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Construction Of A Ssr-Based Genetic Map And Identification Of Qtl For Domestication Traits Using Recombinant Inbred Lines From A Cross Between Wild And Cultivated Cowpea (V. Unguiculata (L.) Walp.), Mebeaselassie Andargie, Remy S. Pasquet, Bhavani S. Gowda, Geoffrey M. Muluvi, Michael P. Timko

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.) is a grain legume commonly grown and consumed in many parts of the tropics and subtropics. A genetic linkage map was constructed using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers and a recombinant inbred (RI) population of159 individuals derived from a cross between the breeding line 524B, a California Blackeye, and 219-01, a perennial wild cowpea from Kenya. Out of 912 primer combinations predicted to amplify SSRs in cowpea, 639 reliably produced amplification products in PCR assays and 202 (31.6%) were polymorphic between the two parents. These polymorphic SSRs were used to construct a genetic map consisting …

Investigating Technological Organization At The Buck Lake Site (45pi438) In Mount Rainier National Park Using A Lithic Debitage Analysis, Michael Charles Schurke

Dissertations and Theses

Few lithic analyses have been conducted or published on collections from Mount Rainier National Park (MORA). This study's lithic debitage analysis, and investigation of hunter-gatherer technological organization through time, contributes to the knowledge base and understanding of how hunter-gatherers used subalpine environments in MORA. The debitage sample is from archaeological excavations between 2005 and 2007 at a Buck Lake Site (45PI438) activity area in the subalpine environmental zone. Two cultural components were examined: the pre-Mount St. Helens Yn tephra component (before 3500 RCYBP) is thought to represent a forager-like mobility strategy and the post-Mount St. Helens Yn tephra component (after …

Defining The Phenotypes Of Sickle Cell Disease., Samir K. Ballas

Department of Medicine Faculty Papers

The sickle cell gene is pleiotropic in nature. Although it is a single gene mutation, it has multiple phenotypic expressions that constitute the complications of sickle cell disease. The frequency and severity of these complications vary considerably both latitudinally in patients and longitudinally in the same patient over time. Thus, complications that occur in childhood may disappear, persist or get worse with age. Dactylitis and stroke, for example, occur mostly in childhood, whereas leg ulcers and renal failure typically occur in adults. It is essential that the phenotypic manifestations of sickle cell disease be defined accurately so that communication among …

Validating The Nike+ Wireless Sport Kit For Estimating Pace, Distance, And Energy Expenditure During Treadmill Walking And Running, Derek Joseph Acosta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The use of accelerometry based physical activity monitors among recreational athletes to meet or exceed recommended physical activity guidelines has grown in popularity. In the interest of capitalizing on this demand, Adidas developed the miCoach Pacer System which allows the user to observe pace, distance, and energy expenditure during walking or running. Purpose. To validate the accuracy of the Adidas miCoach activity monitor in estimating energy expenditure (EE) (kcal/min), pace (min/km), and distance (km) during treadmill walking and running, and for two different sensor configurations. Methods. Nine male and 9 female moderately endurance trained volunteers (mean ± SD age: 28.83 …

Phylogeography Of Northern Populations Of The Black-Tailed Rattlesnake (Crotalus Molossus Baird And Girard, 1853) With The Revalidation Of C. Ornatus Hallowell, 1854, Christopher Anderson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The black-tailed rattlesnake (Crotalus molossus Baird and Girard, 1853) is a wide-ranging species complex with representatives from the southwestern United States through the highlands of central and southern Mexico. The systematics of this group has received little attention and in the past six decades only two taxonomic revisions have been proposed (the transfer of C. basiliscus oaxacus to C. molossus and the elevation of C. m. estebanensis to full species). However, a recent revision of the Neotropical rattlesnakes (C. durissus and C. simus) recovered a polyphyletic C. molossus. Sequenced data were obtained from three mitochondrial genes …

Tom Regan And The Problem Of Conflicting Rights, Jeanine Campsall

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

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Inhibition Of Calcium Oxalate Calculi By Ndga - A Spectroscopic Study, Preethi Dacha

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Formation of calculi in urinary tract leads to kidney stones. This process is known as Urolithiasis. Some of the causes of urolithiasis are metabolic disorders, genetic factors, and anatomic abnormalities in the urinary system. Nowadays, urolithiasis is very common disease in population of all over the world. The present study strives to understand calcium oxalate calculi formation as well as its inhibition by using Nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA), which is a chemical extract of the Larrea Tridentata bush, a plant that is traditionally employed in the El paso region as a natural treatment for kidney stones and bladder diseases. Thus, in …

