General Catalog describes all undergraduate and graduate departments and programs with degree requirements and courses offered for each one. The LSU General Catalog includes information on registration and financial aid as well as academic services offered to all students.

Management Of Economically Important Insect Pests Of Millet, Ruparao T. Gahukar, Gadi V.P. Reddy, Tom Royer

Faculty Publications

Grain of various species of millet is a staple food of rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and China. In addition, millet is used as poultry and cattle feed in the United States, and the foliage is fodder for cattle in India. The crop is damaged by at least 150 insect pests during its growth and development. Although the current status of all of these pests is not known, shoot flies, stem borers, leaf-sucking, and the panicle-attacking insects are considered economically important. Control measures include the application of synthetic pesticides (as both seed treatment and foliar applications) and …

Examining The Interaction Of State And Trait Anxiety On Working Memory Performance, Carly C. Moore

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Criminal Justice Systems And Psychological Disfranchisement, Morgan Johnson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Penitentiaries, Punishment, And Military Prisons: Familiar Responses To An Extraordinary Crisis During The American Civil War, Henry Kamerling

Civil War Book Review

Angela M. Zombek, an assistant professor of history at St. Petersburg College, Clearwater, offers a well-researched monograph examining the similarities between antebellum and Civil War penitentiaries and military prisons. Zombek’s comparative framework not only investigates parallels between these institutions in the early republican, antebellum, and Civil War eras, but she also assesses likenesses in regional northern and southern carceral institutions. In particular, Zombek focuses on both state penitentiaries and military prisons in Washington, D.C., Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina. While the rationale for the selection of these regions and institutions might be explained in more detail, Zombek’s targets are …

Religion And Faith – The Forgotten Factor Of The Civil War, Robert J. Miller

Civil War Book Review

In 1861, the world’s most devout country went to war. Soldiers and civilians alike “read the same Bible, prayed to the same God and invoked His aide against the other.” In the antebellum era, organized faith and religion were easily the most important social and cultural values at work in America. Membership in churches grew from 1 in 15 to 1 in 7 Americans. The Second Great Awakening had led to the most prolific period of church growth in world history after the 1^st century. Even the non-religious Abraham Lincoln said to an aide, “take all of [the Bible] …

Dosage Compensation Of The X Chromosomes In Bovine Germline, Early Embryos, And Somatic Tissues, Zongliang Jiang

Faculty Publications

Dosage compensation of the mammalian X chromosome (X) was proposed by Susumu Ohno as a mechanism wherein the inactivation of one X in females would lead to doubling the expression of the other. This would resolve the dosage imbalance between eutherian females (XX) versus male (XY) and between a single active X versus autosome pairs (A). Expression ratio of X- and A-linked genes has been relatively well studied in humans and mice, despite controversial results over the existence of upregulation of X-linked genes. Here we report the first comprehensive test of Ohno's hypothesis in bovine preattachment embryos, germline, and somatic …

Petersburg To Appomattox: The End Of The War In Virginia, Christian B. Keller

Civil War Book Review

In this latest installment of UNC Press’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series, Caroline E. Janney has made a strong mark for herself as Gary W. Gallagher’s literary successor. Most readers will be familiar with the storied list of previous titles in the series, the last of which on the end of the Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg saw Janney and Gallagher team up as co-editors. That was a fine volume. This one is possibly even better.

