Digital Commons Network^™

Estimation Of Solute Fluxes From Ungaged Headwater Catchments In The Catskill Park Of New York State, Chris Gianfagna

Civil and Environmental Engineering - Theses

Predictions of flow and subsequent solute fluxes from ungaged basins have important implications both for water resources management and ecosystem monitoring studies. The Catskill region of New York State is one such place that requires both water resources management and ecosystem monitoring due to its strategic location as the main water-supplying region for New York City. This study examines the differences in chemical mass flux estimates made in ungaged basins using three different chemistry aggregation methods for solute concentrations determined from monthly grab samples. The efficacy of area ratios for predicting flow at the upstream location of a nested pair …

Using Marine Snails To Teach Biogeography And Macroevolution: The Role Of Larvae And Dispersal Ability In The Evolution And Persistence Of Species, Jonathan R. Hendricks

Faculty Publications

While some marine animals are capable of traveling great distances, many have limited mobility as adults and spend the majority of their lifetimes in a small geographical area or may even be cemented to a single place. While it might be expected that species with limited mobility would have small geographic distributions, some nevertheless occur over very large areas. This is the case for some marine snails (gastropods). A key factor that impacts the geographic distribution of marine snails is the type of larvae they have during the phase of their life history that follows hatching from an egg. Because …

Microfluidic Experiments Reveal That Antifreeze Proteins Bound To Ice Crystals Suffice To Prevent Their Growth, Yeliz Celik, Ran Drori, Natalya Pertaya-Braun, Aysun Altan, Tyler Barton, Maya Bar-Dolev, Alex Groisman, Peter L. Davies, Ido Braslavsky

Physics Faculty Research

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) are a subset of ice-binding proteins that control ice crystal growth. They have potential for the cryopreservation of cells, tissues, and organs, as well as for production and storage of food and protection of crops from frost. However, the detailed mechanism of action of AFPs is still unclear. Specifically, there is controversy regarding reversibility of binding of AFPs to crystal surfaces. The experimentally observed dependence of activity of AFPs on their concentration in solution appears to indicate that the binding is reversible. Here, by a series of experiments in temperature-controlled microfluidic devices, where the medium surrounding ice …

Prism #67, December 2012, Office Of The Provost

Prism: Western Michigan University's Newsletter for Academic Affairs

No abstract provided.

Progression Magazine, 2012-2013, Coastal Carolina University

Progression Magazine

Magazine of the College of Science at Coastal Carolina University.

Secondary Structure, A Missing Component Of Sequence- Based Minimotif Definitions, David P. Sargeant, Michael R. Gryk, Mark W. Maciejewsk, Vishal Thapar, Vamsi Kundeti, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Pedro Romero, Keith Dunker, Shun-Cheng Li, Tomonori Kaneko, Martin Schiller

Life Sciences Faculty Research

Minimotifs are short contiguous segments of proteins that have a known biological function. The hundreds of thousands of minimotifs discovered thus far are an important part of the theoretical understanding of the specificity of protein-protein interactions, posttranslational modifications, and signal transduction that occur in cells. However, a longstanding problem is that the different abstractions of the sequence definitions do not accurately capture the specificity, despite decades of effort by many labs. We present evidence that structure is an essential component of minimotif specificity, yet is not used in minimotif definitions. Our analysis of several known minimotifs as case studies, analysis …

Phenotypic Plasticity Of Oral Jaw Dentition In Archosargus Probatocephalus, Cynthia E. Worcester

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Phenotypic plasticity, the capacity of a single genotype to exhibit variable phenotypes in different environments, is common in many species. A sample of wild caught Archosargus probatocephalus, also known as sheepshead, from Florida was randomly divided into two treatment groups: one group was fed soft prey, Mercenaria sp. muscle tissue, and the other group was fed hard prey, Mercenaria sp. in the shell, for 365 days. It was hypothesized that the sheepshead fed hard prey would have a thicker tooth enamel layer containing more calcium, and therefore be stronger than the tooth enamel layer of those fed soft prey …

Examining Land Use/Land Cover Change And Potential Causal Factors In The Context Of Climate Change In Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal, Kamal Humagain

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In the context of growing tourism and global warming, the fragile landscape of the Himalayas is under immense pressure because of rapid land cover changes in developing countries like Nepal. Remotely sensed data combined with ethnographic knowledge are useful tools for studying such changes. The quantitative change can be measured analyzing satellite images whereas local people’s perceptions provide supportive information. To measure such changes in Sagarmatha National Park of Nepal, Multispectral Scanner (MSS) and Thematic Mapper (TM) images since 1972 were used. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was calculated for different elevation classes and land cover types. These measurements, along …

