Digital Commons Network^™

Movement Ecology Of A Cryptic Ambush Predator: Integrating Radio Telemetry And Tri-Axial Accelerometry To Evaluate Spatial Strategies And Activity Patterns By Western Diamond-Backed Rattlesnakes (Crotalus Atrox), Dominic L. Desantis

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

An animal's decision to move from one location to another within its environment is determined by a complex blend of internal and external factors. Teasing apart the relative roles of specific variables in this web of interacting mechanisms has been a long-standing challenge in animal movement ecology. Historically, this problem was viewed as a sort of black box for which a myriad of methodological limitations precluded rigorous study. Recently, a diversity of animal-borne transmitters and dataloggers (i.e., bio-loggers) have circumvented many of these traditional limitations and transformed field studies of animal movement, behavior, and physiology - in some cases, allowing …

Trypanosoma Cruzi Trypomastigote Glycosylphosphatidylinositol-Anchored Mucins And A Synthetic Alpha-Gal-Containing Neoglycoprotein As Potential Biomarkers And Vaccines For Chagas Disease, Igor Leandro Estevao

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Chagas disease (CD), caused by the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, is a neglected tropical disease that kills or permanently disable thousands of people annually. About 6-8 million people are estimated to be infected worldwide. Although many efforts have been made for the development of an effective immunotherapy, currently there is no vaccine to prevent or treat CD in humans. Despite their toxicity, the two current drugs for CD, benznidazole (BZN) and nifurtimox (NFX), have medium-to-high efficacy in the chronic stage of the disease and could save or improve the lives of thousands of patients. However, negative seroconversion in treated patients, as …

Examination Of Sex Differences And The Role Of Ovarian Hormones In Modulating Nicotine Withdrawal In Rats, Rodolfo Jesus Flores Garcia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Introduction: Aim 1 characterized sex differences and the role of ovarian hormones in physical signs and negative affective states produced by nicotine withdrawal in female, ovariectomized female (OVX), and male rats. We also compared nicotine withdrawal and corticosterone levels with estradiol (E2) and progesterone across the 4-day estrous cycle. Aim 2 validated the role of ovarian hormones in withdrawal in OVX females that received vehicle, E2, or E2+progesterone. Methods: Female rats received a sham surgery or an ovariectomy procedure. Fifteen days later, all rats were implanted with a pump that delivered nicotine for 14 days. On the test day, separate …

Study Of Blinking Statistics In Silver Coated Cobalt Ferrite Single Nanoprticle Using Two-Photon Fluorescence Microscopy, Rajen Kumar Goutam

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Two-photon fluorescence microscopy is a powerful tool to study the molecular and cellular interactions. This technology is a non-invasive approach with the advantage of three-dimensional imaging up to submicron resolution. Two-photon excitation process is the result of simultaneous absorption of two photons that has special features of reduced photodamaged and elongated penetration depth on samples. In this work, blinking statistics of silver-coated Cobalt ferrite (CoFe2O4) single nanocrystal is studied using two-photon fluorescence microscopy. By defining the intensity threshold, the observed fluorescence is divided into two distinct stages: OFF and ON states. Both of these states followed the inverse power law. …

Computational Study Of Disease Related Proteins Form Electrostatic Point Of View, Chitra Bahadur Karki

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the last three decades, many giant DNA viruses have been discovered. The giant viruses present a unique and essential research frontier for the study of self-assembly and regulation of supramolecular assemblies. The question on how these giant DNA viruses assemble thousands of proteins so accurately to form their protein shell, the capsids, remains largely unanswered. Revealing the mechanisms of giant virus assembly will help to discover the mysteries of many self-assembly biology problems. Paramecium Bursaria Chlorella Virus 1 (PBCV-1) is one of the most intensively studied giant viruses. Based on the high-resolution structure of PBCV-1, we implemented a multi-scale …

Interactions Of Bacterial Communities With Hydrous Sulfate Minerals In Water-Restricted Gypsic Environments: A Case Study Based In The White Sands National Monument, Brandon Nicholas Lajoie

