Life Sciences Commons^™

Climate Change, Coral Reef Ecosystems, And Management Options For Marine Protected Areas, Brian D. Keller, Daniel F. Gleason, Elizabeth Mcleod, Christa M. Woodley, Satie Airame, Billy D. Causey, Alan M. Friedlander, Rikki Grober-Dunsmore, Johanna E. Johnson, Steven Miller, Robert S. Steneck

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

Marine protected areas (MPAs) provide place-based management of marine ecosystems through various degrees and types of protective actions. Habitats such as coral reefs are especially susceptible to degradation resulting from climate change, as evidenced by mass bleaching events over the past two decades. Marine ecosystems are being altered by direct effects of climate change including ocean warming, ocean acidification, rising sea level, changing circulation patterns, increasing severity of storms, and changing freshwater influxes. As impacts of climate change strengthen they may exacerbate effects of existing stressors and require new or modified management approaches; MPA networks are generally accepted as an …

Using Conservative And Biological Tracers To Better Understand The Transport Of Agricultural Contaminants From Soil Water Through The Epikarstic Zone, Brian Ham

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Agriculture contamination is very common in karst systems due to the vulnerability of these aquifers. Animal waste is often spread across crop land to enrich the soil with nitrates and phosphates. Herbicides and pesticides are also applied to the crops. The transport of these pollutants through the soil and epikarst is a difficult process to monitor due to the complex, heterogeneous behavior of the groundwater as it makes its way down to the aquifer below.

An experimental site at Crumps Cave lended a unique opportunity to monitor the vadose zone at a waterfall in the cave below. A previous dye …

First Record Of The Extinct Sawfish Propristis Schweinfurthi Dames, 1883 (Batoidea: Pristiformes: Pristidae) From The Middle Eocene Of Spain, Francesc Farrés, Harry L. Fierstine

Biological Sciences

A partial rostrum of Propristis schweinfurthi Dames, 1883 was collected in the Bartonian strata of northeastern Spain. The specimen represents the second record of the species from Europe, and the second occurrence of a sawfish (Mesopristis osonensis Farrés, 2003) from the Vic-Manlleu Marls Formation. In spite of some evidence to the contrary, Propristis probably preferred ecological conditions similar to extant sawfishes, i.e., inhabiting near shore tropical to subtropical seas with occasional excursions into freshwater.

The Lyme Disease Spirochete, Borrelia Burgdorferi, In Tick Species Collected From Raccoons (Procyon Lotor) And Opossums (Didelphis Virginiana) Trapped In The Warren And Barren Counties Of South Central Kentucky, Kristina Tackett

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The incidence of tick-borne zoonoses such as Ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and Lyme disease has steadily increased in the southeastern United States in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the southeastern states accounted for 1,200 of the 27,000 total cases of Lyme disease reported in the U.S. in 2007. Although Ixodes scapularis is the most commonly recognized vector for the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi, Dermacentor variabilis (a common vector for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) also has been shown to be a viable host for this pathogen. The purpose of the present …

Prevalence Of Childhood Obesity: A Study On Bowling Green, Ky Middle School Students, Emily Jensen

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

No abstract provided.

Ua12/13 Wku Campus Wide Holiday Energy Conservation Plan, Wku Sustainability Committee, Christian Ryan-Downing

Sustainability Publications and Resources

No abstract provided.