One big reason this book succeeds is the uniform quality of writing among the nine essays, which range from traditional …

Bottom-Up Trait-Mediated Indirect Effects Decrease Pathogen Transmission In A Tritrophic System, Bret D. Elderd

Faculty Publications

© 2018 by the Ecological Society of America A plant's induction of secondary defenses helps to decrease herbivore damage by changing resource quality. While these chemical or physical defenses may directly decrease herbivory, they can also have indirect consequences. In a tritrophic system consisting of a plant, an insect herbivore, and an insect pathogen, plant based trait-mediated indirect effects (TMIEs) can alter host–pathogen interactions and, thereby, indirectly affect disease transmission. In a series of field experiments, individual soybean plants (Glycine max) were sprayed with either a jasmonic acid (JA) solution to trigger induction of plant defenses or a similar control …

Performance Analysis Of A High-Sensitivity Multi-Pinhole Cardiac Spect System With Hemi-Ellipsoid Detectors, Narayan Bhusal, Joyoni Dey, Jingzhu Xu, Kesava Kalluri, Arda Konik, Joyeeta M. Mukherjee, P. Hendrik Pretorius

Faculty Publications

Purpose: Single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a noninvasive imaging modality, used in myocardial perfusion imaging. The challenges facing the majority of clinical SPECT systems are low sensitivity, poor resolution, and the relatively high radiation dose to the patient. New generation systems (GE Discovery, DSPECT) dedicated to cardiac imaging improve sensitivity by a factor of 5–8. This improvement can be used to decrease acquisition time and/or dose. However, in the case of ultra-low dose (~3 mCi) injections, acquisition times are still significantly long, taking 10–12 min. The purpose of this work is to investigate a new gamma camera design with …

The Gauss Decomposition Of Products Of Spherical Harmonics, Ricardo Estrada

Faculty Publications

The product of two homogeneous harmonic polynomials is homogeneous, but not harmonic, in general. We give formulas for the Gauss decomposition of the product of two homogeneous harmonic polynomials.

The Funk-Hecke Formula, Harmonic Polynomials, And Derivatives Of Radial Distributions, Ricardo Estrada

Faculty Publications

We give a version of the Funk-Hecke formula that holds with minimal assumptons and apply it to obtain formulas for the distributional derivatives of radial distributions in Rn of the type Yk ∇ ∆j (f (r)), where Yk is a harmonic homogeneous polynomial. We show that such derivatives have simpler expressions than those of the form p ∇ (f (r)) for a general polynomial p.

Benchmarking Substellar Evolutionary Models Using New Age Estimates For Hd 4747 B And Hd 19467 B, Charlotte M. Wood, Tabetha Boyajian, Kaspar Von Braun, John M. Brewer, Justin R. Crepp, Gail Schaefer, Arthur Adams, Timothy R. White

Faculty Publications

Constraining substellar evolutionary models (SSEMs) is particularly difficult due to a degeneracy between the mass, age, and luminosity of a brown dwarf. In cases where a brown dwarf is found as a directly imaged companion to a star, as in HD 4747 and HD 19467, the mass, age, and luminosity of the brown dwarf are determined independently, making them ideal objects to use to benchmark SSEMs. Using the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy Array, we measured the angular diameters and calculated the radii of the host stars HD 4747 A and HD 19467 A. After fitting their parameters to …

Practical Liberators: Union Officers In The Western Theater During The Civil War, Zachery Fry

Civil War Book Review

Union officers in the Civil War’s Western Theater were uninterested in waging a purely moral crusade to free slaves. Instead, they executed pro-emancipation policy as a practical measure after recognizing it would help win the war. So argues Kristopher Teters in this powerful volume focusing on the role Union forces played in the complicated process of emancipation.

The Hidden Light Of Northern Fires, Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

Daren Wang is not the first author to write a Civil War novel, but he is one of the few to get a review in these august pages. Hidden Light is his first novel, but Wang has written for The Atlantic Journal-Constitution, Paste, and Five Points magazine. Additionally, he is the founding executive director of the Decatur Book Festival. Such an active mind was imprinted with an interest in history at an early age when he and his family actually moved to Town Line, New York.

