Systems Biology Commons^™

Bats Of The Loess Hills Ecoregion Of Southeast Nebraska, Virgil Brack Jr, Dale W. Sparks, Darwin C. Brack

The Prairie Naturalist

We surveyed bats at 49 sites in the Loess Hills Ecoregion of southeastern Nebraska, along the western edge of the eastern forest biome in eastern Richardson, Nemaha, and Otoe counties. We completed this study shortly before the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) was listed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act. The expectation of listing, along with potential presence of the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis), motivated the study. We captured 183 bats of five species: eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis) (n = 103; 56 %), big brown …

Serological Survey And Pathogen Exposure Of Adult Female White-Tailed Deer In The Western Dakotas, Katherine L. Moratz, Bailey S. Gullikson, Eric S. Michel, Daniel M. Grove, Jonathan A. Jenks, William Jensen

The Prairie Naturalist

Establishing baseline values for pathogen exposure and nutritional indices is necessary to monitor population health. However, little is known about white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) pathogen exposure and nutritional condition in the Northern Great Plains. Our objective was to assess pathogen exposure and establish nutritional indices for female white-tailed deer in Dunn and Grant counties, North Dakota and Perkins County, South Dakota. During 2014, we collected blood serum from 150 adult female white-tailed deer. Pathogens with the highest antibody prevalence included West Nile Virus (WNV; 85%), epizootic hemorrhagic disease (48%), and malignant catarrhal fever (32%). Serum values for creatine …

Review Of Grasslands And Climate Change By David J. Gibson And Jonathan A. Newman, Neal D. Noemuth

The Prairie Naturalist

The last decade has seen an explosion of information about climate change, some of which is contradictory, much of which is confusing, and the entirety of which is too much for the typical biologist or scientist to assemble and comprehend. This is why reviews such as Grasslands and Climate Change, edited by David Gibson and Jonathan Newman, are so valuable. To produce this review of climate change issues and influences relative to grasslands, Gibson and Newman recruited 30 scientists—predominantly from Europe and North America—who wrote 19 chapters dealing with various aspects of grasslands and climate change. The chapters are grouped …

The Missing Metric: An Evaluation Of Fungal Importance In Wetland Assessments, Megan A. Rúa

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

To preserve wetland ecosystem function, federal and state agencies have developed assessment procedures to better manage remaining wetland areas. Currently, wetland assessments do not consider microorganisms when determining wetland quality. This is notable, because fungi are often the primary decomposers of organic material and thus important players in nutrient cycling. The objective of this study is to quantify how wetland quality, as measured using the Ohio Rapid Assessment Method (ORAM), relates to fungal community composition. We sampled soils from six depressional emergent marshes in Ohio belonging to each of the three ORAM quality categories, assessed soil physicochemical properties, and recovered …

Review Of Birds Of Prey Of The East: A Field Guide By Brian K. Wheeler, Janet W. Ng

The Prairie Naturalist

Brian Wheeler’s new field guide, Birds of Prey of the East, is a well-researched, comprehensive field guide to birds of prey found in eastern Canada and United States. This 13- year labor of love reflects a life spent studying the nuances of North American birds of prey, as well as partnerships with fellow enthusiasts who provided detailed range maps and other valuable inputs. Birds of Prey of the East features 72 color plates of 27 species, including 14 plates for the Redtailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), which can be one of the most challenging species to identify in …

Review Of Great Plains Birds, By Larkin Powell, William E. Jensen

The Prairie Naturalist

Biologists who live in the Great Plains of North America know well the general aspersion cast toward our regional home by those unfamiliar with the region and its natural treasures. Larkin Powell alludes to this all-too-common aspersion and diplomatically dispels it in his ornithological showcase of the Great Plains, simply titled Great Plains Birds. The book is a nice, quick read and a well-composed profile of the region’s avian biogeographical history, its disruptions, conservation remedies, examples of basic bird biology, and tips on how to enjoy the bird life on display in this dynamic region. Having been an ornithologist …

Linalool Acts As A Fast And Reversible Anesthetic In Hydra, T. Goel, R. Wang, S Martin, Elizabeth Y. Lanphear , '19, Eva-Maria S. Collins

Biology Faculty Works

The ability to make transgenic Hydra lines has allowed for quantitative in vivo studies of Hydra regeneration and physiology. These studies commonly include excision, grafting and transplantation experiments along with high-resolution imaging of live animals, which can be challenging due to the animal’s response to touch and light stimuli. While various anesthetics have been used in Hydra studies, they tend to be toxic over the course of a few hours or their long-term effects on animal health are unknown. Here, we show that the monoterpenoid alcohol linalool is a useful anesthetic for Hydra. Linalool is easy to use, non-toxic, fast …

Mathematics Saves Lives: Models And Signals Enabling Medicine And Biology, Raina Robeva

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Network Reconstruction Using Computational Algebra And Gene Knockouts, Matthew Macauley

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Petri Nets As A Unifying Tool To Link Physiologically Based Toxicokinetic (Pbtk) Models To Adverse Outcome Pathways (Aops), Ian Edhlund

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Transient Dynamics Of Infection Transmission In An Intensive Care Unit, Christopher Short, Matthew S. Mietchen, Eric T. Lofgren

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Creating A Molecular Map Of The Pediatric Lung, Quinlen F. Marshall

Forum Lectures

The newborn lung undergoes vast biochemical and physiological changes during adaptation from the intrauterine to the extrauterine environment. Lung morphogenesis continues from birth into early childhood, mediated by dynamic gene expression and a diversity of pulmonary cell types that exhibit remarkable heterogeneity. (Whitsett, JA. et al. Physiol. Rev, 2019). Surprisingly, few studies have solely focused on human lung development during this critical period, and many current studies of lung maturation rely on adult, murine, or diseased samples, limiting their insights and applicability to longitudinal pediatric lung development. Understanding the molecular and physiological nuances of pulmonary development has important clinical relevance, …

