Life Sciences Commons^™

Lifelines Fall 2011, Southern Adventist University

Lifelines - Biology Department Newsletter

The Fall 2011 issue of Lifelines features articles on biology student research, the pre-professional campout, and new professors Dr. Timothy Trott and Dr. Lucinda Hill.

Food, Fibre And The Future : Report On Surveys Of Students’ And Teachers’ Knowledge And Understanding Of Primary Industries, Kylie Hillman, Sarah Buckley

National Surveys

Primary Industry plays a vital role in Australian’s economy and society, but the gap between rural and urban communities is growing, contributing to a lack of understanding of where food and other basic necessities of life come from. The goal of the Primary Industries Education Foundation (PIEF) is to provide a source of information on primary industries for educators, to better equip students with not only knowledge about what goes into their food and fibres but also what career opportunities exist in primary industries. In 2010, PIEF contracted the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to design and conduct a …

Erratum For "Inhibition Of Nitric Oxide Synthase By Cobalamins And Cobinamides," [Free Radic. Biol. Med. 46:1626–1632, 2009], J. Brice Weinberg, Youwei Chen, Ning Jiang, John C. Salerno, Dipak K. Ghosh

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Lli Chronicle Volume 2 Number 8, Nova Southeastern University

Lifelong Learning Institute Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2011 Meeting Missing Abstracts

Virginia Journal of Science

Abstracts not included in Virginia Journal of Science Volume 62, No. 1 and 2, presented at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, May 25-27, 2011, at the University of Richmond, Richmond VA.

El Perro De Monte De Sechura: Su Relación Con El Bosque Seco Tropical Y La Gente De La Región Central De Manabí, Julian O. Buffam

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Cerro Hojas-Jaboncillo, located in Central Manabí, Ecuador, is a Patrimonial site that, in addition to containing the ruins of an ancient culture, is home to a species of mammal endemic to the tumbesian eco-region. Currently listed by the ‘LibroRojo de los mamíferos del Ecuador’ as vulnerable, the Sechuran Fox (Lycalopexsechurae) is a nocturnal and solitary animal, of a medium size, that is rarely seen due to its elusive behavior. This species is the focus of this investigation, which seeks to gain an understanding of the plants and animals that the Sechuran Fox requires for food, the home …

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 4: Contributions To The Garden, 1875-1912, Charles H. Smith

DLPS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 3: Two Early Publications, Charles H. Smith

DLPS Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dopamine Regulation Of Cone-Cone Gap Junctions In Ground Squirrel Retina, Xiaoyu Li '12, Steven Devries

Student Publications & Research

Cone photoreceptors are electrically coupled such that when the electrical potential in one cell changes, it also changes in adjacent, coupled cells. Phosphorylation of the cone gap junction protein, connexin 36 (Cx36), determines whether a coupling channel is “open” or “closed”. Cx36- containing gap junctions are phosphorylated in the open state and dephosphorylated in the closed state. Cone-cone gap junction modulation has not been extensively studied, however, the presence of rod-cone gap junction modulation raises the possibility that the same is true for cone pairs. Pieces of thirteen-lined ground squirrel retina were removed from the eye and the tissue was …

Categorical Shortcomings: Application, Adjudication, And Contextual Descriptions Of Game Rules, Chad R. Carlson, John Gleaves

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Afro-Derived Amazonian Populations: Inferring Continental Ancestry And Population Substructure, Luana Gomes Lopes Maciel, Elzemar Martins Ribeiro-Rodrigues, Ney Pereira Cameiro Dos Santos, Ândrea K. C. Ribeiro Dos Santos, João Farias Guerreiro, Sidney Emanuel Batista Dos Santos

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

A panel of Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) was used to identify population substructure and estimate individual and overall interethnic admixture in 294 individuals from seven African-derived communities of the Brazilian Amazon. A panel of 48 biallelic markers, representing the insertion (IN) or the deletion (DEL) of small DNA fragments, was employed for this purpose. Overall interethnic admixture estimates showed high miscegenation with other ethnic groups in all populations (between 46% and 64%). The proportion of ancestral genes varied significantly among individuals of the sample: the contribution of African genes varied between 12% and 75%; of European genes between 10% and …

Status Of The Cockburn Sound Crab Fishery, Danielle Johnston, David Harris, Nick Caputi, Simon De Lestang, Adrian Thomson

Fisheries Research Reports

Blue swimmer crabs (Portunus armatus) (formerly Portunus pelagicus; Lai et al., 2010) in Cockburn Sound, Western Australia, are the basis of an important commercial and recreational fishery close to the Perth metropolitan area with the commercial fishery achieving a peak catch of 362 t in 1997/98 and a recreational catch of about 18 t. Commercial blue swimmer crab catches declined significantly since 2000 due to low stock abundance, resulting in the closure of the fishery in December 2006.