The 30-Year Dynamic Of The Softwood Sawtimber Stumpage Market In Louisiana: Insights From Quarterly Data From 1988 To 2017, Fan Zhang, Sun Joseph Chang

Faculty Publications

Based on a 30-year quarterly data set, this paper examines the dynamics of the softwood sawtimber stumpage market in Louisiana, United States, from 1988 to 2017. Cointegration analysis and the vector error correction model were used to examine the demand and supply of softwood sawtimber stumpage products in Louisiana. Competition among different stumpage products, seasonality patterns in the market, and the impact of some exogenous events were also investigated. The results showed that the demand for softwood sawtimber products is inelastic to its own price, whereas the supply is elastic. Strong seasonality patterns were detected for both stumpage price and …

Nest And Brood Site Selection Of Eastern Wild Turkeys, Jeremy D. Wood, Bradley S. Cohen, L. Mike Conner, Bret A. Collier, Michael J. Chamberlain

Faculty Publications

Management of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forests relies on frequent prescribed fire to maintain desirable plant communities. Prescribed fire is often applied while female wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) are reproductively active and may immediately affect habitat availability and demographic outcomes. We identified covariates affecting selection of areas used by nesting and brooding females and determined if these covariates influenced nest and brood survival in a longleaf pine ecosystem. We captured 63 female wild turkeys and measured vegetation and landscape characteristics surrounding nests, brood roosts, and daytime use sites. We used conditional logistic regression to determine which vegetation and landscape-scale characteristics …

The Role Of Talker Familiarity In Auditory Distraction, Brittan A. Barker, Emily M. Elliott

Faculty Publications

The current research employed a classic irrelevant sound effect paradigm and investigated the talker-specific content of the irrelevant speech. Specifically, we aimed to determine if the participants' familiarity with the irrelevant speech's talker affected the magnitude of the irrelevant sound effect. Experiment 1 was an exploration of talker familiarity established in a natural listening environment (i.e., a university classroom) in which we manipulated the participants' relationships with the talker. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the participants' familiarity with the talker via 4 days of controlled exposure to the target talker's audio recordings. For both Experiments 1 and 2, a robust …

Effect Of Macroporosity On Pedotransfer Function Estimates At The Field Scale, Xi Zhang, Junfeng Zhu, Ole Wendroth, Christopher Matocha, Dwayne Edwards

Faculty Publications

Saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) is one of the crucial hydraulic properties for assessing water and solute transport in soils. However, direct measurement of Ks is time consuming and arduous. Alternatively, pedotransfer functions (PTFs) have been developed to estimate Ks indirectly through more easily measurable soil properties that are part of regional, national, or international databases. These PTFs are usually based on datasets collected from large regions. However, their validity for a specific site remains unclear. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the performance of established PTFs in estimating Ks in a specific field and improve PTFs to arrive …

What We Know About Team Dynamics For Long-Distance Space Missions: A Systematic Review Of Analog Research, Suzanne T. Bell, Shanique G. Brown, Tyree Mitchell

Faculty Publications

Background: To anticipate the dynamics of future long-distance space exploration mission (LDSEM) teams, research is conducted in analog environments (e.g., Antarctic expeditions, space chamber simulations), or environments that share key contextual features of LDSEM such as isolation and confinement. We conducted a systematic review of research conducted on teams in LDSEM-analog environments to identify which factors have been examined with quantitative research, and to summarize what the studies reveal about team dynamics in LDSEM-analog environments. Methods: We used a comprehensive search strategy to identify research on teams that lived and worked together. Data on team dynamics were extracted where possible, …

Review Of The World Doesn't Require You, Michael F. Russo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Co2 Electrochemical Reduction At Thiolate-Modified Bulk Au Electrodes, Yuxin Fang, Xun Cheng, John C. Flake, Ye Xu

Faculty Publications

Electrochemical reduction provides an opportunity to convert atmospheric CO2 to fuels or chemicals using renewable energy. In this work, we demonstrate unexpected influence on the catalytic activity and selectivity of the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) through the functionalization of Au with thiols. 2-Phenylethanethiol modified Au electrodes (2-PET-Au) show up to a 2-fold enhancement in both Faradaic efficiency and current density for CO evolution, between -0.6 and -0.9 V vs. the reversible hydrogen electrode. Functionalization with 2-mercaptopropionic acid, which has a readily ionized carboxylate group, leads to hydrogen evolution with up to 100% Faradaic efficiency at the expense of CO …