Mouth Function Determines The Shape Oscillation Pattern In Regenerating Hydra Tissue Spheres, R. Wang, T. Goel, K. Khazoyan, Ziad Sabry , '21, H. J. Quan, P. H. Diamond, Eva-Maria S. Collins

Biology Faculty Works

Hydra is a small freshwater polyp capable of regeneration from small tissue pieces and from aggregates of cells. During regeneration, a hollow bilayered sphere is formed that undergoes osmotically driven shape oscillations of inflation and rupture. These oscillations are necessary for successful regeneration. Eventually, the oscillating sphere breaks rotational symmetry along the future head-foot axis of the animal. Notably, the shape oscillations show an abrupt shift from large-amplitude, long-period oscillations to small-amplitude, short-period oscillations. It has been widely accepted that this shift in oscillation pattern is linked to symmetry breaking and axis formation, and current theoretical models of Hydra symmetry …

Phylogenetic Trees And Networks Can Serve As Powerful And Complementary Approaches For Analysis Of Genomic Data, Christopher Blair, Cécile Ané

Publications and Research

Genomic data have had a profound impact on nearly every biological discipline. In systematics and phylogenetics, the thousands of loci that are now being sequenced can be analyzed under the multispecies coalescent model (MSC) to explicitly account for gene tree discordance due to incomplete lineage sorting (ILS). However, the MSC assumes no gene flow post divergence, calling for additional methods that can accommodate this limitation. Explicit phylogenetic network methods have emerged, which can simultaneously account for ILS and gene flow by representing evolutionary history as a directed acyclic graph. In this point-of-view we highlight some of the strengths and limitations …

Do Corporate Owned Adaptive Learning Platforms Perpetuate Banking Style Learning? Integrating Technology For Activism Into Transformational Sustainability Education, Tina M. Garner

Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers

We live in a world that tends to be controlled by corporations. The public school system should be wary of the problems that corporate control has on education. Even though public schools should not have corporate influence, the fact remains that they do, and this perpetuates Freire's banking style learning. Through time, the corporate influence in education was through educational materials such as book sales. Since the decline of the use of books and the growth of the use of technologies, corporations have followed suit through the sales of Adaptive Learning Platforms. Through leveraging the technology which students enjoy using, …

Temporal Gene Expression Of Mesenchymal Cells In The Pediatric Lung, Quinlen F. Marshall, Soumyaroop Bhattacharya, Gautam Bandyopadhyay, Ravi Misra, Thomas Mariani, Gloria Pryhuber

Chemistry Student Work

INTRODUCTION: The newborn lung undergoes vast biochemical and physiological changes during adaptation from the intrauterine to the extrauterine environment. Lung morphogenesis continues from birth into early childhood, mediated by dynamic gene expression and a diversity of pulmonary cell types (Whitsett, JA. et al. Physiol. Rev, 2019). Murine models demonstrate that pulmonary mesenchymal cells exhibit remarkable heterogeneity in function and morphology during development, however, confirmation of their role is lacking in human neonates and early childhood (Guo, M. et al. Nat. Comm, 2019). In addition, many current human genomic studies of lung maturation suffer from limited sample size, limiting …

The Mayfly Newsletter, Donna J. Giberson

The Mayfly Newsletter

The Mayfly Newsletter is the official newsletter of the Permanent Committee of the International Conferences on Ephemeroptera.

A Framework For Characterising And Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Environmental Modelling, Serena H. Hamilton, Baihua Fu, Joseph H.A. Guillaume, Jennifer Badham, Sondoss Elsawah, Patricia Gober, Randall J. Hunt, Takuya Iwanaga, Anthony J. Jakeman, Daniel P. Ames, Allan Curtis, Mary C. Hill, Suzanne A. Pierce, Fateme Zare

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Environmental modelling is transitioning from the traditional paradigm that focuses on the model and its quantitative performance to a more holistic paradigm that recognises successful model-based outcomes are closely tied to undertaking modelling as a social process, not just as a technical procedure. This paper redefines evaluation as a multi-dimensional and multi-perspective concept, and proposes a more complete framework for identifying and measuring the effectiveness of modelling that serves the new paradigm. Under this framework, evaluation considers a broader set of success criteria, and emphasises the importance of contextual factors in determining the relevance and outcome of the criteria. These …

Biological Pathway Involvement In Melanoma Heterogeneity And Drug-Induced Resistance, Sarah V. Pack

STAR Program Research Presentations

Tumors develop resistance to numerous drug therapies, and this remains a major obstacle in treating many types of non-surgical cancers. Melanoma provides a good model system for studying drug resistance in cancer due to its high propensity to incur resistance after a significant initial response to a drug. Genes that are highly expressed in melanoma cancer cells have been studied, but in order to further understand the collective function of these highly expressed genes we must analyze gene sets, or pathways. A single gene’s function is rarely independent of other genes, and pathway analysis takes this into account.

Our objective …

Novel Strategies On Characterizing Biologically Specific Protein-Protein Interaction Networks, Bi Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The function, behavior, and environmental response of biological systems are essentially determined by the complex interaction and regulation of biomolecules inside the systems. Therefore, it is critical to characterize the inter-molecular interaction and regulation of biomolecules inside these systems. In this direction, many experimental techniques have been developed and these techniques have been used in many different model systems under various conditions. Consequently, a massive amount of data has been generated. These data cover multiple aspects of molecular interaction and regulation, such as protein-protein interaction, microRNA-RNA interaction, gene expression profiles, etc. While carrying rich information, these data may also contain …