Digital Commons Network^™

University Celebrates Community, Employee Service, Edwin Smith

University of Mississippi News

OXFORD, Miss. – The University of Mississippi recognized accomplishments in community-engaged research, learning, service and scholarship by its students, faculty and staff members on Tuesday (April 16) during the annual Celebration of Service Awards.

Identification And Characterization Of Novel, Small Molecule Inhibitors Of Spermine Oxidase, Amelia Bryn Furbish

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

The major intracellular polyamines spermine and spermidine are abundant endogenous compounds that are essential for cellular growth and development. Dysregulation of polyamine metabolism has been implicated as a key mechanism of injury across multiple forms of clinically challenging pathologies. Of the enzymes within the polyamine pathway, the catabolic enzyme spermine oxidase (SMOX) is of particular interest as it is subject to induction in response to infection, neuronal excitotoxicity, ischemia, and oxidative stress. In addition to the loss of radical scavenging capabilities associated with spermine depletion, catabolism of spermine by SMOX results in the production of toxic byproducts, including H_{2 …}

Leftovers, James Magruder

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

The Field Excerpt, Sara Slingerland Sheiner

Bryant Literary Review

No abstract provided.

Prefrontal Medial Cortex Dendritic Complexity Alteration Following Prenatal Alcohol Exposure And Placental Insufficiency, Zarena M. Dominguez, Suzy Davies, Roberto N. Almeida Mancero, Daniel D. Savage, Jessie R. Maxwell

2024 Pediatric Research Forum Session

Executive functioning is the ability to control and coordinate abilities and behaviors, but prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) negatively impacts these functions. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is a crucial brain region that plays an essential role in higher level functioning such as motivation, long-term memory, and sociability. The effects of PAE have been shown to alter the fetal blood flow in utero, which results in placental insufficiency (PI). PI has negative impacts on fetal development and neurodevelopmental outcomes. There has been little research on the effects of the combination of PAE and PI. We aimed to further investigate the impact …

Spatiotemporal Variation In Regeneration And Herbivory In Stable And Seral Aspen Stands, Sterling Burgess Kerr

Theses and Dissertations

Aspen forests are strongly influenced by disturbances like fire and ungulate herbivory, which can impact plant community composition and succession. Human activities alter these disturbances, affecting their timing, extent, and severity. Chapter 1 explores the effects of large-scale prescribed fire and mechanical thinning treatments on aspen regeneration and vulnerability to ungulate herbivory. Results show that while aspen regeneration was hindered by chronic ungulate herbivory in untreated areas, mechanical thinning and prescribed fire stimulated aspen regeneration. However, mechanically thinned plots were vulnerable to ungulate herbivory, with only prescribed fire having reduced browsing. Chapter 2 investigates herbivory patterns and recruitment across stable …

Advanced Nano-Drug Delivery Systems In The Treatment Of Ischemic Stroke, Jiajie Zhang, Zhong Chen, Qi Chen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

In recent years, the frequency of strokes has been on the rise year by year and has become the second leading cause of death around the world, which is characterized by a high mortality rate, high recurrence rate, and high disability rate. Ischemic strokes account for a large percentage of strokes. A reperfusion injury in ischemic strokes is a complex cascade of oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, immune infiltration, and mitochondrial damage. Conventional treatments are ineffective, and the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) leads to inefficient drug delivery utilization, so researchers are turning their attention to nano-drug delivery systems. Functionalized nano-drug …

Transposable Elements Regulate Thymus Development And Function, Jean-David Larouche, Céline M Laumont, Assya Trofimov, Krystel Vincent, Leslie Hesnard, Sylvie Brochu, Caroline Côté, Juliette F Humeau, Éric Bonneil, Joel Lanoix, Chantal Durette, Patrick Gendron, Jean-Philippe Laverdure, Ellen R Richie, Sébastien Lemieux, Pierre Thibault, Claude Perreault

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Transposable elements (TEs) are repetitive sequences representing ~45% of the human and mouse genomes and are highly expressed by medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs). In this study, we investigated the role of TEs on T-cell development in the thymus. We performed multiomic analyses of TEs in human and mouse thymic cells to elucidate their role in T-cell development. We report that TE expression in the human thymus is high and shows extensive age- and cell lineage-related variations. TE expression correlates with multiple transcription factors in all cell types of the human thymus. Two cell types express particularly broad TE repertoires: …