In Planta "Green Engineering" Of Variable Sizes And Exotic Shapes Of Gold Nanoparticles: An Integrative Eco-Friendly Approach, Daniel Lee Starnes

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Manipulating matter at the nanoscale creates materials endowed with unique optoelectronic and physicochemical attributes. Among the noble metals, the properties of gold in "nano" can be manipulated by varying, their shapes and sizes. Gold nanoparticles find several applications in electronics, medicine and environmental reclamation. Emphasis has been on the “green synthesis” of nanogold to mitigate the hazardous implications stemmed from conventional nanogold synthesis. However, it is not known if the in planta synthesis of nanogold particles could be “green engineered” as well for generating desirable sizes and exotic shapes. In the present study, we used inductively coupled plasma (ICP) analysis …

Creating A Rabbitry For A High School Agricultural Program: A Guide For The Approval Process And Materials Required, Anne Marie Katuin

Agricultural Education and Communication

The proposal for a rabbitry to be added to the campus of Liberty High School in Golden Valley Unified School District in the designated agricultural area was proposed to the agricultural teacher and site administration for the high school. A floor plan was designed to fit the needs of a small rabbit breeding operation for the use of the LHS FFA students who wished to have a breeding or meat rabbit SAE.

Guidelines and plans were created in order to help an agricultural teacher or community member go through the previously mentioned approval process if they were to want to …

Forage News [2009-12], Department Of Plant And Soil Sciences, University Of Kentucky

Forage News

• Grazing Conference Photos
• Growing Alfalfa in the South
• Heart of America Grazing Conference
• Role and Importance of Clovers in Kentucky
• Advantage of Rotational Grazing Confirmed Using Time Lapse Photography
• Corn Stalk Quality After Weathering
• Kentucky Land Values Buck the Trend
• Results of the 1st Year for a Grazing Evaluation of KYFA9302 Tall Fescue, With and Without the AR584 Novel Endophyte
• Cutting Ash Content
• KFGC Update
• Upcoming Events

Bringing Toxicology Into The 21st Century: A Global Call To Action, Troy Seidle, Martin Stephens

Experimentation Collection

Conventional toxicological testing methods are often decades old, costly and low-throughput, with questionable relevance to the human condition. Several of these factors have contributed to a backlog of chemicals that have been inadequately assessed for toxicity. Some authorities have responded to this challenge by implementing large-scale testing programmes. Others have concluded that a paradigm shift in toxicology is warranted. One such call came in 2007 from the United States National Research Council (NRC), which articulated a vision of ‘‘21st century toxicology” based predominantly on non-animal techniques. Potential advantages of such an approach include the capacity to examine a far greater …

Scientific Autonomy And The 3rs, Bernard E. Rollin

Experimentation Collection

No abstract provided.

Organic Carbon Content In Surface And Subsurface Soil On A Toposequence On The Peterson Ranch In Poly Canyon, San Luis Obispo, Renee Michelle Nall

Earth and Soil Sciences

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is directly related to soil organic matter (SOM), and is important in the functionality and stability of terrestrial ecosystems. Soil organic carbon is also an important pool for C storage and small changes of SOC may cause significant gains and losses in the large scale carbon cycle. The mechanisms by which SOC is transported and stored however are not widely studied. This study was conducted to determine if there is a relationship between toposequence and SOC in a small watershed on the Peterson Ranch, San Luis Obispo, CA. Nine soil pits were dug on various hillslope …

Relationship Between Tissue Carotenoid Concentrations In The Pacific Mole Crab, Emerita Analoga, And Parasitism By The Acanthocephalan, Profilicollis Altmani, Whitney Melroy

Biological Sciences

Acanthocephalan worms infect two hosts to reach full development. Some species have been demonstrated to change their intermediate host’s behavior or coloration to increase the likelihood they will reach the final host. The pacific mole crab, Emerita analoga, is commonly parasitized by Profilicollis altmani along the Pacific coast of North and South America, but the impact of parasitism on the crab intermediate host is unclear. We investigated whether P. altmani alters the concentration of dietary carotenoids present in E. analoga tissues and if the parasite may also acquire pigments normally allocated to the host. Fifty eight gravid female crabs were …

Training Manual And Protocol For Ultrasound At Cal Poly, Brian Andrew Waymire

Dairy Science

No abstract provided.

Selecting, Marketing And Rebuilding A Herd Of Genetically Superior Animals, Katherine Rector

Dairy Science

No abstract provided.