Progesterone Alters The Bovine Uterine Fluid Lipidome During The Period Of Elongation, Constantine A. Simintiras, José M. Sánchez, Michael Mcdonald, Pat Lonergan

Faculty Publications

Successful bovine pregnancy establishment hinges on conceptus elongation, a key reproductive phenomenon coinciding with the period during which most pregnancies fail. Elongation is yet to be recapitulated in vitro, whereas in vivo it is directly driven by uterine secretions and indirectly influenced by prior circulating progesterone levels. To better understand the microenvironment evolved to facilitate this fundamental developmental event, uterine fluid was recovered on Days 12–14 of the oestrous cycle – the window of conceptus elongation initiation – from cycling heifers supplemented, or not, with progesterone. Subsequent lipidomic profiling of uterine luminal fluid by advanced high-throughput metabolomics revealed the consistent …

Attachment Strength And On-Farm Die-Off Rate Of Escherichia Coli On Watermelon Surfaces, Vijay Singh Chhetri, Kathryn Fontenot, Ronald Strahan, Veerachandra K. Yemmireddy, Cameron Cason, Karuna Kharel, Achyut Adhikari

Faculty Publications

Pre-harvest contamination of produce has been a major food safety focus. Insight into the behavior of enteric pathogens on produce in pre-harvest conditions will aid in developing pre-harvest and post-harvest risk management strategies. In this study, the attachment strength (S R ) and die-off rate of E. coli on the surface of watermelon fruits and the efficacy of aqueous chlorine treatment against strongly attached E. coli population were investigated. Watermelon seedlings were transplanted into eighteen plots. Prior to harvesting, a cocktail of generic E. coli (ATCC 23716, 25922 and 11775) was inoculated on the surface of the watermelon fruits (n …

An Actin-Depolymerizing Factor From The Halophyte Smooth Cordgrass, Spartina Alterniflora (Saadf2), Is Superior To Its Rice Homolog (Osadf2) In Conferring Drought And Salt Tolerance When Constitutively Overexpressed In Rice, Sonali Sengupta, Venkata Mangu, Luis Sanchez, Renesh Bedre, Rohit Joshi, Kanniah Rajasekaran, Niranjan Baisakh

Faculty Publications

Actin-depolymerizing factors (ADFs) maintain the cellular actin network dynamics by regulating severing and disassembly of actin filaments in response to environmental cues. An ADF isolated from a monocot halophyte, Spartina alterniflora (SaADF2), imparted significantly higher level of drought and salinity tolerance when expressed in rice than its rice homologue OsADF2. SaADF2 differs from OsADF2 by a few amino acid residues, including a substitution in the regulatory phosphorylation site serine-6, which accounted for its weak interaction with OsCDPK6 (calcium-dependent protein kinase), thus resulting in an increased efficacy of SaADF2 and enhanced cellular actin dynamics. SaADF2 overexpression preserved the actin filament organization …

Food-Burying Behavior In Red Imported Fire Ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), Wenquan Qin, Xuan Chen, Linda M. Hooper-Bùi, Jiacheng Cai, Lei Wang, Zhaohui Sun, Xiujun Wen, Cai Wang

Faculty Publications

The food-burying behavior has been reported in many mammals and birds, but was rarely observed in invertebrates. The red imported fire ants, Solenopsis invicta Buren, is an invasive pest in many areas of the world that usually performing food-burying during the foraging processes. However, the impacted factors and measureable patterns of this behavior is largely unknown. In the present study, food-burying vs food-transport behaviors of Solenopsis invicta were observed under laboratory and field conditions. When starved (no food was provided for 37 days) in the laboratory, food (sausage) was consumed by large numbers of ants, and few burying behaviors were …