Influence Of Orography On The Weather Patterns And Water Availability Of A Topographically Complex Chihuahuan Desert Region, Fernanda De La Cerda Camargo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Arid and semi-arid ecosystems cover a large extent of the planet's land surface and are highly susceptible to/and dependent on resource availability patterns, especially precipitation. Topography affects large scale weather patterns and redistributes precipitation which creates a variety of microclimates in complex landscapes; how these patterns are modified, however, is still not fully understood. Climate change models for arid and semi-arid ecosystems predict a change towards more extreme precipitation events; understanding the mechanisms involved in redistributing precipitation is crucial for the protection of these areas. Indio Mountains Research Station (IMRS) is located in the northern Chihuahuan Desert and seems to …

Development Of A Low-Cost Network Of Webcams For Monitoring Plant Phenology In A Chihuahuan Desert Shrubland, Libia Gonzalez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Phenology is the study of the timing of natural events such as the schedule of plant life-cycle events like bud burst, flowering, seed set and senescence. Many factors control plant phenological dynamics including climate. As such, phenology has been shown in published literature to be one of the best biological indicators of climate variability and change. Recent advantages in digital photography and digital image processing have opened new opportunities for inexpensive, repeatable and automated capture of plant and landscape phenological dynamics. This technology, however, remains poorly studied in terms of its capacity to depict the development of different plant phenophases, …

Gpu Based Parallel Smoothing Of Seismic Tomography Models, Ivan Gris

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Three-dimensional models of the velocity structure of the Earth's crust are an important and relevant factor for several types of analyses across disciplines. Crustal velocity models are also commonly used to analyze and search for different materials of interest or to determine and differentiate many aspects of life on Earth during different eras.

Seismic tomography techniques, both in two and three dimensions, perform image reconstruction of the crust of the Earth. Seismic tomography algorithms can calculate crustal velocity structure through inversion of traveltimes of seismic waves produced by natural events, such as earthquakes, or controlled source experiments, such as explosions. …

Quality Of Wastewater In The El Paso, Texas Region--Analysis Of Pharmaceuticals And Personal Care Products Using High Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry, Rodolfo Guerrero Jr.

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs), such as household cleaning materials, prescription medication, and personal hygiene products, are pollutants of emerging concern that are found in 80% of our water system. Because of their applications, PPCPs are subsequently being released into wastewater; however, current wastewater treatment facilities are not regulated or designed to remove PPCPs. Therefore, these compounds are discharged into the environment on a continual basis. The effects of PPCPs on human health are not yet well known; however, recent research has found that exposure to these chemicals has some adverse developmental effects on aquatic species at low concentrations …

Photocatalytic Destruction Of Halogenated Organic Compounds In Water With A New Photocatalyst, Mabruka Hadidan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In this research, a newly developed high surface area semiconductor porous material was synthesized from potassium titanium niobium mixed oxide (KTiNbO5) to be used as a photo catalyst in the presence of UV light to degrade halogenated organic compounds in water. The goal of the project was to investigate the catalytic activity of the material for its effectiveness in the degradation of the halogenated organic compounds, and it is the first investigation of this new photocatalyst with halogenated compounds. Model compounds dichloromethane, 1-chlorobutane, chlorobenzene, and trifluoroacetic acid in aqueous solutions were tested with the photocatalyst under ultraviolet light irradiation, using …

A First Step Toward Assessing Organizational Identification In A University Setting, Didier Hernandez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Organizational culture research has been steadily growing during the last two decades, and has become an essential component for assessing an organization's capacity to adapt and survive. Discovering the underlying assumptions within an organization offers a more accurate insight on how its members perceive, think, and feel about the environment they work in, thus providing the opportunity of assessing the group's cohesiveness and culture strength. This study was designed to establish an initial assessment of an organization within a university setting, and to provide insight to its membership sense of identification. The study reflects the analysis of different information made …

Application Of The Water Poverty Index In Border Colonias Of West Texas, Marcelo Korc

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study applied the Water Poverty Index (WPI) in border colonias and other rural areas of west Texas. The colonias are mostly unincorporated communities located primarily in New Mexico and Texas along the border with Mexico and are characterized by high poverty rates and substandard living conditions. In Texas, access to drinking water and sanitation services has been identified as one of the most significant determinants of health in over 350 colonias with about 50 thousand residents.