Contour Extraction Of Drosophila Embryos Using Active Contours In Scale Space, Soujanya Siddavaram Ananta

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Contour extraction of Drosophila embryos is an important step to build a computational system for pattern matching of embryonic images which aids in the discovery of genes. Automatic contour extraction of embryos is challenging due to several image variations such as size, shape, orientation and neigh- boring embryos such as touching and non-touching embryos. In this thesis, we introduce a framework for contour extraction based on the connected components in the gaussian scale space of an embryonic image. The active contour model is applied on the images to refine embryo contours. Data cleaning methods are applied to smooth the jaggy …

Neuropsychological Outcomes In Adults Commencing Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment In South Africa: A Prospective Study, John Joska, John Joska, Jennifer Westgarth-Taylor, Jacqueline Hoare, Kevin Thomas, Robert Paul, Landon Myer, Dan Stein

Psychology Faculty Works

BackgroundInfection with HIV may result in significant neuropsychological impairment, especially in late stage disease. To date, there have been no cohort studies of the impact of highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART) in South Africa where clade C HIV is predominant.MethodsParticipants in the current study were recruited from a larger study of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) and included a group of individuals commencing HAART (n = 82). Baseline and one-year neuropsychological function was assessed using a detailed battery, and summary global deficit scores (GDS) obtained. Associations with change in GDS were calculated.ResultsParticipants had a median CD4 cell count of 166 at …

An Analysis Of The Factors That Influence Global Mindedness In First-Year College Students, Kristie Broadbent Guffey

Dissertations

This non-experimental, quantitative descriptive study was designed to determine what factors influence a first-year college students’ global mindedness and if any of those factors were predictors of the five subscales of global mindedness. Surveys were used to measure students’ global mindedness and their type of personality (N=424). Demographic questions were administered that included gender, county population, Pell grant eligibility, and first generation college student. Results indicated that first-year college students at a four-year public Master’s Large institution were moderately global minded. To predict global mindedness and its subscales, a regression model was developed using the Myers Briggs scores for extravert, …

Faculty Notes- John Carroll, John Carroll University

Faculty Notes - John Carroll University

Dec. 2012, Vol. 5, Issue 4 (Volume 6, Issue 4 [sic])

Neuroanatomical Substrates Of The Disruptive Effect Of Olanzapine On Rat Maternal Behavior As Revealed By C-Fos Immunoreactivity, Changjiu Zhao, Ming Li

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Olanzapine is one of the most widely prescribed atypical antipsychotic drugs in the treatment of schizophrenia. Besides its well-known side effect on weight gain, it may also impair human parental behavior. In this study, we took a preclinical approach to examine the behavioral effects of olanzapine on rat maternal behavior and investigated the associated neural basis using the c-Fos immunohistochemistry. On postpartum Days 6–8, Sprague-Dawley mother rats were given a single injection of sterile water or olanzapine (1.0, 3.0 or 5.0 mg/kg, sc). Maternal behavior was tested 2 h later, after which rats were sacrificed and brain tissues were collected. …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet December 2012, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The December 2012 Monthly packet includes the December agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held November 2012

Differential Expression Of Alpha 4 Integrins On Effector Memory T Helper Cells During Bordetella Infections. Delayed Responses In Bordetella Pertussis, Tzvia Abramson, Tuan M. Nguyen, Dipti Ravindra, Brian Kwong, Sana Waheed, Ryan Ferguson, Nicole Tarlton, Victoria Wu, Christopher S. Sequeira, Martina Bremer

Faculty Publications, Biological Sciences

Bordetella pertussis (B. pertussis) is the causative agent of whooping cough, a respiratory disease that is reemerging worldwide. Mechanisms of selective lymphocyte trafficking to the airways are likely to be critical in the immune response to this pathogen. We compared murine infection by B. pertussis, B. parapertussis, and a pertussis toxin-deleted B. pertussis mutant (BpΔPTX) to test the hypothesis that effector memory T-helper cells (emTh) display an altered pattern of trafficking receptor expression in B. pertussis infection due to a defect in imprinting. Increased cell recruitment to the lungs at 5 days post infection (p.i.) with B. parapertussis, and to …

Frankenstein: A Seminal Work Of Modern Literature, Traci K. Damron

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, is assigned to the Romantic period of literature, it surpasses her contemporaries by its complexity of themes, philosophies, and social commentary embedded deep within. This paper contends that the novel should be considered one of the seminal works of modernity by closely examining the following elements of Modern literature as they apply to Frankenstein: the beginnings of speculative fiction found within the novel, science vs. religion, dark aspects of the psyche, disenchantment with the world, and the isolation/emptiness of the individual. Additionally, Mary Shelley’s own life and the influences …

College Of Health Sciences Newsletter, December 2012, Tammie Smith (Ed.)