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Microbial communities have been commonly found to survive and thrive in arid to hyper-arid gypsic environments that are considered hostile to most other forms of life. The mechanisms through which microbes have conquered these harsh environments remain poorly understood. Here I hypothesize that the microbial communities in water-restricted gypsic settings could benefit in terms of energy and water sources via their interactions with the abundant hydrous sulfate minerals [i.e., gypsum (CaSO4·2H2O)] that build up these niches. Gypsum is of high bio-relevance because its sulfate component may be used as electron acceptor by sulfate-reducing bacteria and the crystallization water may be …

Study Of D-Electron Systems With Fermi-Lowdin Orbital Self-Interaction Correction, Prakash Mishra

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Density Functional Theory (DFT) is one of the very popular and versatile methods for calculations to study electronic structure, and the accuracy of DFT depends on the approximation used in the exchange-correlation functional. One of the known problems with the approximation is that the widely used density functional approximations (DFA) suffer self-interaction errors. Systems with d-electrons such as transition metal oxides often show deviation of DFT predicted behavior from experimental result. SIE tends to unphysically lower the energies of fractionally occupied state which leads to deviation from piece-wise linear behavior of total energy between two integer occupations. This leads to …

Using Two-Photon Microscopy To Analyze Arabidopsis Thaliana Leaves Under Autophagy Conditions And Second Harmonic Generation In Collagen, Andres Martin Reyes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Two-photon microscopy has emerged as a highly efficient and effective imaging tool for biological samples. This can be utilized in studying recently emerging technologies and conditions such as the autophagy process in arabidopsis thaliana leaves and second harmonic generation in collagen. Both of these areas of study utilize the two-photon microscopy practice effectively in uncovering more information of the biological nature of examined samples.

Varying Ratios Of Collagen I And Iii For The Study Of Fibrotic Conditions In Tissue Engineering, Brian Roman

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Maintenance of collagen I (Col I) and III (Col III) in a 3:1 ratio is necessary to promote cardiac health. Increase in the relative amount of Col I within the myocardium, leads to an imbalance of Col I:III during cardiac fibrosis, which has damaging effects on cardiomyocytes (CM). To represent fibrous- and normal-cardiac tissue, gels composed of Col I:III ratios of 9:1 and 3:1 were developed and used to study resultant changes in CM function. Second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy, used to image Col I fibers, displayed a decrease in image intensity with the addition of the non-second harmonic Col …

Ibuprofen As A Probe Of Lipid Metabolism, Jose Antonio Rosales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The hypothesis that deracemization of racemic ibuprofen (IBU) occurs via the enolization of a Candida rugosa lipase (CRL)-ibuprofen ester (Scheme 1.6.2) was disproven by reacting racemic IBU under the conditions that were used to deracemize ibuprofen methyl ester (IME), namely pH 7.6. At pH 7.6, IME through IBU butyl esters were not formed in-situ and racemic IBU was not deracemized by reacting the corresponding primary alcohol with racemic IBU in the presence of CRL.

At pH 7.6, hexyl through dodecyl IBU esters were formed in-situ by reacting the corresponding primary alcohol with racemic IBU in the presence of CRL. The …

On The Performance Of Variable Selection And Classification Via Rank-Based Classifier, Md Showaib Rahman None Sarker

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In high-dimensional gene expression data analysis, the accuracy and reliability of cancer classification and selection of important genes play a very crucial role. To identify these important genes and predict future outcomes (tumor vs. non-tumor), various methods have been proposed in the literature. But only few of them take into account correlation patterns and grouping effects among the genes. In this article, we propose a rank-based modification of the popular penalized logistic regression procedure based on a combination of l1 and l2 penalties capable of handling possible correlation among genes in different groups. While the l1 penalty maintains sparsity, the …

A Quantitative Assessment Of Trace Metals In Subsurface Soils And Groundwater In Agricultural Fields Of El Paso, Texas, Emmanuel Sosa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Intensive agricultural practices such as irrigation, application of pesticides and the use of fertilizers, as well as contamination from urban settings and industrial activities contribute to the input of trace metals onto soils and groundwater. Consequentially, biological uptake and accumulation concentrate these toxic metals in fruits, vegetables, and grains that will be used for human consumption. In southern New Mexico and western Texas, cropland is developed along the Rio Grande valley. These farmers are concerned about the quality of their irrigation water and soils in order to produce adequate crops and maintain healthy soils to maximize revenue. To evaluate loading …