The WPI is a multidimensional measure that links household welfare with water availability. WPI components were identified and prioritized by a wide range …

Ecology Of The Rock Rattlesnake, Crotalus Lepidus, In The Northern Chihuahuan Desert, Vicente Mata Silva

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Rock Rattlesnake, Crotalus lepidus is a small species that is found from southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and southern Texas, in the U.S., into northern Mexico. To date, little is known about the ecology of this species. Ecological information is becoming desperately needed for supporting the conservation and protection of species living in fragile environments such as the Chihuahuan Desert amid current local and global threats (e.g., habitat destruction and modification, urban development, and climate change). Although rattlesnakes spend a significant amount of time underground while overwintering, little is known about the physiology and behavior of these organisms during …

Choque Cultural In Higher Education: The Lived Experiences Of Two Transnational Doctoral Students On The U.S. Mexico Border, Lyn Mckinley

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the experience of transnational students in higher education in a U.S. public university. The setting for the study is the U.S.-Mexico border between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. While numerous studies examine the experience of transnational K-12 populations in U.S. schools, there is limited research on students in advanced levels of higher education in this context.

The purpose of this study is to provide an in-depth perspective of the experiences of two transnational doctoral students enrolled at the doctoral level at a U.S. university on the U.S.-Mexico border. The …

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Integrating Sequential Narratives Into An English Language Learner's Curriculum, Cira Michelle Montoya

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The following thesis aims to explore the subject of using comics in the classroom, particularly with English Language Learner (ELL) students. Do the images, vocabulary, and contextual cues found within comics and graphic novels positively affect language comprehension and writing skills of ELL students when these texts are integrated into a tailored curriculum? Within my research I have composed an extensive literature review comprised of two major sections. The first section aims to highlight the use of comics to assist struggling readers, again focusing on ELL students. The second section compiles a list of comics and graphic novels I reviewed …

Exploring Organizational Culture And Leadership Styles In El Paso Nonprofit Organizations, Milena Murta

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study focuses on two non-profit organizations in the El Paso region to document the communication processes by which they maintain their culture across their units. The study also explores leadership styles, both what are they and how they are employed in these organizations. This study involves three research methods, including: content analysis of organizational documents, interviews with leaders, and ethnographic observation. The findings of this study suggest that managing non-profit organizations is a challenge but yet rewarding duty. Moreover, managers explained that mission management is facilitated through four major ways: through documents, through the delivery of services, through training …

Free Radical Stress-Induced Parkinsonian Lewy-Like Aggregation Prevented Through Polyphenolic Phytochemical Analog Intervention: Implications For Subcellular Trafficking And Neurodegenerative Disorders, Rituraj Pal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Protein disulfide isomerase (PDI), the chief endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident oxidoreductase chaperone, is known to catalyze the maturation of disulfide-bond-containing proteins primarily through oxidation-reduction and isomerization functions. The rate-determining step in the oxidative regeneration path of disulfide-bond-containing proteins generally couples chemical thiol-disulfide-exchange reactions to a physical conformational folding reaction. I have determined the impact of PDI and its subdomains on the rate-determining step in ribonuclease A folding and on the physical structure-forming step of select ER-processed proteins including RNase A. This was facilitated through application of a novel chemical tool to exclusively populate native-disulfide-containing intermediates in unstructured forms. The described biochemical …

Isometric Neck Strength In Concussed And Non-Concussed High School Football Players, Cameron Layne Raschke

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Football accounts for a significant portion of the 1.275 million concussions per year. Neck strength has been theorized to possibly assist in the attenuation of severe impacts and possibly prevent football-related concussions. The purpose of this study was to investigate potential differences in isometric neck strength in flexion, extension, and lateral flexion right/left between concussed high school football players and matched non-concussed football players. Sixteen high school players that suffered a football-related concussion during the 2010 competition season comprised the research group, and were later matched to a player that did not suffer a concussion, on the basis of age, …

Relationships Between Central Obesity, Fructose Intake, And Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease In Overweight Hispanic Adolescents, Hector Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether central (visceral) fat measured as waist circumference and daily fructose intake were associated with measures of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in Hispanic overweight adolescents.

Methodology: Thirty four obese boys (n=15) and girls (n=19) between the ages of 13 and 18 years were measured for body composition, waist circumference, and dietary fructose intake. Fasting alanine (ALT) and aspartate (AST) aminotransferase levels in blood, ALT/AST ratio, and hepatic fat fraction (HFF) by magnetic resonance imaging were measured and used as surrogates for NAFLD. Pearson Product-Moment correlation analyses were used …

Río Que Teme Al Mar, Juan Pablo Roman Alvarado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Río que teme al mar es una novela de formación, que narra el viaje iniciático de tres personajes: David, Francisco y Violeta, estudiantes universitarios que deciden dejar sus carreras para vivir y aprender a través de las experiencias que tendrán viajando como mochileros y artesanos vagabundos por cuatro de los países de Suramérica: Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. La novela plantea el viaje como una especie de rito de pasaje a la adultez, en el que los personajes deben abandonar la comodidad de su casa para emanciparse y hacerse verdaderos dueños de su vida, es decir, para ganarse el derecho …