A Study Of Sponge Aquaculture In Jambiani: Is Shallow Farming Feasible?, Sarah Friday

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In the village of Jambiani, Unguja, a Swiss NGO called Marine Cultures has established an experimental sponge farming initiative to improve local employment and support economic development. Currently, the main farming site is only accessible through SCUBA diving. This is consistent with experimental farm sites in other oceanic regions, as most are located in depths of at least five meters with sponges suspended vertically to maximize water flow exposure. Farms located in shallower water may not be conducive to sponge growth due to highly variable environmental conditions; however, no conclusive research has been conducted on this matter (Duckworth 2009). Nonetheless, …

Sempush: Privacy-Aware And Scalable Broadcasting For Semantic Microblogging, Pavan Kapanipathi, Julia Anaya, Alexandre Passant

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users of traditional microblogging platforms such as Twitter face drawbacks in terms of (1) Privacy of status updates as a followee - reaching undesired people (2) Information overload as a follower - receiving uninteresting microposts from followees. In this paper we demonstrate distributed and user-controlled dissemination of microposts using SMOB (semantic microblogging framework) and Semantic Hub (privacy-aware implementation of PuSH3 protocol) . The approach leverages users' Social Graph to dynamically create group of followers who are eligible to receive micropost. The restrictions to create the groups are provided by the followee based on the hastags in the micropost. Both SMOB …

Sam Van Aken: New Edens, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Hybridized fruit trees, grafted orchids on shiny, reflective aluminum pedestals, fluorescent lights placed vertically on stands, and sheets of silver Mylar create a lush and somewhat disorienting space in contemporary artist Sam Van Aken’s most recent body of work New Edens. Van Aken makes Gettysburg College’s Schmucker Art Gallery into a kind of fantastical and futuristic winter garden. Without daylight and despite the cool fall weather of the Northeast, the dozen trees in the gallery are leafy and green, some even bearing fruit. Peach, plum, cherry, nectarine and apricot branches emerge from a single trunk and grow productively alongside their …

Green Marine Construction, Sylvain Pioch, Kirk Kilfoyle, Harold Levrel, Richard E. Spieler

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

The oceans incorporate three-quarters of the Earth's surface, and most of humanity lives in coastal regions. For example, more than half of the total U.S. population presently lives in coastal areas, and the coastal population is projected to increase by 7 million between now and 2015. Similar projections can be made for other developed countries many of which depend on the coastal zone as a major source of tourism-related income. The long-term ecological health and sustainability of the marine and coastal environments are obviously at risk. Coastal projects such as beach re-nourishment, housing developments, and pipe-line, harbor and marina construction …

Ribozyme Stability, Exon Skipping, And A Potential Role For Rna Helicase In Group I Intron Splicing By Coxiella Burnetii, Linda D. Hicks, Indu Warrier, Rahul Raghavan, Michael F. Minnick

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

The 23S rRNA gene of Coxiella burnetii, the agent of Q fever in humans, contains an unusually high number of conserved, selfish genetic elements, including two group I introns, termed Cbu.L1917 (L1917) and Cbu.L1951 (L1951). To better understand the role that introns play in Coxiella's biology, we determined the intrinsic stability time periods (in vitro half-lives) of the encoded ribozymes to be similar to 15 days for L1917 and similar to 5 days for L1951, possibly due to differences in their sizes (551 and 1,559 bases, respectively), relative degrees of compactness of the respective RNA structures, and amounts of single-stranded …

The Roles Of Transcription And Genotoxins Underlying P53 Mutagenesis In Vivo, Barbara E. Wright, Karen H. Schmidt, Aaron T. Hunt, J Stephen Lodmell, Michael F. Minnick, Dennis K. Reschke