Preclinical Models Of Metastatic Disease, Paloma Alejandra Valenzuela

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Breast cancer is a disease that continues to take the life of approximately 40,000 men and women in the United States each year [1]. Tumor drug resistance represents a major problem for the treatment of many breast cancer patients. The mechanisms underlying such resistance remain to be elucidated, and one approach to study this issue involves the development of tumor drug-resistant breast cancer models in mice. HER-2 positive breast cancer is considered to be one of the most aggressive subtypes of breast cancer and has become a major target for treatment. HER-2 status is a routinely checked marker for breast …

Recent Changes In The Zooplankton Communities Of Arctic Tundra Ponds In Response To Warmer Temperatures And Nutrient Enrichment, Mariana Vargas Medrano

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Warming is altering Arctic freshwater ecosystems, enriching the water column, increasing primary productivity and shifting the composition, dominance and the timing of emergence and reproduction of zooplankton communities. Historic data from arctic tundra ponds near UtqiaÄ¡vik, AK have given us valuable insight into changes that have occurred in recent times. A change of dominance from cyclopoid copepods to Daphnia middendorffiana has occurred over a 40 year period. Daphnia are more common, abundant and larger, which may be explained by increased primary productivity stimulated by nutrient release from permafrost thaw. Copepods and fairy shrimp emerged earlier from the overwintering states, which …

The Representation And Shaping Of The Hispanic Identity And The Assignment Of Power In Three Types Of Hsi-Related Discourse: Hea Amendments, Utep President Diana Natalicio Convocation Speeches, Academic Articles, Julie Ann Rivera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This Dissertation examines the impact of Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) related written discourse on the representation and shaping of the Hispanic identity and the assignment of power. Performing a critical discourse analysis of three types of written HSI-related discourse: amendments to the Higher Education Act (HEA), academic articles, and UTEP President Diana Natalicio convocation speeches, I look below the surface of the discourse to draw out implications for Hispanic students and HSIs. My analysis merges Norman Fairclough's method of Critical Discourse Analysis, known for its focus on the relationship between language and society, with Lloyd Bitzer's The Rhetorical Situation, which will …

Assessing Rotifer Diversity In Desert Wetlands Through Sediment Rehydration And Amplicon Sequencing, Sergio David Samaniego

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Species living in temporary wetlands can be threatened due to the instability and fluctuation of rising temperatures and evaporation caused by global climate change. In addition, regions characterized by dry climates, where most temporary wetlands exist, are expected to have a stronger response to climate change than other ecosystems. While most organisms are not able to respond to rapid changes in their environments, others like freshwater invertebrates have shown great resiliency to short- and long-term ecological disturbances. Rotifers for example, inhabit temporary waters that remain desiccated for indefinite periods of time making assessment of rotifer biodiversity challenging. Fortunately, many microinvertebrates …

Art As A Mediating Tool: Children And Learning In A Music And Arts-Based After School Program, Claudia Saldana

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study explores the experiences of primarily Latina/o children with learning music in a Music and Arts-Based Program (MABP) the context of a low-income neighborhood on the U.S- Mexico border. This year-long ethnographic study was conducted in an after-school art program in the Rio Grande Elementary School, in a low-income neighborhood located within one-mile of the U.S.-Mexico border. The purpose of the study is to understand how music and art can be used as a mediating tool for children to construct social and cognitive learning within a culturally diverse community, thus, enhancing the social environment in which they interact. The …

Dedicated Hardware For Machine/Deep Learning: Domain Specific Architectures, Angel Izael Solis

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Artificial intelligence has come a very long way from being a mere spectacle on the silver screen in the 1920s [Hml18]. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, and we begin to develop more sophisticated Artificial Neural Networks, the need for specialized and more efficient machines (less computational strain while maintaining the same performance results) becomes increasingly evident. Though these “new” techniques, such as Multilayer Perceptron’s, Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks, may seem as if they are on the cutting edge of technology, many of these ideas are over 60 years old! However, many of these earlier models, at …

