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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Rhodococcus Opacus Pd630 Genetic Tool Development To Enable The Conversion Of Biomass, Drew Michael Delorenzo
Rhodococcus Opacus Pd630 Genetic Tool Development To Enable The Conversion Of Biomass, Drew Michael Delorenzo
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
The discovery of fossil fuels facilitated a new era in human history and allowed many firsts, such as the mass production of goods, the ability to travel and communicate long distances, the formation of population dense cities, and unprecedented improvements in quality of life. Alternative sources of energy and chemicals are needed, however, as hydrocarbon reserves continue to deplete and the effects of burning fossils on the planet become better understood. Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant raw material in the world and a viable alternative to petroleum-derived products. The pre-treatment of lignocellulose (e.g., thermocatalytic depolymerization, enzymatic hydrolysis, pyrolysis, etc.) …
Dynamics And Control In Spiking Neural Networks, Fuqiang Huang
Dynamics And Control In Spiking Neural Networks, Fuqiang Huang
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
In the brain, neurons (brain cells) produce electrical impulses, or spikes, that are thought to be the substrate of information processing and computation. Through enigmatic processes, these spikes are ultimately decoded into perceptions and actions. The nature of this encoding and decoding is one of the most pervasive questions in theoretical neuroscience. In other words, what are the specific functions enacted by neural circuits, through their biophysics and dynamics? This thesis examines the dynamics of neural networks from the perspective of control theory and engineering. The pivotal concept is that of the normative synthesis of neural circuits, wherein neural dynamics …
Metabolic Engineering Of Cyanobacteria For Production Of Chemicals, Po-Cheng Lin
Metabolic Engineering Of Cyanobacteria For Production Of Chemicals, Po-Cheng Lin
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Concerns over the impact of climate change caused by CO2 emission have driven the research and development of renewable energies. Microbial production of chemicals is being viewed as a feasible approach to reduce the use of fossil fuels and minimize the impact of climate change. With recent advances in synthetic biology, microorganisms can be engineered to synthesize petroleum-based chemicals and plant-derived compounds. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic prokaryotes that use only sunlight, CO2, and trace minerals for growth. Compared to other microbial hosts, cyanobacteria are attractive platforms for sustainable bioproduction, because they can directly convert CO2 into products. However, the major challenge …
Metabolic Engineering Of Cyanobacteria For Production Of Chemicals, Po-Cheng Lin
Metabolic Engineering Of Cyanobacteria For Production Of Chemicals, Po-Cheng Lin
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Concerns over the impact of climate change caused by CO2 emission have driven the research and development of renewable energies. Microbial production of chemicals is being viewed as a feasible approach to reduce the use of fossil fuels and minimize the impact of climate change. With recent advances in synthetic biology, microorganisms can be engineered to synthesize petroleum-based chemicals and plant-derived compounds. Cyanobacteria are photosynthetic prokaryotes that use only sunlight, CO2, and trace minerals for growth. Compared to other microbial hosts, cyanobacteria are attractive platforms for sustainable bioproduction, because they can directly convert CO2 into products. However, the major challenge …
Development And Application Of New Methods For Magnetic Resonance Elastography Of The Brain, Charlotte Anne Guertler
Development And Application Of New Methods For Magnetic Resonance Elastography Of The Brain, Charlotte Anne Guertler
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Accurate mechanical properties of the intact, living brain are essential for modeling traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, the properties of brain tissue in vivo have traditionally been measured in ex vivo samples. Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) can be used to measure motion and estimate material properties of soft tissues in vivo, but MRE typically assumes tissue isotropy and homogeneity. The objective of this thesis is to improve MRE of soft tissue, like the brain, by developing and evaluating methods for in vivo estimation of heterogeneous, anisotropic properties. This was achieved through pursuit of the following aims: (1) quantifying the differences …
Mechanosensitive Epithelial Cell Scattering And Migration On Layered Matrices, Christopher Michael Walter
Mechanosensitive Epithelial Cell Scattering And Migration On Layered Matrices, Christopher Michael Walter
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Epithelial cells form multi-layered tissue scaffolding that makes up every organ in the body. Along with epithelial cells, the basement membrane (BM) and connective tissue are composed of various proteins that sculpt the organs and protect them from foreign macromolecules. Epithelial cells respond to various cues, both chemical and mechanical, from their surrounding matrices to aid in maintenance and repair of these layers through degradation and deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins. In cancer progression, epithelial cells lose their normal function of supporting tissue structure and instead adopt more aggressive behaviors through an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of their cellular traits. …
Understanding Excitation Energy Quenching In Isia, Hui-Yuan Steven Chen
Understanding Excitation Energy Quenching In Isia, Hui-Yuan Steven Chen
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Cyanobacteria are photoautotrophic organisms that contribute a significant amount of global primary productivity. They are found in freshwater, marine and even some extremely severe environments. Among those environments, iron deficiency is one of the most common stress conditions in cyanobacterial habitats. To survive, cyanobacteria have evolved and developed several strategies to alleviate the damage caused by iron deficiency.
