The protein palmitoylation cycle has been shown to be important for protein signaling and synaptic plasticity. Data from our lab showed a change in the palmitoylation status of certain proteins with age. A greater percentage of the NMDA receptor subunits GluN2A and GluN2B, along with Fyn and PSD95 proteins, were...
The television show South Park, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is viewed by millions of people each week, regularly addresses a number of controversial issues and plays a major role in contemporary popular culture. Current academic research acknowledges Parker and Stone's willingness to attack the dominant views surrounding...
Globally, as surface water quality and quantity diminishes there is increasing reliance on groundwater to buffer water demands of growing populations. Today in many arid regions around the world aquifer pumping rates far exceed recharge rates. Often the groundwater is nonrenewable, or thousands of years old. Despite the known hydrologic...
Microbial ecology has been transformed by metagenomics, the study of the genetic in-formation in entire communities of organisms. In the following we develop metagenomic tools arising from the classic Wasserstein metric as applied to questions regarding the diversity between microbial communities. We provide a novel proof of the characteriza-tion of...
The primary goal of my studies was to elucidate the mechanisms for the well-recognized interaction between two nutrients, vitamins E and K. The outcomes from my studies assess mechanisms for adverse effects of vitamin E and provide novel information on mechanisms for vitamin K homeostasis. These findings will provide information...
This thesis consists of two major components. The first part is concerned with video object instance segmentation (VOS), which is the task of assigning per-pixel labels perframe of a video sequence to indicate foreground object instance membership, given the first frame ground truth mask. VOS has myriad applications, from video...
Due to public and regulatory restrictions, genetic containment technology is critical for research and development of transgenic trees in forestry. A multi-year field trial demonstrated that the RNAi-LFY construct successfully induces sexual sterility in 6K10 poplar (Populus alba) without visible effects on vegetative development. However, its limited number of replicates...
The order Cornales (dogwoods) is the earliest diverging lineage within the most diverse group of flowering plants, the asterids (>80,000 species). Although molecular phylogenetics have significantly improved our understanding of cornalean systematics, early phylogenetic relationships remain uncertain due to an initial rapid radiation. The fossil record of Cornales is extensive...
A bad software development process leads to wasted effort and inferior products. In order to improve a software process, it must be first understood. In this work I focus on understanding software processes.
The first process we seek to understand is Continuous Integration (CI). CI systems automate the compilation, building,...
Of 14 transgenic poplar genotypes (Populus tremula × Populus alba) with antisense 4-coumarate:coenzyme A ligase that were grown in the field for 2 years, five that had substantial lignin reductions also had greatly reduced xylem-specific conductivity compared with that of control trees and those transgenic events with small reductions in...