Attitudes And Barriers Affecting Hearing Aid Use In Hispanics Living In The U.S. Borderland Region, Loren Renee Sotelo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hearing loss can affect a person's overall quality of life, and has been linked to depression and dementia in older adults (Brewster, Ciarleglio, Brown, Chen, Kim, Roose, Golub & Rutherford, 2018; Ciorba, Bianchini, Pelucchi, & Pastore, 2012). In the largest study to date of hearing loss among Hispanic adults residing in the U.S., researchers found that nearly 1 in 7 has hearing loss, which is close to the overall national average (National Institutes of Health, 2015). Currently, hearing aids are the primary/most effective treatment for an age-related hearing loss; Unfortunately, the adult uptake rates are low (Chien & Lin, 2012; …

Grammatical Error Types Using A Picture Description Task In English And Spanish With Young Children, Lisa Valles

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Purpose: The current study was part of a larger project examining diagnostic accuracy of various assessment tools for bilingual children living in a border community. The purpose of this project was to examine language sample measures in young children using a picture description task (Eisenberg & Guo, 2013) by answering the following questions:

1. What were the frequent types of errors exhibited by young children in English and Spanish?

2. Were there distinct types of grammatical errors across languages in bilingual children?

Methods: Participants were recruited from a large city on the US/Mexico border. There were 47 participants in the …

A Computational Method For Predicting Functional Effects Of Cancer-Related Genetic Sequence Variants, Bofei None Wang

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Rapid advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies provide many oppor- tunities to identify associations between genetic sequence variants (GSV) and diseases, which may lead to better clinical diagnosis and treatments. OncoMiner is a bioinformatics pipeline developed at UTEP (OncoMiner.utep.edu) for mining NGS data. It can identify exonic sequence variants, link them with associated literatures, visualize genomic locations and compare their occurrence frequencies among dierent groups. However, the current version of OncoMiner is limited to accepting only a specic input le format provided by the Otogenetics NGS Lab Services. The main objectives of my current work are (1) to de- …

Tourists Of The Past: Topographies Of Memory In W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Ana Menéndez's Loving Che, And Teju Cole's Open City, Benjamin Lee Williams

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Examining, comparatively, the exemplary fictional texts of W. G. Sebald, Ana Menéndez, and Teju Cole enriches the study of exilic experience concerning cultural memory as their destabilization, while geographically and ethnically divergent, represents the constellations of mobility and potential for memory. As absences resonate and profoundly disrupt their works, there is a turn to histories to cope with traumas. By turning to the past, each writer confronts destabilization and uprootedness and, in doing so, plays a game with History. Readers play too as we search through the fictionalized lacunae to consider the extent to which we are complicit in the …

The Genie Is Out Of The De-Extinction Bottle: A Problem In Risk Regulation And Regulatory Gaps, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Once the province of horror films and fantasy, the idea of recreating extinct life forms is poised to move from science fiction to laboratories and from there to the world at large. While “de-extinction is not something that will take place tomorrow . . . scientists are making major advancements, and eventual success appears inevitable.” Spurred on by the burgeoning field of genetic engineering, it was only a matter of time before scientists turned their attention to recreating extinct life forms, either for the thrill of it or in atonement for the human role in the extinction process.

But science …

Assessment Of The Incubation Period For Each Sex Of Turkish Semiwild Northern Bald Ibis (Geronticus Eremita), Ahmet Kiliç, Ersi̇n Uysal

Turkish Journal of Zoology

The semiwild population of Northern Bald Ibises (Geronticus eremita) at Birecik, Turkey, are the final representatives of the Eastern population of the species in the Middle East, apart from a few captive birds in Turkish zoos. This study took place between 2012 and 2015. Breeding is highly synchronized among the colony and incubation behavior was monitored for multiple nests throughout the day. Differences were found when incubation duty period was examined according to sex. In 2013, the incubation period varied significantly between males and females (F = 71.059, P < 0.001). The female incubated eggs for 178.42 min per day on average, while the male incubated for 233.69 min per day on average. A significant difference in incubation was determined between males and females (F = 91.260, P < 0.001) in 2014. Females sat on eggs for 188.06 min on average, while males sat on eggs for 244.13 min on average. In 2015 the incubation period varied significantly by sex, similar to previous years (F = 79.871, P < 0.001). The female incubated for 159.66 min in average, while the male incubated for 223.07 min on average.