Social Media Among College Students, Julia Martorano

Honors Projects

Within the past decade, social media has become a huge part of most peoples’ everyday life. People use social media to keep up with old friends, to see what their current friends and family are up to, to follow celebrities, and so much more. Researchers and the general public have begun to wonder if this obsession with social media is detrimental to individuals and society. Throughout my research, I strived to answer two research questions. “How does social media affect a college student’s GPA, productivity, and life satisfaction?” and “How do celebrities and companies create social media content that drives …

Chapter 10: Chemical, Biological, Radiological, And Nuclear Weapons

International Law Studies

The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations is used in the United States and throughout the world as a restatement of U.S. doctrinal law positions on matters affecting the operations of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Judge advocates and legal advisers have occasion to conduct deeper research to identify the context and source of the rules reflected in the Commander’s Handbook. Responding to this need, an Annotated Supplement to The Commander’s Handbook was produced in 1997 and published as volume 73 of International Law Studies. In the intervening decades, …

Latu Mae Rissa: Leader Come To War! An Autoethnography Of Colonialization And Post-Colonization, Leah Latumaerissa

Honors Theses

Latu Mae Rissa: Leader Come to War! An Autoethnography of Colonialization and Post-colonization is an undergraduate honors thesis that examines the effects and aftermath of Dutch colonialism regarding the Moluccan community through oral history, and unique narratives from four generations in the family Latumaerissa in the Netherlands. The generational narratives capture the indigenous Moluccan experience during the Dutch colonial and postcolonial eras. The findings in this thesis indicate that the Dutch colonial past and the historical events that occurred during and after Dutch decolonization function as significant Moluccan identity markers as they influenced the Moluccan being through intergenerational trauma which …

Improving Restaurant Customer Service Through Job Aids, Madisyn Slater

Honors Theses

A key concern for restaurants is good customer service as it directly relates to repeated customers and revenue generation. Customer service plays a large role in keeping a business up and running, without appropriate customer-employee interactions, a business may cease to exist. The field of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) has several empirically-based interventions that may help. One of these interventions, job aids, gives a brief description of what is expected and can be consulted by an employee at any point in time. However, most research uses a package intervention and has not examined the effects of job aids alone. The …

Musical Figures In Mythology And Their Effect On Ancient Greek And Roman Culture, Nathaniel Weeldreyer

Honors Theses

This thesis combines anthropology and music to approach the topic of how ancient society was affected by mythological stories focusing on musical heroes and the role of music in general. The essay begins with providing introductions to important divine figures such as the Muses, Apollo and others. These figures appear throughout the research and analysis further in the thesis, and it is important to understand their relation between each other and to the world as a whole before going any further. The prevalence of festivals and contests is another point discussed as they provided much more than just entertainment to …

Organic-Based Nutrient Solutions For Sustainable Vegetable Production In A Zero-Runoff Soilless Growing System, Maitha Salem Almheiri

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

As the adoption of soilless production systems escalates to meet the rising demand for safe and healthy fresh produce, the growing environmental awareness and consumer’s preference for sustainable production systems are stimulating the reduction of synthetic inputs. A greenhouse study using an auto-pot zero-runoff hydroponic system and lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) as a model vegetable crop was conducted to evaluate the potential of substituting synthetic fertilizer nutrient solutions (NS) with organic-based NS. The use of organic NS resulted in lettuce plants with fewer leaves and a smaller leaf area, plant height, stem diameter, and fresh biomass compared to those grown …

Cocoa Polyphenols Modulate The Fecal Microbiome In A Mouse Model Of Colitis, Independent Of Basal Diet And Colon Inflammation, Abby D. Benninghoff

Browse all Datasets

Chronic inflammation increases the risk of developing multiple chronic diseases, including cancer. The risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC) specifically is increased in individuals who suffer from colitis, a characteristic of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Diet is another risk factor for developing CRC, particularly an inflammation-promoting Western-type diet. Thus, supplementing a Western diet with functional foods containing anti-inflammatory polyphenols is a potential approach to decreasing CRC risk by reducing gut inflammation and altering gut microbiome profile. This study aimed to determine the effects of cocoa polyphenol (CP) supplementation on inflammation status and microbiome profile before, during, and after colitis when …

Listening To Moose Tracks, Maeve Gifford

UNH Today Archive

No abstract provided.