Ellmer College of Health Sciences Newsletters

December 2012 issue of Old Dominion University's College of Health Sciences Newsletter.

Clemson Commencement Program, December 2012, Clemson University

Clemson Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

Reducing In-Stent Restenosis Through Novel Stent Flow Field Augmentation, Eoin Murphy, Fergal Boyle

Articles

In-stent restenosis (ISR), manifested as a re-narrowing of the arterial lumen post-implantation of a stent, is a detrimental limitation of stent technology. Understanding and consequently devising ways of reducing the frequency of ISR has been a continuing goal of research into improved stent designs. The biological processes that can lead to ISR have been found to be partially flow dependent with the local hemodynamics at the arterial wall of crucial importance. This paper investigates these biological processes and their instigating factors. Furthermore, the history and theory behind three stent technologies which endeavour to reduce ISR rates through stent flow field …

Benchmarking Cow Comfort On North American Freestall Dairies: Lameness, Leg Injuries, Lying Time, Facility Design, And Management For High-Producing Holstein Dairy Cows, Marina A.G. Von Keyserlingk, A. K. Barrientos, K. Ito, E. Galo, Daniel M. Weary

Housing and Confinement of Farm Animals Collection

In this paper, we describe a novel approach to corporate involvement in on-farm assessment, driven by the desire to provide a service for dairy producers and to create a vehicle for engagement on issues of dairy cow welfare. This program provides producers with feedback on animal-based (including gait score, leg injuries, and lying time) and facility-based (including freestall design, bedding practices, feed bunk design and management, and stocking density) measures that can be used to better address their management goals. The aim of this paper is to describe variation in the prevalence of lameness and leg injuries, lying behavior, facility …

Species Shout-Outs From Abdul To Zebra: Encouraging Nonmajors To Communicate In The Biology Classroom, Christina P. Colon

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Host Selection And Parasite Infection In Aedes Taeniorhynchus, Endemic Disease Vector In The Galápagos Islands, Arnaud Bataille, Guillaume Fournié, Marilyn Cruz, Virna Cedeño, Patricia G. Parker, Andrew A. Cunningham, Simon J. Goodman

Biology Department Faculty Works

Host selection in blood-sucking arthropods has important evolutionary and ecological implications for the transmission dynamics, distribution and host-specificity of the parasites they transmit. The black salt-marsh mosquito (Aedes taeniorhynchus Wiedemann) is distributed throughout tropical to temperate coastal zones in the Americas, and continental populations are primarily mammalphilic. It is the only indigenous mosquito in the Galápagos Islands, having colonised the archipelago around 200,000. years ago, potentially adapting its host selection, and in the process, altering the dynamics of vector mediated pathogen interactions in the archipelago. Here, we use blood-meal analysis and PCR-based parasite screening approach to determine the blood-feeding patterns …

Blended Learning In Anesthesia Education: Current State And Future Model, Jaya Kannan, Viji Kurup

Jandrisevits Faculty Publications

Purpose of review: Educators in anesthesia residency programs across the country are facing a number of challenges as they attempt to integrate blended learning techniques in their curriculum. Compared with the rest of higher education, which has made advances to varying degrees in the adoption of online learning anesthesiology education has been sporadic in the active integration of blended learning. The purpose of this review is to discuss the challenges in anesthesiology education and relevance of the Universal Design for Learning framework in addressing them.