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Transcription drives supercoiling which forms and stabilizes single-stranded (ss) DNA secondary structures with loops exposing G and C bases that are intrinsically mutable and vulnerable to non-enzymatic hydrolytic reactions. Since many studies in prokaryotes have shown direct correlations between the frequencies of transcription and mutation, we conducted in silico analyses using the computer program, mfg, which simulates transcription and predicts the location of known mutable bases in loops of high-stability secondary structures. Mfg analyses of the p53 tumor suppressor gene predicted the location of mutable bases and mutation frequencies correlated with the extent to which these mutable bases were exposed …

Semantic Annotation And Search For Resources In The Next Generation Web With Sa-Rest, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Maryam Panahiazar, Sanjaya Wijeratne

Kno.e.sis Publications

SA-REST, the W3C member submission, can be used for supporting a wide variety of Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH) annotation capabilities on any type of Web resource. Kino framework and tools provide support of capabilities to realize SA-RESTs promised value. These tools include (a) a browser-plugin to support annotation of a Web resource (including services) with respect to an ontology, domain model or vocabulary, (b) an annotation aware indexing engine and (c) faceted search and selection of the Web resources. At one end of the spectrum, we present Kino^E (aka Kino for Enterprise) which uses NCBO formal ontologies and …

Transgenic C. Elegans Dauer Larvae Expressing Hookworm Phospho Null Daf-16/Foxo Exit Dauer, Verena Gelmedin, Thomas Brodigan, Xin Gao, Michael Krause, Zhu Wang, John M. Hawdon

Research Center for Neglected Diseases of Poverty

Parasitic hookworms and the free-living model nematode Caenorhabtidis elegans share a developmental arrested stage, called the dauer stage in C. elegans and the infective third-stage larva (L3) in hookworms. One of the key transcription factors that regulate entrance to and exit from developmental arrest is the forkhead transcription factor DAF-16/FoxO. During the dauer stage, DAF-16 is activated and localized in the nucleus. DAF-16 is negatively regulated by phosphorylation by the upstream kinase AKT, which causes DAF-16 to localize out of the nucleus and the worm to exit from dauer. DAF-16 is conserved in hookworms, and hypothesized to control recovery from …

Plant Pathologist And Grain Scientist Earn K-State’S Highest Honor, Gloria Holcombe

INTSORMIL Impacts and Bulletins

Two innovative College of Agriculture faculty — John Leslie, professor and head of the Department of Plant Pathology, and Xiuzhi “Susan” Sun, professor of grain science and industry — were selected university distinguished professors, a lifetime title and the highest honor K-State bestows on its faculty.

Toxic Effects And Bioaccumulation Of Nano-, Micron- And Ionic-Ag In The Polychaete, Nereis Diversicolor, Yi Cong, Gary T. Banta, Henriette Selck, Deborah Berhanu, Eugenia Valsami-Jones, Valery E. Forbes

Valery Forbes Publications

There is increasing concern about the toxicities and potential risks, both still poorly understood, of silver nanoparticles for the aquatic environment after their eventual release via wastewater discharges. In this study, the toxicities of sediment associated nano (<100 >nm)-, micron (2–3.5 μm)- and ionic (AgNO3)-Ag on the sediment-dwelling polychaete, Nereis diversicolor, were compared after 10 days of sediment exposure, using survival, DNA damage (comet assay) and bioaccumulation as endpoints. The nominal concentrations used in all exposure scenarios were 0, 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50 μg Ag/g dry weight (dw) sediment. Our results showed that Ag was able to cause …

Iron Insufficiency Compromises Motor Neurons And Their Mitochondrial Function In Irp2-Null Mice, Suh Young Jeong, Daniel R. Crooks, Hayden Wilson-Ollivierre, Manik C. Ghosh, Rachid Sougrat, Jaekwon Lee, Sharon Cooperman, James B. Mitchell, Carole Beaumont, Tracey A. Rouault

Department of Biochemistry: Faculty Publications

Genetic ablation of Iron Regulatory Protein 2 (Irp2, Ireb2), which post-transcriptionally regulates iron metabolism genes, causes a gait disorder in mice that progresses to hind-limb paralysis. Here we have demonstrated that misregulation of iron metabolism from loss of Irp2 causes lower motor neuronal degeneration with significant spinal cord axonopathy. Mitochondria in the lumbar spinal cord showed significantly decreased Complex I and II activities, and abnormal morphology. Lower motor neurons appeared to be the most adversely affected neurons, and we show that functional iron starvation due to misregulation of iron import and storage proteins, including transferrin receptor 1 …

Forage News [2011-10], Department Of Plant And Soil Sciences, University Of Kentucky