First-In-Human Phase I Trial Of Tpst-1120, An Inhibitor Of Pparα, As Monotherapy Or In Combination With Nivolumab, In Patients With Advanced Solid Tumors, Bruno Bastos

All Publications

Purpose: TPST-1120 is a first-in-class oral inhibitor of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα), a fatty acid ligand-activated transcription factor that regulates genes involved in fatty acid oxidation, angiogenesis, and inflammation, and is a novel target for cancer therapy. TPST-1120 displayed antitumor activity in xenograft models and synergistic tumor reduction in syngeneic tumor models when combined with anti-PD-1 agents.

Experimental design: This phase I, open-label, dose-escalation study (NCT03829436) evaluated TPST-1120 as monotherapy in patients with advanced solid tumors and in combination with nivolumab in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), or hepatocellular carcinoma. Objectives included evaluation of …

Secondary Characters As First-Person Narrators: A Study Of Empathy, Lily Walter

Senior Honors Theses

One of the greatest functions of literature is its ability to make readers attuned to the emotions of others. Specifically, literature promotes the practices of both empathy and sympathy. Point of view has a strong effect on how emotion is directed, and the secondary character as the first-person narrator functions as a literary device to direct the reader’s sympathy toward an unlikable, fatally-flawed protagonist. Secondary characters draw the reader close to the emotional world of the narrative through an others-orientation, their status as survivor, and their relationship to the protagonist. Ishmael in Moby Dick and Nick Carraway in The Great …

Ethanol-Induced Alterations To Astrocytic Glutamate Transporter Mrna Expression In The Mpfc Of Adult Mice, Zachary Evans

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is one of several brain structures that is contained in the mesolimbocortical pathway and controls many processes involved in alcohol use disorder (AUD). There is vast glutamatergic output from the mPFC to other mesolimbocortical regions; neuroplastic changes to this system are believed to be closely tied to the development and maintenance of AUD. Astrocytes are key regulators of glutamatergic transmission through their uptake of excess glutamate from the synapse and recycling back into neurons. Ethanol (EtOH) alters the expression of astrocytic genes that encode for transporters that control glutamate homeostasis; these include the glutamate transporter-1 …

Kenyon Collegian - April 18, 2024

The Kenyon Collegian

No abstract provided.

Germinal Center Persistence Diversifies B Cell Responses To Vaccination, Katherine Marie Mcintire

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Vaccination is the best defense against infection, but highly variable and evolving pathogens like influenza virus pose a significant immunological challenge for vaccine design. An ideal influenza virus vaccine should elicit a durable and broadly cross-reactive antibody response. However, the development of cross-reactive antibodies is hindered by the high degree of antigenic variation among influenza viruses, particularly in the surface glycoprotein hemagglutinin (HA), which is the main target of vaccine-induced responses. Successful vaccination works by driving the differentiation of antigen-specific B cells into short-lived, antibody-secreting plasmablasts (PBs) and long-lived populations of memory B cells (MBCs) and bone marrow plasma cells …

Cdk8/Cdk19 Promotes Mitochondrial Fission Through Drp1 Phosphorylation And Can Phenotypically Suppress Pink1 Deficiency In Drosophila, Jenny Zhe Liao, Hyung-Lok Chung, Claire Shih, Kenneth Kin Lam Wong, Debdeep Dutta, Zelha Nil, Catherine Grace Burns, Oguz Kanca, Ye-Jin Park, Zhongyuan Zuo, Paul C Marcogliese, Katherine Sew, Hugo J Bellen, Esther M Verheyen

