Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Teloportwrapper: A New Tool For Understanding The Dynamic World Of Fungal Telomere Ends, Trey Stansfield

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Telomeres are repetitive DNA sequence motifs found at eukaryote chromosome ends. Telomeres help protect chromosome ends from DNA damage and promote chromosome stability. Chromosomes play important roles in aging, mutation, and cancer. Eukaryotic pathogens also use telomeres to mutate and manage virulence genes. In response to chromosome end breakage newly formed telomeres, called de novo telomeres, are formed to recreate the lost telomere and sub-telomeric regions.

Magnaporthe oryzae is a fungal pathogen which causes wheat blast, a deadly plant disease in wheat. Magnaporthe oryzae is also known for its highly variable sub-regions which show high amounts of induced variability due …

Simulating The Machine Translation Of Low-Resource Languages By Designing A Translator Between English And An Artificially Constructed Language, Michaela Snyder

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Natural language processing (NLP), or the use of computers to analyze natural language, is a field that relies heavily on syntax. It would seem intuitive that computers would thrive in this area due to their strict syntax requirements, but the syntax of natural languages leaves them unable to properly parse and generate sentences that seem normal to the average speaker. A subfield of NLP, machine translation, works mainly to computerize translation between different languages. Unfortunately, such translation is not without its weaknesses; language documentation is not created equal, and many low-resource languages—languages with relatively few kinds of documentation, most often …