Forage News

• 12th Kentucky Grazing Conference
• Frost Approaching: Beware of Prussic Acid!
• KFGC Field Day
• Don't Overgraze Warm-Season Grasses
• Freeze Tolerance of Forage Bermudagrass
• Performance by Spring and Fall-Calving Cows Grazing with Full Access, or No Access to Toxic, Wild-Type Endophyte-Infected Tall Fescue - 3-Year Summary
• The Determination of Switchgrass Growth Curves
• Chemical Suppression of Seedhead Emergence in Toxic Endophyte-Infected Tall Fescue for Improving Cattle WEight Gain and Physiology
• Reducing Feed Costs with Grazing Management

Review Of Rare: Portraits Of America's Endangered Species. By Joel Sartore., Jim Mason

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Short of being in the presence of a creature, a really good photograph of one can also make a lasting impression. That is something RARE does compellingly, with exquisite portrait photos of 68 North American species that are dwindling dangerously in numbers or have recently recovered from the brink of extinction. Included are such Great Plains natives as the lesser prairie chicken, the interior least tern, and the black-footed ferret. All creatures were photographed with either a pure white or black background, but unconventional poses surprise the reader with each turn of the page, while creative framing and layout engage …

Surveillance Of Selected Diseases In Free-Ranging Elk (Cervus Elaphus Nelsoni) In Nebraska, 1995-2009, Michael A. Cover, Scott E. Hygnstrom, David W. Oates, Kit M. Hams, Kurt C. Vercauteren

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Sera samples were collected from 21 free-ranging, captured female elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni) in 1995- 96, and tissue and sera samples were collected from 415 hunter-harvested elk from 1995 to 2006 and tested for selected diseases. Titers for Anaplasma marginale were detected in 81 of 436 (19%) elk. Occurrence of antibodies to anaplasmosis increased from 4 to 40 elk from 2002 to 2006. Titers for bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) were detected in 18 of 346 (5%) samples. Titers for Leptospira interrogans serovars were detected in 21 of 289 (7%) of samples from 1995 to 2004. Titers for …

Review Of Damselflies Of Texas: A Field Guide. By John C. Abbott., Forrest L. Mitchell

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Well-produced field guides are always in demand, and Damselflies of Texas is one such. This compact, camera-bag-friendly compendium displays each of the 77 species known to occur, or that have been historically documented, in the state. The guide's first 50 pages are introductory and full of useful detail. There follows a large section devoted to species descriptions and a set of appendices.

Review Of Grass: In Search Of Human Habitat. By Joe C. Truett. Foreword By Harry W. Greene., Mary Ann Vinton

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Much of the book is devoted to discussing the heavy human dependence on grasslands and whether this relationship can be maintained in company with grassland conservation. Can humans continue to use grasslands for food, fiber, and newer uses like biofuels and carbon banking while still sustaining the ecosystem? Many of us in academic ecology struggle with resolving perceived conflicts between conservation and human grassland use. In many cases, a "win-win" scenario exists in which, for example, the proper use of livestock grazing is perfectly compatible with a healthy grassland ecosystem. In other cases, such as conserving prairie dog populations, tensions …

Historical Biogeography Of Nebraska Pronghorns (Antilocapra Americana), Justin D. Hoffman, Hugh H. Genoways, Rachel R. Jones

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Archeological and paleontological records indicate that the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) have a history of at least 20,000 years of occurrence within the current boundaries of Nebraska. Pronghorns occurred throughout the state for much of its history. With the evidence at hand we concluded that the eastern boundary of the geographic distribution of the pronghorn south of the Niobrara River in Nebraska at the beginning of the 19th century was along the western perimeter of the eastern deciduous forest and tallgrass prairie. This excluded most of the easternmost tier of counties in the state. This geographic arrangement persisted throughout …

Review Of Sandhill And Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices Over America's Wetlands. By Paul A. Johnsgard., Janice M. Hughes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This charming, informative book has clearly been written by someone who truly understands and appreciates the magnificence of cranes. Indeed, Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices over America's Wetlands is Paul Johnsgard's fourth book on the subject. The knowledge he imparts, presented from the heart, culminates almost five decades of personal observations and research on cranes. Moreover, the book features many attractive illustrations and detailed maps sketched by the author himself.

Sandhill and Whooping Cranes is a scholarly work with a much-welcomed personal touch. Whether its reader is contemplating a pilgrimage to observe these wonderful birds in the wild, or …