Population And Ecological Characteristics Of The Dice Snake, Natrix Tessellata(Laurenti, 1768), In Lower Portions Of The Vrbanja River(Republic Of Srpska, Bosnia And Herzegovina), Goran Sukalo, Sonja Nikolic, Dejan Dmitrovic, Ljiljana Tomovic

Turkish Journal of Zoology

Despite their comparative richness and accessibility in the Republic of Srpska and in Bosnia and Herzegovina in general, population studies of reptiles have not been performed in Srpska until recently. For example, one of the most common snake species in this area is the dice snake; nevertheless, previous studies have only reported its distribution. The aim of the present study was to analyze characteristics of the dice snake population along the Vrbanja River. Animals were processed during 2011 throughout their activity period. In total, 199 individuals of all ages were collected. We observed substantial differences in numbers of animals captured …

Enhanced Efficiency Nitrogen Formulation Effect On Grass-Legume Pasture Productivity, Kathryn Marie Payne

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

The use of nitrogen (N) fertilizer is generally restricted on mixed species forage systems due to its stimulatory effect on grasses which increases competition with legume species. Reduced legume growth from this competition can compromise forage nutritive value and prospective yields. The controlled-release nature of several enhanced efficiency fertilizer N products holds the potential to improve legume persistence in mixed species pastures while providing supplemental N required by the grass component. The studies contained in this dissertation evaluated the effect of different enhanced efficiency N formulations (ATU, ESN, methylene urea, SuperU, and a 75% ESN: 25% urea blend) and untreated …

Long-Term Land Management Practices And Their Effect On Soil Health And Crop Productivity, Thomas Joseph Muratore Jr.

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Agricultural intensification reliant on monocrops could change soil health in a way that does not support maximum crop productivity. Twenty-nine-year-old no-till field plots at the University of Kentucky Spindletop research farm showed a significant reduction in corn yields from continuous corn plots compared to those from plots in various types of rotation. The objective of this study was to determine what role soil microbes might play in yield reduction and how management and time effects microbial community structure. Samples were collected from the following treatments: continuous corn (CC), continuous soybean (SS), a 2-year corn/soybean rotation (CCSS), Corn in rotation with …

Optimizing Cover Crop Rotations For Water, Nitrogen And Weed Management, Cintia Soledad Sciarresi

Theses and Dissertations--Plant and Soil Sciences

Winter cover crops grown in rotation with grain crops can be an efficient integrated pest management tool (IPM). However, cover crop biomass production and thus successful provisioning of ecosystem services depend on a timely planting and cover crop establishment after harvest of a cash crop in the fall. One potential management adaptation is the use of short-season soybeans to advance cover crop planting date in the fall. Cover crops planted earlier in the fall may provide a greater percentage of ground cover early in the season because of higher biomass accumulation that may improve weed suppression. However, adapting to short-season …

Effects Of Multisensory Stop Signals On Sensitivity To Alcohol-Induced Disinhibition In Drinkers With Adhd, Alexandra R. D'Agostino

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Multisensory environments facilitate behavioral functioning in humans. The redundant signal effect (RSE) refers to the observation that individuals respond more quickly to stimuli when information is presented as multisensory, redundant stimuli rather than as a single stimulus presented to either modality alone. Our studies show that the disinhibiting effects of alcohol are attenuated when stop signals are multisensory versus unisensory. The present study expanded on this research to test the degree to which multisensory stop signals could also attenuate the disinhibiting effects of alcohol in those with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a clinical population characterized by poor impulse control. The …

Body Processing And Attentional Patterns In Infancy, Rachel Lynn Jubran

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Bodies provide important social information, and adults benefit from this information by recognizing and responding appropriately to bodies. Body recognition is enabled by the fact that human bodies are defined by parts, such as the limbs, torso, and head, arranged in a particular configuration. To understand the development of social cognition, it is important to analyze and document how infants come to recognize bodies. Infants are sensitive to distortions to the global configurations of bodies by 3.5 months of age, suggesting an early onset of body knowledge. It was unclear, however, whether such sensitivity indicates knowledge of the location of …