Developing A Green Tea Based Natural Energy Drink, Natalie Ohanessian

Food Science and Nutrition

No abstract provided.

Use Of Loading Reports To Evaluate The Accuracy Of The Total Mix Ration, Kailen Johnson

Dairy Science

No abstract provided.

Turning A Small Residential Farm Into A Non-Profit Educational Organization, Thomas John Anderson

Agribusiness

This study was undertaken to determine whether Felicity’s Farm could become a non-profit organization for education. In order to determine the feasibility of turning Felicity’s Farm into a non-profit organization, interviews were conducted and financial statements were collected. In addition, a Certificate of Incorporation was completed based on the interview and financial data. It was concluded that Felicity’s Farm could become a non-profit organization; however, better organization of finances, fund-raising and the use of volunteers was recommended.

Concentrate Levels And Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Affect Rumen Fluid-Associated Bacteria Numbers In Dairy Heifers, G. J. Lascano, G. I. Zanton, A. J. Heinrichs

Dairy Science

Total viable rumenbacteria counts through the use of colony-unit forming assays lack accuracy because they only include culturable bacteria capable of initiating cell division. Thus, bacterial counts can be underestimated. The use of fluorescent characteristics of cell membranes allows flow cytometry to enumerate and distinguish dead from live bacteria cells. The objective of this experiment was to investigate the viable and total ruminal bacteria counts when 3 levels of forage:concentrate in diets were fed at restricted levels with the addition of Saccharomycescerevisiae (YC). Three cannulated post-pubertal Holstein heifers (age 18 ± 1.0 months) were fed corn silage (CS)-based diets in …

Fisheries Research Report No. 197 - Coastal And Marine Resource Condition Monitoring - Scoping Project, Brett A. Human, Justin I. Mcdonald

Fisheries Research Reports

Final NRM Report – Project 073007

Part 1– Knowledge review and gap analysis: Resource condition monitoring in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia

This report details extensive literature searches for both research and monitoring programs that have been undertaken in the marine and coastal environments of the Pilbara and Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. The Pilbara and Kimberley region is remote and difficult to access, resulting in very little monitoring effort of the marine and coastal environments in that region.

We currently know very little of the condition of marine and coastal natural resources in the Pilbara …

Sparql Query Re-Writing For Spatial Datasets Using Partonomy Based Transformation Rules, Prateek Jain, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth, Peter Z. Yeh, Kunal Verma

Kno.e.sis Publications

Often the information present in a spatial knowledge base is represented at a different level of granularity and abstraction than the query constraints. For querying ontology’s containing spatial information, the precise relationships between spatial entities has to be specified in the basic graph pattern of SPARQL query which can result in long and complex queries. We present a novel approach to help users intuitively write SPARQL queries to query spatial data, rather than relying on knowledge of the ontology structure. Our framework re-writes queries, using transformation rules to exploit part-whole relations between geographical entities to address the mismatches between query …

A Local Qualitative Approach To Referral And Functional Trust, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Dharan Althuru, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trust and confidence are becoming key issues in diverse applications such as ecommerce, social networks, semantic sensor web, semantic web information retrieval systems, etc. Both humans and machines use some form of trust to make informed and reliable decisions before acting. In this work, we briefly review existing work on trust networks, pointing out some of its drawbacks. We then propose a local framework to explore two different kinds of trust among agents called referral trust and functional trust, that are modelled using local partial orders, to enable qualitative trust personalization. The proposed approach formalizes reasoning with trust, distinguishing between …

Cloning Of "Animal Cryptochrome" Cdna From The Model Organism Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii For Functional Analysis Of Its Protein Product, Shobha Lavanya Silparasetty