Recent findings: There is a wide chasm between student demand for online education and the …

Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Examination Of Fear Generalization And Anticipation Of Affective Stimuli, Tsafrir Greenberg

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Despite increasing interest in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) it remains one of the least studied anxiety disorders and little is known about its neurobiology. The aim of the current research study was to investigate the neural basis of GAD from two perspectives: fear generalization and anticipation of affective outcomes. Thirty-two women with GAD (17 with and 15 without comorbid major depression disorder) and 25 healthy women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while completing two tasks: a fear generalization task in which participants were presented with a conditioned stimulus (CS) that co-terminates with a brief electric shock, and generalization stimuli …

Study Of Lipid Raft Formation In Model Membranes And Cells, Priyadarshini Pathak

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Ordered membrane domains, (conventionally called lipid rafts) are tightly packed sphingolipid and cholesterol rich domains, proposed to co-exist with disordered domains, in the plasma membrane. In spite of many cellular functions allotted to rafts, their direct detection in cells has been difficult. Rafts may be too small to detect and this could easily be misinterpreted as their absence. For this reason, the contention that in the absence of detergent Triton X-100 (commonly used to isolate rafts), domains may not exist in the lipid mixture resembling the plasma membrane, was investigated. A novel FRET pair variation assay in which, FRET pairs …

Investigation Of Factors That Control Droplet Formation In Microfluidic Cross-Junctions Using The Lattice Boltzmann Method, Jason Pellegrino

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Microfluidics could potentially provide a cheaper and more effective alternative to current industrial and laboratory fluid management techniques due to the large surface area-to-volume ratios; however, optimization of the flow conditions necessary for precise droplet generation is required for any segmented flow application. The Shan-Chen multicomponent multiphase Lattice Boltzmann method was used to simulate droplet formation conditions and provide insight about the conditions for different flow regimes like streaming, threading, and stable droplet generation. For the range of numerically stable flow conditions tested, the combined effects of the Capillary number and velocity ratio were demonstrated to be the process drivers …

An Ambient And Surfactant-Less Synthesis Of Segmented Palladium/Gold Multi-Functional Nanowires, Zhibo Tan

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Segmented noble metal nanowires (NWs) represent an exciting, multifunctional one-dimensional structural architecture with a variety of potential applications. However, currently available methodologies for preparing these systems require either rigorous reaction conditions or expensive equipment. An example of such a conventional protocol is electrodeposition. These strict requirements have limited the potential for these systems to be produced on a large scale, since this protocol is costly and requires complex processes and caustic reaction media. Given the inherent limitations of such methodologies, we report for the first time an ambient, surfactantless template-based approach for the reliable production of Pd/Au segmented nanowires that …

An Efficient Framework For High-Quality Low-Dose Ct Reconstruction And Reference-Based Image Restoration, Wei Xu

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

CT imaging procedures have been shown to considerably increase the medical radiation dose to patients, giving rise to cancer. As a result, low dose imaging modalities have gained much attention recently. However, this renders traditional CT reconstruction processes no longer sufficient. Iterative reconstruction algorithms using numerical optimization paradigms are better suited, but they suffer from (1) expensive computation, (2) problems with the selection of optimal parameters to simultaneously optimize speed and (3) poor reconstruction quality. To cope with these problems, we have made several contributions to low-dose CT. First, we have devised a GPU-accelerated ordered subset iterative CT reconstruction algorithm …

Mercury, Polychlorinated Biphenyls, And Immune Response Indicators In The National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey (Nhanes), Carolyn Michele Gallagher

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

Autoimmune diseases are among the leading causes of death among young and middle-aged women, and prevalence is increasing; however, autoimmune etiology is poorly understood. The need to investigate relationships between environmental factors and human autoimmune responses has been prioritized by the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), yet epidemiologic research is sparse. Mercury (Hg) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are ubiquitous and persistent environmental contaminants with early evidence of immunotoxic associations. Immunotoxic responses fall on a continuum, with the normal range of immune responses at the center, immunostimulation and autoimmunity at one end, and immunosuppression and infection …

Mapping O-Fucosylation And O-Glucosylation On Human Notch3 Epidermal Growth Factor-Like (Egf) Repeats Using Nano-Lc-Esi-Ms/Ms, Ga-Ram Hwang

Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions)

The Notch protein is a transmembrane signaling protein responsible for regulating several important pathways among all metazoans including cell proliferation, differentiation, and death. Notch exists as one protein in Drosophila, but has four homologs in mice and humans (Notch1- 4). A defining component of the Notch protein is the presence of 29-36 tandem epidermal growth factor-like (EGF) repeats, small protein motifs defined by the presence of six cysteines forming three disulfide bonds. Defects in Notch have been linked to various diseases like Alagille syndrome and cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL). CADASIL is responsible for early …