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Cdk8 in Drosophila is the orthologue of vertebrate CDK8 and CDK19. These proteins have been shown to modulate transcriptional control by RNA polymerase II. We found that neuronal loss of Cdk8 severely reduces fly lifespan and causes bang sensitivity. Remarkably, these defects can be rescued by expression of human CDK19, found in the cytoplasm of neurons, suggesting a non-nuclear function of CDK19/Cdk8. Here we show that Cdk8 plays a critical role in the cytoplasm, with its loss causing elongated mitochondria in both muscles and neurons. We find that endogenous GFP-tagged Cdk8 can be found in both the cytoplasm and nucleus. …

April 18, 2024, James Madison University

The Breeze, 2020-

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

A Data-Driven Framework To Inform Sustainable Management Of Animal Manure In Rural Agricultural Regions Using Emerging Resource Recovery Technologies, Mohammed T. Zaki, Lewis Stetson Rowles, Jeff Hallowell, Kevin D. Orner

Civil Engineering & Construction: Faculty Publications

Thermochemical conversion technologies are emerging as preferred resource recovery practices for managing animal manure in agricultural regions. Although the implementation of such technologies has been previously studied, difficulties exist in maintaining balance between high rate of resource recovery and low environmental, economic, and social impacts, particularly in rural regions with limited resources. We developed a data-driven framework by integrating machine learning with life cycle thinking that can be used as an open-source tool to help overcome these barriers. The framework was applied to compare two emerging technologies: pyrolysis versus hydrothermal carbonization for managing the excess poultry litter in a rural …

The Association Of Prenatal Fine Particulate Matter (Pm2.5) Airway Exposure And Pulmonary Function Among Preschool Children: The Mediation Effect Of Dna Methylation At Birth And Metabolites, Nutrients, And Toxins In Cord Blood, Rui Luo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Prenatal exposure to particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) has been linked to altered lung function and respiratory diseases. However, the conclusions of previous studies are controversial. To our knowledge, no study examined whether DNA methylation (DNAm), metabolites, nutrients, and toxins (MNTs) at birth mediate the association between prenatal PM2.5 exposure with multiple respiratory outcomes. This dissertation includes three carefully designed studies focusing on prenatal PM2.5 exposure, and its association with respiratory outcomes. Data obtained from three generation of Isle of Wight birth cohort (IOWBC) were utilized. In the first study, I examined the …

Assessing Design Quality In Online Courses At A Public University, Anthony Kiech

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This research assesses the extent to which asynchronous online STEM courses at a public university integrate Merrill's First Principles of Instruction. Through a quantitative content analysis of thirty unique online courses within the College of Arts and Sciences, the study investigates the extent, if any, to which these courses embody principles such as problem-centered learning, activation, demonstration, application, and integration. A validated survey instrument, Course Scan, was used for evaluation and indicated a low extent of Merrill's First Principles of Instruction in the sample courses. Methodology, including the investigation plan and instrumentation, are shared. Results are shared, indicating low implementation …

Diagnosis And Current Treatment Strategies For Adult And Juvenile Hereditary Hemochromatosis, Tori Tyler, Amber Wiggins-Mcdaniel, Staton Mcbroom, Caroline Parry, Robert Tyler, Robert A. White

Student Publications

Hemochromatosis is a common genetic disorder manifesting as an iron overload state requiring complex processes in diagnosis, treatment, and management of both adult, and pediatric, populations. This review outlines general diagnostic and treatment strategies for hemochromatosis detailing fundamental processes in iron excess, or iron overload, through physiologic function and associated pathological effects. Genetic mutations, as ascribed to hemochromatosis, have significant impact in producing pathophysiology. Understanding basic pathophysiological mechanisms can inform future diagnosis and treatment through advances such as erythrocytophoresis. Linking concepts related to the diagnosis, treatment, and management of adult and juvenile hereditary hemochromatosis with scientific advances may enlighten clinical …

Design Principles For Sustainable Packaging, Nerida Kelton, Ralph Moyle

Turning The Dial conference

No abstract provided.

Brain/Computer Interfaces, Relational Ethics, And The Habitus Of Ableism, Rosie Wilkinson '06

Midwest Ethics Symposium

No abstract provided.

Epistolary Glossopoesis Tolkien’S Letter Writing And Language Invention, Andrew Higgins

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper was given when I was the Guest Speaker at The Annual Meeting of the UK Tolkien Society on 13 April 2024.