Mixed-Signal Distributed Feature Extraction For Classification Of Wide-Band Acoustic Signals On Sensor Networks, Humberto Santacruz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis proposes a distributed/collaborative scheme for the classification of wide-band acoustic events within the context wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The proposed method is characterized by a mixed-signal processing scheme for the extraction of feature vectors which reduces the processing, memory allocation, and power requirements of the sensor nodes. The mixed-signal scheme assumes that nodes have an analog frontend consisting of a microphone, a bandpass filter, a squaring element and an integrator. This chain of components produces an estimate of the energy over the frequency subband extracted by the filter. The WSN has the ability to form a distributed filter …

Perceptions Of Disabilities Amongst The Tarahumara In Northern Mexico, Carolyn Raynor Trussell

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research focuses on the perceptions of disability amongst the Tarahumara, known amongst themselves as the Rarámuri, in the Sierra Madre region of Northern Chihuahua. This population of individuals has typically lived in isolated areas in communities in the Sierra Madre where medical and specialized educational services were rare. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions, knowledge and beliefs related to disabilities, as well as the access and beliefs related to educational and medical services.

The study focused on the individual and the society to examine how bodily conceptions influence perceptions of others. The target group for …

A Framework For Strategic Sustainable Supply Chain Design, Abril Paola Vazquez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Sustainable supply chain management has raised interest considerably in recent years; due to environmental concerns from society as well industries. There is a high interest in the industries to solve this problem but many of the frameworks are directed to specific situation or structure. A strategic sustainable supply chain design framework is presented with the purpose of providing many companies, including small and big industries, the means to maintain an eco-friendly operation. These include; industry plants, distribution centers, and retailers.

Utepcam: A Scalable Wireless Vision Sensor Architecture For Computational, Power And Bandwidth Constrained Scenarios, Ricardo Zepeda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

UTEPcam is a low cost and power vision sensor node system. UTEPcam is composed of an Atmel atmega32 8-bit microcontroller, a CY7C09099V static RAM chip, an OV6620 CMOS image sensor, a XBEE transceiver and a SD Flash memory card, and four logic gates. UTEPcam's simple yet efficiently architecture enables it to capture video at one frame per second. At its absolute highest, it is estimated that UTEPcam consumes only 1.321 Amps. When in standby, UTEPcam consumes 21 microamps. Furthermore, UTEPcam's program takes up only 1Kbyte of memory space.

UTEPcam's CPU, a simple 8-bit MCU, is unlike most vision sensor node …

Gender Differences In The Processing Of Acute And Repeated Stress, Jaidee Zavala

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Chronic stress is implicated in the pathogenesis of a variety of diseases, including affective, immune and cardiovascular disorders, which are differentially experienced by men and women. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), arginine vasopressin (AVP), and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) are the major regulators of the stress response and are widely expressed in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVH), where adaptive responses to stress are generated. Adult male and female rats were subjected to single (acute) or 14 consecutive daily (repeated) 30 min restraint sessions, or maintained as unstressed controls. Rats were perfused after their final restraint, and their brain tissues sectioned and …

Residential Recycling Study, Richard Adams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to gain baseline performance figures and statistics for El Paso's curbside recycling program. With these baseline statistics the effectiveness of changes for promotion and outreach can be evaluated once implemented. In addition, operational changes such as to every other week recycling collection rather then every week or a "pay as you throw" system could be evaluated.

Drowning In The Depths Of Climate Change: An Exploration Of Polar Bear Rhetoric, Gloria Leticia Bebber

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study explored campaigns that used polar bears to bring awareness to the issue climate change. The study analyzed three environmental campaigns, two major corporations, and one non-profit organization. The campaigns were examined using a rhetorical criticism method. Findings show that although polar bears are symbolically a good representation of the effects of climate change, it is imperative to address the entire issue. The limitations that occurred during the study are addressed.

Altered Leptin Signaling On Dendritic Cells As A Potential Mechanism For Cancer Immunotherapy, Lorena Y. De Los Santos

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Leptin is a pleiotropic hormone synthesized primarily by white adipocytes and its receptors are expressed in a variety of tissues and cells such as in the hypothalamus and cells of the immune system. Multiple cell types can produce a considerable amount of leptin such as skeletal muscle, placenta, and osteoblasts to name a few and its synthesis has been shown to be regulated by sex hormones and a broad range of inflammatory mediators. Although leptin has been shown to directly affect immune response, we are interested in how leptin affects dendritic cell function and their ability to induce a proper …