Iron stress-inducible protein (IsiA) is a chlorophyll-binding membrane protein found in cyanobacteria grown in iron-deficient conditions. During the past decades, considerable effort has been put on understanding how IsiA functions to help cyanobacteria survive iron deficiency. It has been reported that IsiA …
Coupled Correlates Of Attention And Consciousness, Ravi Varkki Chacko
Coupled Correlates Of Attention And Consciousness, Ravi Varkki Chacko
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Introduction: Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been shown to restore lost motor function that occurs in stroke using electrophysiological signals. However, little evidence exists for the use of BCIs to restore non-motor stroke deficits, such as the attention deficits seen in hemineglect. Attention is a cognitive function that selects objects or ideas for further neural processing, presumably to facilitate optimal behavior. Developing BCIs for attention is different from developing motor BCIs because attention networks in the brain are more distributed and associative than motor networks. For example, hemineglect patients have reduced levels of arousal, which exacerbates their attentional deficits. More …
Approaches To Understanding The Function Of Intrinsic Activity And Its Relationship To Task-Evoked Activity In The Human Brain, Dohyun Kim
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Traditionally neuroscience research has focused on characterizing the topography and patterns of brain activation evoked by specific cognitive or behavioral tasks to understand human brain functions. This activation-based paradigm treated underlying spontaneous brain activity, a.k.a. intrinsic activity, as noise hence irrelevant to cognitive or behavioral functions. This view, however, has been profoundly modified by the discovery that intrinsic activity is not random, but temporally correlated at rest in widely distributed spatiotemporal patterns, so called resting state networks (RSN). Studies of temporal correlation of spontaneous activity among brain regions, or functional connectivity (FC), have yielded important insights into the network organization …
Elucidating The Roles Of Astrocyte-Derived Factors In Recovery And Regeneration Following Spinal Cord Injury, Russell E. Thompson
Elucidating The Roles Of Astrocyte-Derived Factors In Recovery And Regeneration Following Spinal Cord Injury, Russell E. Thompson
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Central nervous system (CNS) injury often causes some level of long-term functional deficit, due to the limited regenerative potential of the CNS, that results in a decreased quality of life for patients. CNS regeneration is inhibited partly by the development of a glial scar following insult that is inhibitory to axonal growth. The major cell population responsible for the formation this glial scar are astrocytes, which has led to the belief that astrocytes are primarily inhibitory following injury. Recent work has challenged this conclusion, finding that astrocyte reactivity is heterogeneous and that some astrocytes are pro-regenerative following injury. Astrocyte transplantation …
Improved Orthopaedic Repairs Through Mechanically Optimized, Adhesive Biomaterials, Stephen Wheeler Linderman
Improved Orthopaedic Repairs Through Mechanically Optimized, Adhesive Biomaterials, Stephen Wheeler Linderman
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Despite countless surgical advances over the last several decades refining surgical approaches, repair techniques, and tools to treat tendon and tendon-to-bone injuries, we are still left with repair solutions that rely on fairly crude underlying mechanical principles. Musculoskeletal soft tissues have evolved to transfer high loads by optimizing stress distribution profiles across the tissue at each length scale. However, instead of mimicking these natural load transfer mechanisms, conventional suture approaches are limited by high load transfer across only a small number of anchor points within tissue. This leads to stress concentrations at anchor points that often cause repair failure as …