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

reinhardtii, a unicellular green alga, is a model organism to study the circadian clock. Cryptochromes are the blue light photoreceptors that entrain the clock in some organisms. The CPH1 protein of C. reinhardtii resembles the cryptochromes of the plant model Arabidopsis, but whether CPH1 entrains the circadian clock in C. reinhardtii is not yet known. Recent reports have suggested the existence of one more cryptochrome in C. reinhardtii, which resembles the cryptochromes of animals. However, the amino acid sequence of this protein shows even higher sequence similarity with the 6-4 DNA photolyase of Arabidopsis. DNA photolyases …

Computational Prediction Of The Agregated Structure Of Denatured Lysozyme, Pongsathorn Chotikasemsri

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Mis-folded proteins and their associated aggregates are a contributing factor in some human diseases. In this study we used the protein lysozyme as a model to define aggregation structures under denaturing conditions. Sasahara et al. (2007), Frare et al. (2009, 2006), and Rubin et al. (2008) observed conditions where heat denatured lysozyme formed fibril structures that were observed to be 8-17 nanometers in diameter under the electron microscope. Even though the crystal structure of lysozyme is known, the denatured form of this protein is still unknown. Therefore, we used Rosetta++ protein folding and blind docking software to create in silico …

The Effects Of A Reservoir On Genetic Isolation In Two Species Of Darters, Kerstin Lindsay Edberg

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The addition of dams into a riverine system causes a wide range of changes (i.e., sedimentation, erosion, thermal) to the river as well as to the fish assemblages of that river. Although there have been many studies documenting the changes that occur to the fish assemblages in the impounded river, there have been fewer studies examining the effects of a reservoir on the fish inhabiting the tributaries upstream of the impoundment. One possible impact of a reservoir could be to act as a barrier to fish migration between streams.
To determine if reservoirs restrict migration, the genetic diversity of two …

Heirloom And Hybrid Tomato Yield And Quality In Organic And Conventional Production Systems, Diana J. Edlin

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Due to the recent changes in the economy of Kentucky tobacco production, some producers are seeking an alternative crop that will provide similar economic gains to tobacco without needing more acreage. Tomatoes are an existing crop in Kentucky that have been declining in acreage over the last five years. There is evidence to suggest that, through niche and local marketing, tomatoes may be able to fill the void left by tobacco. However, there is concern among producers that they will lose yield and/or quality if they switch to one of these niche production systems or cultivars.

A two year study …

Effects Of A Topical Analgesic Using Massage On Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, Carrie E. Varvil

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

No abstract provided.

A New North American Genus Of Hetaeraiinae (Coleoptera: Histeridae), With Descriptions Of Six New Species From The U.S.A. And Mexico, Michael S. Caterino, Alexey K. Tishechkin

Publications

Renclasea n. gen., a genus of the Hetaeriinae (Histeridae), with six species, R. skelleyi n. sp. (United States: Florida and Georgia), R. falli n. sp. (United States: California), R. helavai n. sp. (United States: Arizona), R. mexicana n. sp. (Mexico: Hidalgo), R. occidentalis n. sp. (United States: Arizona and New Mexico) and R. cazieri n. sp. (United States: Arizona), are described, illustrated and diagnosed. The status of two female specimens of Renclasea from western Texas, apparently closely related to R. occidentalis, remains uncertain. The only host record available for the genus is an association of R. mexicana with undetermined species …

Sagestep News, Winter 2009, No. 8, Sagestep

Newsletters

Seasonal newsletter of SageSTEP.

Introducing Mothur: Open-Source, Platform-Independent, Community-Supported Software For Describing And Comparing Microbial Communities, Courtney Robinson

Department of Biology Faculty Publications

mothur aims to be a comprehensive software package that allows users to use a single piece of software to analyze community sequence data. It builds upon previous tools to provide a flexible and powerful software package for analyzing sequencing data. As a case study, we used mothur to trim, screen, and align sequences; calculate distances; assign sequences to operational taxonomic units; and describe the α and β diversity of eight marine samples previously characterized by pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene fragments. This analysis of more than 222,000 sequences was completed in less than 2 h with a laptop computer.